The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (34 page)

 

H
E WAS STILL NEW TO HIS HOUSE.
On his refrigerator door, he still had a drawing a little boy down the block had sent him, a stick figure emblazoned with the words
MR. ZEKE, WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
He hadn't met the little boy yet, nor any of his other neighbors. After all, he had not bought the house because he wanted to make friends but rather, he said, because it was at the end of a dead-end street and offered an advantageous line of fire. The house was two stories, with dormer windows, and contained a small arsenal. There were bullets everywhere—in boxes, in the bathroom, on bookshelves, a few scattered on the floor—like candy in the home of a fat man. There were a lot of knives, too, the fighting kind, with handles like brass knuckles. There was a handgun secreted away in the couch that faced the forty-three-inch TV screen, another next to the computer keyboard, and another on top of the refrigerator. In Zeke's bedrooms, there were two handguns on his nightstand and a black pump-action shotgun propped in the corner. In one of the spare bedrooms, there was an empty black case, very long and designed to carry the long rifle—Zeke said he preferred a Remington 700—that snipers use.
There was a Ruger .22-caliber Mark II long-rifle target pistol. There was a scope next to a pair of black gloves. There were a dozen empty magazines, a magazine half filled with bullets, and three magazines that were fully loaded. There were a couple of holsters, a stock, a shooting brace, and a metal case filled with 7.62 mm shells. On the floor, there was a pair of handcuffs and a big box filled with smaller boxes of bullets. On the shelf bracketing another wall, there were two Kevlar helmets, a set of pads for a shooter's knees and elbows, and a long coiled rope. In the corner, there was a backpack, ready to go, and then a duffel bag, olive-green and already packed with clothing and gear, so that if Zeke ever got called on a mission, he would be able to leave—and leave everything behind, including his new house and his new wife and his very real job at the nuclear plant—at a moment's notice.

 

H
E LIVED IN FEAR,
because he was not in control of his life. He had a handler, he said. Did I know what a handler was? A handler was a person who handled him and who handled things for him. He'd had a handler since 1984. He'd been in the Army, been in Vietnam, been a Ranger, with marksman as his particular skill set. He'd gotten into some trouble, so he'd gotten out in 1977. He'd become a cop, outside of L.A. He was SWAT. He was, by his own description, “hard charging,” maybe too aggressive. He made a lot of arrests. He also spent a lot of time at the range. One night, he said, the phone rang at his house. “Friend of a friend. ‘We hear you're a hell of a shot. Why don't you come and talk to us?' I told him I had a job. He said, ‘Don't worry, we'll pave the way.' The next day I got to work and was told to take a leave of absence. I went for training in northern Virginia, and six months later I was in Honduras. ‘There's your target. Handle it.'”

He handled it, and from then on he had a handler. It wasn't always the same guy, and one time, about five years ago, it was a woman. But the handler always did the same thing. Made sure he was current on his piss test. Made sure he was current on his polygraph. Made sure he could get insurance and a mortgage. Made sure that Zeke had a reference when he went for a job and had to explain the gaps in his résumé. Made sure that Zeke knew where to go and knew what to do once he got there. Made sure that Zeke followed orders. Made sure that Zeke was still handling it, which meant that he wasn't talking to anyone—whether wife or friend or shrink or reporter. Handling it was what Zeke was good at, until he wasn't. Now, for the first time in his life, he was scared. He couldn't sleep at night. He had nightmares. He was afraid that he was too old. He was afraid that no one was going to call him with another mission. He was afraid that he
was
going to get called on another mission tomorrow. He was afraid that he was never going to go back to Afghanistan or Iraq. He was afraid that he
was
going to go back to Afghanistan or Iraq and die there. He was afraid of losing his job at the nuclear plant and winding up on a park bench. He was afraid that he was going to spend the rest of his life at the nuclear plant, a washed-up old operator “with a lot of stories that no one believes till they see the scars.” He was afraid of being betrayed, afraid of disappearing, afraid of being afraid forever. “I've hurt a lot of people, Tom,” he said. And he knew he would hurt a lot of people again if he didn't burn his bridges to the handler who ordered him to hurt them. “And there's only one way I'm going to burn my bridges, and that's by talking to someone like you.”

 

H
E HAD THE MOST AMAZING THINGS
to say about hurting people, about the reality of sitting up on high and hunting them, about the quiet deliberation of it, about the stillness of it, about
watching a man “through the glass”—the scope—about watching him smoke and drink coffee and talk to friends even as you know the order is in and he's already dead, about taking aim at his lip or his teeth—“teeth are always good, because you can always see them”—or between his buttons and concentrating only on the shot, on the tumbling piece of paper that helps you determine which way the wind is blowing, and then on the soft squeeze of the trigger, only that, before the kick of the rifle brings you back to life with almost more adrenaline than you can bear.

He's always lived for the adrenaline. We were watching an NFL game one night at his house, and he got up and assumed the stance of a defensive back, but with his elbow up high, as if ready to drop the hammer. He said that he'd been a cornerback in high school, all county, and that he still remembered what it was like, watching a play develop, watching the whole field, the movement of the ball both chaotic and marked by a sense of inevitability, because it had to come to an end, and it came to an end when he made the hit. He was the end. He was a hitter, and nothing could match that feeling of intervention—that feeling of being the instrument of inevitability—until later in his life, when he felt the kick of the Remington 700 and heard his spotter say, “Man down.”

 

O
NE NIGHT HIS MOTHER CALLED
his cell phone. She called him almost every day. He was closer to his mother than he was to anybody, and once, when I asked him if he had any code of conduct, he said, “No women. No children. And I don't lie to my mother.” Now he talked to her for a few minutes and handed me the phone. “Well, I'm glad someone's finally writing about Billy, because he's an American hero,” she said, in a strong old-woman's voice. Then I handed the phone back to Zeke, but he was sitting on the couch, looking sick to the soul. “She's so happy that I have
this job at the plant,” he said. “I don't have the heart to tell her that I hate it. So I lie to her, like I lie to everyone else.”

 

I
STAYED AT HIS HOUSE THREE TIMES.
The first time, last August, I stayed with him for two nights. I stayed with him for two nights again in September. When I visited in December, I cut my trip short—I stayed one night instead of two—but by that time the process of revelation that he'd started in the summer threatened to go out of control. He had revealed secrets about himself from the moment I introduced myself to him, and yet over the course of four months he had always managed to up the ante, to suggest that behind every secret there loomed another whose revelation would prove dangerous not only to him but to me.

In August, he told me about his handler and about the remorselessness his handler expected of him. He detailed his methods as a sniper and called himself an assassin. And he told me that he lived in fear of being arrested for what he'd done for Blackwater—and, by extension, his country—in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In September, he said that it was in Iraq where he had crossed the line that had made him lose “the stomach” for killing. “In all my years as a professional, I've seen a lot of conflicts,” he said. “I never committed murder until I went to Iraq.” When I pressed him about what he meant, he said, “You're going to get me indicted, Tom.” And when I asked him why, he replied, “War crimes, man. War crimes.”

And yet he kept talking, driven by his guilt and his compulsive need to tell me that he was not like mere contractors—that he was both better and far worse. In November, I sent him a book about Blackwater and asked him to read it. When I called for his comments, he said that it was accurate, but only so far as it went. “The
guys in that book are really sort of knuckle draggers,” he said. “I operate on a much higher level.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I'll tell you the next time you come up.”

And so I visited him again, one last time, in December. It was 12 degrees in Michigan, and the phone books and old cardboard boxes that had littered his driveway in the summer were now stuck there, frozen solid. He was wearing all black, black jeans and a black ribbed mercenary sweater, and he told me that something had changed since the last time I spoke to him. He told me that he had gotten married.

 

T
HE PEOPLE WHO LOVE HIM ARE REAL.
He has a mother and father, still alive. He has two brothers. He has an ex-wife, Linda, to whom he was married for thirty years. He has a son, Rick—Linda's son, whom Zeke adopted when he was four years old. And he has a new wife, a woman he calls Baby Doll. They all love him, but he is afraid they wouldn't if they knew who he really was and what he had really done.

Does he love them in return? He said he did, while acknowledging that a man who couldn't tell the truth about himself to those closest to him was going to have trouble with his relationships. He had, for instance, a photograph of one of his brothers on his bookshelf, but he said that he hadn't seen or spoken to him in years. And he hadn't spoken to his son, Rick, since the divorce, and although Rick lived on an Air Force base not five hours away, Zeke had never met his grandchildren. And although he still spoke to Linda as often as twice a day—as often as he spoke to his mother and Baby Doll—he viewed his divorce from her as the ultimate cost of his lifestyle and its necessary secrets. In his darkest moments, he even intimated that his handler had gotten to her, had called her and told her, well, everything, for why else would he have come home from the hell of
New Orleans and heard from his wife that she wanted out after thirty years?

He had met her in high school, in Tulare, California, in the Central Valley, south of Fresno. She was his English teacher his senior year. She was eleven years older than he was. They got married in 1975, when he was still in the Army. They did not live together at first—he was at Fort Stewart, in Georgia, and she remained in Tulare, teaching—but she was always available to him, as she had to be, for even as a young man he was haunted by his past, he said, and in this case his recent past was Vietnam. These were the last shadowy years of the war. There was a period when he just
disappeared
—when neither his mother nor Linda knew where he was—and when he resurfaced, he had a story to tell, except that he couldn't tell it. He was bound not to tell it, though of course it leaked out over the years, both to Linda and to Rick, as did all the others. It was hard on Linda, Zeke said, because she had to guard his secrets as closely as he did. She was even liable to be polygraphed, as he was, and so after a while he made it easy for her—he stopped telling her things, and she stopped asking questions. She just
knew
—and it was her unspoken knowledge of who he really was that led him to say that she was his “real wife,” no matter what, and to keep the gold band from his wedding with Linda up on his bookshelf, right next to the picture of Baby Doll.

Baby Doll was his nickname for a woman he met on eHarmony in 2006. Her real name was Terri, but she had a small, breathy voice, so he called her Baby Doll. She was divorced, living with two teenaged sons, and she described herself as a “wounded soul,” for she had multiple sclerosis. Zeke was a wounded soul, too, she said, and their relationship seemed to enter a new stage with each visit: In August, they met; in September, she'd just visited him in Michigan for the first time, and he was deciding whether to “take on” a woman with such a debilitating illness; in December, he'd just married her, because she'd
saved his life. He'd been all alone on Thanksgiving 2006, eating a frozen pizza, waiting for the phone to ring and determined to “eat the barrel” of one of his handguns if it didn't. It did, and it was Baby Doll. Her voice gave him something to live for, and he married her a week later. She wasn't living with him, but she called his cell phone all day long, and one night, when we were out to dinner, he passed the phone to me. Terri's voice was just as Zeke said it was, and in answer to my question, she confirmed that she had met Zeke on eHarmony. Then she said that she had a question of her own: “Is he wearing his ring?” I told her that he was, although as soon as she hung up, he said he was going to take it off when he got home and put it on the bookshelf next to the ring from his marriage to Linda.

 

Z
EKE TRIED TO CONTINUE
the affair with the volunteer he met in New Orleans after they both returned home. One day, she even received an e-mail from Zeke's wife, Linda, while Linda and Zeke were still married. It was an admission of failure—an admission that Linda had never been up to the adventure of living with someone like Zeke, an admission that she simply wasn't as passionate as he was. Linda wished the volunteer luck and expressed hope that Zeke had finally met a woman who was his equal. How extremely gracious, the volunteer thought, and how extremely odd, for the e-mail was marred by elementary misspellings and grammatical errors. Wasn't Linda Clark an English teacher? Then she realized something, in a flash of alarm: The letter had been written by Zeke, from his wife's account and in his wife's name.