Borderline Insanity

by Jeff Miller

  “And most important, if you have a clear shot at Fisher, shoot to kill! Allison Jenkins may still be alive, and we can’t give Fisher a chance to harm her. Special Agent Dagny Gray is in charge, and you should all obey her commands. Now, let’s do this!”

  Everyone picked through the fatigues on the racks to find the best fit. The women took theirs to the girls’ locker room. A flat-screen television hung on the wall. CNN was still broadcasting live from Bilford, even in the middle of the night.

  As they changed, one of the women asked Dagny, “You ever do anything like this before?”

  “I’ve been part of SWAT raids.”

  “No, I mean have you been a part of anything like this before?”

  “Not like this.”

  As she dressed, her phone buzzed again. Another text from her mother: Never mind, I did the Google on it.

  “But you’re going to be in charge out there?” It wasn’t really a question; it was a judgment.

  “Actually, the frail ninety-year-old in the other room is going to be in charge,” Dagny said. “He’ll be relaying his commands to me.”

  The woman rolled her eyes. Wait until he’s Director, Dagny thought.

  The bulbous figure of Sheriff Don Marigold flashed on the flat screen and caught Dagny’s eye. CNN was replaying footage from a press conference on the courthouse steps earlier that day. The bottom banner read: Sheriff Don Announces Arrests.

  Dagny walked over to the set and turned up the sound.

  “And that’s why,” the sheriff said, “I’m happy to announce that we have arrested Juan Sanchez, owner of Bilford Ford, for his employment of illegal-migrant labor, which renders him complicit in the recent massacre and in the disappearance of Allison Jenkins. Had Mr. Sanchez not enticed and exploited the young illegals, they never would have moved here and would likely be alive today. Without a massacre, Ms. Jenkins would be safe and well. And that is my message to the rest of Bilford’s business community: If you hired illegal workers, I will get you, and you will be held accountable for what has transpired. We in Bilford have sinned. It is time to do the Lord’s bidding. And I will continue to do it, no matter what the heretics might say about me. I love America. I love the people of Bilford. I will not stop this crusade.”

  Someone has to stop the crusade, Dagny thought. Her phone buzzed.

  Harold Fisher had turned on her iPad. She opened the Find My iPhone app and found his location. She smiled. They were going to catch him.

  She looked back up to the blustering sheriff on the television. If Diego’s sacrifice was going to mean anything, it wouldn’t be enough to catch Fisher. She had to bring down Sheriff Don, too.

  In a flash, she knew how to do it. Immediately, she wished it had not occurred to her. It was reckless and stupid, entirely inappropriate, and probably illegal.

  It was also the right thing to do.

  She called John Beamer. He took some persuading.

  CHAPTER 66

  Dagny climbed into the fake moving van with Brent, Victor, and the Professor while the CIRG team filled the other trucks. Taking a seat across from Victor, she noticed for the first time that he was wearing civilian clothes. “You’re not joining the raid?”

  “I know my strengths.”

  “Tech support,” the Professor said. “Lord knows we don’t want a gun in his hand.”

  As they rode, Dagny studied the faces of the team, wondering what they would think of her when it was all over. The Professor was smiling in silent satisfaction, certain, it seemed, that victory would deliver to him control over the entirety of the FBI. Until Brent had mentioned it, it hadn’t occurred to her that the Professor would want to be Director. She felt silly now for having missed it. He was an elderly man with no children. The Bureau had been his life’s obsession. It was his identity, and it would be his legacy.

  Brent was thumbing through the ammo on his belt pocket. He was right, of course—she had been unfair to him. There was no reason for it. Dagny had repeatedly flouted the FBI’s rules in ways small and big. Brent, by contrast, was the model special agent, loyal to the Bureau and its rules. For perhaps the first time, she saw this as a virtue. A Bureau full of lone wolves could never function. The world needed more Brents than Dagnys.

  Victor, laptop open, was studying the geography of the raid. He was a great kid and fiercely loyal to her, having risked his career to join her in Bilford. Without his efforts, they never would have found the silo or the bodies inside it, and they never would have made the connection to Diablo Rico. She hoped he and his bride-to-be would have children, and that he’d find joy in them. She hoped he would never make the Bureau his life.

  Dagny rode with a pit in her stomach, eager to bring this all to a close and afraid of what that would mean.

  The convoy parked out of sight of the house. Everyone exited the vehicles and huddled around the Professor, who reviewed the plan for the final time. The snipers were dispatched to their stations, while the Professor and Victor retired to the inside of the van so they could watch their progress unfold through the magic of the helmet-cam. Dagny and the others huddled low, waiting for authorization to move on the house.

  After a few minutes, the Professor’s voice rang in her ear. “Snipers are in place. Begin ground operation.”

  She scanned the assembled team, all outfitted in fatigues, armed for combat. Their eyes were trained on her, waiting for instruction. Brent, usually dapper in a suit, smiled at her. He looked at home in his war clothes. It seemed wrong that battle wear was so comfortable while law enforcement clothing was stiff and stifling.

  “Let’s go,” Dagny said.

  She led the team on a crawl toward the house. There was a palpable energy from the collective adrenaline of the group. Brent sidled up next to her. “These are the moments we live for, right?” he said. She was too filled with dread to respond.

  The team split at the west wall of the house. She led her half around the front, while Brent took his around the back. One of the CIRG members bashed in windows with a Hallagan tool, while another tossed flash grenades and teargas into the home. The Professor continued to bark instructions in her ear, but she couldn’t hear him over the noise. Everyone donned their masks, and the strongest man in the group knocked down the front door. She entered the house with her pistol drawn, and the others followed.

  “Fan out!” she shouted, but the CIRG team was ahead of her; they’d done this before, many times.

  Dagny walked through the entry toward the kitchen. “Check the closet!” the Professor yelled, and she opened the coat closet in the foyer and rifled through the coats. It was empty. She continued into the kitchen.

  “Where is everyone else?” the Professor said. “I can’t see them. Check the pantry.”

  A CIRG agent came around from the dining room and beat her to the pantry door. Empty. He opened another door to the basement, and two more CIRG agents followed him down. “Spin around; I can’t see what’s behind you,” the Professor barked, and Dagny complied, turning toward the family room. The television was on—more cable news about Bilford. She walked into the room and moved the curtains that hung at the window.

  “The garage! Try the garage!” She spun around, opened the door to the garage, and peered in. It was empty. There were cabinets lining one of the walls; CIRG agents had already opened them.

  “What’s upstairs?”

  Dagny walked back through the kitchen to the foyer, and the steps that went upstairs. Brent was walking down them.

  “What did you find?” she asked.

  “Evidence of confinement. Ropes, chains, tape. A video camera on a tripod.”

  The Professor shouted in her ear. “I don’t care about any of that. I want Fisher!”

  “No Fisher?” she said.

  “Nobody,” Brent replied.

  The Professor shouted, “What about the basement!” She circled around to the kitchen. A CIRG agent was coming up the steps from the basement.

  “Anything?” Dagny aske
d.

  “No,” she said.

  One of the snipers came running up to her. “We found the driver and the newsgirl in the trunk of the taxi outside.” She followed her outside to the taxi and peered into the open trunk. Jenkins’s body lay on top of the dead cabbie’s. The newswoman’s neck was bruised and abraded, and there were rope burns on her wrists, but there was no decomposition—her death was recent. The cabbie’s body was in worse shape, green and bloated, with bloody foam leaking from his nose and mouth. Dagny filled with sadness. They’d come close but hadn’t managed to save anyone. Not the boy in the silo, who managed to scream for help moments before the silo’s explosion. And now not Allison Jenkins, who had probably been killed only hours ago. If she’d been only a little bit better at her job, both might have been saved.

  “I don’t care about this,” the Professor said. “I want Fisher. Has anyone checked to see if there is an attic, for Christ’s sake?”

  CHAPTER 67

  Harold Fisher sat on an old wood trunk, listening to the sounds below. Boots clattering on the floor and stairs. Glass shattering, doors breaking. Flash grenades exploding. People yelling.

  His right hand held his gun, a Springfield XD-S, with seven rounds of 9mm Luger. It was enough to take down a small team but not a whole army, and from the sounds of it, an army was coming.

  The attic was maybe twenty by fifteen; it was eight feet tall in the middle but only two feet tall at the sides. Wood crossbeams rose from the middle of the floor to support the roof at forty-five-degree angles in both directions. If the army came for him, these beams would slow them. There was a small closet in the far wall, six feet high but only a foot wide. He tiptoed to it, opened the door, and looked inside. There was a broom and nothing else. He withdrew the broom and leaned it against the wall, then stepped inside the closet. If he hadn’t been so thin, he never would have fit.

  Fisher pulled the door nearly shut, leaving a small crack so he could see what was coming. His chest began to heave. For a long time, he’d wanted this final confrontation. Now that Dagny Gray and her army were just below his feet, it was too much. There was always the chance, he supposed, that they might miss him—that they wouldn’t check the attic, or if they did, that they would overlook the closet. He closed his eyes and prayed to God, asking forgiveness for what he had done and what he would do if they found him.

  The frenzy of noise below continued. How had they found him? Maybe when he had turned on the iPad? Could she have tracked it? His own curiosity had done him in. If only he had left that backpack on the motel landing.

  He heard them pop the ceiling panel that led to the attic. A hand reached up and tossed a small black object into the room. It exploded with a bang that shook the closet door; the thin man held it to keep it from flying open. Smoke filled the attic. Another grenade landed closer to the closet. The thin man held the door tight and felt it shake when the grenade exploded. Now the attic was filled with smoke.

  Fisher heard the smattering of steps on the ladder. He couldn’t see through the smoke and guessed that they couldn’t see him, either. As the smoke dissipated, he saw three officers covered in fatigues and helmets. He wondered whether one of them was Dagny. She’d been lucky his key no longer worked at the Bilford Motor Inn. He figured she wouldn’t be so lucky today.

  Opening the closet just an inch wider, he stuck the barrel of his gun out the door and peered over the scope. There were five officers now, and one was walking toward the closet. He squeezed his finger on the trigger and fired off a shot.

  CHAPTER 68

  When Dagny got back to the house, Brent was standing at the door. “The Professor wants to know if anyone checked the attic,” she said.

  He shook his head. “You need to see this.” She followed him inside to the family room, where CIRG agents were huddled around the television set. Channel 2 was broadcasting live from a house in Bilford. One of the agents turned up the sound.

  On the screen, John Beamer stood on the steps of the house, dressed in full tactical gear, speaking into a microphone held by a reporter and reading from his phone. “Approximately thirty minutes ago, we began an operation to capture Harold Fisher, the suspected perpetrator of the massacre in Bilford.” Dagny heard the Professor swear through her earpiece. He was watching the report through the camera in her helmet.

  “As expected,” Beamer continued, “Mr. Fisher resisted our efforts to capture him and fired at our men. Fortunately, he missed. Mr. Fisher’s actions, however, required counterfire, which killed him. We are processing the scene now. Our preference would have been for Mr. Fisher to stand trial for his crimes against our community, but the most important thing is that his spree is over.”

  She heard the Professor swear some more.

  “None of this would have been possible without the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which deserves the bulk of the credit for what happened here today. In particular, Timothy McDougal is singularly responsible for the success of our operation. Without his genius, we would not have found the bodies at the silo, we would not have identified Mr. Fisher as the perpetrator, and Mr. Fisher would still be free today. I think I can speak on behalf of all of Bilford in thanking Mr. McDougal for what he has done for this community.”

  The Professor let out a string of archaic expletives that Dagny had never heard.

  Someone turned off the television, and the agents began to filter outside. “Wait!” Dagny called. “This is still a crime scene. We need to log the evidence.”

  “He’s dead,” Brent said. “There’s not going to be a trial.”

  “But it’s still protocol.”

  “Nobody cares about protocol,” he said. “Nobody cares about anything. We lost.”

  CHAPTER 69

  Dagny sat with the Professor, Brent, and Victor at the corner table at the New Bilford Chili’s. Brent ordered a coffee; Victor, a slice of apple pie; Dagny, a cheeseburger with extra cheese. The Professor ordered nothing and stared at her, seething in silence. He knew, she decided.

  “I don’t understand it,” Victor said. “How did Beamer find him? And why didn’t he involve us in the raid? I thought he was a good guy.”

  “Sometimes,” the Professor said, still staring at Dagny, “people have their own agendas, and they’re willing to be disloyal to achieve them.”

  It hurt to hear him say this. There was nothing she could say in response.

  “He’s a jerk,” Brent said. “Not only was he disloyal, but it was bad judgment. This was way too hot for the Bilford PD. They have no expertise for this. If we had led the raid, we would have captured him alive. I guarantee it.”

  The Professor continued to stare straight into Dagny. “I cannot fathom how Beamer knew where he was,” he said. “Any idea, Dagny?”

  “I don’t know,” she lied.

  “I would ask him, but I doubt he’d tell me,” the Professor said. “Convenient that Fisher was killed. If there were a trial, Beamer would have to explain how he found Fisher. But now, he doesn’t have to.”

  Dagny took a bite from her burger. “No one else is going to eat?”

  The Professor rose from the table. “Of course not.”

  Brent stood, too. “I can’t take this, either. I’m going back to the hotel.”

  They stormed away, leaving Victor alone with Dagny. He turned to her. “What just happened?”

  “The Professor is mad at me.”

  “Why?”

  She thought about dodging the question, but Victor deserved the truth. “I gave Beamer the coordinates for the raid and told him to lead it without us.”

  He leaned back in his seat. “And the Professor knows this?”

  “Apparently, he suspects.”

  “How did you get the coordinates?”

  “Fisher stole my backpack at the motel.”

  “And you tracked your iPad?”

  She nodded. “You mad at me?”

  He tilted his head in contemplation. “No.” Pulling his pie plat
e closer, he lifted a bite with his fork and ate it.

  “Why not?”

  “Dagny, I don’t care who gets credit. A terrible murderer isn’t going to kill again. That’s all that matters. Everything else is politics. If you want Beamer to beat Sheriff Don in the next election, that seems noble enough to me, I guess.”

  He was always more perceptive than she expected him to be.

  “You had to know that it would enrage the Professor and possibly damage his quest to be Director,” he continued. “So I assume you texted Beamer the speech he read, thanking the Professor for his help with the investigation. Trying to mitigate the damage.”

  “Whether it mitigated it or not, we’ll see.”

  “It was super reckless, of course. Gambling on Bilford PD to pull this off. They’ve got no training for something like this. Imagine if it hadn’t worked.”

  “I know.” It was the most reckless thing she’d done as a special agent, and she’d done a lot of reckless things.

  “I’m surprised Beamer went along with it.”

  “It gave him a way to defeat Sheriff Don. It was the only way someone would. You’re really not mad at me?”

  “No,” he said, eating another scoop of pie. “All that matters is the harm we stopped, I figure. I know you think I’m naive about all of this.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m pretty sure you’re the wisest of all of us about this kind of stuff.” She took another bite of the burger and studied Victor. At twenty-five years old, he was as far away from the Professor’s Machiavellian ways as a kid could ever be. “Be careful, Victor. Everything about this job is designed to change you. I pray that it won’t.” The Bureau needed more Brents than Dagnys, but it needed Victors most of all.

  Her phone buzzed. She picked it up and saw Diego’s number flash on the screen.

  CHAPTER 70