by Jeff Miller
After the fire and brimstone, it was time for his plea. “I am asking only that you visit and identify the bodies at the high school, and that you sit with the agents working the case and give detailed and thorough statements. I will make sure you have safe transport. I can, if you’ll let me, work to arrange for security near your homes. This is not a time to burrow and hide and cower in fear. This is a time to stand with God. It is easy to stand with him in good times. Virtue is standing with him when times are bad.
“If you’ll stand with God and help with the investigation, please reply to this e-mail so that I can make the necessary arrangements. Thank you.”
CHAPTER 35
The Professor was still sitting in front of the computer in Beamer’s basement when Dagny walked down the steps. Before she could speak, he held up his hand, silencing her. She followed his eyes, darting about the map on the screen, following each dot as it moved toward its murder. He paused the action and closed his eyes, seemingly searching for deep insights and revelations.
She set her backpack on the floor and sat next to him. When she opened her mouth, he again silenced her—an impressive trick, since his eyes were still closed. After a few minutes, he shook his head. “I can’t decide.”
“Can’t decide what?”
He ignored it. “How is the morgue?”
“Operating. Organized.”
“They’re still emptying the silo?”
“Yes. It’s my next stop.”
“You talked to the coroner?”
“I did.” She enjoyed it when the Professor was dialed in to a case. There was no small talk.
“What else is on your immediate agenda?”
“I want to check to see if there is video of the gas-station explosion.”
He shook his head. “I talked to the local police. The only camera was inside the station, and that melted down.”
“Some neighboring business had to have a camera.”
“It’s a rural gas station, they say. But you should confirm it.”
“What can’t you decide?”
“The president wants me to fly back to DC to brief him on the case.”
“The president of the United States?”
“No, Turkmenistan.” Sarcasm was the only form of humor the Professor ever displayed.
“That’s unusual.”
“So is finding eighty-one illegal immigrants in a small-town silo in Ohio.”
“You can’t do it by phone? Video?”
“One should never pass up the chance to meet with the president in person, Dagny.”
“Isn’t this something the Director is supposed to do?”
He smiled. “I have a better handle on the facts.”
“And the Director is okay with it?”
“The Director doesn’t know.”
Dagny shook her head. “That seems unwise.”
“To the contrary. The president has lost confidence in the Director.”
She had met the Director once, and he had been reasonable enough under the circumstances. He had also permitted their little group to operate without supervision. Alienating him seemed risky. “Are you sure about this?”
He smiled. “Come with me to DC.”
She shook her head. “I have too much to do.”
“Mistake on your part. I’m going to take credit for everything good in your absence.”
“And everything bad?”
“All yours.”
“Tell me you’ve got a profile for the unsub.”
“I have some preliminary ideas. I think he’s a local. Mechanically minded. A handyman of sorts.”
“Why?”
“He modified a silo and then rigged it to explode.”
“Fair enough.”
“I suspect he has been unable to keep a job for very long, maybe uninterested in doing so. Prefers to be left to his own devices. Not dumb, but not cultured. Something traumatic happened to him, I’m guessing. Likely former military.”
“Why former military?”
“Because our military attracts the aimless. It teaches them discipline, authority, and confidence.”
“And where do you see that here?”
“He loaded up a truck with migrants, took them to the silo, ordered them to surrender their phones, and convinced them to climb up and then down to their deaths. You can only pull that off with an air of authority and a great deal of confidence. Plus, the canvas bag that held the phones.”
“So, canvas is a military thing?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Anything else?”
“Not much family,” he continued. “Not around him, anyway. Maybe estranged.”
“Physically?”
“Generally fit. Something like this takes energy. Taller rather than short. Thinner rather than fat. When are you getting the files from the various coroners?” Most people paused when changing topics, but the Professor never did.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Get some sleep tonight.”
“We’ll see.”
“It’s an order, not a suggestion. You look terrible. As for the coroners, I’m guessing they’ll have some unsolved murders of Hispanic men, but I doubt our guy is the one who did it. Although he was likely a cruel man, I don’t think he was a criminal one until something set him off.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But the grandeur of his enterprise isn’t something that festers within a man throughout his life. With your average, run-of-the-mill serial killer, that evil was always inside him. But something like this was sparked. Our unsub was always a bad man. But not bad like this.”
As profiles went, it was fine. But in the end, profiles were just guesses, and she preferred evidence. She didn’t dare say this to the Professor, who had made a career out of such behavioral analysis. “What can’t you decide?” she asked again.
He pushed a key on the computer, staring at the flow of dots on the computer screen. When the dots came together, he paused it. “That’s the point of abduction. The NSA may very well know whether another phone was in the vicinity at that time. But my contact at the NSA won’t do a search for me because of new safeguards and such. Thank you, Edward Snowden,” he sneered.
“I seem to remember someone suggesting it might be difficult to get this data from NSA without a terrorist connection,” Dagny said.
“Yes, a very annoying person suggested that. Even a broken clock, you know the rest. In any event, I can’t decide if I should ask the president to make the NSA cooperate.”
Of course he should, she thought. “What’s the downside?”
“Apparently, the use of this data to solve crimes is now a political issue, what with all the civil-liberty nonsense going around.”
Dagny believed in more of that civil-liberty nonsense than the Professor. “If you don’t ask the president, what’s the alternative?”
“I have a friend who works for an NSA contractor.”
“That sounds far-fetched.”
“That he can access the data?”
“That you have a friend.”
“You’re delightful when you haven’t slept in two days. If my friend is caught, he’ll be fired. Perhaps prosecuted. They’ll trace it to us unless I find a way to contact him without leaving a record. That’s harder than you’d think these days.”
“Buy a burner.”
“A what?”
“You’ve obviously never worked a drug case.”
“They’re beneath me. What’s a burner?”
“You buy a cell phone with prepaid minutes from Walgreens, and you throw it away when you’re done.”
He shook his head. “They’d find some way to trace it. Tie it back to the store and watch video footage to see who made the purchase.”
“Then wear a hood and pay in cash.”
“I miss the old days, when you could get away with anything,” the Professor said. He stroked his beard for a moment. “I have the answer. I’ll casually float t
he idea to the president, and let him decide whether he wants to order NSA to cooperate or, alternatively, if he will agree to stymie any investigation into a breach of NSA security associated with my friend’s inquiry into the data. That option would give him the opportunity to maintain plausible deniability.”
“The mark of any true leader.”
“You don’t become president by being a true leader, Dagny.” He glanced at his watch. “My cab should be here any minute. A private jet is waiting for me at the Bilford County Airport. I’ll be in the Oval Office three hours from now. There’s a possibility that we’ll have an answer from NSA one way or the other tonight. We’re close, Dagny.”
She hoped he was right, but she wasn’t optimistic. In his profile, the Professor had described a man with no job, no friends, and no family. Someone who lived a life of isolation.
It didn’t seem like someone like that would carry a cell phone.
CHAPTER 36
Hank Frank sipped ice water from an insulated, oversize travel mug and moved the mic closer. He spoke at a near whisper. “I was going to talk about the sales tax today.” He paused. “Not even the whole tax. I was going to talk about point five percent. That was today’s topic. I had notes. I had spreadsheets. I had guests lined up to talk about a half a percent increase in the sales tax.
“It was all going to be about another penny on two dollars.” He took another sip of water, and then looked up to Lucy in the control room, who seemed to be watching him—really watching him—for the very first time. “That’s what we do, right? We argue about small things with righteous passion and relentless indignation, certain in our infallibility. Certain that those on the other side of the issue are stupid or dishonest or ignorant.” He sighed.
“I don’t really care about the sales tax, or having to wait five days to buy a gun, or what they read in a high school English class. I mean, I care about them enough to have an opinion about them. And when I tell you that opinion, it’s sincere. Right or wrong, everything I’ve said, I really meant.
“But . . .” He took another sip of water. “What really matters to me? What really matters is my life with my wife and son. Dinners together. Baseball games. Christmas mornings. School plays. The kiss my wife gives me when I leave the house. The smile my son gives me when I pick him up from school. Family vacations. All of those things, and thousands of those things. The thousands of those things still to come.
“No matter what your politics, those are the things that matter. We share that, regardless of party or politics, religion or skin color. Or even place of birth.”
Tears started to well in his eyes. “We’re hearing now that several dozen young men may have been killed. That means there are dozens of families that have lost sons and brothers and fathers, and many dozens more that lost friends or lovers. The greatest tragedy and loss one can imagine, and it’s being felt in hundreds of homes, here, in and around our small town.” He stopped a moment in the enormity of the tragedy he had described, and then he continued.
“And I feel great personal shame because it happened here, in our town, with our eyes closed. We talk about Bilford pride, but there is no Bilford. There’s no sense of community. Only pockets of people who look like one another, so they hang out together and ignore everyone else. We surround ourselves with mirrors, not windows, and there’s so much we don’t see as a result.
“And the real shame I feel? That in two years, I’ll be ranting on here about the sales tax or abortion or even immigration, because I will move on just like so many of you who were lucky enough that a madman in our midst didn’t hate the color of our skin or the place we were born. We all have the luxury of forgetting. There are a thousand folks in Bilford who don’t. I urge you all—every one of you—to reach out to that community with all the love and help you can. At the end of the day, we’re not Republican or Democrat, young or old, white or black or brown, citizen or noncitizen. At the end of the day, we’re all human. We feel the same emotions and grieve the same losses. There’s no ‘them’ today in Bilford. There is only us.”
CHAPTER 37
When Dagny arrived at the farm, technicians and crew were still working on the last of the silo’s bottom remnants, mostly small, charred pieces of bodies and clothing mixed among animal carcasses and feces, all of which was difficult to segregate. The lead technician on duty gave her an overview of the excavation. Everything had been done with commendable efficiency and expertise, but there was no surprise find or smoking gun. Things would be sampled and dusted and scanned, and it was likely to tell them nothing at all.
Brent’s booming voice lifted her from the gloom. “Dagny!”
She turned and saw him walking toward her. Tall, fit, handsome. Impeccably attired in a well-tailored and pressed suit. Hoover would have cloned him back in the day, if he had the technology and hadn’t been racist.
“Tell me good news,” she said.
He spun around, pretending to leave. “I’ll try to get you some.”
“Just tell me what you’ve found.”
He turned back, smiling. He was always smiling with her. As far as she knew, he was always smiling with everyone. It was an inclination she couldn’t understand. Pretending to be happy was exhausting. To do it all the time would kill her. She supposed he might have been smiling because he was genuinely happy, although this seemed impossible to her. Happiness was something Dagny understood in theory, like a black hole. She knew black holes existed, but they were several thousand light years away.
“Why do you always look at me like you’re an anthropologist?” he said.
“The neighbors?”
“I’ve interviewed everyone contiguous and three properties out. Was waking people all night long.” He pulled out a notepad. “Fifty-nine interviews at thirty-one properties. Four interviews were fruitful.”
“How so?”
He flipped through his notes. “Susan Marks, twenty-eight, housewife, lives in a farmhouse three properties south. Was taking her kids to school and passed a pickup truck with a bunch of Hispanic men in the back. It was headed this way. Couldn’t remember the color of the pickup. Thinks there were about eight men in back. Didn’t notice the driver. That’s all she had.”
“Second?”
He flipped the page again. “Douglas Stills, lives next door. Mid-fifties, white. Said the Hoover farm has been vacant three years. Foreclosed by the bank. Hoovers moved to Georgetown, Kentucky. Thinks Terry Hoover got a job at the Toyota plant. Hasn’t seen them since. Farm was in disrepair; property was uncared for. Stills was happy a few months ago when he saw a pickup truck pull into the property with a, quote, ‘bunch of Mexicans in the back.’ Figured the bank was finally getting the property ready for sale. Guessed that the truck was black. Didn’t notice who was driving. Said the truck didn’t use the driveway, but figured that maybe the men were clearing some of the woods. That’s it for him.”
“I hope you’re saving the best for last. Third?”
“Maxwell Hammond. White, forties. Leases part of the Baker farm for growing soybeans. Saw a pickup drive by twice with Hispanic men in the back. Hammond was working down by the road. Says it was a blue pickup. About a dozen men in the back each time. Says he thinks the driver was black but can’t remember anything else.”
“Black?” That didn’t meet the Professor’s profile for their serial killer. It didn’t meet the profile for any serial killer. “How far was he from the road when he saw him?”
“Twenty feet.”
Dagny nodded. “Fourth?”
“Harrison Baker has a farm two lots to the west. Eighty-one years old, lives alone with his dog. Spends most of his time sitting on his front porch with binoculars, watching birds and anything else that happens by. Says he saw a pickup truck headed here with men in the back three times; he saw the same truck headed back the other way, empty, a couple of other times. Couldn’t remember the color of the truck. White, he thinks, but he says that’s just a guess, and he can’t picture it i
n his head. Never really looked at the men in the back; he didn’t know if they were Hispanic or not. His sightings were scattered over the last three months or so; last one was maybe two weeks ago. That’s the best he could do on dates. His porch sits about a hundred yards from the road, and he spotted them through a small gap in the trees, so it’s all a bit shaky. As for the driver, he said the guy was definitely white and definitely thin.”
“White, not black?”
“Yes.”
“And thin? He was sitting in the cab of a pickup. How could Baker tell if the guy was thin?”
“That’s what I asked him. He said you could see it in the guy’s face.”
“So an eighty-year-old catches a one-second glance at a man driving a pickup as it passed between some trees, and he could tell the man was thin in the face?”
Brent shrugged. “I’m just telling you what he said.”
“So we have one guy who says he’s black and another who says he’s white.” Eyewitness testimony was always terrible.
“Could be two guys working together. Ebony and Ivory. Side by side on the—”
“Assuming it’s one guy, who was more credible?”
He smiled. “You know I’m going with the guy who said the unsub is white.”
Dagny laughed. “Besides general policy, any reason?”
“Hammond had a Confederate flag decal on his truck. He’s had some run-ins with the law. Looked at me the way a Klansman might. Whereas Baker is a quality guy. Keeps a meticulous journal of all the birds he sees, with details on the dates and times. Even sketches them in the margins. When people see me coming up to talk to them, I can tell some are thinking ‘scary black guy,’ even though I’m wearing a suit. Baker wasn’t like that. Hammond was. So if I had to bet, I’d say the unsub is white and thin.”
