“Julie, oh, Julie—”
All he needed to say. “I hear you. Even with the White House making calls, it took me all day to convince the records people to do it without a warrant.”
Amazing but true, even the President didn’t truly command the federal government. He could steer it. But federal workers were effectively impossible to fire. On a day-to-day basis, they followed their own rules. “They’re running the names now?”
“You’re funny. If there’s a more bureaucratic bureaucracy than the National Personnel Records Center, I haven’t seen it. They punch out at exactly three forty-five p.m. Central Time, rain, snow, or sniper attack. Ironically enough, they’re in St. Louis. Good news is, they show up bright and early, seven-thirty a.m. sharp. It won’t take them long to run it tomorrow morning. With the time difference, you should have it when you get up. But don’t expect any specifics about their service. That was the compromise. Names, ages, rank upon leaving the military, and addresses.”
Another disappointment. Any soldier who had received a disability rating for post-traumatic stress disorder or head trauma would have jumped to the top of the list. Instead, Wells and Coyle would be working blind.
“Anything from Dallas?”
“Not yet, as far as I know. But they’re on it. And say what you like about the FBI, they do work late. They plan to start knocking on doors tonight. ’Course, our friends are probably long gone—”
“But maybe someone will remember them.” Having the passport pictures from Banamex would have helped. Maybe Wells should have insisted on taking them, as Coyle had wanted. Too late now.
“Shafer’s getting down there tomorrow morning, so you can ask him.”
“If he doesn’t get his head beaten in again.”
“Banamex side will take longer. I know this’ll come as a shock, but the Mexican government isn’t doing the United States any favors these days. By the way, we checked immigration records for the Banamex names—”
“Annalise Fabian and Alan Vartan?”
“Yes. Guess what? No entries in the last two years.”
Not a surprise. Easier to create fake passports and driver’s licenses than clean bank accounts, so the Russians would have done everything possible to keep their aliases out of United States government databases. They might even have hired a coyote to sneak them over the border.
“Appreciate the update.”
“Any more delays, I’ll call you.” Tarnes hung up.
Of course, even having the names would hardly guarantee success. Veterans didn’t always tell the VA when they moved. On an even more basic level, Wells couldn’t be sure the woman who called herself Annalise Fabian had come here to find a sniper. But he and Coyle had to start somewhere.
They rented a Ford Explorer, drove south on the two-lane state highway that paralleled the Idaho border. Past the Spokane suburbs, the country opened up, pastures bordered with wooden fences, cows and horses lazily wandering. Coyle drove slumped in his seat, staring at the world from behind big mirrored sunglasses, clocking a steady 80 with one hand loose on the wheel. Reminding Wells how young he really was.
“Where’d you grow up again, John?”
“Hamilton, Montana. Just on the other side of Idaho. Beautiful country.”
“Looks just like this, right?”
“And Malibu looks just like Long Beach.”
Coyle gave a soft Pffft! of dismissal. “Don’t know anything about that. Only black people allowed in Malibu are Will Smith’s family. Maybe Kobe.”
“Should have learned to surf.”
Another Pffft! “Know the joke they like up there? How do you stop a black man from drowning?”
“Tell me the punch line doesn’t involve chitlins.”
Coyle turned to stare at Wells through his sunglasses, didn’t lay off the gas. The Explorer drifted. “Went there, did you?”
“You started it. Eyes on the road, Sergeant.”
Coyle straightened out the Explorer but didn’t stop looking at Wells. “You want to know?”
“If you insist.”
“How do you stop a black man from drowning? Take your foot off his head, you racist.”
Wells had no choice but to laugh. “I’m racist?”
“Whole world is racist. White and black. Black people just know it better than you.” Coyle pulled off his sunglasses. “You like growing up in all this nothing, John?”
“I did. The sun would go down, and it would be dark in the mountains. When I was little, my dad would take me for hikes. He was a doctor—a surgeon—and he always said the mountains were the best cure after a tough operation. No lights, no fire, no tents. Not in the summer, anyway. We’d bring bedrolls and blankets, lie on our backs, looking at the stars, listening to the critters. Sound carries a long way in those canyons; we heard the wolves, the foxes, the owls—all the predators. Hawks and eagles get the credit, but owls are vicious. You’re a squirrel and you hear that Hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo! time to jump. After I was about twelve or so, he let me go on my own—”
“Twelve?”
“I knew every stream and ridge to the Idaho border. He figured I could handle myself. Sometimes I had a rifle, but, even without, I never minded, I never was scared.”
Coyle kept driving.
“Think I’d be lonely,” he finally said. “Anyway, there’s nowhere to hide up there—”
“People have been hiding in those mountains a long time.”
“You can hide yourself, sure, but I mean your secrets. The way you take a drink before work. Or even something simple: You’re a Marine who likes jazz. Those little towns, everyone knows everyone’s business. In a city, you can disappear.”
“Never thought of it that way.” Wells remembered how Coyle had vanished into the Mexico City night. “You like jazz, Coyle? Shoo-bee-doo-bop—”
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. Not your business. What would they have said in Hamilton if you’d come back and told them you were Muslim, John?”
Interesting question. The answer wasn’t as obvious as Coyle thought. Frontier tradition said a man’s home was his castle. Long as he didn’t bother anyone, he could do what he pleased. But Coyle was right, small towns tended to be heavy on gossip. Hamilton was no exception. Wells remembered his mother complaining about one neighbor who always seemed to go to the grocery store at the same time as she did and spent an inordinate amount of time checking out what she bought.
Wells was still mulling his answer as they reached Colfax. Pullman, another twenty miles down, was much bigger, but Colfax was the county seat. “Let’s see if the sheriff will talk to us.”
The Whitman County Sheriff’s Office was a gray concrete block conveniently next door to the county courthouse. The building looked to Wells like a place where justice would be dispatched fairly, if brusquely. A sign beside the front door warned FIREARMS BANNED AND WILL BE CONFISCATED. Underneath, a smaller sign, handwritten, added: We Mean It—Don’t Tempt Us!
Wells and Coyle found themselves in a five-foot-square lobby, adorned only with an American flag and a framed photo of Sheriff Clay Darby. In the pic, Darby wore a dark gray uniform, a light gray tie, and a toothy smile. He looked friendly yet protective, a human Labrador retriever. Judging by a picture was a mistake, but Wells liked him.
A steel door with a magnetic lock offered the only entrance to the offices, though a thick Plexiglas window permitted a view of a single empty desk. Wells pushed the buzzer next to the window. After a minute, a deputy appeared behind it. Late fifties, with a brushy white mustache and a belly that pushed his gun belt.
“We’d like to speak to Sheriff Darby.”
“Any reason you can name?” The deputy’s gruff high-country accent took Wells back to his youth.
“Looking for someone.”
“You bounty hunters?”
“Not exactly.”<
br />
The deputy grunted, waited for more. “Names?” he finally said.
“John. And Winston.”
“ID?”
Wells and Coyle slipped their driver’s licenses through the slot beneath the window.
“You have warrants outstanding, now would be a good time to leave.”
Wells noted the deputy had waited until he had their licenses before offering the advice. “We look like the warrants-outstanding type?”
“Lil’ bit.” The deputy scooped up the licenses, disappeared.
“Last time I showed up at a police station unannounced, the man put me in jail,” Coyle muttered.
“That was France. Anyway, you got to hang with me. So it wasn’t all bad.”
“Says you.”
A few minutes later, the maglock door swung open.
“Any firearms?” the deputy said.
“We saw the sign.”
“That’s a no?”
“That’s a no.”
“Come on, then.”
Darby’s office was as bare and practical as the rest of headquarters, two laptops on his desk, a bookshelf sagging with books on criminology and crime scene investigation. The room carried the faint smell of late nights, sneaked cigarettes, and not enough deputies for all the work. Darby was a few years older than he’d been when the picture in the lobby was taken. More gray in his hair. Still looked like a good guy to Wells. “Sit, please.”
They sat. The deputy stood behind them, reasonable under the circumstances. I trust you. Sort of.
“Gentlemen, Deputy Walsh tells me you’re looking for someone.”
Being straightforward would be their best bet, Wells saw. “Sheriff, this is gonna sound strange, but I promise we’ll give you a way to confirm it. We’re CIA, and we have reason to believe that the Chicago sniper is from this area. Maybe closer to Spokane, maybe over the border in Idaho or Oregon, but Whitman County is the center of where we’re looking.”
“Reason to believe—you two psychic, then?”
“Foreign source.”
“How come the FBI isn’t here?”
“We developed the information. Plus the source isn’t the kind the FBI likes. If we can’t find the guy in about three days, you’ll see them, but I thought we might have a better chance coming in quiet. I grew up in Montana. FBI’s been known to get people’s backs up.”
“Whereas everyone loves the CIA.” Darby shook his head. “Have to be honest, gents. Even if you are who you say, I’m not buying it. I can watch CNN same as you, and everybody says it’s terrorism. We’re short on Muslims here. Especially outside Pullman.”
Wells hesitated only a moment. “There’s about five people in the United States who know this. But we don’t think he’s Muslim. We think someone recruited him.”
“For money?”
“Not necessarily. We think it was a woman. Blond, late twenties, pretty. She showed up in Pullman a couple months back. She may have called herself Annalise. Our working theory: Maybe she met the shooter online. He had anti-government or anti-religious leanings, and she fostered them.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble to avoid the obvious explanation, that the guy is some jihadi nut.”
“We have more, but I can’t tell you what.”
Darby reached into his desk for a Nicorette pack, popped out a piece. “Used to smoke Camels. Lot cooler than these. Then one day I woke up, and I was thirty-six and couldn’t run a mile.”
“Ever try vaping?” Coyle said.
Darby tucked the gum in his mouth. “What is it you want from me and my deputies? Pullman has its own PD, by the way. Wazzu, too. If this guy’s on campus—”
“I don’t think he goes to Washington State,” Wells said. “Or lives in town. Guy like this doesn’t want the neighbors too close. But sooner or later he announces himself. Swings at the mailman. Smacks his girlfriend and winds up in here for a domestic. Or just writes the local paper to complain about the United Nations. You know those guys. Especially the ones who like their guns.”
“Or maybe he lives in the hills, like you said, doesn’t bother anyone. And I’ve never heard of him.”
“Sure. But we’d appreciate any names that fit the profile.”
“What then? You knock on their doors, offer a hit on your vape, ask if they shot anyone lately?”
“Start by seeing who’s home. The second shooting was yesterday morning in Chicago—that’s two thousand miles. If our guy does live here, I doubt he’s back yet. Anyway, two kills so quick, I think he has more on his plate. He’s not coming home until he’s done.”
“Lot of guesses. Maybe somebody’s away driving a rig. Or working a double shift.”
“True enough, but we can talk to the neighbors. We should have a list of local veterans with sniper training by tomorrow morning. If we can cross-check it against the names you give us, we might get somewhere. Look, maybe we’re wrong. But I promise if we can’t find this guy, the FBI will come knocking and make a lot more noise than we do.”
“You have a card?”
Wells scribbled down his and Coyle’s information.
“And that confirmation. Not that I don’t trust you.”
Wells added Julie Tarnes’s number and cia.gov and ucia.gov email accounts. “Call her anytime, day or night, she’ll call you back on the Langley trunk line. Even better, just email her. Can’t fake those addresses.”
“I’ll call you after I’ve talked to her. Maybe put in a call to the Pullman cops, too. A couple potential names come to mind, but honestly no one who fits the profile a hundred percent.”
Tomorrow seemed to be the best they could do. Wells stood. “Thanks, Sheriff.”
They went to a Staples in Moscow, Idaho, for a couple items Wells thought they might need, then found a hotel in Pullman. Wells wondered if he should go to the local cops, decided he was unlikely to build a better rapport with them than he already had with Darby. He’d let Darby handle them. The VA office, thirty miles south in Lewiston, was closed for the night. And when he checked online, Wells didn’t see any veterans’ meetings scheduled. There was one group the next night in Lewiston, another specifically for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder in Pullman.
“That’s it for tonight?” Coyle said. “Seems like we should be doing something.”
“We are. We’re getting a decent night’s sleep and waiting for Tarnes to send those names. See you in the morning, Sergeant.”
Sure enough, the list from Tarnes arrived at 7:30 a.m. the next morning. It included fifty-five names within a hundred miles of Pullman, more than half clustered to the north, in and around Spokane. As Tarnes had warned, the list included only the barest facts—name, age, rank at discharge, and address. Seven veterans lived in Pullman or Moscow, eleven more within a fifty-mile radius, scattered at random in every direction.
Given the distances and the rural roads, Wells thought they would be lucky to clear those first eighteen names before nightfall. He wanted to be back in time to meet with the Lewiston support group, which began at 7:30 p.m. Those conversations might be tricky, too. He printed out the names and maps of all eighteen addresses.
“Ready, Sergeant?”
“No, let’s keep waiting.”
“Bet the sergeants loved you at Camp Lejeune.” Wells’s phone buzzed. A 509 area code. Local. “Sheriff.”
“I have three names you should know. Unfortunately, they’re all over the place. The first guy lives in Hay, the western edge of the county. Not really a town at all, it has a zip code and a cemetery. Anyway, his name’s Harlan Gould. He’s got six kids, and a wife who keeps calling nine-one-one to say he’s hitting her, and changing her mind by the time we get there. I don’t think he’s ex-military, but he has an arsenal. Even a light machine gun that he says doesn’t work. My guys treat him carefully, and I suggest you do the
same. Your buddy, even more so. Guys like Harlan often have strange notions about black people.”
“Understood.”
“Second guy, he’s up near a place called Lamont. Name’s Kenneth Brane. He lives on a farm his parents owned. I mention him because they died a few years back in a fire I’d call suspicious. We brought in the State Patrol, but they couldn’t prove anything. I’ll tell you a secret. Strangle your kin while they’re sleeping and burn their house—unless you’re dumb enough to leave out a gas can, you’ll probably walk. Fires happen. He’s a little bit older, ex-military. Might even have been a Ranger. We haven’t heard from him in a while, but I assume he’s still there.”
Wells looked down the list Tarnes had sent, didn’t see Brane’s name. But if he’d been a Ranger, he could probably shoot even without sniper training.
“Got it.”
“The third one lives east of Colfax, town called Palouse, he’s Nez Perce. Palouse has a thousand people. So compared to the other two, he’s a city boy. He applied to become a deputy maybe three years back. He’d won a shooting contest. It was on his application. Underlined about four times. We had to reject him because he had two psychiatric hospitalizations he hadn’t disclosed. He kept emailing, asking us to reconsider. His name, believe it or not, is Milo Nighthorse.”
“No wonder he’s pissed. Were the emails angry?”
“More childish, I’d say. Emotionally immature. I mean, I actually drove to Palouse to see him. Not because I was worried he might do something, but because he sounded so lost. He wasn’t home, I left a card with his mom. He never called. That was the end of it. Probably a long shot, but I figured you’d want to know.”
“We do. Thanks, Sheriff.”
“I’ll text you the addresses. Remember what I said about Harlan.”
Wells hung up. “The Staples stuff is going to come in handy,” he said to Coyle. “Darby may have broken this open for us.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“I’m gonna make you write him a thank-you note.”
Wells decided to start with Harlan Gould. Guys like him were best approached in the morning, before the day’s frustrations and the drink mounted. The drive to Hay took more than an hour, plenty of time for Wells to fill in Coyle on the three possibilities.
The Deceivers Page 31
