by Liliana Hart
I saw Floyd Parker before I got out of the vehicle. He was standing with a photographer and a cameraman, and he was interviewing a woman who was in hysterics and pointing wildly toward The Witches’ Brew.
Floyd’s gaze locked on mine, and I couldn’t help but smile. His nose was still red and swollen, and his left eye showed the colorful shadows of a black eye. Technically, he’d been impeding an investigation by blocking my transport of a body, so I’d taken the liberty of moving him out of the way. I had the authority to do so as the coroner, but it was a little bit of a gray area as far as how much force I was allowed to use. I figured I’d be hearing from his attorney at some point, but for now, I felt immense satisfaction looking at his fat nose on his fat face.
“Man, if looks could kill,” Chen said, following me inside the sheriff’s office. “I’d watch your back with that guy.”
“He’s a weasel and a coward,” I said. “He likes to use his size to intimidate. But he’s tenacious. I’ll give him that.”
The lobby was full of people, and Hitchcock was signing people in and giving them a waiting number. The door on the right side of the lobby led to common rooms where reports could be taken, and I assumed they had everything set up to collect any medicines or products that had been dispensed by The Witches’ Brew.
Chen keyed in her passcode to the door on the left, and we quickly walked through and shut the door behind us. I handed her the tissue samples so someone could get them to Richmond, and she headed off in the opposite direction. I saw Jack in his office and went straight for him. Malachi was still fresh on my mind, and if I was being honest, I was still shaky from my run-in with him.
Betsy didn’t even look up from her computer screen as I walked around her desk and into Jack’s office. He was on the phone, so I closed the door behind me. His office was in the middle of the west wall and there were three sides of windows so he could see the station from every angle.
He had a big L-shaped desk, and there was an old conference table on one side of the office, and on the other side was a battered leather couch and two matching chairs with a round coffee table between them. Behind his desk was a door that led back to a private bathroom, and a room no bigger than a closet where he had a cot set up so he could crash if he had to work crazy hours. There was a gunmetal-gray gun safe next to the door.
Jack liked to keep weapons close. I knew he probably had a backup in his desk drawer, and he always wore his ankle holster. I found guns in random places all around the house—dish towel drawers, under a sofa cushion, and in the tank behind the toilet.
I paced around the office and felt my anxiety increasing, and I realized it was because of what Malachi had said about watching us. I’d felt his eyes on us. It was impossible not to. He’d conditioned me, ever since he’d come back from the dead, to look over my shoulder. I was surprised I didn’t have ulcers.
I went around to each of the windows and closed the blinds. We couldn’t see out, and no one could see in. Jack raised his brows in question, but I just shook my head. We needed to be more careful. If Malachi had set up these poison murders to distract us, then we were playing right into his hands. And now there were unprecedented crowds in the streets, and he could move in and out of spaces easily.
“Listen, Ernie,” Jack said, leaning back in his chair. “I’m not sure what more you think can be done. It almost sounds like you’re blaming me for not preventing a crazy person from killing people. But last time I checked, neither you nor I can tell the future. We’ve contained this very quickly, and we’ll continue to investigate every lead and talk to every person until we find out who’s responsible. The crime lab in Richmond is working around the clock, and the CDC was called in after the second victim showed up. The best thing you can do right now is stop griping in my ear and let me get back to my job.”
Jack listened for a few more seconds. “I don’t care if it costs me an election. No offense, but I’m not particularly worried about how much your opinion influences the people when everyone in town knows you’ve been messing around on your wife for the last six months with Margaret Miller. Worry about your own election.”
“Dang,” I whispered. Everyone in Bloody Mary suspected something was going on between Ernie and Margaret, but Ernie’s wife was so sweet no one wanted to cause her any problems by speaking up.
Jack pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen. “I guess he hung up,” he said. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
I took the ring out of my pocket and then my body crumpled onto the chair in front of his desk. I tossed the ring so it landed on the pile of papers sitting in front of him.
“Where’d this come from?” he asked, not picking it up.
I couldn’t blame him. It was a bad omen.
“I found it on my desk yesterday,” I said. “After I finished Nina Walsh’s autopsy. Nash had staked out, keeping watch the whole time I was down there except for when I brought him down to tell him about the poisoning. We came back up and I showered, and when I came out it was just there.”
“When you put it in the safe,” Jack said. “You never took it out again?
“I haven’t thought about it since I put it in there,” I said. “After I saw it on the desk, I shoved it in my pocket, and then we got busy with Doug coming into town and Warren Buchanan’s murder, so I forgot to tell you about it.”
“We know your dad likes to play these games,” Jack said. “He likes to keep you off guard, constantly looking over your shoulder. It’s psychological warfare. And he’s good at it.”
“Believe me,” I said. “When Chen and I left the house this morning the ring was sitting in my seat in the Suburban. I never took it out of my pocket from the other day. I’d forgotten about it. I just tossed all my clothes in the dirty clothes hamper in the bathroom. Malachi knew exactly where I put it, and exactly where to look for it.”
Jack stared at the ring, and I could tell he was trying to get a rein on his temper. The news wasn’t going to get any better, so I pressed on.
“There’s more,” I said. “He stopped me outside the funeral home today.”
Jack’s head snapped up. “What?”
I nodded. “Broad daylight. There were people and cars everywhere. He has no fear of getting caught. He’d changed his looks again. An old man this time. If I’d seen him from a distance, I would’ve pegged him as late seventies or eighties, and I wouldn’t have recognized him at all. He walked with a cane. But his eyes were the same. He can’t hide his eyes.”
“What did he say?” Jack asked. “Where was Chen?”
“Bathroom,” I answered. “I went out and put my bag and the samples in the trunk, and he came up behind me. He stabbed me in the leg with a hypodermic needle, and then told me if he pressed the plunger that I’d be dead before I hit the ground.”
The scar over Jack’s eyebrow turned white, and he pushed back from his chair so he could walk around. He paced like a caged lion, and violence simmered just below the surface.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
He finally dropped down into the seat next to mine and took my hand.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I’m not dead, so in that regard I guess I’m fine. But I’ve got an idea that I want to float by you. And I’m hoping you’ll tell me I’m crazy.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling my hand back and rubbing my hands over my face. “Maybe I’m crazy. But is it outside the realm of possibility that Malachi’s the one behind these poison murders?”
Jack opened his mouth to say something, but then he paused and sat up straight in his chair. “No,” he said. “It’s definitely a possibility. And I don’t think you’re crazy. Unless we both are and are just suffering from acute paranoia.”
“Good to know,” I said. “But think about it. Think of the chaos this has caused. You’ve got personnel doing double duty, us included. Our attention is splintered, and we’re not taking the care we s
hould be. He can move freely through the crowds and no one would think twice about it or notice. He’s got us running all over the place. He’s been in our house. I asked him if it was him who had killed those two victims.”
“What did he say?” Jack asked.
“He said it was an interesting case, and that it seemed like the perfect crime.”
Jack blew out a breath. “There’s no such thing,” he said, his eyes hardening with a steely determination I wasn’t feeling at the moment.
“That’s what I said,” I told him. “Malachi disagreed with me. He’s curious about the kid, so it’ll only be a matter of time before he’s got the intel he needs on him. He’s been watching us, and I’ve felt his eyes on me for days. He knows there’s something up with Doug. He mentioned how odd it was that the minute Doug stepped into the house all outside interference was shut down.”
“He’s getting desperate for the flash drives,” Jack said.
“Yeah, he mentioned that,” I said. “For whatever reason, he’s ramped up the timeline. He said he hadn’t found them in the house or the funeral home, and he mentioned something about you maybe having them locked up at the station or in a safety deposit box.”
“Desperation leads to mistakes.”
“Jack,” I said, pleadingly. “He’s done playing. He gave us until midnight tonight to hand them over, or he said he’s going to come and get them.”
“Then we need to be ready for him,” Jack said. “Let’s go see what kind of progress Doug is making.”
“Hey, Sheriff,” Betsy Clement said as we came out of the office. “That FBI guy called again. I told him you were a little busy with murders at the moment, but I’d be happy to send him the initial police report on Carver’s crash. I told him I’d fax it to him.”
Jack’s lips twitched. “Did the fax machine get fixed when I wasn’t looking?”
“Oh,” she said, putting the tips of her fingers to her mouth. “I’m always getting the technology stuff confused. I’m old, you know.”
Jack nodded solemnly, and then knuckle-bumped her on the way by. There was a narrow hallway over by the bathrooms, and because I care about my personal safety, there were two things I wouldn’t touch at the station—the coffee and the bathrooms.
There was a door at the end of the narrow hallway with a rectangular window, and crooked blinds on it.
“What room is this?” I asked.
“Screening room,” Jack said. “Kind of. It’s dark and it has a TV, so it’s the easiest place to watch surveillance tapes. Doug said he does his best work in a dark room and with pizza.”
Jack opened the door and I felt like I was walking into a college dorm room. I crinkled my nose in disgust involuntarily, and my lips peeled back from my teeth.
“Eww,” I said.
“It’s on the list for upgrades,” Jack said.
“You should probably just burn it to the ground and start over. Did you raid the elementary school from 1988? That looks just like the TV cart they brought in on movie day.”
“Those were my best memories of school,” Jack said. “I wanted to preserve them.”
“I thought most of your best memories from school happened under the bleachers,” I said.
“I can’t even bring those memories up, they were so meaningless,” he said.
“Nice save.”
“What are y’all talking about?” Doug said. “Close the door. The light is causing a glare.”
Doug looked a little worse for wear. Jack must have rolled him out of bed and put him in the car without a chance to change clothes. His hair looked like he’d combed it with an eggbeater, and he had the squinty-eye, glazed look of someone who’d been sitting in the dark for too long.
Besides the TV cart, there was a modern projector hanging from the ceiling and a wall screen. Doug was sitting at the table with his computer open in front of him, an empty pizza box next to him, and Bob’s Burgers was playing on the screen, though there was no sound.
“This is crazy messed up, man,” Doug said. “I mean, like, I’ve never seen an encryption cadence like this. Whoever made this is crazy skilled.”
“Does that mean you can’t do it?” Jack asked.
“Pssh,” Doug said. “Not to worry. I’ve totally got it. But usually stuff like this takes me an hour or two. It only took me seven minutes to hack into the Pentagon. This has been, like, hours. But now that I’ve got it figured out, I should be able to transfer all the data to a separate server and make backup files.”
Jack looked at his watch. “It’s two o’clock. We’ve got until midnight to make our deadline. How long will it take to transfer everything?”
“Trinity is doing everything she can,” Doug said. He turned the computer screen so we could see a series of numbers and screens were flashing in rapid succession. “It’s going to take time. Especially if the other five are as complicated as this one.”
“Other five?” I asked, looking at Jack.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got the others in a safe place. I figured it would be harder for him to break into the police station than the house or anywhere else.”
“My dad said there were only five total,” I said, gripping Jack’s arm. “He specifically said he wanted all five back by midnight.”
“Maybe he didn’t realize what we had,” he said. “We took those flash drives out of a box from the bunker where all his stuff was. Maybe he just forgot how many were in there.”
“Maybe,” I said. But my dad wasn’t one to get the details wrong.
“We need to get home,” Jack said. “You’re right about the chaos. If your dad is the one responsible for the murders of Nina Walsh and Warren Buchanan, then we’re playing right into his hands. And we’ll probably have more victims. If he’s not the killer, then there’s nothing we can do until we hear back from the lab in Richmond. Nash can take point on that.”
“Can we see some of the things that are on the flash drive?” I asked Doug.
With a few strokes on the keyboard the rapid jargon changed into something else. There were scanned documents dating back more than twenty years, but also electronic files that had dates of just over two years ago. There was a Super Top Secret Clearance stamp at the top of each form.
“Looks like authorization forms,” Jack said, scanning quickly. “Malachi was working for the CIA. We already knew that. But he was triple dipping. He was brokering arms deals and gathering intel for his boss. And at the same time, he was selling the names and locations of the deals to foreign governments, setting up two drops so the CIA was happy getting their target, and then Malachi was siphoning off the rest of the shipment and money for a side deal.
“The CIA knew they had a mole, so they set up a team of agents to track everything back to the source. It looks like Malachi sold those agents’ names to competing agencies and every one of them was picked off.”
“This could be bad,” Doug said, sweat starting to form on his upper lip. “I’m already kind of in trouble with the government. It would be really not good if they found out I hacked into this stuff. Do you know how much it sucks to wear an ankle bracelet and be on house arrest? Do you know how many social issues I have?”
“You’re going to be fine,” Jack told him. “And we’ll work on your social issues when this is all over. Maybe toss a ball around or something.”
“I don’t have good depth perception,” Doug said. “I used to get hit in the face with balls quite a bit when I went to public school.”
“Then we’ll try the arcade,” Jack said. “My point is we’re in the middle of this now, and there’s no going back. We can only go forward. These people have been using the government as their personal piggybank, with no accountability for decades. They’ll kill us all if they find out we’ve seen any of this.”
“That’s not making me feel better,” Doug said.
Jack clapped his hand on Doug’s shoulder. “Your Uncle Ben is my best friend. And he believes in you. Just like I do. I think
you can run circles around anyone sitting in some office and throwing out orders. I know it’s a lot of pressure on you. But we need you to keep a shield around us. We don’t want anyone to be able to listen or watch by electronic means. Can you do that?”
“Yeah,” Doug said, wiping his upper lip. “I can do that. There’s no way they’re getting through Trinity. She provides a one-mile shield for satellite imagery and listening devices. The government doesn’t have anything that comes close to that.”
“There you go,” Jack said. “I’m going to go get the rest of the flash drives. Why don’t you pack up and we’ll head back to the house? I want to get us away from these crowds.”
“Okay,” Doug said. “But you’re out of food at your house.”
“We’ll find something,” Jack said. “And kid, good work. Your Uncle Ben would be proud.”
Doug flushed a little and shrugged. “Thanks. It’s easier not to follow the rules. Of course, that gets you in bigger trouble if you get caught.”
“How’d you get caught the first time?” Jack asked.
Doug grinned. “Uncle Ben. He said it was an important lesson I needed to learn, and that if God gave me this much talent then I needed to do something with it that could change the world. Not just something for myself.”
“Yep, that sounds like Ben,” Jack said. “Can Trinity run interference when she’s closed?”
“No,” Doug said. “I could technically route everything through my cell, and then ping it off different locations, but there’s always the chance someone could piggyback off my signal and get in. Trinity is the safest way to go.”
“Then wait until right before we walk out the door before you shut her down,” Jack said. “We need to keep all our cards as close to the vest as we can. Which means I don’t want a word from anyone the entire way back home.”
Doug and I shared a look, and then I followed Jack out of the room.
