Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  For those reasons, and more, Gregor had been careful over the years only to work as a consultant. He questioned witnesses if the police brought him along when they were investigating themselves. He looked at the evidence other people had collected. He did not go out on his own and do the footwork required of any decent investigator. The game had not swallowed him whole, and he did have a life. He would not be distraught if no one ever asked for his help on a case again. He refused to allow himself to be sucked into the all-consuming totality of the work. If there was legwork to be done, somebody else could do it.

  Sitting in his living room after breakfast with John Jackman and Father Ti-bor, he decided that all rules had exceptions, and this was going to be the exception to this rule. He was glad that Bennis was off doing something with Donna Moradanyan Donahue. That way, he didn’t have to explain himself until he was ready to. He got the cell phone and punched in a number he knew by heart, in spite of the fact that before a week ago, he hadn’t dialed it for ten years. He got past the director’s secretary with a heartening lack of resistance and laid out his problem, in detail. Then he hung up and waited until the call came telling him what he wanted to know. The call was not, of course, from the director himself, but it came because of him, and Gregor was very satisfied.

  “You’re all set,” the man on the phone said. “I’ve told him you’re coming. I’ve read him the riot act. You should be fine. Christ, he hasn’t heard anything but the riot act all week.”

  “If it was up to me, I’d fire him.”

  “We’ll get around to that, don’t worry. First we’ve got a missing agent, right now presumed dead. Good luck. He’s a pain in the ass.”

  “I know.”

  Gregor got his coat, took the paper he’d written down the information on—hotel, hotel room number, hotel room direct line number, cell phone number, pager number—and went down to the street. He started walking up Cavanaugh Street toward a busier intersection, up beyond Krystof An-drechev’s store, but didn’t make it all the way there. The cab appeared out of nowhere, as if summoned by fairy godmothers. He thought he could use a fairy godmother. He got in, gave the address of the hotel, and sat back. Then he tried to clear his mind of everything having to do with the case, and most especially of everything having to do with Walker Canfield. The problem with thinking about Walker Canfield was that it made him do something very much like mental frothing at the mouth.

  The hotel was a mid-level one, built in the forties, right in the middle of downtown. The lobby was pleasant but dark. The furniture was newish, modern, and without character. He gave his name and was told he was expected. He got into the elevator—paneled, but not with good wood—and rode up to the fifth floor. Walker Canfield was waiting for him when the elevator doors opened on five.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Canfield said. “I got a call—I mean, the director—shit.”

  “Where’s your room?”

  Walker Canfield gestured vaguely down the hall. He no longer looked nervous, which was how he’d looked when Gregor first saw him. He no longer looked scared, either, which was how he’d looked by the time Gregor had been through talking to him on that first meeting. He looked dead.

  “Let’s go,” Gregor said. “There’s no point conducting this conversation in a hotel hallway. Even if it is empty.”

  Walker Canfield turned on his heel and walked halfway down the long hallway to the left of the elevators, looking like a sleepwalker. Gregor followed him to the door of room 525. Canfield got out one of those plastic card keys and shoved it quickly in and out of the slot. The door buzzed. Canfield pushed it open and gestured Gregor inside. Gregor went. It was not a hotel room with character.

  “So,” Gregor said. “Is this where you’ve been since you got to Philadelphia, you and your partner?”

  “Steve Bridge,” Canfield said. “They think he’s dead. I think he’s dead. Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know. What would they have done with him? You can’t just make a body disappear. It’s got to be someplace. Even burning it doesn’t get rid of it entirely. Hell, even putting it through a wood chipper doesn’t get rid of it entirely. Do you remember that case, out in Newtown, Connecticut? What a thing.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “I remember it. Let’s try to stay on subject, shall we? What I’m trying to figure out is how exactly the FBI got interested in America on Alert. You don’t monitor all these groups, do you? There are hundreds of them, as far as I can tell.”

  “Well, there are hundreds of Web sites, anyway,” Canfield said. “I don’t really know if there are hundreds of groups. It’s more like—when I was a kid, I used to be a big science fiction fan. It’s like that. You’ve got lots of people, some groups, but mostly individuals. They all know each other and keep up with each other and go to each other’s stuff and buy each other’s books. There are stars and groupies—the stars are the writers and the lecturers, the groupies are the people who follow them. It’s like this whole alternative little world. They’ve got their own publishing companies—really small ones, you know, run out of post office boxes and people’s basements, but you can do that these days. With desktop publishing, it’s easy to make a book that looks like a real one. If you know what I mean. And if you didn’t know what you had and you didn’t know anything about the movement, you’d think you were seeing real scholarly work done by a professor somewhere. It’s only when you start looking into the references in the footnotes that you realize they all only quote each other, or they quote outside sources out of context. It’s like an alternative universe.”

  “All right. But that still doesn’t answer my question. What got the Bureau interested in America on Alert, rather than in one of the others?”

  “They were buying guns.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said patiently. “But how did you know they were buying guns? Unless you are monitoring all the groups out there, which has got to be expensive as hell and mostly useless, since most of these people are no more going to kill anybody than they’re going to lay eggs. Something must have tipped the Bureau off to the gun buying.”

  “Oh,” Canfield said. “Yeah. I know that. There was a tip.”

  “An anonymous tip?”

  “Yeah. I mean, we have those all the time. You have to listen to them. You have to check them out. You can’t—”

  “Yes, I know,” Gregor said, “I’m not criticizing you. When did you get this tip?”

  “Five, six months ago—no, wait. I can tell you exactly. July third. It’s my niece’s birthday. It stuck in my head when I saw the file.”

  “Exactly what did this tip consist of?”

  Walker Canfield looked blank. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  It was, Gregor thought, like trying to get molasses out of a squirt gun. “What did the tip consist of? Did somebody call in and say, ‘you’d better take a look at America on Alert’? Did they say ‘Michael Harridan bought six guns under six different names at six different gun shows last month.’ What?”

  “Oh.” Canfield brightened. “I see what you mean. It wasn’t that specific. It was—just a minute. Let me get my notes.” He ran around to the side of one of the big double beds and came up with his briefcase. “I spend a lot of time going over this stuff these days. I’m going crazy, sitting in this room, waiting for something to happen. But that’s what they want me to do, you know, the Bureau. They’ve sent up a couple of other guys to look into things. Here it is.” He drew out a sheet of paper and brought it back across the room to Gregor. “It’s only a copy, but you get the picture.”

  Gregor got the picture. The paper was a copy of a letter. At first glance, it looked like a business letter. The format was perfect—headings and addresses in the right places, paragraphs carefully blocked out with a space between each one, closing and signature centered. To the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it started, and then, This is to inform you of the activities of an organization called America on Alert, centered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to its own literat
ure, the purpose of this organization is to “save America from being oppressed under the One World Government of a New World Order.”According to its president, Michael Harridan, “the day will soon come when good Americans must arm themselves and take to the hills and the side streets to save our nation by force of arms.” I have reason to believe that that day is now here, and America on Alert is getting ready to commit a significant act of violence.

  “Very nice,” Gregor said. “Nothing at all to indicate that whoever wrote it is a nutcase. It could have come from a bank.”

  “It’s a mistake to think these guys are all illiterate yahoos,” Canfield said. “I thought that too, before I got involved in this. You’d be amazed at how professional some of their material can sound. That’s what makes what they do so insidious. If they wrote in bad grammar and exclamation points, nobody would listen to them.”

  “Was any attempt made to trace this letter?” Gregor asked.

  Canfield nodded. “We looked into it, yeah. It was mailed in Philadelphia. We got one of those profiles done on the sender, if you want to see that.”

  “No.” Gregor had no use for the psychological analysis of mail—“the writer is a middle-aged male with a deep neurotic attachment to his mother”—and it wouldn’t tell him anything he wanted to know at the moment even if it were accurate. He gave the copy of the letter back to Canfield. “I want to get this straight. The Bureau got the letter. The Bureau assigned you and Steve Bridge to investigate it—”

  “Well, there were about four of us at the time, back in Washington. They assigned Steve and I to come out here and do something about it.”

  “Okay, what made them decide to send the two of you out here? And to send Bridge undercover?”

  “We checked it out,” Canfield said. “We looked into the organization, sort of sideways. We went to their Web site. That kind of thing.”

  “And?”

  “And it was true. This Michael Harridan really was saying that the time was near when the black helicopters would be coming and we’d be taken over by the UN and all the rest of it. But you’ve got to watch it for a while to see what’s happening. They just don’t leap out at you and start acting like complete lunatics.”

  “No, I’m sure they don’t. So you checked out their material, and that—”

  “No, not that alone,” Canfield said. “It was something else. We checked out Michael Harridan.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s even more than I told you before. There is no Michael Harridan. Not anywhere in the country. At least, not anywhere that would fit somebody involved in America on Alert. There’s a Catholic priest in Oregon, but he’s been in Rome for the past two years. There’s an eighty-five-year-old guy in a home for people with Alzheimer’s in Texas. That’s about it. You’d think it was a common enough name. It isn’t. And there’s no Michael Harridan in Philadelphia or on the Main Line. At all.”

  “So he’s using an alias,” Gregor said. “Is that all that surprising? These groups are the epitome of paranoid. Half the people in them must use assumed names.”

  “No, that’s where you’re wrong,” Canfield said. “You see, the thing is, the whole movement is really hyped on trust. They’re very suspicious people. They’re convinced that everybody is lying to them. They put a lot of emphasis on the people they deal with being open and aboveboard and trustworthy.”

  “And are they?”

  “Well,” Canfield said, “a whole lot of them are lying their heads off. This is really fertile ground for running a scam. You have all these people, afraid of the government, afraid of their television sets. I mean, what do you do with people who think magic wands and witches’ spells are real? Critical thinking is not their strong suit here. There’s this guy out there who’s got a whole little thing going—he claims to have been a Catholic priest, a Freemason, a Mormon, and a priest in the Church of Satan. Sit down and try to add up the times and places and dates, and he’d have to be a hundred and fifty years old. But when people do add up the times and places and dates, he just says he did all this stuff at once and nobody thinks to question him. He sells books and tapes and lectures. People send him money.”

  “Then there isn’t really anything odd about Michael Harridan not being named Michael Harridan,” Gregor pointed out.

  “No, but it was a compilation of things. The more we checked, the odder it got. We got hold of their mailing list and did gun checks. Practically everybody on it had at least one gun license. The more we looked into it, the creepier it got. And Harridan himself, that newsletter, it was so—”

  “So what?”

  “So targeted,” Canfield said. “Most of these newsletters just give you big long lists of names. These are the people who were at the Bilderberger retreat this year. These are the people who work for David Rockefeller. That kind of thing. But The Harridan Report was always talking about specific people doing specific stuff. Charlotte Deacon Ross giving that party. That kind of thing.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said. “So you got assigned to come up here, and you came. Then what?”

  “Then we came,” Canfield said. “And Steve went to one of their lectures, and then he went to another one, and then he joined up and started going to meetings.”

  “And?”

  “There isn’t much else. It’s like I said. Nobody ever sees Michael Harridan, and nobody ever claims to have seen him except this one woman, Kathi Mittendorf. She says she went to a lecture Harridan gave personally. Steve and I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. She could be telling the truth, but she could just be, you know, making herself hot. She doesn’t have much else going for her to make herself hot. She’s middle-aged. She works on the floor at Price Heaven. Part-time, by the way. Hell, she might not even have that for a while. From what I can tell from the papers, Price Heaven seems to be exploding.”

  “Did you check into Kathi Mittendorf? Or any of the others?”

  “Of course we did,” Canfield said. “Mittendorf and this other woman, Susan Hester, went to gun shows a lot, and sometimes they bought, but not usually. Steve and I were both convinced that they were buying on the black market, but we couldn’t prove it, and until we could—” He shrugged. “You know how that is.”

  “How did Harridan keep in touch with the group?” Gregor asked. “Did he send letters? Send e-mail? Set up chat rooms?”

  “He made conference calls,” Canfield said. “Steve was there for one. They set up a speakerphone so that everybody could hear. Sort of a low-tech virtual meeting.”

  Gregor thought it over: the letter to the Bureau; the meeting-by-speaker-phone; the gun shows. He tried not to think about Walker Canfield.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m going to want some contact information on a couple of people, if you have it. And if you don’t have it, I’m going to need to know where to get it.”

  3

  He began by going to the Price Heaven on Altaver Street, a small store without distinction crammed into a row of other stores, not the sort of place he associated with Price Heaven at all. Maybe this was what the papers meant when they said that Price Heaven had made the mistake of hanging on to older, outmoded stores that they would have done better to close down in order to give themselves more resources to compete in the suburbs. At least the people going into this store looked as if they needed a bargain outlet. The kind of people you saw going in to Price Heavens in the malls often looked as if they’d been just as comfortable at L.L. Bean or Coach. He looked around inside for a while, noting a few things that made no difference. Most of the shoppers were African-American or Latino. Most of the saleswomen were white. All of the managers were white. The clothes hanging on the racks in women’s wear were stretched against their hangers. The wide-open plan of the store made it feel oddly empty, in spite of having far too many small and inconsequential things crammed into it. He did not intend to question Kathi Mittendorf in Price Heaven. He didn’t even intend to introduce himself to her. Doing something like that co
uld get someone fired, especially from a place like this. All he wanted to do was to get a look at her.

  Gregor went to the two departments where she was supposed to work, but saw nobody answering to her description, and nobody wearing a name tag with her name on it. In toys, a very small boy was sitting on the floor, having a screaming fit over something his mother would not let him have. In house-wares, a rickety old woman was pawing through box after box of blue ceramic dinner plates, as if the next box she found would be something else, like a dinner plate. The longer he stayed, the more depressed he became. The very air in the store was depressing. The saleswomen were all wearing dirty aprons. The cashiers all looked bored.

  He went back out onto the street to look for another cab. It took him four blocks to find one, by which time he was in another neighborhood entirely. He gave the second address on the list Walker Canfield had given him and sat back to think. He didn’t recognize the street, but that wasn’t necessarily significant. He didn’t know much about Philadelphia anymore. Since he’d come back from Washington to live, he’d restricted himself to Cavanaugh Street, a few neighborhoods in the center of the city where there were restaurants he liked and things he liked to do, and crime scenes. With crime scenes, he was never 100 percent sure where he was. Streets full of brick and stone houses went by, the kind of places that had either been cut up to make cramped apartments or renovated and restored by rich people who didn’t want to live in the suburbs. Those turned into streets full of clattering industrial equipment, doing Gregor did not know what.