Old School Ch. 04: The Weight

They had no proof that Ruth Rothermel was cooperating with the police. They just suspected her because she was demonstrably cool to the Eyes of Ebenezer Holiness Tabernacle, and that just didn't square for them, considering that Elder Elmer Brewer is her older brother.

When they had asked her about it and about why she didn't share their antipathy for "the sodomites," she would wave it off with the explanation, "I ain't never been much for religion of no kind."

Lack of evidence notwithstanding, she stood out to them after the arrests, so they decided that she would have to prove herself to them — carry out a risky deed, strike a blow for the movement, something that they could see for themselves. After her grandchildren disappeared, she was instructed to drive to Petersburg, Kentucky, a crossroads west of Francisville, and wait in the parking lot of a shuttered gas station for a man and a woman in a sport utility vehicle with a camouflage paint job.

Moorefield was encouraged when he received word from brothers Ethan and Farley Locke that Ruth had performed admirably in confronting the girlfriend of the Cincinnati lawyer who, according to news reports, played a role in Mason Burnley's arrest and was blamed in the suicide note found in his Florida jail cell. Ruth had ruined a considerable amount of high-end merchandise at the girlfriend's fashion boutique — the pink spray paint, Ruth Mae's idea, being a particularly nice touch. And for added measure, Moorefield learned, she sprayed a large pink cross on the front shop's door for all the god-fearing world to see as she departed the store, just before they sped away.

That's one down, another big one to go, Moorefield mused to himself.

Part two of the plan was being carried out right about now in Cincinnati by Heddley and Dooley. Their mission was to kidnap the lawyer, Les Walker, in the parking deck of his law firm and bring him to a shed farther down the road from the trailer where no one could hear him scream. What nobody but Moorefield knew was that once in the shed, Walker would be flogged, sodomized with a sawed-off shovel handle, tortured with a butane torch, then killed, dismembered and buried in several shallow graves throughout the woods. No sense leaving a witness.

Between 5:30 and 5:45, after Moorefield was to receive a text from his goons that Walker was bound, gagged and immobilized in the spacious trunk of their 1997 Chevy Impala, he would turn the children over to Ethan and Farley Locke, who would release them in a supermarket parking lot in Francisville, then tell Ruth where she could find them.

Five-thirty came and passed. By 5:45, Moorefield still had no word and was getting jittery. The longer those two hung around in the building parking deck, the more likely they were to leave evidence or be spotted. By 6 p.m., Moorefield was pacing the floor of the trailer and cursing.

The text came from Doo's phone at 6:10, and it wasn't the news he was expecting.

Lawyer is dead.

"Goddammit," Moorefield screamed. He stopped himself before he flung his mobile device into the wall across the trailer. Now the plan was off the rails.

WTF??? Moorefield texted back.

No choice. He had a gun. Him or us. We wasn't told he had no gun!

Can't fault them for that, Moorefield reasoned, but now it depended on how they responded. Get the fuck out of there, he texted back.

Already did. Ditching car in the Grt Miami River now. Need u to come get us.

Moorefield knew that kinks like this are how people wind up in prison for life, but leaving his co-conspirators, Dumb and Dumber, out in the wild for the cops to find was not an option. Where?, he texted back.

Boat ramp off Lawrenceburg Rd just before it crosses the Grt Miami Riv just over Ohio state line.

K. Stay put & hide there. Wait for me to flash headlights 3x, he texted back.

Then another important consideration occurred to Moorefield.

Y'all sure he's dead? Do you have the body?

The response: Dead. Put one in his skull to be sure. Left body there & ran.

In a way, Moorefield was relieved. No evidence in the car with them and no living witness. But the stakes had just gone way up. This wasn't kidnapping anymore. It was murder. Yes, he intended to kill Walker, but in his own place and time.

Moorefield's obese body didn't respond well to situations like this. He was breathing rapidly through flared nostrils and sweating profusely. The condition wasn't aided by his four-liters-per-day Mountain Dew habit.

Now he had to move fast and decisively. He left the children locked in the bedroom, jumped in his 12-year-old Honda Ridgeline crew cab and sprayed gravel. He knew the pickup spot well. His grandfather had lived in Elizabethtown, Ohio, and this was the boat ramp they used when he'd take him fishing in the Great Miami when he was a boy. The drive would take about 40 minutes each way, maybe less if he sped up. The Rothermel kids would be fine on their own for an hour and a half.

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Traffic crept into Cincinnati. There was the ever-present bottleneck where merged Interstates 71/75 narrow from five lanes down to four to cross the two-deck Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River into downtown Cincinnati. As she jockeyed for position, Kass could feel her heart hammering in her throat. She tightened her grip on her steering wheel to keep her hands from trembling.

She kept trying to call Les. No luck. Now, Sandy Corder wasn't answering her phone, either. Kass had to have information, so she began toggling her AM radio dial using her steering wheel controls, hoping she could find a station that broadcast something other than pop or country music, sports talk or evangelists. Eventually, the scan stopped on Cincinnati's powerful news giant once well known to long-haul truckers across a huge swath of middle America: WLW. After traffic and weather on the eights, the lead local story chilled her.

"A massive police presence at this hour in downtown Cincinnati. Four blocks around the offices of a major law firm have been sealed off. Police are urging motorists to avoid an area along Sycamore from Fifth street through Seventh. They're calling it a potentially dangerous situation. No further details at this time. Witnesses tell WLW at least a dozen police vehicles arrived at the building and raced into the law firm's parking deck with guns drawn. At least some of the officers wore SWAT team gear ..."

Kass shrieked. She could feel the terror tug at her stomach. Her legs almost felt too weak to tend to the brake and accelerator. She was torn between gunning her engine and trying to weave through the crawling traffic or pulling onto the berm, except that there is no berm on the Brent Spence Bridge. She forced herself to stay mentally collected enough to ride it out until she was across the river, into Ohio, when she took the ramp to the right onto I-71 and took the first exit, as Google Maps instructed.

"No, please God, no," she kept muttering to herself.

Now an on-scene WLW correspondent was on the air live. He said the activity was focused on a high-rise on Sycamore between East Fifth and Sixth streets.

"Police are evacuating nearby buildings and pushing people well back from what they call a 'possible active shooter situation.' The building they're entering houses a major stock brokerage and a national accounting firm, but the top seven floors are leased by the law firm of Gladney & Watson. If that name sounds familiar, one of its attorneys, Les Walker, was named in a suicide note disgraced northern Kentucky state trooper Mason Burnley left before he hanged himself in a Florida jail where he was held on sex-related charges. The trooper was connected with the anti-gay Kentucky denomination whose leaders were rounded up recently in a joint federal and state sting operation ..."

Kass's despair deepened by the second.

WLW's reporter continued: "There's no word from officials on the scene whether the ongoing standoff is related to any of that or whether the firm or Walker are involved ..."

Kass was now in downtown Cincinnati. She had taken a left onto Elm Street, as her GPS guidance instructed, drove several blocks and turned right onto Seventh Street. When she did, she saw the dizzying collection of blue and red strobes from emergency vehicles a couple of blocks ahead, and her heart sank further. She drove the car as far as she could before an officer directed her to turn left. She turned pulled into the first available parking spot she saw. Whether it was reserved, whether it required payment, whether she got towed was immaterial to her. She had to find Les ... or at least find out what happened to him.

She took off down Sycamore in a dead sprint, unsure of her directions but moving toward the pulsing emergency lights. By the time she reached the yellow police tape at Sycamore's intersection with Sixth, her lungs burned. In the next block rose the office tower that was the focus of her angst.

"Officer, can you help me?" Kass shouted at a Cincinnati policeman keeping people and traffic behind the secured perimeter. "Officer," she pleaded.

When he at last heard her, the officer walked toward her as she gasped for air. "Ma'am, you're going to have to stay behind the tape," he said.

"I believe I have information on what's happening in there. I think my boyfriend may have been the victim of this," she said.

"You have evidence relevant to what's going on?" he asked. His first inclination was to dismiss her as a hysterical onlooker, but this was a sensibly dressed, well put together woman, and the desperation in her eyes persuaded him to follow up.

"Yes. I was warned this afternoon by an FBI informant that my boyfriend's life was in danger and I just drove here from Danville, Kentucky," Kass said. "I called agent Sandy Corder with the FBI and alerted her to the threat. It's connected to this Ebenezer church thing."

That got the officer's attention and he raised the tape, motioned Kass under it and instructed her sit on a bus stop bench while he spoke into his radio, informing his superior officer that he had a "subject who seems to have some knowledge of this situation at my twenty." The number is slang for 10-20, the police communications code meaning 'location.'

"What does she know and how does she know it?" a tinny voice said over the officer's radio.

"Says she was warned by an informant for the feds that her boyfriend might be a target. Says she talked to an FBI agent named ... hold on," he said, turning to Kass. "What's the agent's name again?"

"Sandy Corder," Kass said.

The officer nodded and returned to his radio mic, "agent Sandy Corder. Says she Informed her of the threat."

A few seconds lapsed. "Stand by," the voice on the officer's radio said.

Minutes passed, and Kass struggled not to give in to her fear and dissolve into a weeping, useless mess. More people gathered behind the tape she had been allowed to cross, preoccupying the officer who had just made the inquiry for her. She feared she'd been forgotten in all urgency and scurrying. Finally, the officer answered his radio. He was too far away for Kass to make out what was being said. He nodded and began walking toward her.

"Ten-four," he said, then turned to Kass.

"Ma'am, they want to know your name."

"Kass," she said, remembering that she had left her identification in her wallet tucked in her purse and locked in her car. "Kassie Lorene Felson. I live in Danville, Kentucky."

The officer repeated it into his radio mic. Moments later, a response.

"Keep subject at your twenty. Someone's on the way," the reply said.

"Ten-four," the officer said into his microphone. Then he looked at her and his expression softened. "You heard what the lieutenant just said, right? Stay put."

Kass nodded.

Five minutes later, a figure in a suit came striding purposefully from the midst of the amalgam of police and ambulance lights toward the officer. When he was within speaking distance of the officer, Kass recognized him: agent Will Gustin. The officer pointed to Kass, still crouched by herself on the bus stop bench shivering and hugging her knees to her chest in the winter evening chill.

"Miss Felson. Come with me, please." Gustin said in a clipped, urgent tone.

Kass and Gustin walked briskly toward the bright, busy, pulsating scene on the city streets around Les's office tower.

"Sandy asked me to get you away from the crowd, where reporters might be able to talk to you and bring you to mobile ops center."

The ops center was a self-contained tour bus loaded with high-end computers and communications gear inside and painted black from top to bottom outside except for a small Cincinnati Police logo near the door, which opened for Kass after Gustin led her there and knocked on it.

"Go on in," Gustin said. "Safest place for you. They'll be able to update you eventually."

"Will someone tell me whether Les is OK? Dead? Wounded?"

"Eventually," Gustin said, then closed the door. Kass sat in a cushioned seat directly behind the driver's seat, grateful for the warmth if nothing else, as the vehicle's idling diesel engines purred beneath the floor, powering the sophisticated electronics inside. A few feet away was a closed door behind which she could make out the dim murmur of voices but not what was being said.

She checked her watch: 6:53 p.m.

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Tony Moorefield crossed the state line into Ohio on Lawrenceburg Road and slowed his pickup truck looking for the familiar ramp that would lead to the Great Miami River boat ramp where so many happy fishing trips with his grandpop had begun decades earlier.

Time had changed things. A sizeable tree had grown on the highway right-of-way just ahead of the turnoff, now partially obscured by the gray, winter-killed stalks and blades of waist-high weeds and Johnson grass. He turned onto the crumbling pavement of the access road and his truck rolled slowly down the incline to the concrete ramp placed there by the state of Ohio so bass boats and pleasure craft with outboard motors could be backed into the Great Miami. When he reached the bottom of the access road, Moorefield scanned the darkness looking for other vehicles or people. He saw none — not on a Friday night in the dead of winter.

The digital clock readout on his dashboard said 6:52 p.m. Almost exactly as he planned it. He flashed his headlights on and off three times. From a thicket at the far end of the ramp, he could see the flashlight of a mobile phone come on and begin to wave. He drove his truck slowly in the direction of Doo Dooley and Billy Joe Heddley and stopped about 30 feet from where he had seen the light. Strange, he thought, that they hadn't already emerged from the underbrush in the winter chill and hopped into the crew cab.

"Hands where we can see 'em, Moorefield!"

At that instant, blinding lights from almost 360 degrees around his truck were fixed on the cab of Moorefield's truck and, more specifically, on him. He suddenly felt a tightness in his chest; inhaling became a chore as his brain went into panic mode — the classic fight-or-flight mode, and neither was a survivable option at the moment.

Attempts to force bladder control on himself failed. He could feel hot urine soaking his jeans and puddling in the leather seat beneath his ass.

"FBI and Ohio State Police!" a man screamed. "Hands! Show us your hands!"

Now they were close enough for Moorefield to see not just the intensely bright LED flashlights issued to law enforcement but also that they were armed with assault rifles for the most part. One wrong move and he would never survive that fusillade.

An officer had reached his driver's side door and opened it. "Where are the kids, motherfucker?"

They knew everything, Moorefield concluded. Had they arrested Dumb and Dumber before or after they ditched their Impala. Were they here? Had they already cut a deal with the cops and rolled over on him? Someone had betrayed him, he concluded, and now he was fucked.

"Don't know what you're talking about," he said as he stepped out of his truck just before a powerful arm grabbed him and slung him to the gravel, face-down.

"You take us for dumb fucks, Moorefield? We know you've got Ruth Rothermel's grandkids. They're not in this truck, so you've got 10 goddamn seconds to tell us where they are," screamed a burly Ohio State Police officer who had his service weapon trained on the base of Moorefield's skull. At the same time, two other officers frisked Moorefield. Another searched his truck, quickly finding the .44 magnum revolver he stashed beneath his seat. And something else in the back seat.

"Tell us what this is, you child-molesting piece of shit," another state police officer yelled at Moorefield. "Look at this!"

In the officer's hand was an aqua-blue backpack imprinted with the image of the cartoon characters Elsa and Olaf from the children's feature film "Frozen." The name "KYLIE" was written neatly in indelible marker across its front.

"You want to rethink your answer in time to avoid a life term in prison? You know what they do to fuckin' child kidnappers and predators there, right?" the officer holding the book bag said. "After a week, you won't shit right for the rest of your goddamn life."

Now with his hands securely cuffed behind his back, Moorefield was pulled to his feet by the Ohio troopers. Police vehicles, lights flashing, seemed to materialize from thin air and filled the boat ramp parking area. A man in khakis and a black windbreaker with FBI emblazoned in block letters on its left breast stepped toward him.

"It's over Moorefield. We've got your goons. Now the only thing left for you to do is to see if there's a deal to be cut and take it while you can. You're looking at federal prison time plus state sentences in Indiana and Ohio. Help yourself in the next few minutes while you still can."

Moorefield hung his head.

"I want a lawyer," he said, missing the irony that it was his plan to "get a lawyer" that irreversibly fucked up his life.

The FBI agent smiled and nodded. "OK, Moorefield," he said as he turned to walk away. "Read him his rights."

The record would show that Moorefield was Mirandized at 7 p.m. sharp, the exact same moment an Indiana State Police cruiser with its blue strobes flashing stopped in front of a rundown trailer off a dirt road in the pitch-black backwoods near Milan, Indiana. The instant he opened his car door, the trooper heard children wailing.

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Operations that develop this hurriedly go wrong way more often than they don't.

The FBI had less than two hours to orchestrate Tony Moorefield's takedown at a darkened, empty fisherman's boat ramp on the Great Miami River. The key had been the quick apprehension of Doo Dooley and Billy Joe Heddley in the law firm's parking deck and their ability to turn the more frightened and penitent of the two, Dooley, into a cooperating witness.

Sandrine Corder was able to monitor several channels of law-enforcement communication from behind the locked door of the mobile command center parked on East Fifth Street in Cincinnati.

She was relieved when Dumb and Dumber obeyed the officers' orders to drop their weapons. It very easily could have become a bloody charnel-house situation like the one a few months earlier at Fulbright University that still tormented her sleep.

The trap for Moorefield was Corder's idea. It became possible when Doo, eager to mitigate his prison time, agreed to turn his mobile device over to the FBI and helped Corder originate a thread of texts, posing as Dooley, to Moorefield. An Ohio State Police lieutenant suggested the location.