The Big Dig (Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Book 9)

by Linda Barnes

  Walsh—Wells—was supposed to confine his activities to discovering whether minority and woman-owned businesses were truly represented on the Dig, or whether blacks and women had been brought in as figureheads to get around federal contract regulations. He wasn’t supposed to go sneaking around at night, getting his head beaten in. I’d been right about who he was, and I’d been right about the fact that he hadn’t submitted a report detailing his midnight escapade.

  And that’s why I was sitting in the truck instead of twiddling my thumbs at home or calling my lawyer from jail. I wasn’t here because I’d given the feebs Kendall Heywood’s fingerprints and they’d sent up every red flag in Washington from the IRS to the Secret Service. Kenny Heywood, devout soldier of the Texas Republican Army, had vowed on tape and in print to blow up the White House, torch the Capitol, machine-gun senators and representatives racing for the exits. I wasn’t here because he was currently pretending to be one Jason O’Meara, night watchman, or because I’d been able to steer the FBI to Rogers Walters and his crew, or because I’d unveiled the plot to dig beneath the Dig, using a huge tunnel as a blind for a small one. I was part of this operation because I was blackmailing Walsh. My involvement was the price for my silence.

  I rubbed my hands over my eyes. Walsh-Wells gunned the motor to give us a little heat. My FBI all-nighter had been divided into three stages, indignation, disbelief, and finally, planning, with disbelief taking up way too much time. Dunfey couldn’t credit the fact that an organized cell had infiltrated security for the Faneuil Hall extravaganza. Ken Heywood was probably a windbag; no one would dare to blow up ex-presidents. The Bureau couldn’t take a tour of the secret tunnel, and since I hadn’t exactly seen it either, they preferred to imagine it couldn’t exist. Walsh and McNamara brought in a Dig engineer and a Department of Utilities supervisor who backed me up. The tunnel might not be there, but it could be there; it was possible. An old sewer line, a hell of a big one, long abandoned, ran parallel to Chatham Street.

  Once the feebs wrapped their minds around the necessity for action, once the bureaucracy ground into motion, the wheels spun quickly. The manpower, the money, the persuasive force of the FBI was impressive. The New Hampshire Commissioner of Motor Vehicles, eager to cooperate even in the middle of the night, identified the strip mall parking lot from which the Jaguar had been stolen. It became the first pin in the large map someone tacked to a wall. A vice president at Fleet Bank identified the small Concordia Bank branch in Derry as the place where Alicia Smith or Smithe had endorsed and cashed Dana Endicott’s check. Another pin. The red diamond logo Marian had noticed on a dump truck led to Hastings Hauling, a small trucking firm, also in Derry. Pin number three.

  By this time, half the special agents in New England were in New Hampshire, waking district attorneys, contacting judges, preparing warrants. Since the operation would be carried out across state lines, it was necessary to fix jurisdiction. The District Attorney’s Office for Racketeering and Terrorism, the Secret Service, FEMA, had to be talked on board.

  Roz came through with a lead, producing the tattoo artist who’d done designs six months ago on three dudes who gave their address as River Ridge Farm. One was a girl of twenty or so who fitted Veronica’s description to a T. The tat man was currently combing through files of known and suspected terrorists.

  The tattoo, he explained, was a hybrid, part Montana State Prison—where agents immediately began checking files in the hopes of finding either Rogers Walters or Harold, his incorruptible underling—part homage to various Texas-bred militia groups. The star was straight from the stars and bars, the Confederate flag.

  The FBI located the the Hastings truck driver and rooted him out of bed. Urged to do his civic duty and prompted by the name River Ridge Farm, he’d recalled delivering dirt to a small compound off a gravel road in a quiet area that would be bustling with summer camps in three months’ time. He’d drawn a map, showing how many gates he’d driven through, exactly where he’d dumped the dirt.

  Postal inspectors were awakened and questioned about the number of people receiving mail at the Jasper Pine Road address. The town clerk brought in a platte map. The gas company and phone company gave details about the service.

  There were no landline phones, but no one knew how many cells. No one knew how many guns. Three women had been seen and a couple of kids. Two men, a mail carrier thought. A neighbor, the brother-in-law of the mailman, said it was a religious retreat house and the folks were very nice and respectful. Two families, he thought.

  “Shit. If it weren’t for the kidnapping.” Walsh-Wells didn’t go any further because we’d been there before. If it weren’t for the kidnapping it would be simple. Disarm the bombs and round up the crooks.

  Tandy, borrowed from Dana Endicott, nudged my shoulder, and made soft inquiring noises. I patted her head and she wagged her tail, eager and alert. In the end, I’d gotten the two things I wanted most: participation, and an agreement that the conspirators wouldn’t be grabbed until an attempt had been made to rescue both Krissi Horgan and Veronica James.

  They’d keep Kristal alive until after her daily call to mom and dad, because if mom and dad talked, the entire operation was at risk. The Horgans had never received a phone call before noon. I thought we could count on Veronica as an ally in Kristal’s rescue. I’d gone over my reasoning with the FBI, and by and large, they’d scoffed. She was the sister of a Waco victim, and their faces had gone still at the mention of the Texas town.

  I ran through the sequence in my mind. She’d said she’d be gone for a weekend. She hadn’t made the phone call explaining her disappearance. I wasn’t sure what Walters had told her, how he’d conned her into helping, but I didn’t think she’d grasped the enormity of the plan until it was too late. At some point, I thought, romance had turned to reality and the idea of revenge had been personified by a real girl, a bright and sympathetic girl who loved dogs.

  When push came to shove, I thought Veejay would help Kristal, but I wasn’t a hundred percent on it. I wasn’t even a hundred percent on Kristal. Kidnapping does funny things to people. We could have two little Patti Hearsts in there, armed with AK-47s waiting for the glorious revolution to begin. But if I was right, if I could get Kristal out alive … If I could grab Veronica James, give Dana Endicott the chance to hire the best attorney money could buy …

  “You awake?” Walsh asked softly.

  “Yep.”

  “Almost time.”

  I ticked off details in my mind. The black Jeep’s stolen plate was known to law enforcement. Charles River Dog Care was under careful watch. No one had been arrested; surveillance was deliberately loose. Better to lose someone than to let them know the game was over.

  If the game was over, they’d kill the hostage and blow the hall. It might not be as satisfactory to kill teens and tourists and lunching secretaries as former heads of state and a senator who’d helped clear the FBI of wrongdoing at Waco, but demolishing the Cradle of Liberty on the anniversary of Waco would be a coup in itself.

  At Faneuil Hall, they could do nothing. They couldn’t sandbag; they couldn’t shut down. The National Parks Service was in an uproar. A quiet uproar, I hoped.

  Walsh-Wells poured a cup of coffee from a thermos and passed it my way. I drank it black, that’s how much I needed it.

  “We ought to get our vests on,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “You don’t have to go. We got guys can do this.”

  “Hey, you don’t have to go, either.”

  “It’s my job,” he said.

  “Mine, too. I’m getting paid.”

  “Jesus, let’s not get into it again.”

  “Good idea.”

  He chuckled softly. “You went through my stuff, didn’t you? That’s how you knew what was in the other sock.”

  “While you slept like a baby.”

  He touched my hand. “Let’s do it again, when this is over.”

  It was time; if we waited any lon
ger the darkness would dissolve into pale gray mist, into the dawn of April 19. I unwrapped one of Veronica’s old shoes, held it at arm’s length for Tandy to sniff.

  “Take it, girl,” I whispered. “Take it, Tandy.”

  Chapter 38

  The dog strained at the leash and I quickened my pace. My eyes had made what adjustment they could, but it was darker than I’d anticipated, true country dark rather than the city glow to which I’d grown accustomed. I could hear Walsh’s—damn, Wells’s—footsteps, faintly echoing my own. The dog padded silently. I could barely hear her panting breath. Underfoot, the brown leaves were limp and damp, a heavy winter mulch that sucked at the soles of my boots. The cold was thick and moist, a blanket that chilled rather than warmed. I risked a beam from my flash, shielding it, aiming it low.

  The four buildings within the compound were spread out much as they’d been on the hastily sketched FBI map. There was a trailer set on concrete blocks, smaller than the construction site office, a large weathered barn where the mailman thought people slept, a narrow shed, possibly for equipment storage, and what looked like an outhouse, with a half-moon cutout on the door. Windows in shed, trailer, and barn were few and small. The last light, a candle burning on the sill of the trailer, had flickered and died before midnight, and no lights had been spotted since.

  The silence was heavy and deep, creeping like fog out of the old pine forest. A murmur of wind brushed my neck. I thought about FBI watchers in the trees as the leash grew taut, and my spine prickled. We emerged from the woods fifty yards from the river at the same time a sliver of moon appeared from behind a bank of clouds. I flicked off the flashlight and hugged the ground, listening.

  A man named Henry, Ryan Henry, a ringer for Rogers Walters, had sublet the campground eight months ago. He ran an animal shelter, the original lessee understood, a refuge for elderly pets who might otherwise be destroyed. Only other thing he knew, the man sent the rent on time. Eight months is a long time to maintain armed vigilance and I was hoping the troops had slacked off, trusting to the dogs that ran free within the fences, dogs that ought to be sleeping now, thanks to hamburger liberally dosed with sleeping pills. I tugged gently on the leash. I didn’t want Tandy eating any of that meat.

  She whimpered and urged me forward. She hesitated, sniffed the ground, pulled in the direction of the narrow shed. I checked out the rough path as far as my flash would illuminate. Trip wires were a staple of survivalist groups, the FBI advisor had warned. My turn to scoff; dogs and trip wires don’t mix. Advisors, experts, agents—I’d had my fill. The kidnapping experts said it wasn’t technically a kidnapping, since kidnapping is for money. They labeled it a hostage situation. The hostage negotiating team said it wasn’t a classic hostage situation either. Both groups seemed to value deniability more highly than responsibility, and a hit-and-run rescue plan had been approved only because we were running out of time and options. There wasn’t time for a standoff, and no one wanted to risk coming in with guns blazing, not with potential armed resistance. No one wanted an Eastern Waco, a new rallying cry, another April nineteenth to remember. One thing the experts agreed on: If the plan was to be successful, no one communicates, no one escapes.

  Tandy pulled and I moved, running lightly behind her, Wells behind me.

  The shed’s only door was to the northeast, blocked from view by a huge pile of dirt. A rusty bulldozer sat five yards away, just as the truck driver had described. If I were holding prisoners in an old wooden shed with warped boards, I might kill them after their usefulness had come to an end, then knock the whole damned place down with the ’dozer and cover it with cheap dirt. Two birds, one stone. Get rid of telltale dirt from a secret tunnel, build a funeral mound.

  If the shed door hadn’t been blocked by the dirt pile and the ’dozer, the watchers in the trees would have spotted the huge silver padlock earlier, warned us. An iron chain looped twice around the doorjamb through a slotted latch. Wells swore under his breath while Tandy whimpered and put her nose to the door. I gave her the “quiet” sign, touched her tawny fur. Wells kneeled and removed his backpack and I did the same. I pointed the flash as he unzipped a pouch, sorted through lock picks.

  “Hold it steady.”

  “Wait. Let’s check the chain.” I played the light over the looped metal. At first, I saw new galvanized links, but then the chain went dark and splotchy. It was a hybrid, with a section of old rusty links.

  “Bolt cutter?”

  Wells supplied the tool and the upper body strength. One of the old links snapped neatly in half. Tandy pawed the ground while I slowly unwound the broken chain. The door creaked when it opened. There was a muffled snort of surpise, maybe dismay, maybe fear. I couldn’t see, but I could smell, and the place smelled like an outhouse. I made sure the door was closed before I turned on the flash.

  The straw under my feet was matted and dank. Two bodies—women, prisoners—were lying on the unclean straw, their arms bound behind their backs, their legs roped as well. Tandy yanked so hard I almost lost the end of the leash. Wells put a warning hand on my shoulder. He had his flash out, too, and he played it slowly over the women. I knew he had to make sure they weren’t rigged, wired, connected to explosives, but it was hard not to approach them immediately, loosen the tight bonds.

  I breathed through my mouth. They were filthy, one blonde, one dark haired, facedown on the straw. Dark-hair moved and tried to speak. Her voice was muffled by the bandana wrapped tightly around her face, but she managed a noise, a double syllable that could have been “Tandy.”

  “Okay,” Wells murmured.

  “Don’t try to talk.” I started on the thick rope at Veejay’s feet. My fingers fumbled the knots and I thought I might need the bolt cutter, but then something gave and the ropes loosened. I had to roll her to the side to get the knots at her wrists. She struggled to keep her face out of the straw. Finally my fingers released the tightly bound bandana.

  “Tandy,” she whispered in a rusty voice. “Who—”

  “Keep quiet. Dana sent me.”

  “They’ll kill me, kill us, kill everybody—”

  “Shhh.”

  While I was untying Veejay, Wells was doing the same with Krissi. I could hear him murmuring soft encouragement, see tears streaking her grimy face, blood caking one corner of her mouth. Her eyes were wild and staring. She looked nothing like the glossy photo on her mother’s desk and I wondered whether she could be restored like a damaged photograph, whether she would ever be the same.

  “Who are you?” I heard her whisper.

  “FBI. Can you move your right arm?”

  The door creaked at the same time I heard the bolt slide on a rifle. Rogers Walters’s voice sounded along with an explosion of light, a beam that caught me square in the eyes, made me squint. “Drop the weapons. Now. Let me hear them hit the floor. Drop them or I shoot the little blondie on three. One, two—”

  I pressed the tiny device at my waist, the move-in signal, the Mayday. No one communicates, no one escapes. At the same time I dropped my S&W at my feet. A nearby thunk told me Wells had done likewise.

  “Now back away. Girls, down in the straw. Do as I say, dammit!” Veronica went to her knees first. She had to take Krissi’s hand and tug to make her follow. Krissi’s face was pitiful—bewildered, tearful, and stoic at the same time. With both prisoners wallowing around in the straw, I couldn’t hear Tandy, couldn’t see her in the shadows.

  “And now you two. Move! Up against the wall.”

  I caught Wells’s eye and we tried to get some distance between us, but Walters ordered us to stay close. One of him, two of us. His rifle was a semiautomatic.

  “FBI?” Walters said bitterly. “I hear you right?” He jerked the barrel for emphasis.

  “Right,” Wells said.

  “Then I assume you’re not alone.”

  “We’re only here for Krissi. Why not let her go? How is she a danger to anyone?”

  “How is she a danger? Hell, how was Randy We
aver’s wife a danger? How was David Koresh a danger? A man of God, a scholar?”

  “Did you know Mr. Koresh?” I could almost feel Wells willing Walters to go on, keep talking, tell us the whole story, long and detailed, give us time.

  “No, but I know you. You’re FBI and that means you’re lying. If you’re FBI, the whole damned place is surrounded. I saw one of the dogs down; that’s what brought me out. I should have woken—never mind.”

  “I won’t lie to you,” I said. “The place is surrounded.” If he hadn’t roused the others, they could be taken easily. If we could keep Walters talking, keep him from firing

  “You!” he said. “He told me—I thought you were just a busybody PI.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, too bad. We don’t take prisoners, not since Waco. We know you don’t take prisoners either, not patriot prisoners, and we’re all ready to die here.”

  “You don’t have to,” Wells said. “At least, send the children away. Are the kids yours?”

  “Shut up, boy.”

  Wells flinched at the word. And then I saw Veronica’s arm move, heard her low command, and saw the streak that was Tandy arch through the air. For half a second, Walters stood frozen; he was ready to kill us, to let his children die, but he was unprepared or unwilling to shoot a dog.

  Wells threw himself at Walters, grabbing him around the knees, bringing him toppling down like a felled tree. There was a deafening blast and one corner of my mind thought, That will wake the others, dammit. I scrabbled inside the top of my boot, came out with Horgan’s borrowed automatic. Walters had raised himself to one knee. He was aiming at Kristal, prone on the straw, hands pressed to her ears. She was screaming, screaming, and I knew I couldn’t get a shot off in time, wouldn’t be able to stop the execution. I couldn’t see Wells, didn’t know if he’d been hit or where he’d been hit.

  Veronica turned, looked, launched herself, not at Walters but at Krissi, over Krissi, shielding the younger girl with her body. At the same time I heard the report, saw blood blossom on her back.