by Jeff Miller
“It is. You touch the screen to do things. It says it was made by HP.”
“You got a smartphone. Not every smartphone is an iPhone.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure it is. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Healthy?”
“Yes.” Dagny looked at her half-eaten double cheeseburger.
“I saw you on the news, you know, but I didn’t call because I know how much you hate that. Talking always seems to make you angry.”
That made her angry, because it was true. “Is there anything else, Mom?”
“Are you in danger?”
“No.”
“Are you going to catch the guy?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
It was only one word, but it was so supportive and unconditional that it took Dagny by surprise. She needed a moment to respond, and then managed to say, “Thank you, Mom.”
“I love you, Dagny.”
“I love you, too.”
For the second time in two weeks, she sat in a Wendy’s parking lot in Bilford, eating a burger and crying.
There was a Red Top Cab company near Dagny’s home in Virginia; its headquarters had four garage bays for servicing its fleet of taxies, gas pumps to fuel them, and thirty or forty red taxis sitting on the depot lot at any given time. The Red Top Cab company in Bilford, Ohio, by contrast, was located behind a strip mall in New Bilford and had neither garage bays nor fuel tanks. There were only two cabs parked in front. Dagny parked next to one of them and walked into the one-room office building.
The man sitting behind the counter was reading the newspaper. “I didn’t know that people still read print,” Dagny said.
He lowered the paper. “How else do you get your coupons?” He was middle-aged, mustached, and round in most places. The cap on his head hid what was likely a receding hairline. “You looking for a cab, ma’am?” Even in Ohio, taxi dispatchers sounded like New Yorkers.
“Kind of.” She pulled out her creds and set them on the counter. “I’m Special Agent Dagny Gray.”
“Marcus Wells,” he said, glancing at her credentials and then sliding them back. “This about the silo thing?”
“It is.”
“How can I help you?”
“How many drivers do you have?”
“Ten.”
“You have photos of them?”
“You think one of them did it?”
“No idea, Mr. Wells. Merely trying to fill in some gaps.”
“I’ve got copies of their licenses in their personnel files.”
“That will do.”
He ducked down and opened a cabinet drawer, pulled a stack of files, and set them on the counter. Leafing through them, Dagny counted six nationalities and seven sideburns among them. None could be described as anything approaching thin.
“Any cab missing, Mr. Wells?”
“No.”
“I only saw two cabs in the lot. Is that all you have?”
“No, ma’am. We’ve got twelve. Drivers lease them from us, take them home at night. Company’s got two extra in case we’re overbooked and need more coverage.”
“Do your drivers use their cabs for personal use?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And none of them are missing?”
“I talked to all of them today. All except Arthur Mavis. He’s on vacation.”
“Vacation?
A review of the drivers’ schedules showed that Mavis began his vacation the morning that Allison Jenkins disappeared. A call to Mavis’s cell phone went straight to his voice mail. His son, listed as his emergency contact, said that he hadn’t heard from his father since he left for vacation and gave Dagny the address of his father’s cabin in Petoskey, Michigan. Dagny called the Petoskey Police Department and asked them to check out the cabin. Twenty minutes later, they reported there were no signs of recent entry. Mavis had never made it to the cabin. He had never made it out of Bilford, most likely.
Dagny called the Professor, explained the situation, and gave him Mavis’s cell phone number so that the NSA could find the last recorded location of his phone. “Between Mavis’s phone and Diablo Rico, I think the NSA has some promising leads to work,” Dagny said.
“Unfortunately, they’re working more slowly than I had hoped.”
“Why is that?”
He waited a moment before answering. “They insist upon getting warrants for each search.”
“I think a smart person suggested that we needed a warrant for this.”
“That’s funny. I don’t know any smart people.”
“I guess the winks expired. You need me to swear out a declaration?”
“I swore one for you. Imitated that chicken scrawl you call a signature.”
“Thanks.” After hanging up, she called Brent and Victor to update them on what she’d found. The case was almost over. She was sure of it.
Exhausted and spent, Dagny drove back to the Bilford Motor Inn. She grabbed her backpack, climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing, and found Diego’s dead body lying in front of her motel-room door.
CHAPTER 64
Dagny dropped her backpack and ran toward his body. “Diego!” she shouted, but he didn’t move. She kneeled at his side and held her hand in front of his nose. No breath. She started to cry. Placing two fingers on his wrist, she felt for a pulse that wasn’t there. There was a bullet hole in his forehead. His eyes were open. His hands were cold. “Diego,” she cried softly.
She fell back against the balcony rail and crumbled to the floor. He was dead because of her. She had allowed him to become too involved in the investigation. He was a priest—he had no business climbing silos and gathering intelligence on Diablo Rico.
Diablo Rico. Perhaps they had tipped off the thin man. Perhaps that was why Diego was dead.
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. There wasn’t time to fall apart. She pulled her phone from her pocket and texted Beamer, the Professor, Brent, and Victor: Diego dead at Bilford Motor Inn—Hurry!
Looking over at Diego’s body, she noticed there was no blood on the concrete around him. Maybe it was just hard to see under the dim fluorescent lights under the motel overhang. Waving her iPhone flashlight along the floor, she searched again. No blood. He’d been shot elsewhere and had been dumped here as a message.
Dagny steeled herself. This was a crime scene, and she had to investigate. She walked back to the top of the stairs to get her gloves from her backpack, but the backpack was missing. If the thin man had waited for her to find Diego, he could have grabbed her backpack when she ran to his body. If that’s what happened, he couldn’t have gotten very far. She sprinted down the steps and circled the perimeter of the motel lot. There was no sign of anyone. He was gone.
She ran back to Diego’s body to protect it from tampering. Kneeling over him, she studied the lines of his face. The soft whine of distant sirens built to a cacophony as a fleet of police cars and ambulances flooded the motel lot.
Beamer led the troops up the stairs. When he saw the body, he muttered, “Dear God,” loud enough that Dagny could hear it.
Beamer walked over to her and kneeled beside her. “I’m sorry, Dagny.”
There was nothing to say except business. “Establish search points at roadways three, five, and ten miles from here,” she said. “Request neighboring police departments assist on the outer perimeters. As for the motel property, no one enters or exits. All guests must stay in their rooms for now. We don’t want them contaminating the crime scene. Your men need to limit their own pathways. They can’t gallop up and down the stairs as they like. Everyone hug the left side so that most of the stairway remains untouched. We’ll need witness statements. Hopefully, the Professor is bringing agents to conduct interviews, but we may need to augment them with your men. After witness interviews, we want to evacuate guests through the rear windows of their rooms so that we limit contamination of the landing and parking lot. I assume that the
Professor has notified the Bureau forensics team that we’ll need them to collect physical evidence. However, if your men could establish custody over any surveillance feed the motel has, that would be appreciated.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll rally my troops.”
“And after that,” Dagny said, “you’ll need to take my statement, so that we get down everything I remember before I forget it.” Then, thinking it over, she said, “Forget that. I’ll do my statement now.”
She pulled out her iPhone, activated the voice recorder, and began dictating. There wasn’t much to record, but she had to stop twice because she was crying. As she put the phone back in her pocket, her eyes settled on Diego.
He wasn’t wearing his clerical collar, just tattered jeans and a T-shirt. She wondered if that’s why he stayed in Dayton—to unburden himself of priestly duties. His hair seemed shorter. He’d gotten a haircut. Right when he was ready for a rebirth, life had been taken away. She reached out to run her fingers across his face but stopped short. He wasn’t the man she had kissed two days ago. He was evidence now.
And so she sat against the wall in front of her room at the Bilford Motor Inn, oscillating between catatonic numbness and convulsing sobs. Father Diego Vega hadn’t only been a good man. He had been a genuine saint in every sense of the word, the kind whose quiet acts of sacrifice and heroism made him too good for canonization.
The gentle touch of Victor’s hand on her shoulder woke her from these thoughts. She stood and accepted his embrace. Hugs were doled out only in times of tragedy in her work, and they occurred with all too great a regularity. “He was a great guy,” Victor said.
Brent followed with his own embrace. “I’m sorry, Dagny,” he whispered in her ear.
When he pulled away, the Professor was standing behind him. “The evidence-response team is on its way,” he said. “We need to establish perimeter points and take witness statements.”
“Beamer is setting up perimeter points,” she said.
“I’ve also arranged for four drones to surveil from the skies. We’ll have them up in minutes. With respect to metadata, warrants have been approved. The NSA is searching through the data. I expect us to have coordinates for the unsub’s home base within the hour. I’ve ordered SWAT equipment, and I would like you to lead the team, Dagny, if you are emotionally able.”
This was the Professor’s version of a hug, she supposed.
She nodded. If she’d learned anything in the Bureau, it was how to postpone grief. “I thought we didn’t use SWAT teams, Professor. What happened to the theory that a small team is better?”
“I don’t mind SWAT teams if they do what I say.” He smiled. “When we catch him, things are going to change quickly for us. This isn’t about the bodies in the silo or the girl from the news. This is about an opportunity to change the way we police the country.”
For years, the Professor had been marginalized within the Bureau, so the promotion would be validation of his efforts and victory over his opponents. He’d be the oldest Director in the history of the organization, mostly likely the smartest, almost certainly the least corrupt. Like every Director before him, he suffered from the personal flaw of wanting the position. And he wanted it so badly that he couldn’t parcel a thought to the dead man on the landing who had brought him the case. It made her sick.
They had to surrender their perch on the motel landing when twelve members of the Bureau’s Evidence Response Team arrived on the scene to begin their forensic analysis. Dagny slowly stepped away from Diego. She knew he’d look like a stranger the next time she saw him. Crime science had a way of sucking the soul from a body.
As they walked down the steps to the motel parking lot, she thought about her backpack and the fact that her iPad was in it. She’d collected and saved most of her notes on it. The unsub was likely to inspect it, and if he turned it on, its location would be logged to her iCloud account. She pulled out her iPhone and opened the Find iPhone app. Her iPad showed up under her account as “offline.” She clicked “Notify When Found” so that she would receive an alert if the unsub turned it on.
Six white vans parked adjacent to the motel, and additional teams of FBI agents swarmed into the lot. John Beamer walked over to Dagny. “I see your cavalry is here,” he said. “What do you want us to do?”
“Brief them on what your men have done, and offer to assist as needed.”
He nodded. “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” she said with a quiver that undermined the declaration. She gestured to the commotion around them. “It only becomes real when this is gone.”
Victor tugged at her shoulder. “We’re meeting at the high school to plan the raid.”
CHAPTER 65
There were six new trucks parked in the lot behind the high school gymnasium. One was a tank. The others were armored vehicles disguised as two FedEx trucks, two mail trucks, and a moving van for a company called Helping Hands. Dagny wondered how the Professor had been able to pull these resources together so quickly. No matter how much she thought she was running the investigation, he was the one who pulled the strings in the end.
She parked Diego’s Corvette next to a faux mail truck, flashed her creds to the guard, and went inside. Dozens of technicians and agents were still processing the evidence from the silo. She realized that she didn’t know any of them by name. Victor had done an incredible job organizing the effort. It was something she couldn’t have done. With any luck, though, their work would be moot.
Brent was standing in front of the men’s locker room. He motioned for her to come.
“The Professor got those vehicles pretty fast,” she said.
“You haven’t seen anything yet. Follow me.”
Dagny had never been inside a men’s locker room, and she wasn’t sure she was entering one now, since it looked more like an armory. All of the lockers had been pushed aside to accommodate a dozen racks of weapons and gear. She surveyed the collection of machine guns, pistols, shotguns, flash grenades, Kevlar vests, belts, helmets, visors, gas masks, canisters, camouflage, boots, and infrared cameras. “Good Lord, Brent. Is this Bilford or Fallujah?”
He smiled. “I think the official policy is better safe than sorry.”
“Who are we getting to wear this stuff?”
“CIRG is sending its national team.” CIRG was the Critical Incident Response Group. The Professor was bringing in the best and brightest. “They should be here within the hour.”
“And who’s in charge of them?”
Brent laughed. “The Professor says you are.”
“Why, exactly?” It sounded funny when she said it, but it was an honest question.
“I guess you’re the only person he really trusts.”
That was a lot of weight to carry. Her phone buzzed, and she looked down, hoping to find an alert as to her iPad’s location. Instead she found a text from her mother that read: What is HDMI? She slipped the phone back in her pocket.
They sat in silence, waiting for the Professor to arrive. She spent the downtime thinking about Diego and her increasing sense of culpability for his death.
There was a loud boom as the door to the locker room flew open. The Professor hobbled in with a stack of paper in hand. “We have the coordinates!”
Victor followed behind him.
The Professor handed the stack to Dagny. She leafed through it, trying to make sense of page after page of inscrutable data. “Does this come with a glossary?”
Victor walked over and took the papers from her hands, flipped through them, and explained. “There were dozens of calls from Diablo Rico to various locations in Ohio, but only one of them matches the last location of Arthur Mavis’s cell phone.” Two matching locations had been circled on the page—both showed 39.48747 longitude and 84.595838 latitude. “You overlay this on a map and you get the unsub’s house: 4587 Kiggens Way, in Rhodes, Ohio, just north of New Bilford. Owned by a man named Harold Fisher.”
“What do we k
now about him?”
“Ex-navy,” the Professor said. “No real career. Floats from job to job. Last reported income was for a foreclosure outfit that helps banks manage vacant properties.”
“I spoke to his last boss on the phone,” Victor said. “Fisher quit a few months ago and wouldn’t say why. I asked him to describe Fisher, and he said, ‘Real thin.’ First thing he said, honest to God.”
“As soon as the CIRG team arrives, we’re raiding the house on Kiggens,” the Professor said. “Allison Jenkins may be alive, so it will be a tricky operation. I want snipers in the trees, and I want them to take Fisher out if they have a shot. I will station myself in the moving van, which is outfitted with monitors that will receive video transmissions from cameras embedded in each of the helmets worn in the raid. I’ll be able to speak to Dagny’s earpiece and direct the action.”
That’s why she was to lead the raid. It wasn’t that he trusted her to head the operation; it was that he trusted her to be at his command. “Seriously?” she said.
He smiled. “My brain will be in your body.”
“It’s like I’m a drone.”
“Exactly,” he replied, missing her sarcasm or choosing to ignore it.
She might have pressed him further on this, but the CIRG team arrived—twenty-two men and six women, every one of them an expert in tactical maneuvers. Victor borrowed a projector from the high school AV closet, hooked it to his laptop, and projected a satellite image of Fisher’s property onto the white locker-room wall. The Professor stood in front of the screen and barked instructions like George C. Scott’s Patton.
The house was located in a clearing in the woods. Taking any of their trucks close to the house would draw attention, so they would have to park out of sight and approach by foot. Flipping among satellite views, the Professor identified the most climbable trees for the snipers, who would take their places first. Then the others would advance from the west side of the property, because there were no windows on that side of the house. After the team reached the west wall, half would run along the front of the house, half along the back, and both would smash windows and toss flash and teargas grenades into the house.
