The Triggerman's Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Oh, my. One bureaucrat standing up for another. I’m not in much shock.”

  Dumars set down her iced tea and locked her gaze onto Susan Baum’s green eyes. Sharon could feel the heat rising into her cheeks. Her calves felt tight.

  “Ms. Baum, if you’re implying some kind of kinship between your suspect and the agency he used to work for, you are being overly suspicious and naive.”

  The columnist stared back.

  “Do you honestly believe we wouldn’t investigate him because of his former employment with us?”

  Baum touched her napkin to her lips, then spread it onto her lap. “I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. Believe in us.”

  Baum leaned forward, her voice a hiss and her eyes luminous with the inward light of emotion. “Then talk to me!”

  Sharon sat back and again stared hard into Susan Baum’s eyes. She tried to look pitying, respectful and admiring all at once.

  She’ll do anything to get inside. She’ll lap up our truth like one of John’s dogs.

  “We have something,” Sharon said finally. “That’s one of the reasons it took some time to meet with you. We had to make some connections, gather some more facts. We’re sorry for what must seem like an incredible delay. But we’ve been busy, I can assure you. In fact, Susan, right now you could safely say that we’re hot.”

  Baum said nothing, but kept her brilliant green eyes on Dumars.

  “We have a suspect. And we’re ready to go public with it.”

  Baum’s face turned an excited pink and her eyes seemed to grow even brighter. “Who?”

  “I think we should talk about this somewhere else. Let’s finish up and take a walk. Okay?”

  “Oh, I’m finished.”

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  They strolled down the boardwalk at Laguna’s Main Beach, but Sharon knew Baum could not go far. It was Josh’s idea to “pre-fatigue” her, loosen her up for gullibility as a picador would loosen up a bull for the sword. The poor columnist was sweating hard and limping badly before they’d gone a hundred yards. She’d pulled a hat from her bag and jammed it down over her hair, and slipped on a big white windbreaker. She kept looking behind them.

  “I don’t like looking the same for more than about one hour,” Baum stated. “But it’s hard on the wardrobe.”

  “It’s okay, Susan. You’re okay here with me.”

  They sat on two multicolored ceramic seats with a multicolored ceramic stand and chessboard between them. Sharon looked out at the autumn Pacific—waveless, breeze-brushed, silver.

  Along the boardwalk tourists wandered, taking pictures. Locals smashed volleyballs back and forth in the sand while further down the beach two basketball courts teemed with jerking, jumping bodies. Offshore stood two jagged black rocks topped with birds that didn’t so much as flutter when the swell heaved up around them. Sharon could even see Catalina Island, twenty miles away, a low shape separating the metallic sea from a pale blue sky. She liked this town. She had lived here her junior year in college with her boyfriend. The city and its beaches always brought back memories of her love, his betrayal, the way they went from being happy to being over. Donny. That was almost a decade ago.

  “His name is Mark Foster,” Sharon said. “He’s twenty-four, a drifter, a criminal. At the time of Rebecca’s death he was living in Huntington Beach, hanging out at a White Supremacist compound in Newport.”

  “Alamo West,” said Baum. “I wrote about it.”

  “We think you might have touched an even bigger nerve than you usually do,” said Sharon, flatteringly.

  “I tried to be nice to those skinhead Nazi morons. It was my chance to be forgiving. But the man who runs the place—that reverend?—he actually made me nauseous. I do remember that Mark Foster was less of a swine than the others, or seemed to be. Funny though, I’ve forgotten which one he was.”

  “This might help.”

  Sharon removed from her briefcase the file supplied by Norton. On top was one photograph of Foster—a mug shot taken by Gainesville Police back in 1988. There were two others: one a mug taken by police in Eaton, Colorado, 1992; the other a snapshot of Foster and friends at a neo-Nazi skinhead rally in Huntington Beach, 1994. His face wasn’t very clear in this nighttime shot because Mark and his friends were gathered around a bonfire, some holding torches, some holding beers, and the photographer was obviously an amateur.

  “The Journal ran this picture with my column,” said Baum.

  “Right. We’ve got a rap sheet on him, too. Burglary, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, public drunkenness, public disturbance. To be honest, Susan, it took the Bureau some time after Rebecca’s death to start poking around Alamo West. I mean, we had quite a list of people you’d attacked in the Journal.”

  “I didn’t attack anyone at Alamo West.”

  “That’s why we didn’t scrutinize them at first. But you did condescend to them. To some people, that’s worse than a full offensive.”

  “Well, I was a little . . . maybe, pitying.”

  “Maybe Jewish women shouldn’t condescend to neo-Nazi men, Susan.”

  Dumars wondered if she was laying it on a little thick. She had the psychological equivalent of a choke-hold right now, and years of law enforcement training had taught her to never, ever surrender an advantage. Still, she flinched inwardly at her own feigned superiority. To hide this, she took a deep breath and looked knowingly at the columnist.

  Baum nodded as Dumars continued.

  “The man you suspected, by the way—Vann Holt—was someone we looked hard at, early. He cleared. So congratulations on your instincts, Susan. Maybe you’ve got a career with the Bureau if you ever get tired of newspaper work. Anyway, Holt isn’t and never was our man. But by the time we started focusing in on Alamo West, Mark Foster was gone.”

  “And?”

  “Remains so. We’ve gotten unverified reports that he headed up into the Pacific Northwest. If he shows his snout, we’ll hook it.”

  “Wonderful language. Can I quote you?”

  “Absolutely.” Dumars smiled then, but it felt strange to be smiling and lying at the same time. She wondered if the columnist could sense her duplicity. Sharon had never considered herself an even passable deceiver, but Joshua had told her it was time to learn the craft. To deceive successfully, he said, began with belief in one’s self. Like a religion, it required faith. If you had that, it was as easy as falling into bed.

  “I can give you this file copy, if you’d like. I ran it on our best machine, but it’s still a little blurred. The photos are really pretty decent.”

  Baum accepted the file, her eyes dancing with curiosity and pleasure. “What led you to Foster?”

  “First, we matched all the people you’d written about negatively against their potential as killers. You’d hit the Boy Scouts pretty hard for opposing gay troop leaders and insisting on mentioning God in their pledge, but we didn’t think the Boy Scouts of America would target you for assassination. You had a field day with the tobacco lobbyist who summers in Newport Beach, the GI Joe designer who lived in Fullerton and the Christian recording label out in Irvine, but are they killers? No. So, once we cast our net wide enough, we came up with Alamo West. A different story. We’d heard rumors that some members had planned violence against a local synagogue, and were targeting an Orange County group called One Hundred Black Men. We weren’t convinced they had the, uh, the . . .”

  “Balls?”

  “. . . Well, resources for that, but we try to keep an eye on those kinds of people as a matter of course. Maybe, if Foster had just stuck around to answer our questions we might not have latched onto him so fast. You can imagine how skittish these types are, after Oklahoma City. But he didn’t stick around. No doubt the reverend tipped him to our interest, and that was enough. In Mark’s sudden absence we managed to turn up, at his last residence, a box of .30/06 ammunition similar to that used on Ms. Harris. There were two cartr
idges missing from the box. We also found copies of your column on Alamo West. The clincher was a letter addressed to you that we assume he never mailed. It was in a safe deposit box that took some time to get into. In it, he implied that he would love to kill you because you were a Jew and a traitor to America and a fool.”

  “Oh, my.”

  After you’ve hooked her, enlist her.

  Dumars set a hand on Baum’s. “I ask you not to mention that. Say nothing about what we found in his place. It would encourage him to destroy evidence, and evidence is the only thing that will convict Rebecca’s killer. Please.”

  “Understood. I would have come forth with that letter, if I’d gotten it.”

  “I know. There’s a copy of it in the file for you.”

  “Did you find the gun?”

  “No gun. Yet.”

  “Have you gotten an arrest warrant?”

  “No. We want him only for questioning. It’s important you say that in your article. There’s no reason to put the fear of God in him if there’s even a slight chance he’ll come forward. It’s possible he didn’t do it. It’s also probable that he didn’t do it alone. So we want to give him the opportunity to include his friends at Alamo West, if that’s how it went down. A suspect wanted for questioning—not for arrest.”

  “I understand. God, this is . . . I feel so conflicted right now.”

  “There’s no conflict in busting creeps.”

  Baum removed the largest of the photographs of Foster and stared at it. “He was the most decent one of them. Or so I thought.”

  “He’s a fringe character, Susan. They all are at Alamo West.”

  “And you’ve got nothing on any of the others?”

  “Not so far.”

  Baum continued to regard the picture. “Now that the killer has a face, I feel . . . it’s like . . . this boy was capable of that? He looks so innocent.”

  “So did Ted Bundy.”

  “Oh, my.” Baum flipped through the rap sheets. “A violent man. Of all the people I regularly insult in print, this boy . . . wanted to kill me. You know, I wondered when I wrote that piece on the skinheads if one of them—just one—might read it and, well, learn something from me. Be illuminated. Change. That was naive.”

  “Optimistic, but naive.”

  Baum’s bright green eyes held Sharon’s. “And I’m not a naive person. Not after covering the news for thirty years. And here, I was so sure Vann Holt was behind it.”

  “Wishful thinking, Susan?”

  “I hit him hard a few times in print. All his right-wing this and right-wing that. All those secret men he trains. I exposed his son as a probable sex offender during the Ruiz trial. I was sure he had decided to get me. He seemed like a perfect assassin. A pig with a gun. Though on some level, I felt sorry for him.”

  “It’s a long journey from Republican to assassin.”

  “I know.”

  Sharon watched a flock of seagulls scatter as a puppy ran toward it. The birds cried, cawed, circled and gathered further down the beach, landing on feet as orange and bright as plastic.

  “The Bureau thought, given the circumstances, that you should get this information first. We’ll have a news conference tomorrow up at county, to fill in the other media. They’ll get most of what you got.”

  “Thank you. Sharon, do you think there’s a chance that Foster will try again?”

  “No. But keep a weather eye.”

  Baum nodded thoughtfully.

  Sharon left the interview with an uneasy conscience. She was a woman most comfortable with black and white, wrong and right, and she had willingly promoted a falsehood here. Yes, it was a lie designed to put Wayfarer’s mind at rest, to further draw him away from any suspicion of John. A white lie. It was important that the Bureau be seen as working hard on the wrong suspect.

  Of course, the longer Foster remained at large the better, and the Bureau would help him stay that way.

  Unsettled as she was by her subterfuge, Sharon was thrilled by the power of it, too. What a feeling, to sway and influence the media. Deceit ruled. She consulted the rearview mirror to see if dishonesty had changed her face. No, Sharon decided: it was the same 34-year old biological-clock-ticking-away face she’d left home with that morning. She wondered about Retin-A.

  She drove by the old apartment she had shared with Donny, at the base of Third Street hill. It was still there, though freshly painted. A new Honda sat in the place her old Chevy Malibu once occupied. The apartment had new curtains. She parked in the driveway for a moment. She remembered the life she had then, all the books and part-time jobs and sharing every expense with Donny, all the lovemaking and fighting and tears and long Sunday morning hours in bed with the newspaper strewn across the covers and cups of coffee growing cool on the nightstands. Those were the best times, she thought, those Sunday mornings.

  She thought about Josh Weinstein and John Menden—the men in her life now—and how close they could be to her heart, yet so far from it. Maybe that was the price you paid for a career like hers. Men all around you, really, but what did they amount to except teammates, competitors, flirts, maybe friends at best?

  A woman could do worse, she thought.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  October the fourteenth hovers gently upon Liberty Ridge. It is an autumn evening scrubbed by breeze, cloudless and dry, ripe with the promise of change.

  If seen from above, the dominant feature of Liberty Ridge is the blue oval of lake in its center. In the middle of the lake is a small round island, densely wooded and dark. The lake seems to stare upward at you, like an eye, with its calm black pupil of an island taking you in.

  To the north are two hundred acres of orange grove, a perfect rectangle bordered by a windbreak of eucalyptus. Early each morning the irrigation rows fill with water and glisten like stripes of poured silver. Holt has gone to enormous expense to bring his citrus up to certified organic standards, though never applying for the final papers because his operation is not commercial and he detests inspectors of any kind on Liberty Ridge. Without the use of chemical herbicides to control weeds, or chemical insecticides to kill pests, the two hundred acres are labor intensive. Holt’s ranch workers are relatively small in number and well paid. Behind the lake, to the south, lie four hundred acres of Southern California coastal scrub and savanna. Because this natural habitat is part of a greater belt of undeveloped land, it is impossible to tell, from above, where the southern boundary of Liberty Ridge lies. Only from the ground can you see the actual border—an eight foot chain link fence topped by another two feet of acutely angled barbed wire, all charged with 24,000 volts of current. The electricity to the fence is turned off and on at arbitrary hours during the day, but it is always on at night. The charge is strong enough to send a deer spasming hoof-over-ear back into the brush, or to knock a man completely senseless. One of Holt’s independent springers roamed far from the pack last summer, urinated on the fence and snapped its own spine in a howling recoil. The animal scratched back to the compound a day later using only his front paws, setting off a dispute between Holt and his daughter, Valerie, that Valerie, as usual, won. She demanded surgery for the pup. The dog was operated on that day, but expired during the ordeal.

  East of the lake, inland, lie soft foothills of oak and sage, grasslands, and Interstate 5, which marks the edge of the property. From a frontage road used mostly by surfers and the Marines of nearby Camp Pendleton, a private asphalt ribbon lined with date palms winds west toward the house and outbuildings, the lake, and groves. There is a gate near the frontage road—just out of sight around the first bend—which is manned round-the-clock by Liberty Ridge Security, a team of five men supervised by Vann Holt’s ubiquitous protector, hunting companion, drinking buddy and personal assistant, Lane Fargo.

  To the west is the Pacific. The property line ends almost half a mile before the beach, which is fine with Vann Holt because beach access in California is nearly impossible to restrict anymore, a
nd because a long, narrow, brackish slough runs parallel with the coast on the western edge of Liberty Ridge, making electric fences, guarded gates or even routine security patrols all but unnecessary. In light moments he jokes about stocking the slough with crocodiles. It would be nice to have a beach, but when a strong south swell powers up from Mexico and Holt wants to surf, he and Valerie and Fargo just drive to the dirt parking patch like everyone else, then paddle out and fight for the waves. As a boy he’d belonged to a private surf club there, but privacy in current day Orange County—Holt once pointed out to a client visiting from South Africa—has gone the way of the mastodon, the full-service gas station and apartheid.

  The compound itself is built around what Holt calls the Big House—a little joke on himself, a retired Federal crime buster. This house is made primarily of restored adobe over cinderblock and steel I-beam. This expensive combination of materials makes for very good insulation against heat and cold, and of course provides the Big House’s old-time California Mission flavor. Holt often points out to guests that it is bulletproof, apropos of little but his desire to raise eyebrows. It is an imposing structure with three stories that seem to just wander on forever once you’re inside. Holt designed the re-model himself, which captures the Mission ambience but has contemporary touches such as oversized double-paned windows and twelve-foot ceilings that gather plenty of sunlight. Some of the rooms are furnished with genuine Mission-era appointments, others feature pale gray walls hung with the somewhat sentimental plein-air landscapes of the early twentieth century that Holt admires.

  There is a separate residence for Lane Fargo. Fargo’s home is actually a portion of the restored orange-packing house that sits between the Big House and the lake. It has the functional tin facing and cavernous interior of the original. Holt has kept a great deal of the old packing equipment in tact: the conveyors and hoppers, the processing tables, the two roll-up doors large enough for a truck to drive through. But Fargo keeps the doors locked and the windows shut on all but the hottest days, giving the old plant an air of rusty malignity. The dogs kill an occasional rat along the decking that runs around the perimeter of the packing house.