by Robert Pobi
Whitaker drove slowly through the field so they would see them coming. They weren’t sure how things would unroll; Myrna Mercer—Quaid’s sister-in-law—would react how she would react. Judging by everything Whitaker had highlighted on her social media accounts, she would not be the welcoming type. At least not to a pair of federal badges.
Myrna had a propensity for friending and following gun ranges, gun manufacturers, and pro–Second Amendment activists on several social media sites. She was a proud member of the NRA and a charter member of the Covenant of the New Order. She was a hunter, collected little crystal bells, and was part of a quilting club called the Sisters of America. She was the shy one.
Myrna’s husband, Grant, was a prototype for anti-government sentiment. He had been with the 173rd Airborne in Vietnam and was one of the 130 critically wounded on Hill 875 in the summer of 1967; he took a round in the back that confined him to a wheelchair. He came home to run a mechanic’s shop in Milliner for the next half century. His social media accounts painted a pretty specific portrait of a man who had a lot of anger and a general distrust of the powers that be.
The rest of the file was filled with basic givens, general internet Big Data—they had both graduated from high school, but Grant had tried his hand at college when he got back, earning a degree in accounting. They owned two vehicles—a Jeep Grand Cherokee and a Ford F-150—both more than a decade old. Grant still reported a little income from his on-site mechanic business, and their one daughter, Doreen, had moved out three years back. They had no credit cards, and it looked like they had never traveled out of state—at least not in the past decade. They never made long-distance phone calls, but they did receive two a month from D.C., from their daughter.
All of this had been discovered without a warrant, and Lucas wondered how that was even possible.
They were two hundred yards from the house when he spotted them on the road ahead. Six large dogs that blocked their path. There were four shepherd mixes and two that had strong pit bull genes—don’t-fuck-with kind of dogs. Whitaker slowed down, and the dogs parted to let them through. Once they passed, the barking started, and they closed up the rear. Not that they’d be able to stop the SUV if Whitaker ripped it into reverse and pounded down on the gas, but it was a nice little bit of psychological warfare.
They pulled up in front of the house. The other outbuildings shot off the rotunda like spokes. The doors to the big wooden barn were open, and several trucks and cars stood inside. Like the guns in Oscar’s shop back in New York, they were in various stages of repair, restoration, or plain old decay. There were three other buildings, one that looked like a woodshed and another that had to be a smokehouse, followed by a small Quonset hut that had a single human-sized door in the front.
A woman with a rifle stepped out onto the porch. Her social media accounts put her at sixty, but she had that lean, energetic look a lot of city people lose by the time they are fifty. She kept the rifle pointed at the ground, but her index finger was out, over the trigger guard.
Lucas took her in. Welcome to America, Land of the Free, Home of the Afraid.
The dogs circled the SUV in a cacophony of barks.
Whitaker waved at the woman and said to Lucas, “That’s a Sig SG 551. Don’t get in front of that thing.”
Lucas looked at the weapon. “No shit.”
The old lady whistled a three-note alert, and the dogs abandoned the SUV to go to her side.
Whitaker dropped the shift into park, opened the door, and said, “Keep your hands where she can see them.”
“I thought we were looking for rhinoceroses, not old ladies with machine guns.” He followed her out into the cold.
“You lost?” the woman asked.
Whitaker followed her own advice and kept her hands out in the open. “We’re with the FBI, ma’am—I’m Special Agent Whitaker, this is Dr. Page. I was hoping to speak with Mrs. Myrna Mercer.”
The woman shifted on her hip, and the rifle muzzle made a small circle. “How am I supposed to know that you really are the FBI?” she asked. “Not that it makes any difference. I don’t want to speak to you nohow.” Good old star-spangled paranoia at its best.
“May I show you identification?” Whitaker asked.
Lucas took up position a little to Whitaker’s left, in a spot where Myrna Mercer could keep an eye on him without taking her attention from Whitaker. He also realized that it would make it a lot easier for the old woman to shoot both of them.
Myrna nodded. “It’d be a start.”
Whitaker pulled her ID and held it up before taking a few steps toward Myrna.
Myrna didn’t even bother to check it. “What do you want?”
Lucas kept his head pointed at the old lady but ran his eye over the windows. The muzzle of a shotgun poked through the curtain beside the door. Probably the old man—it was perfect wheelchair height.
“I’d like to talk to you about what happened to your brother-in-law.”
Myrna shifted her weight, and once again the muzzle of the rifle traced a little circle at the ground. She stared at Whitaker for a few cold seconds. “No, you don’t.”
“I’m sorry?”
Myrna raised the rifle and aimed it straight at Whitaker’s head. “You want to ask me about them dead agents in New York City.”
68
The house smelled of burned hardwood and dogs and stew on the stove. There were enough deer heads to replace the ones in the family diner back in Carlwood if they had a fire, and a stuffed wolf stood guard by the door, his plastic tongue snapped off and gone. The mantel was decorated with a few family photographs, and the wall above was adorned with a selection of bolt-action hunting rifles that hung on an antler rack. The bottom space was empty, no doubt home to the angry-looking rifle Myrna had greeted them with—and still held now. The house was comfortable and a little messy in the way that happens when time gets to a certain point in a couple’s life.
It definitely didn’t appear that they had spent much of the settlement money. These were not people who wanted names on the paintings on their walls or prancing horses on their vehicles. They just wanted to be left alone to live out their time without any more assholes shooting their loved ones.
Whitaker sat on the sofa, facing Myrna in her La-Z-Boy by the kitchen with the big Sig resting across the arms. Lucas stood at the fireplace, enjoying the warmth of the hearth. Grant was in a wheelchair by the door, and the dogs lay at his side, looking like there was nothing they wanted more than an attack command.
Myrna was a no-nonsense woman with the clipped diction and purposeful body language of someone who didn’t like to waste time. At least not with FBI people. She was five feet in her big shearling slippers and wore jeans and a plaid shirt with pockets on both breasts. Her hair was long, once red and thick like Erin’s, now run through with gray and pulled into a bun. Grant was a decade older and sat lopsided in his chair, emotionless and unmoving other than the occasional grunt. His gut covered his belt buckle and spilled over a pair of too-skinny legs covered in old jeans and ending in cowboy boots that hadn’t seen polish in a long time. There was a shotgun—a twelve-gauge pump—on the back of his chair, and a sidearm—this one a chrome .45—in a tooled holster hanging off the right arm of his chair. Nope, these folks were not spending the settlement on finery.
The Mercers were kind enough to offer coffee, and at first Lucas wondered if it was poisoned. Then he realized that they weren’t monsters, they were just old people who didn’t trust a government that had let its servants murder their loved ones for no real reason.
“So you know about the shootings?” Whitaker asked.
Myrna nodded solemnly. “The message boards is lit up with it. Fox and Breitbart, too.” She took a sip of her own coffee, but her right hand never left the handle and trigger of the big ugly Sig. Her focus never shifted off Whitaker.
“Someone is hunting federal agents. Five people are now dead.”
Myrna shook her head. “Four people a
re dead.”
“It’s five.”
The old lady shook her head. “That imam ain’t worth more’n a cockroach.”
She pronounced the word eye-mam.
Whitaker went silent.
Lucas pivoted a little to bring heat from the fire to distant parts of his body, and it brought his line of sight to the photos on the mantel. There was a single photo of Grant when he was younger—just a kid, really—all ribs and biceps under a palm tree. He had a cigarette in his mouth and an M16 in his hands, taken during his time with the 173rd Airborne in Vietnam. There was another, more recent—in his chair at a rifle range, wearing a sweatshirt with his airborne insignia on it, a younger man with a flat top, a lopsided grin, and the same sweatshirt beside him, a hand on Grant’s shoulder, the banner behind declaring it old-timer’s day for the 173rd. Lucas felt wistful as he compared the two pictures, separated by what—fifty years?—and realized that life rolled over everyone.
Grant spoke up. “Why are you here?” There was no finesse in the question, just a brutish search for information.
“We have reason to believe that whoever is killing these people is somehow connected to your sister and brother-in-law’s deaths.”
“You mean their murders.” Grant rolled forward through the throng of dogs that automatically lifted a forest of tails.
“Yes, that’s what I mean.” Whitaker looked up at him and nodded. “Connected to your brother-in-law’s murder.”
That seemed to be the right answer, and Grant nodded definitively before switching gears. “You accusing us?” It was difficult to blame him for being hostile, and Lucas realized that they were only inside because Myrna had invited them in—Grant seemed more like a sic-the-dogs kind of guy.
Whitaker held up her hand. “Of course not.”
Whitaker was doing well, and Lucas decided that the mute act was the way to go; for some reason, Whitaker and Myrna were connecting. Maybe it was because they both liked guns. Maybe it was that invisible woman thing that he saw Erin and the girls do. But whatever it was, he would only screw it up if he opened his mouth. So he played the mute, nodding or shaking his head at the appropriate junctures in the conversation.
“The shooter has intimate knowledge of what happened on Bible Hill. I don’t know where he got this knowledge, and I was wondering if you had any information that might point us in the right direction. Have you spoken to anyone about what happened?”
Myrna looked at her for a few cold seconds. “Spoken to anyone? No, Agent Whitaker, I haven’t spoken to anyone. I’m not allowed to. That was part of the deal. You people gave me a bag of money, and I’m not allowed to discuss how you shot down my family. How’s that for land of the free?” She stared Whitaker down for a few seconds more before turning to Lucas. “I lost my blood up there, and you’re asking me for help?”
One of the photos on the mantel was of Myrna in her younger days—a good ten or fifteen years back—she was kneeling on the ground, the butt of her hunting rifle resting on a mule deer, its bloody tongue lolling out. Her daughter stood beside her—Doreen was maybe seven or eight, about Laurie’s age—hand on her mom’s shoulder. Lucas suddenly wished he were back at home with his kids, decorating the tree or playing with the Luigi board. Anything had to be better than being in this house of sadness.
Lucas couldn’t help but wonder if Grant Mercer’s country had done as much for him as he deserved when he came home minus the use of his legs. A lot of men either fell between the cracks or were ignored altogether. He wondered when the people who were so keen on buying bullets and bombers for the country would see fit to give the boys who used that stuff medical coverage befitting their sacrifices. But they’d need empathy for that, something that the people in Congress seemed to be missing on every conceivable level—unless it was tax breaks for billion-dollar companies; that one they had down.
Whitaker kept at Myrna. “Whoever is killing these people knows about what happened at your brother-in-law’s cabin.”
“What makes you say that?” the old woman asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t share that with you. But I can tell you that he knows things only available to people with intimate knowledge of what happened. I know you don’t want anyone else to get hurt over what happened on Bible Hill. There’s been enough suffering already.”
Myrna locked Whitaker with that hunter’s stare she displayed in the photographs. “You people ain’t too smart.”
“What do you mean?”
Lucas couldn’t tell if it was an act or if she really didn’t know what Myrna was going to say next.
Myrna leaned forward, and her face went cold again. “If it’s so secret, did you ever stop to think that maybe it’s someone in the FBI?”
69
Carlwood, Wyoming
The hotel room smelled of tobacco smoke and Lysol and scented lubricant and laser ink from the little HP they bought at the general store in downtown Carlwood. Every surface in the room was piled with papers, birthed from the dead printer cartridges piled on the snot-green shag beside the dented garbage can. There was a grease-stained bag filled with burger wrappers and crunched plastic water bottles on top of the television. Welcome to room 9 of the Buck Stops Here Motor Lodge, population: 2.
Lucas’s eye felt like it was too large for his socket, and he put the pages down, clamped it shut, and listened to the circuits in his head hum in protest.
“You okay?” Whitaker asked from somewhere else.
They had been at this for hours now, and it felt like another day. “Just tired of the nothing.” He opened his eyes.
The latest victim report on the imam from New York was in front of him. More surgical precision with a .300 Winnie Mag. It was like this guy was ivory hunting, only taking the trophies that would make headlines. But now he had crossed the line from proactive to reactive in denying he had a master. With that one death, he had finally sent a decipherable message: Don’t make an ass out of you and umptions.
The shooter was letting everyone know that he wasn’t out there for someone else—he was doing this for his own reasons. And killing the imam had been a poignant fuck-you and a warning to any other terrorist agencies thinking about hanging their shingle around his neck.
And now they had Doyle’s sour sentiments about Hartke, compounded by Myrna Mercer’s pronouncements that the only people left who knew about Bible Hill were those in the FBI. Which, Lucas hated to admit, made sense from a certain perspective.
But what did that give him and Whitaker in the way of options?
And they still hadn’t tied Jameson’s murder in with those of Hartke, Kavanagh, and Lupino back in New York. At least not beyond anything circumstantial. Jameson most definitely had nothing to do with Bible Hill. So how was his death connected to their shooter?
They couldn’t call Kehoe until they had something solid. And Lucas was having trouble swallowing all this without a way to link it all together. All he had was a sea of dotted lines.
Lucas stood up and cracked another bottle of water from the plastic-wrapped case purchased at the gas station. “You?” Their coats were spread over the radiator under the window but they both wore their boots; neither wanted to catch cooties from the carpet.
“I was just reading the report on the mosque killing in New York. The lands and grooves from the slug they found embedded in the steps match our guy. Same round. Same weight. Same weird core. Same same same.” She closed the laptop and tossed it onto the bed, which squeaked for what had to be the ten millionth time in its sad life. “And we’re up to three copycat shooters now. A man hit three pedestrians in Brooklyn, but they’ll all be fine; there was a shooting down in the Bowery—UPS driver took a round in the hip, but they caught the guy trying to get on a bus with a rifle case two blocks up; a third down on Canal Street—someone took a shot at a tourist but missed. No .300s in the lot.”
He put the bottle of water away, then crumpled the empty and tossed it into the garbage can. “You find any mention of Har
tke in this pile of dogshit?” He hated wasting time on something that might be a witch hunt dreamed up by a sheriff who was still angry at losing a deputy. Not to mention having a cinematic mistake by the FBI and ATF forever scarring his record in a tiny little outpost on the edge of civilization.
“Nothing in the files by the FBI proper. He never got a promotion; he stayed a field agent for twenty-eight years even though he had an exemplary record.”
“Not according to Doyle.”
“Not according to Doyle,” she repeated. “No.”
Lucas thought back to all the time he had spent with the man and realized that Hartke had never spoken about his past. He was a here and now kind of man with nothing in the way of regrets, his three biggest data points being two bad marriages and an old Dodge that sucked up money like a vengeful casino. He had never hinted at bad career juju like Bible Hill. Not even close.
Whitaker picked up a long-cold burger. “So we have Doyle mimicking WikiLeaks. But there’s no way to tie Deputy Jameson’s death directly to Bible Hill or Hartke, Kavanagh, and Lupino. So it’s a big bag of coincidences and not much more.”
Lucas leaned forward and stretched, reaching for the floor. His prosthetic locked, and he had to twist his back and flex his shoulder to unkink the elbow joint when he got back up. It made an audible clink. “If our shooter is somehow motivated by Bible Hill, why would he kill Jameson? It doesn’t fit the narrative. He wasn’t even working for the local SD when the Quaid incident went down. I can’t believe that our shooter would kill a deputy and an innocent bystander simply for target practice. He would—” And Lucas stopped as the gears in his head meshed, and it came to him. “The other victim in Jameson’s cruiser, the one who drowned in the back—what was his name?”
Like an appliance, all her lights went on, and she picked through a pile of papers until she came up with Doyle’s docket on the Jameson killing. She opened it. “Here … it … is. Second victim was one Donald Francis Doowack.”
