“I’ve just never heard of cars being bombed in St. Louis, that’s all.”
Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-seventh City
Other than being attorneys who parked their all but identical, dark metallic gray Acura TLs one floor apart in the Carondelet Plaza garage in Clayton, Missouri, Richard “Rick” Eisen and John Gillis had little to nothing in common and had never met as of October 16, 2008. At about 11:15 that morning, a bomb exploded in the garage, seriously injuring Gillis. The bomb had been meant for Eisen, who at the time was in Chicago with his wife, belatedly celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. He was not parked that day in the garage.