“Somebody had his picture?”
“Did I say that?” I was back peddling. “I meant you didn’t have his picture, right?”
“No,” Gunner said, looking crabby. “It really didn’t matter much though. The guy stuck out like hen at a cock fight.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. I was genuinely interested.
“To start with,” Gunner said, “his pants legs were too tight and his boots were too new. He was wearing a jacket when it was about a hundred degrees outside. His cap was on crooked.” He stopped and looked at me. “Do you need to hear more?”
“No,” I said. “I guess that’ll do.”
Most people don’t realize it, but the observational powers of the average law man are truly amazing – not that Gunner was average.
“Nice job, Gunner,” I said. “Well done.”
Gunner smiled at me like there was a private joke.
“I got to break in a youngster,” he said with a grin. “Took Kyle along.”
“I’ll bet that was exciting for him,” I said.
“Yeah.” Gunner chuckled. “I told him to cover me while I patted the punk down and Kyle pulled his gun on him.” The chuckle turned to laughter. “It was all I could do to not bust out laughin’ right then and there.” Gunner was laughing so hard he was crying.
I assumed it was law enforcement humor. I didn’t get the joke.
“Right,” I said, faking a smile.
“Whew,” Gunner said, catching his breath. “I guess you had to be there.”
I guessed you did.
“Anyway . . . I want you to know that your services yesterday were appreciated by someone. So I got you a present.” Reaching into a pocket I produced a leather cigar case. “Here you go,” I said. “Four of Havana’s finest.”
Gunner snatched the cigar case and stashed it in a desk drawer.
“Are you crazy bringing those Cubans in here?” he whispered. “This is a law enforcement facility.”
“I didn’t think the cops paid much attention to Cuban cigars these days,” I said, whispering back.
“They sure as heck do,” Gunner said. “If anybody here lays eyes on these babies . . . they’ll get smoked up in no time.”
He smiled.
I guess even by-the-book cops make an exception for a good cigar from time to time.
“I’ll be stealthier next time. I promise.”
* * *
Costa’s call came in before I was done at Gunner’s office. I had to make my excuses and ditch.
I was anxious to learn the FBI’s findings about the ricin, about Southdale, about Mrs. Cho . . . heck, about pretty much everything.
The receptionist showed me into a real conference room this time, where Costa was waiting.
“Good morning, Beck,” he said, rising from his chair to greet me.
“Agent Costa,” I said, shaking his hand. I couldn’t help noticing that the conference table was empty – no photos, no files, no lab reports, no nothing.
“Have a seat,” he said, motioning me to a comfortable-looking chair. I sat. Costa sat, too.
Instead of commencing the briefing, Costa reached inside his suit coat and withdrew a can of Skoal tobacco, tapped it twice with a knuckle, then held it out to me.
“Care for a dip?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said, waving him off. “I’m still on the wagon.”
“As you wish,” Costa said, sliding a pinch of sticky-looking black goo inside one cheek. He covered the Skoal can and returned it to his pocket before beginning the briefing.
“I hate to sound cliché,” he said, “but I have good news and bad news. Which do you prefer to hear first?”
I hoped it was bad news for somebody besides me.
“Let’s go with the good news first,” I said. “That way, if I die while you’re talking, at least I’ll have a smile on my face.”
Costa laughed and shook his head.
“You never quit, do you?”
“I try not to,” I said. “I’ve found cracking jokes keeps me from saying something even stupider.”
“Ah,” he said. “I can imagine. In any case . . . let’s start with the lab results from the Mercedes trunk, shall we?”
“Okay.” I held my breath. This was supposed to be good news, right?
“The lab confirms the presence of ricin in the car trunk,” Costa said. “Pure ricin. No flour.”
I exhaled.
“That’s nice,” I said, striving for nonchalance.
“Not only that,” Costa continued, “but the total volume of pure ricin collected in the two samples – the diluted one from Cho’s van and the clean one from the Mercedes – adds up to just enough to fill the titanium sphere.”
“Downright tidy,” I said.
“Indeed,” Costa acknowledged. “So it appears that we no longer have missing ricin on our hands, and for that, the FBI owes you our thanks.”
“Can I get that in unmarked twenties?”
“No,” Costa said, not missing a beat.
“Continuing on to the FMD arrest . . . the man Deputy Gunderson apprehended was in possession of a water pistol, as well as other paraphernalia, which contained a live specimen of the Foot and Mouth Virus.”
“Same variant as at Holton’s farm?” I asked. “From South Africa?”
“It appears so,” Costa said.
“So what was the deal with this guy,” I asked. “Al Qaeda? Cartel? What?”
“Unfortunately, this gentleman . . . one Kent Evans of Ames, Iowa . . . represents the ultimate outlier – a terrorist whose actions no one can anticipate, and from whom no complete defense is possible.”
“NRA?” I said.
Costa raised one eyebrow.
“Sorry,” I said. “Please continue.”
“This man champions no cause or ideology. He has no gripe with government, or even with his target. He was once an above average, productive, content member of society who has recently fallen victim to widespread economic distress. He is a victim of the recession, a man trying to save his home and feed his family. He thought an outbreak of FMD would stimulate demand for FMD vaccine . . .”
“Which, as a veterinary pharmaceutical representative, he would gladly sell at no small profit,” I said.
“Exactly,” Costa said. “There is absolutely no way to prevent a terrorist like Mr. Evans from acting – no watch list that would contain his identity, and no reason anyone would suspect he was about to melt down. We are very lucky to have captured him before he could introduce the virus into the marketplace.”
“Lucky like Thomas Jefferson,” I said.
“What?”
“You know. Jefferson. ‘The harder I work the more luck I have?’ Never mind. It’s not important. Keep going.”
“Mr. Evans proved very cooperative under interrogation,” Costa said. “We are quite certain he acted alone. So the FMD threat is extinguished as well.”
“Until somebody else feels the pinch,” I said. It was a sad truth, but truth just the same.
“Yes. Well.” Costa had no adequate reply. “Moving on . . .”
“Yes,” I said, “moving on . . .”
“I’m afraid that’s it for the good news.” Costa’s mouth was filling with saliva. He needed to swallow. When he did, it looked like it hurt.
“Mrs. Cho,” he said.
“Yes?”
“The lab found no trace evidence of ricin on her or among her belongings. And at least so far, there doesn’t seem to be a clear surveillance video of her at MOA either.”
“How . . .” I started to say.
“Apparently, she wore a disguise when she planted the balloons,” Costa said. “It’s nothing fancy, but there’s no way to identify her face. And the outfit she wore at MOA is . . . dare I say it . . . MIA.”
“Isn’t there footage of the POI leaving the mall?” I asked. “Maybe there’s another license plate to be traced.”
“The video shows the unknown woman gettin
g into a taxi and departing the mall area,” Costa said. “And to anticipate your question, of course we contacted the cab company and spoke with the driver. He dropped her off outside a Goodwill store along the Interstate. We hypothecate that she may have changed clothes in the Goodwill and grabbed another cab which brought her to Southdale sometime later. As luck would have it, not all the cameras at the Goodwill are working and she seems to have eluded video capture there.”
“You mean you can’t connect the woman at MOA to Mrs. Cho at all?” I said.
“Unfortunately not.”
“How did she get into the Southdale Mall?” I asked. “I thought you guys had it surrounded.”
“We know that Mrs. Cho parked her car in the Southdale ramp at 9:14 this morning,” Costa said. “We have that on video. And when we picked her up at the food pavilion, she was wearing the same clothing as when she arrived at Southdale that morning. Based on the time signatures on the MOA surveillance tapes, it would have been possible for Mrs. Cho to plant the ricin balloons at MOA, catch a cab to Goodwill, change clothes, and catch another cab, or perhaps a bus, to the Southdale vicinity. She still might have had enough time to re-enter Southdale on foot before we locked it up tight.”
“And the Southdale surveillance cameras?” I asked.
“Southdale Security informs us that a number of their systems were down yesterday as the result of a system overload that occurred sometime yesterday morning.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Probably about the time Mrs. Cho stuck a capacitor into a camera wire.”
“Probably,” Costa acknowledged. “But we haven’t given up hope. We’ve got people at the Goodwill searching for the mystery woman’s outfit and the lab could still come up with a Hail Mary.”
“In the meantime?” I asked.
“We can hold Mrs. Cho for seventy-two hours without formal charges,” he said. “After that, if there’s nothing new, we let her go.”
“What about the guy I left in the locker at MOA? Did he have anything to contribute?”
“He was somewhat more circumspect than Mr. Evans and elected to lawyer up as soon as we read him his rights. He won’t be helping us out any time soon.”
“Wow!” I said.
If Mrs. Cho was in fact the terrorist – a proposition that remained far from proven – it appeared she had a good chance of getting away with the attack.
“Okay,” I said. “Anything else to share?”
“Our search at Southdale did not find ricin, but I suppose that goes without saying since the missing remainder was accounted for in your bust. Besides that, we shall keep everyone working every possible angle. We at the FBI are nothing if not . . .”
“. . . thorough,” I said.
CHAPTER 66
Red Wing, Minnesota.
“So this whole double terror threat scenario is actually over?” Beth said from her seat on the red leather sofa. “Everything tied up in a bow?”
“Everything except Mrs. Cho,” I said, “that is, if she was involved at all. There’s no evidence to condemn her. And unlike many folks these days, I’m reluctant to find her guilty until proven innocent.”
“She did disappear for a suspicious period of time,” Beth said. “And then there was the rental car.”
“True. But she often drove a rental . . . at least, so records indicate. As for her absence . . . her excuse could be as mundane as an extramarital affair. That happens more often than one would like to think.”
“I suppose,” Beth allowed. “After all, as far as the cops can tell, she was shopping at Southdale during the whole event at the Mall of America. She and her husband do seem a likely duo, though. And he was caught white handed, so to speak.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Or else, he was another victim . . .”
“How do you figure?”
“Maybe everyone’s overthinking the terror angle concerning Mr. Cho’s death. Who would the police normally suspect in a husband’s murder?”
“The wife, at least if I can believe the cop shows on TV.”
“Oh. That much is accurate,” I said. “Given a smidgeon of evidence, the law will home in on a spouse and steamroll them into submission. Our legal system actually contains an inherent disincentive to consider multiple suspects for a crime.”
“Go on,” Beth said.
“Think about it,” I said. “If the cops gather evidence that might lead to the notion that more than one person could be guilty of a crime, any defense attorney is gonna make hay with that info at trial. All the defense needs to show is reasonable doubt, after all. If some other suspect wasn’t a reasonable candidate to commit the crime, why did the cops investigate them? Lawyers can be pretty creative interpreting evidence . . . or even inference . . . for a jury.”
“You know,” Beth said, after listening to my “our system isn’t perfect” speech, “that’s a serious downer.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is. Then again, there doesn’t seem to be a better model available elsewhere. Unfortunately, the result is that innocent people sometimes get ground up in the process. And if the law doesn’t get a conviction, there’s always the court of public opinion. The media loves to see the bad guys – who can be anyone at all, really – caught and condemned, whether they’re convicted or not.”
“Witness the alleged bomber at the Atlanta Olympics,” Beth said, “or more recently, the Mississippi man in the presidential ricin scare.”
“Uh huh. Or the other two Castro brothers in the Cleveland “House of Horrors” case. Even when the cops said there was ‘no evidence implicating them in any way,’ the news reported their release from custody was a result of ‘not enough evidence’ against them. That word ‘enough’ puts a pretty mean spin on the facts.”
“I think I understand now why Bull likes to keep out of the limelight,” Beth said.
I laughed.
“That and many other reasons we needn’t discuss today.”
“Getting back to the MOA ricin attack,” Beth said. “If it wasn’t Mrs. Cho who did it, who else do you suspect?”
“Nobody, really,” I said, after a moment’s consideration.
“So we’re back to Mrs. Cho again.”
“Probably,” I said.
“You know,” Beth said, “it can be frustrating to watch your mind work. Isn’t anything black and white in your world?”
“One wonders,” I said.
Beth shifted on the sofa, tucking both legs under her bottom. One had to admire her flexibility. I know I did.
“So if you were to wax philosophic concerning these two, very different, terrorists,” she said, “what would you say they had in common? Is there a fatal flaw, or some common element, that ties these two criminals together?”
It was a good question . . . one I had asked myself often on previous cases. Was there some trait all terrorists had in common, some shared element that was critical to making a man – or a woman – into a weapon bent on indiscriminate destruction?
For Mrs. Cho, and maybe Mr. Cho as well, devotion to – or perhaps fear of – an egomaniacal dictator was certainly a factor. But not for Kent Evans. He was a regular guy who’d fallen on hard times. In many ways he was no different than Jean Valjean from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a man who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family.
What was the commonality here, the critical element present in the minds of all terrorists? I could only answer in the abstract.
“Irrational commitment to achieving an impossible goal,” I said.
“I think that’s the best way I can express it. All terrorists possess a pathological single-mindedness of purpose, to the exclusion of all conflicting morality, and without regard to social norms or likelihood of success. It is a madness of sorts, a distortion of reality that leads them to actually believe in their actions, to think that somehow, by acting out in a way that others find unimaginably horrific, or utterly detestable, they are demonstrating a commitment that will allow them to achieve goals that would be impossible f
or others to accomplish.
“Kent Evans convinced himself that his life was over if he couldn’t force a bad economy to favor his business. But changing the economy was impossible, at least for those less committed than he. He needed to do something no one had ever done before. Something sane people would detest and reject. Only then could he succeed.
“And the Chos . . .” I went on. “We’ll never know their motivations for certain. But there are at least two possibilities that stick out. On one hand, they may have feared for their lives – and perhaps the lives of family members as well – if they failed to act as directed. They thought the only way to survive under the oppression of a rogue regime was to please the dictator . . . a course of action which has proven futile time and again throughout history.
“Or the Chos might have actually bought into the regime’s aspiration to win for itself fear and respect from the rest of the world – another impossibility, of course, to justify an impossibly terrible act.”
I realized I’d been staring into emptiness as I spoke. I turned my focus to Beth’s eyes. She has such beautiful eyes, though they looked sad at the moment.
“Does that make any sense at all?” I asked.
“I’m afraid it does, Babe.” She paused. “Which means any one of us could become a terrorist given the right circumstances and psychological triggers.”
“Exactly,” I said. The truth of her words made my heart sink. “Exactly.”
CHAPTER 67
Red Wing, Minnesota. Several weeks later.
I was perched on a rock along the Mississippi River next to Bay Point Park, watching my red and white fishing bobber struggle to free itself from an eddy near the shore, when my cell phone rang. The caller ID told me it was Agent Costa. I laid my rod across the limestone riprap, anchoring it with a shoe on the hand grip, and answered the call.
“Hello?” I said.
“FBI Agent Costa here, Beck. It’s been a while. How have you been?”
Costa hadn’t called just to make small talk, especially after his humiliation in the ricin matter.
“Just wetting a line, Agent. What’s up?” I was cordial, but not about to dilly dally. I had fish to catch.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 99
