Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Don’t know, Janet, but Foster is insisting we keep aTF in the mushroom mode for a little while longer, while certain people way above our pay grade, quote unquote, work the Kreiss angle. You get some rest now, okay? Hey, and you did fine out there.”

  Janet closed her eyes after Farnsworth left. He was upset—hell, they were all upset—after losing Ken Whittaker. And apparently Ransom’s prognosis wasn’t wonderful. aTF headquarters would of course be asking why a Bureau resident agency had called for one of their people without clearing it through Washington, and why they had even been out there at the arsenal. Farnsworth, anxious at this point to keep the bullshit swirling, had probably told them that it was part of the missing kids case.

  She turned in the bed to ease the pressure on her aching ribs. She vaguely remembered going through a wooden railing. That wood must have been very dry. The docs said she had no broken bones, and that she could check out in the morning, as soon as they made sure she hadn’t suffered a cardiac tamponade, whatever the hell that was. Her right wrist was swollen but usable.

  The fly in all this ointment, of course, was Edwin Kreiss. She tried to remember if the DCB had been told about the Kreiss angle or not.

  Because if they had, then Farnsworth’s game with the aTF wasn’t going to hold up for very long. And poor Kreiss: tearing up the visible world, looking for his daughter, and now the feds had her and weren’t going to tell him? She cursed all bureaucratic rivalries and fell asleep.

  Browne didn’t see the cop car until it was too late; he was already signaling his turn into Jared’s entrance road. He slowed as the cop got out and

  waved him over. With a sigh, Browne shut down the truck and prepared himself. There was no way someone could have made a connection between the arsenal explosion and him, he reassured himself again. Or Jared, for that matter, so this had to be something else. Had to be.

  “Evening, sir. May I see some ID, please?”

  “Certainly, Officer,” Browne said, reaching for his wallet.

  “What’s going on here?”

  The cop didn’t reply as he looked at Browne driver’s license. He asked him to please wait in the truck, then went back to his cruiser to make a radio call. When he came back over, he said, “There’s a sergeant coming out to speak to you, Mr. McGarand. It’ll just be a minute, sir.”

  Browne saw that the cop was uncomfortable, rather than angry or suspicious.

  Had something happened to Jared? Was this why he hadn’t shown up? Then he had an alarming thought. Had that woman’s husband caught them? Jared had said someone had been creeping around his trailer. He felt a pang of conscience—he remembered hoping that the woman’s husband would catch them. He knew the old rule: Be careful of what you wish for.

  A dark four-door sedan nosed alongside the cruiser. Two men in civilian suits accompanied by a bulky state trooper with sergeant’s stripes got out and approached his truck. The trooper took his hat off and informed him that a man, whom they believed to be Jared McGarand, had been found fatally injured. Was he related to Jared McGarand? Browne said yes, he was Jared’s grandfather and his only local next of kin. Would he be able, and willing, to make a next-of-kin identification at the scene?

  Browne, a cold feeling in his stomach, nodded a soundless yes. The trooper cleared his throat and began to explain that the victim had been crushed by the trailer, and that identification might be difficult. Browne blinked. Crushed by the trailer? That didn’t sound like some irate husband.

  He took a deep breath and said that, yes, he’d do it.

  He got out of the truck and waited for the trooper to introduce the two men in suits, but the sergeant did not do so. He almost didn’t have to;

  Browne was almost positive they were government agents, probably FBI.

  The city suits, the faintly supercilious expressions on their faces, and the body language of the local cops told the tale. Browne forced his expression to remain as neutral as he could get it. This was the enemy: The FBI, along with its incompetent cousin, the BATF, had taken William from him. It was one thing to talk about a formless, faceless, and powerful enemy, and quite another thing altogether to be standing

  three feet away from two of its agents. On the other hand, he realized, they would expect him to lose his composure if his grandson had been killed. But why were they here?

  They walked, rather than rode, back down jared’s entrance road to the trailer, Browne with the local cops, and the G-men bringing up the rear.

  They rounded the corner and Browne saw the yellow Mylar tapes, a Crime Scene Unit van, two police cars, two unmarked police cars, and a coroner’s black-windowed ambulance. Jared’s pickup was parked next to his phone company repair van. Technicians in white overalls were wandering around Jared’s yard, while two men who were probably detectives stood talking and smoking cigarettes near the back of the trailer. The trailer’s doors were open and there were obviously people inside. Browne tried to think if jared would have anything in the trailer that might tie him to what they’d been doing at the arsenal, but he didn’t think so.

  Unless he had a stash of copper, and even that could be explained, since he was a telephone repairman. Or had been one.

  The trailer was no longer level. The space underneath the downed end of the trailer was curtained off with a temporary railing, on which some kind of fabric had been stretched. There was a portable light stand set up on one side, which a tech turned on as they approached. Browne hadn’t even noticed that it was getting dark. The cops put out their cigarettes as the sergeant escorted Browne to the curtain, offering at least a public show of deference to impending grief. Browne wasn’t worried too much about grief. He’d spent all he had when William had been killed. By some of these people, he reminded himself, glancing sideways at the two feds.

  He still couldn’t figure out why they were here. Had something turned up in the trailer to draw in federal agents? And were they FBI or aTF?

  The sergeant explained that Jared had been found underneath the trailer, next to a hydraulic jack, and that the jack had broken through the floor of the trailer, causing the trailer to drop directly onto Jared. Browne was conscious of a bad smell coming from behind the curtain. One of the Crime Scene Unit techs walked over and offered a small bottle of Vicks Vapo-Rub. Browne understood at once, and he rubbed a dab into each of his nostrils, then stepped forward. It was not a pretty sight. The end of the trailer had been jacked back up. Jared’s entire body was flattened and his head was swollen, the familiar face almost unrecognizable. There was an industrial-sized hydraulic jack positioned to hold up the near end of the trailer on a steel plate next to the body.

  He saw as much as he wanted to see and then stepped back. He put the

  back of his hand to his mouth, closed his eyes for a moment, and then nodded. The cops were watching him, probably to see if he was going to throw up, but the wave of nausea passed, replaced by a pang of long-lost familial hurt, the kind of hurt he had not experienced since watching the news tapes of those federal bastards cremating his son at Waco. Hate them, he told himself silently, suddenly very conscious of those two federal agents behind him. Hate them and feed on that hate. Maintain control of yourself. Jared’s beyond help or hurt, but you are the bringer of retribution. But you must not attract further attention.

  He caused his shoulders to slump and his face to wilt.

  “That’s my grandson, Jared McGarand. I guess I don’t understand what happened here.”

  “Well, sir, we’re all looking into that. Do you know of any reason he’d go underneath that trailer like that? Or knock down those cinder blocks?”

  Browne looked down at the twisted jack stand. He shook his head.

  “Them cinder blocks were either knocked over or they fell over, one or the other,” one of the detectives said, pointing with a flashlight.

  “Any idea why or what did that?”

  Browne shook his head again.

  “It doesn’t make sense, those blocks just falling
over. Why would they do that? He hit it with his truck or something?”

  The two federals, who had kept back while remaining within earshot, exchanged glances but didn’t say anything. Why are they here? Browne wondered again, fighting off the urge to look at them.

  The sergeant was nodding.

  “Yes, sir, that’s kinda what we thought. But there’s no sign of that. And it would take something pretty big, what with the weight of the trailer and all. We figured he may have been jacking the trailer so’s to reset the blocks or something.”

  “What have you done with the dogs?” Browne asked, looking over their shoulders at the empty pen.

  The cops all looked around and then at one another.

  “How many dogs we talking about, Mr. McGarand?” the sergeant asked.

  “We saw the pen, but there weren’t any dogs here when we got here.”

  The sergeant had a bit of a mountain accent, so Browne decided to countrify his own language a bit.

  “He had him some pig dogs—three of ‘em. He never let ‘em run free less’n we were hunting.”

  One of the detectives introduced himself then, flashing a leather credentials wallet with its golden shield at Browne. He, too, spoke with a southwestern Virginia country accent.

  “Your grandson, Mr. McGarand?

  He have him any enemies? Anyone who would have wanted to do something like this?”

  All Browne could think about was that intruder at the arsenal, the big man in the weird coveralls, or whatever they were, looking right at him with those intense eyes, almost like he knew him. The cool way he had just run off when Browne opened up with the .44, not bothering to shoot back or try anything fancy. That had taken calm professionalism, and Browne was beginning to think that there was something going on here, something much bigger than the disappearance of those college kids.

  Instinctively, he decided to throw them a red herring. He looked down at his shoes for a moment and shuffled his feet, creating the picture of a man making up his mind to tell the cops something embarrassing about his grandson.

  “My grandson?” he said with a parental sigh.

  “He liked the ladies.” The Vicks was making his eyes water, which was perfect, actually.

  “And they liked him, if you know what I mean. Some of those ladies had husbands. I was supposed to see him Saturday night, but he called, said he had him a hot date. By the way he was talking, I think she was maybe one of the married ones. I warned him, right there and then, but with jared, well…”

  The cops were writing in their notebooks and nodding. This was something they understood right away. It was also something to go on.

  “Any idea of who she was?” one of them asked.

  “No, sir,” Browne said.

  “Jared, he wasn’t one for naming names; knew I disapproved. But my guess is it was someone who’d had a telephone problem, called it in, got Jared as the repairman. Something like that, I imagine.

  He usually operates alone, working the back county trouble tickets.”

  One cop closed his notebook and headed for his car to make some calls.

  Browne kept his eyes downcast. Why were they here?

  “Sir, how’s about we go inside, see if you can tell us if anything’s missing?”

  They went into the trailer, past a tech who was scraping some gooey looking substance off the edge of the front steps. They walked around inside the sloping trailer, but everything seemed to be in place. Browne went through the bureau and night table drawers but didn’t say anything about the missing guns. He wasn’t entirely sure that Jared had obtained the guns through lawful channels, since Jared frequented the gun shows in Roanoke and up in Winchester. Plus, there was a lot of gun swapping that went on among those Black Hats idiots. While back in the bedroom, he asked, as casually as he could, who the other people were outside.

  “Those guys? They’re Roanoke FBI agents. They’re doing some investigation at the phone company, some kind of interstate wire fraud case.

  Your grandson worked for the phone company, so a couple of them came out when we made the tentative ID. Me, I think they’re just curious to see how us local yokels do a homicide investigation.”

  That settled that, Browne thought with relief. Nothing to do with the arsenal explosion. They walked back through the trailer, although Browne felt weird walking over the area atop of jared’s body like that.

  They asked him for some background information on himself, where he lived, and whether he would be seeing to the funeral arrangements. They informed him that, due to the suspicious circumstances, there would have to be an autopsy, after which the body would be released to him. They let him go after that, and he walked back out to his vehicle by himself. He was pretty sure that the two FBI agents watched him go.

  He drove away and headed back to Blacksburg, watching his rearview mirror. Now that the propane truck was parked out at the truck stop, the clock was running. He had planned to leave late that night, but now he would have to make sure there was no one operating in his backfield, like maybe those feds, before he set out. After what had happened at the arsenal, he should be in the clear. If the Bureau would be occupied by anything in southwestern Virginia, it’d be with that explosion. He looked forward to watching it on the television news; he wanted to see what the hydrogen had done to a reinforced-concrete building like the power plant. It would give him a feel for what it was going to do to a certain mostly glass and steel office building in downtown Washington, D.C. He smiled in the darkness. He had few doubts on that score: It would absolutely, positively obliterate an office building.

  At 10:30, Kreiss drove Jared’s phone repair van down Canton Street and turned at the block just before he would have reached Browne McGarand’s house. He had gone back out to Jared’s trailer at 9:30, hoping to find the cops gone, which they were. He knew he couldn’t operate in Browne’s neighborhood in a crawl suit, but he had kept Jared’s keys. He’d decided that if he could get his hands on that phone company repair van, he’d have some pretty effective cover in town. The cops had apparently towed Jared’s pickup truck away, but the repair van was still sitting there. The dogs were still not back, and the only signs of what had happened there was all that yellow tape fluttering in the semidarkness. He had watched the trailer for fifteen minutes to make sure no one was still there, and then

  he’d gone in, after parking his own truck behind an abandoned house a half mile beyond Jared’s road. He had put his surveillance equipment, car phone, Jared’s .45, and Janet Carter’s pager into a bag and taken it with him in the van.

  Kreiss was dressed in plain dark blue overalls, and he had Jared’s white plastic phone company helmet sitting on the seat next to him. He also had Jared’s Southern Bell ID pinned to the overalls, although the picture wasn’t even close. He might fool a civilian, but not a cop, so he would have to take some care as to where he parked the van. The vehicle smelled of cigarette smoke and the front seat was a trashy mess of fast-food wrappers, technical bulletins, repair-order manifests, and empty soft-drink cans. The back was a slightly more orderly mess of wire bins, parts shelves, opened boxes, coils of telephone wire, a pair of red traffic cones, and a variety of tools and tech manuals. He had Jared’s .45 auto in a pouch behind the seat, but still no shells. Sometimes an empty .45 was as good as a loaded one, though: People tended to make assumptions when it came to looking a .45 auto in the eye. He found the entrance to the alley that ran behind his target’s house, pulled in, came to the first telephone pole, and doused the main headlights.

  Browne McGarand was almost ready to go. His pickup was in the garage, with the cap mounted on the bed to protect his tools and equipment. He had called the weekend number for a local funeral home and made arrangements for them to pick up Jared’s remains for cremation once the autopsy was completed. Then he’d called the detective who’d given him his card and left a voice-mail message that he would be out of town for a couple of days, that he was going down to Greensboro, North Carolina,
to inform Jared’s younger brother face-to-face about what had happened.

  He explained that the boy was mildly retarded and that the news would take some special handling. He expected to be back on Wednesday. Not asking them, just keeping them informed, everything perfectly routine and normal. That should keep them at bay if they decided they wanted to question him further.

  He went out the back door to the garage and put the last bags into the passenger seat. He had everything he needed for the operation in Washington.

  He hadn’t planned to leave on a weekend, but it wouldn’t matter at the target’s end, because any weekday morning would do for what he had planned. He went back into the house, turned out all the lights, and locked up. He had no dogs or other pets to worry about, and his

  mailbox was big enough to let his bills pile up. He had actually considered burning the house, but in the end, he’d decided against it. If he succeeded at the target, they’d never be able to trace him to the propane truck, which might not even survive the explosion. If the bombing at Oklahoma City was any indication, they would eventually be able to trace the truck back to the town in West Virginia where Jared had heisted it a year ago, but there the trail would end. There was no physical evidence of his clandestine activities in the house, because he had never done anything illegal there.

  He looked around the darkened house from the inner kitchen door. He had lived there for over thirty years, twenty-four of them with Holly, until the cancer took her. William’s room down the main hall, untouched since the disaster in Texas. Jared and Kenny’s room across the hall. While raising William, Browne had risen from ordinary chemical engineer to chief engineer of the Ramsey Arsenal. His life had gone as he’d planned it:

  Hard work, a persevering attitude toward marriage, regular churchgoing, and a good wife had taken him to the number-two management position at the arsenal. And then it had begun to come apart: William getting that girl pregnant, their aborted marriage, Holly’s cancer, and then a major blow, when the government unexpectedly closed down the arsenal. Holly had worked for seven years at the arsenal in one of the mercury-recovery plants, and Browne was pretty sure that’s where her cancer had come from. There had been three other women who had died of cancer from that unit, but the government scientists all proclaimed that there was no possible connection. Once the plant shut down, the government didn’t want to discuss the problem anymore. They’d even cheated him out of part of his pension, and then, adding insult to injury, made him oversee putting the plant into mothballs in case the Army ever required it again.