The Hollow Ones(2)
On September 6, 1949, Howard Unruh, a twenty-eight-year-old World War II veteran, departed his mother’s house in Camden, New Jersey, dressed in his best suit and a striped bow tie. He had argued with his mother over breakfast, prompting her to flee to a neighbor’s home, frantically telling them she feared something terrible was about to happen.
Unruh walked into town armed with a German Luger pistol, carrying thirty 9-millimeter rounds. In a twelve-minute span he shot and killed thirteen people, wounding three more. Locations included a pharmacy, a barbershop, and a tailor. While the desire to murder was proven to be premeditated—Unruh was later found to have kept a list of enemies in a diary—his victims were a mix of preferred targets and people unfortunate enough to cross his path on that clear Tuesday morning. Victims and eyewitnesses alike described the look in Howard’s eye that morning as trance-like, dazed.
To anyone other than a law enforcement professional, the classification of the crime matters little. The only truly important fact of the matter was that, for more than sixty years, Unruh’s shooting spree stood as the worst rampage killing in New Jersey.
That is, until the night Walt Leppo ordered meat loaf.
“Is it cooked fresh?” Walt asked the young server after his return from the men’s room.
“Oh, absolutely,” she answered.
“Would you do me a favor, then?” he said. “Could you look and see if there’s maybe a slice or two left over from the lunch rush? Preferably set under a heat lamp for a few hours? Really dry with toasted edges?”
The server held his gaze for a few moments, as if unsure whether or not she was being put on. She was a student probably, likely at one of the nearby law schools. Odessa had put herself through her third year of law school in Boston waiting tables, and she acutely remembered the uneasy feeling she got when certain male customers made vaguely creepy, borderline fetishistic food requests—usually loners, men who she suspected wished that they could order women off menus, not just food.
The server glanced at Odessa sitting across from Leppo. Odessa offered an encouraging smile, hoping to set the fellow young woman at ease.
“Just let me check,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, closing his menu and handing it to her. “By the way, I prefer the end pieces.”
She left with their orders. Walt added to Odessa, “We used to call the end pieces the heels.”
Odessa nodded as though fascinated. She said, pleasantly, “Serial killer.”
Walt shrugged. “Because I like my meat loaf the way my mother used to make it?”
“Oh God. Add one oral fixation.”
“You know what, Dessa? I got news for you: Everything can be sexualized. Everything. Even meat loaf, apparently.”
“I bet you like your toast burnt, too.”
“Like a slice of charcoal. But didn’t you get the regulation about rookies not being allowed to profile veteran agents?”
Both their heads turned when the first drops of rain began tapping at the other side of the picture window at the front of the Soup Spoon Café.
Leppo said, “Oh great.”
Odessa checked her phone. The weather app radar showed a mass of precipitation in shades of jade and mint approaching Newark like a cloud of toxic gas. She turned it around so that Leppo could see. Her umbrella happened to be locked next to the Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun inside the trunk of their car, parked half a block up the street.
“Jersey rain,” said Leppo, unfolding his napkin. “Like hosing down a dog. Everything gets wet, nothing gets clean.”
Odessa smiled at yet another “Leppo-ism,” looking outside as more drops strafed the window. The few people outside moved more quickly now, with a blurry sense of urgency.
Things speeding up.
At the very same moment Leppo was asking about meat loaf (as later chronologies would bear out), a dozen miles north of Newark, Evan Aronson was on hold with his health insurance provider, listening to soft 1970s rock while waiting to question a surcharge for a recent emergency room visit. At his ten-year Rutgers reunion a few weeks before, Evan had torn his left biceps during a re-creation of his Greek brothers’ traditional late-night porta-potty leap, as he attempted to catch his former fraternity house roommate, Brad “Boomer” Bordonsky, despite Boomer having packed on a solid thirty pounds since graduation.
While enduring another one of Styx’s greatest hits, Evan looked up from his desk in the Charter Airliners office at Teterboro Airport and watched as a late-model Beechcraft Baron G58 taxied out of the nearby private aviation hangar. The pilot, tall and in his fifties, climbed out of the cockpit of the million-dollar twin-engine piston aircraft. The man wore gray track pants, a long-sleeved pullover, and sandals. He disappeared back inside the hangar, leaving the aircraft engines running outside. A hangar attendant exchanged a few words with him and then moved away.
Moments later, the pilot returned holding a very large wrench.
Pilots, but especially owner-pilots, do not perform their own aircraft repairs. Not with the plane’s twin three-hundred-horsepower engines still on, propellers rotating faster than the eye can track. Evan stood out of his chair to get a better look at the pilot, standing there with his left arm in a sling, his right arm holding the telephone receiver, connected by a cord to the base on his desk due to airport radio frequency regulations.