Everett Boyd Dynes

Everett Boyd Dynes is a paper-industry production manager whose résumé puts him among the job competitors Burke Devore has decided to eliminate. Their encounter overturns Burke’s abstract picture of a rival: in a diner, Dynes is not at a desk or factory line but serving customers as a counterman. Burke recognizes him, hesitates, and then later runs him down with the Voyager. In the confession that follows, Burke names Dynes as his final victim, making the résumé that first marked him for violence also the document that closes Burke’s account of the murders.

Identity and Background

Dynes’s résumé presents an experienced specialist in the paper industry. He had worked in sales, design, customer relations, and management for twenty-two years, including nine years in specialized polymer-paper applications. His responsibilities had involved working with customers and designers, coordinating with design and production teams, and managing a production-line crew of twenty-seven people. The résumé identifies his position as production-line manager at Patriot Paper Corp., a role he had held from 1986 onward.

His education was a BA in history from Champlain College in Plattsburgh, New York. The combination of a liberal-arts degree and a long technical and managerial career makes him legible to Burke as the kind of experienced middle manager the employment market is squeezing. The résumé does not give Dynes a personal history beyond these credentials; instead, it introduces him through the professional record Burke reads while deciding who counts as competition.

A Rival on Paper

Burke’s immediate concern is that a production-line management job remains available to him, and he believes Upton “Ralph” Fallon is holding it. He sees Fallon, the six résumés he has taken from the application stack, and the wider population of middle managers as parts of the same threat. In Burke’s imagining, a flood of educated, middle-aged, middle-class applicants is approaching. He believes he must act before that competition becomes overwhelming.

Dynes’s résumé fits the specific qualifications of the position Burke wants: paper-industry experience, polymer-paper knowledge, coordination between design and production, and responsibility for a sizeable crew. That fit gives Burke a professional reason to select him, but the narrative also shows how the reasoning becomes a system of reduction. Dynes first appears as one more résumé among rivals, identified by initials and an address in Lichgate. His extensive working life is compressed into evidence that he might take a job Burke wants.

Recognition in the Diner

When Burke reaches Lichgate, he considers killing Dynes in a diner. The room is nearly empty, with three people drinking coffee at the counter and an elderly couple eating in a booth. Burke thinks about retrieving his gun from the Voyager and waiting for Dynes to come out of the men’s room, then decides that it would be better to act after Dynes has sat down again. The plan is disrupted by a fact Burke has not anticipated: Dynes works there.

Dynes comes through the swing door behind the counter wearing a green apron and carrying a plate of fish and chips, which he sets before a customer. Burke is so stunned that he remains seated as Dynes approaches. Dynes smiles pleasantly, looks at him with an honest glance, and speaks in an easygoing manner. He then moves down the counter to offer another customer a refill, reaches for the coffee pot, and returns to Burke. These small acts of service expose the difference between the man Burke had imagined from a résumé and the person now moving around the diner.

Burke had adopted a rule against getting to know the people he intended to kill, believing familiarity would make it harder to carry out his plans. He tries to restore that distance by treating Dynes only as a counterman and insisting, to himself, that he does not know him. The scene makes that rule visible as an effort rather than a settled fact: Dynes’s ordinary friendliness has already unsettled Burke, even as Burke attempts to turn him back into an impersonal target.

The Killing

Later, at night and in the rain, Burke sees Dynes crossing the street. Dynes emerges from between parked cars and walks diagonally across the road, glancing over his shoulder only briefly. Burke accelerates the Voyager toward him. Dynes senses the approaching vehicle, looks back, and jumps toward the curb; the car strikes him as he is rising, throwing him against its front rather than directly beneath it.

Burke brakes, but Dynes slides down the front of the vehicle and scrabbles for a hold. The Voyager is still moving. Burke feels the car pass over him, stops, switches on the headlights, and shifts into reverse so that the backup lights illuminate the scene. In the inside mirror and both side mirrors, he sees Dynes moving. Burke’s later confession removes any ambiguity about the act’s intention: he says he deliberately ran Dynes down with his automobile and identifies him as a victim of murder.

Confession and Narrative Significance

In the confession, Burke calls Dynes his final victim and places the killing in Lichgate the previous night. He expresses sorrow for the people killed and their families, says he hates himself, and ends by calling the statement his confession. Dynes is thus not merely the last name in the chain of job rivals; his death marks the point at which Burke’s private campaign becomes an explicit account of four murders.

Dynes’s part in the story turns on the contrast between professional abstraction and immediate presence. His résumé documents years of expertise and responsibility, while the diner scene gives him a green apron, a plate of fish and chips, a coffee pot, and a pleasant manner. Those details do not change Burke’s decision, but they expose the moral cost of the rule that a rival must remain a stranger. The résumé identifies the person Burke intends to remove; the encounter shows the person his categories cannot fully contain.