Voyager

Burke Devore’s Voyager is both the ordinary family car that carries him through domestic routines and a working instrument in his campaign of violence. As he repairs, watches from, drives, conceals a weapon in, and finally loads the vehicle with a victim’s body, the car’s familiar utility becomes inseparable from his effort to make extraordinary crimes look like ordinary life.

Repair and the Appearance of Normality

On a Wednesday, after Bill Martin tells Burke he can have the car fixed, Burke arranges the repair with Jerry at the dealership. The necessary parts are already waiting. After dropping Marjorie Devore at Dr. Carney’s office, Burke drives to the dealer, where the Voyager receives what he calls plastic surgery: repairs intended to make it look like every other car. The exact damage and the repair work are not described, but the emphasis falls on the result—an individual vehicle made visually unremarkable. That effort to blend in anticipates the role Burke will give the Voyager in his surveillance and criminal plans.

The repair also sits within the car’s routine family use. Burke takes Marjorie to her appointment, and elsewhere drives home with her and Billy. The vehicle moves easily through the practical errands of a household, an ordinary function that will coexist with its increasingly deliberate use in stalking and concealment. Its normality is not an accessory to Burke’s criminal life; it is part of what allows that life to continue alongside family routines.

A Stationary Lookout

The following Thursday, Burke parks the Voyager beside the road near a stub of stone wall on Footbridge Road. From this position he watches Kane Bagley Asche and his wife garden. The vehicle gives him a place to sit unnoticed while he observes them working together on the slope below: setting stakes, carrying seedling flats, digging and planting, and passing things between them. Burke’s view from the car turns their shared activity into both surveillance and a source of resentment. The Voyager is still, but its position makes watching possible.

Burke has arrived before the couple comes outside. He notes that the Honda Accord is in the driveway, waits, and watches them emerge around nine-thirty in their gardening clothes. He remains in the car as the morning passes. The scene establishes a recurring contrast in the Voyager’s uses: it can be a shelter for patient observation, not merely a means of travel. Its height and roadside position provide Burke a vantage point from which he can scrutinize the domestic togetherness he finds irritating, while keeping himself out of sight.

Pursuit and Practical Limits

When Burke discovers that Kane Bagley Asche’s Accord has left, he guesses that Asche has gone to a garden nursery at a mall and drives down the hill. The Voyager gives Burke the mobility to pursue him, but Burke’s plans depend on the relative positions of the two cars. He reasons that he would need to meet Asche traveling in the same direction, so that he could pull alongside and shoot; meeting him head-on would not work. Nor can Burke repeat what he did to Everett Dynes with a car, because Asche is also in a car. The earlier killing thus defines a limit: the Voyager is useful, but it cannot make every method available in every circumstance.

At the mall, Burke eases the Voyager into a parking space and prepares to wait. Still inside, he puts on a raincoat and transfers the Luger pistol to its right pocket, using the coat’s open-through pockets to hold the weapon while he watches Asche’s Accord. After ten minutes, he sees Asche returning with a shopping cart loaded with small boxes, white plastic bags, and a large sack of peat moss. The car has brought Burke to the place where he can watch his target; from there he leaves it and approaches on foot. The vehicle’s role in the sequence is therefore specific: it delivers and conceals Burke, but does not itself carry out the planned attack.

The Voyager also follows Herbert Coleman Everly after Everly leaves in a Ford Taurus. Burke signals and pulls out only after Everly and a gray Chrysler Cirrus have passed. He keeps at least one other car between himself and the Taurus as they leave Regnery and join State Route 9, which Everly takes north toward Sable Jetty. Burke had expected Everly’s anger to make him drive aggressively, but the Taurus remains easy to follow and proceeds lawfully. The Voyager serves as a mobile means of pursuit, with Burke adjusting his distance to preserve the trail without drawing close attention.

The Car as a Hiding Place

After returning home from a distant mall, Burke and Marjorie move the bookcase out of Billy’s closet and into the garage, where Burke piles it among paint cans and old rags. He then takes the Luger pistol from the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and hides it inside the Voyager’s backseat. As he drives home with Billy, the gun is beneath the seat and, in Burke’s formulation, beneath his son. The placement turns a passenger compartment into concealment for a weapon, while leaving the car outwardly available for family transport.

When five local police officers arrive in a van and search the house, Burke is waiting in the living room. He believes there is nothing for them to find, and the hidden pistol is not in the house: it is inside the Voyager. His preparation extends beyond the vehicle, but the car is crucial to separating the weapon from the rooms the police are examining. The contrast is stark and concrete: the officers search the family home while the gun rests inside the family car. Burke’s confidence depends on that division between visible domestic space and concealed danger.

The Mall Attack and Its Aftermath

For the attack on Herbert Coleman Everly, Burke returns to the mall near the Taurus. He parks the Voyager four spaces away, with the vehicle’s left side toward the building and its long sliding door open on the other side. He also leaves the hood open, exposing the engine, and rests a new hammer on the depression between the windshield and hood, its striking end pointed down and its handle accessible from the side. The layout makes the open vehicle look like part of a practical task, while positioning the tools and the side door for Burke’s plan. At the end of a long June twilight, the lot is less than a quarter full, and no other cars are near the two vehicles.

When Everly reaches him and turns toward the flashlight Burke has offered, Burke sprays Mace in his face, drops the can, and strikes him twice on the temple with the hammer. As Everly falls, Burke catches and supports him, then crab-walks him around to the Voyager’s open side. A clear plastic tarp already covers the seat and floor. Burke struggles to get the limp body inside, folds the excess tarp over it, and throws a dark green blanket across the body before sliding the door shut. The open sliding door, prepared interior, tarp, and blanket make the Voyager a means of removing Everly from the parking lot as well as concealing him within it.

Burke closes the hood, retrieves the Mace and hammer, and gets behind the wheel. The engine starts, to his surprise, and he joins the slow traffic leaving the mall before driving up Route 9 toward Kingston, the bridge, and home. He does not stop along the way to prepare the body, reasoning that a place that seems dark and deserted could become exposed if people arrived, lights came on, or police passed. Instead, he chooses his own garage, where he can work with his family inside for the night.

A little after eleven, Burke uses the Voyager’s visor remote to open the garage door, drives in, and waits until it closes before getting out. He switches on the main garage light and opens the side door to face the mound beneath the blanket. Plastic lawn-and-leaf bags and white cotton gloves, both bought at the mall, are ready for his next steps. The vehicle has carried the body from the attack site into the protected space of the family home; it remains there with the body while Burke begins dealing with it. Across these episodes, the Voyager’s defining significance lies in its double life: its repairs, errands, and passenger space preserve the appearance of routine, even as its compartments and layout are made to serve concealment, pursuit, and murder.