“Okay.”
“Here’s my case,” Mark said. “Lauren Novak. Homicide. Unsolved.”
She didn’t say anything. She’d gone very still.
He pushed back from the table. “Spend some time on your phone, Lynn. Do some searches for Lauren, and for me. Then call your client back. When you’ve decided what level of cooperation you’re willing to show, I’ll be ready.”
Mark left the deck and returned to the bar.
23
Lynn left Mark in the bar for maybe ten minutes, then she slipped in and took the stool beside him and said, “I’m sorry.”
He nodded.
“That’s an awful thing.”
He nodded again. What the hell did you say? Yes, they shot her in the head, it’s an awful thing.
“So your case is really—”
“Of personal interest,” he finished for her. “Yeah. I don’t have a client, Lynn. I’ve got nobody to protect. I just want to find the woman.”
“You think she had something to do with your wife’s murder.”
“I think she knows the man who killed her. His name is Garland Webb. He walked out of prison and vanished. No contact with the parole office. I’ve got a witness to the, um, events of last night who says that Janell and the man she was with are on their way to meet Garland Webb. ”
He didn’t mention that the witness was a child who also believed Mark was attended by the ghost of a murdered man named Walter.
“Where did the events of last night take place?”
“Cassadaga. The house is one weird place. Someone’s very fond of painting on the walls. Mostly vortex symbols, but some words. Rise the dark, the dark will rise, things like that.”
Even in the dim light of the bar, Mark could see color drain from her face.
“Rise the dark?”
“That mean something to you?”
“Maybe.”
“Bullshit, maybe. You just reacted more visibly to that phrase than you did to learning they’d killed somebody. Why?” He didn’t want to admit his own interest in the phrase, not yet. He had to hold some cards back.
“Was there any reference to a place called Wardenclyffe?” she asked.
“No, but I saw it was her company name, and the vehicle is registered to the company. What does it mean?”
“It was the site of Nikola Tesla’s financial ruin, a place out on Long Island that has been a popular home to conspiracy theories over the years. But the name means something else to these people. It’s a place, a movement, something. Do you know anything about the man she’s living with?”
“The only man I know is the one who helped her burn the house down. He is a big bastard with a short temper and, as of yesterday, a broken nose. That one is on me. Myron and I got off to a bad start.”
“Myron. Do you know his last name?”
“I know what he told me, but it’s a false name. He was going by Myron Pate.”
Again her face showed recognition. Mark watched and remembered what the boy had said and played one of the last cards he had left.
“They’re off to meet Garland and a man named Eli,” he said.
“Eli Pate.” She said it immediately, and he didn’t question it. He’d heard no last name for Eli, and he’d assumed Myron’s was an alias, but the way she connected the names suggested it wasn’t a shot in the dark.
“They’re going to see him? That’s what you were told?”
“That’s what I was told. Who is Eli Pate?”
She studied his face. “You really don’t know?”
“My only interest is Garland Webb. Who is Pate?”
She slid off the stool and stood up. “I’ve got some pictures to show you. You might not recognize anyone other than Janell, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”
She took an iPad out of her bag and opened a photo album that was labeled with only a case-file number, no names, and began a slide show. Some photographs were facial close-ups that had clearly been pulled from driver’s license photos, some were lifted from social media sites, but there were also others in which the subject had obviously been unaware of the camera. Surveillance shots.
The first five photographs were of the same woman, and Mark had no idea who she was. Janell Cole followed, looking nothing like the woman he’d last seen leering at him in the flashlight beam. Here, she was the picture of the perfect young professional. There was another unfamiliar man, and then the screen filled with a close-up image of Myron Pate’s face.
“Stop. That’s the guy she’s traveling with.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. Who is he really?”
“His name is Doug Oriel.”
“If you tell me he’s another electrical engineer I’m really going to begin to lose respect for the profession.”
“Not an engineer.”
“Good.”
“He’s a demolitions specialist.”
Mark paused. “Ex-military?”
“No. His background is in construction. He recently attended a school near Cleveland where he obtained certifications in blasting concrete, underwater blasting, vibration and air-blast control, and delayed-timing methods.”
She rattled this list off like someone who’d prepped for a job-interview question. Myron, like Janell, had been on her mind a good deal.
“Did he work with your client company too?”
She shook her head. “We pulled surveillance photos that put them together. We aren’t sure how they met.”
She closed the cover on the tablet. For a while she watched the boat channel without seeming to see it and then she said, “How confident are you that they’re really going to Eli?”
“Very,” Mark said. It was true, though if he explained the boy to her she probably wouldn’t agree. “Do you know where he is?”
“Only a possible town. He maintains a post office box, and there’s been surveillance conducted there before, but without success. The box is still active, though. We’re told he sporadically appears to gather mail.”
“Who is he?”
She hesitated, and he said, “Lynn, come on. I just signed my soul over to you. I thought we were past this.”
She nodded, almost to herself. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you the gist.”
The gist took them about twenty minutes. The gist started with a power company in Georgia and ran to the FBI. The gist was the type of scare that some in the electrical industry and some in national security roles had been warning the nation of for decades.
The Pinkertons had been brought in by the Georgia power company after its prized young systems engineer Janell Cole quit her job and took some highly sensitive data with her. By the time the company realized it had been hacked, she’d left not just the building, but the city. Lynn had been tracking her ever since. “I’m in regular communication with Homeland Security and the FBI,” she said, “but I don’t think you need to be very astute to understand why the FBI is interested in a missing grid-systems engineer and a guy who specializes in industrial demolition.”
“No,” Mark said, “I don’t think there’s much of a reach there. But what’s their affiliation? Is there a shared group, some sort of right-wing fringe deal, religious fanatics, environmental nuts, or…”
She shook her head. “No affiliation is clear yet.”
“What’s Eli Pate’s role?”
“Online communication suggests he’s a recruiter. We wondered if Janell would head his way at some point, but she didn’t seem to be. Until now.”
“Where is his way?”
“The post office box is in Lovell, Wyoming.”
Mark set his beer down and stared at her. “Lovell?”
“You know the place? Did they talk about it?”
“They didn’t talk about it, but yeah, I know the place.” He felt queasy suddenly, the beer stirring in his stomach. Lovell, Wyoming, was not a coincidence kind of town. Anything was possible, he knew that, but it didn’t feel right.
&nbs
p; It’s the Cassadaga effect. The freaks got in your head, and now you’re superstitious, jumping to silly conclusions, having silly fears.
“How do you know the place?” Lynn asked.
“I lived there when I was a kid, but I lived a lot of places when I was a kid. It’s not as odd as it seems, not when you’ve gone through as many small towns in your life as I have.” He was saying this more for himself than for her. “There’s nothing in Lovell to draw anyone, though, so what in the hell brought him there?”
“Probably the nothingness,” Lynn said. “But if they’re headed to him, that’s his last known address.”
Cassadaga had occupied pole position of the places Mark didn’t want to see for a long time. Wyoming, though, was one of the places he’d already promised himself he would never see again. But if Garland Webb had headed west, then Mark would too.
“I can go and tell you what I find,” he said.
“I don’t want to ask anyone else to do my work,” she said. “I’d like to go myself, if I can get the budget approved to fly into Wyoming.”
“Are we doing this together, then? It’s going to be odd if we’re working on top of each other, overlapping questions and suspects.”
“Working together is fine with me. It helps me. You’ve seen her recently, you’ve seen him, and you apparently know that part of the world.”
“Yes, I know that part of the world.” Mark’s voice was empty, the words clipped. “And you don’t get to Lovell by flying into Wyoming. You fly into Montana. Billings is the closest airport. Or you can start from Bozeman, but the drive to Lovell is longer.”
Such familiar names, familiar places. He could picture them all easily. He didn’t want to see them again.
He thought of the boy who’d told him that if he went to the mountains he might not survive. Only a few hours ago, there had been no mountains involved. Now here he was, discussing a return to them.
“If they’re driving,” he said, “we’ll beat them to Wyoming.”
“They’ll be driving. They pay cash and they drive. They stay away from airports. So, yes, we’ll be ahead of them.”
“I wonder where they are now,” Mark said, picturing the red truck headed northwest on the interstate, slicing through an oblivious nation, at least one murdered woman left in their wake already.
“I’ve been wondering that every day for months,” Lynn said. “This is the first time I might have an idea.”
24
On his way home, Jay passed a police car and had the overwhelming urge to pull a U-turn and chase after him, screaming for help.
But he couldn’t. He understood the way it had to work now; he understood the power dynamics, and it required patience.
At home, he paced the lower level of the house, the tracking chip clutched in his hand, and waited for the hours of the night that belonged to emergency workers and insomniacs. Occasionally he stopped and stretched out on the couch, setting alarms each time to prevent sleep, but sleep never came.
Mostly, he thought of the things he had never said to Sabrina.
Things like the truth about why they were here. Why he’d led them to Red Lodge, to this house from which she’d been taken. Now that he was alone in the dark, still-foreign house, the things he had told her appalled him. They’d all sounded good at the time, sure. The move would keep him on the ground. That part was always honest. What he’d allowed her to believe in the silence that followed it, though, was unforgivable. In the silence, he’d allowed her to believe that the decision was for her. Never had he confessed to freezing on a climb. Never had he described her brother’s face, the smoke that left his mouth like a final attempt at words, some last message that dissolved into the dark sky, unheard.
You’re next, the smoke seemed to promise Jay then.
But he hadn’t been next. Sabrina was next. And he’d led her here. Would Eli Pate have found him in Billings? Possibly. It didn’t feel that way, though. It felt like the result of Jay’s own deceit, his own secrets. He’d hidden the truth, had fled from the truth, and in so doing he’d guided them here.
What if you’d told her? Where would you go then? What if you’d just told the truth? Maybe you’d never have ended up in this place. You’d take another job. Work for her, work side by side with her, never let her out of your sight. All of this was possible if you’d just told the truth.
He rose and walked again. Paced in anguish. Every step recorded.
At four in the morning, with a few hours left before dawn and his movement patterns well established, he crawled on the floor, following the wall into the kitchen, then fumbled with the drawers until he found the duct tape. Then he crawled back through the dark living room to the entryway closet, where an all-time failure of a Christmas gift waited, a reason you had to stay away from late-night television advertising. The robotic vacuum cleaner, two feet in diameter and with the look of a large hockey puck, was useless when it came to cleaning floors, and Sabrina hated the sound of it as well as its inefficiency. Jay’s intrigue in the gadget had earned it a place in the closet instead of the garbage can, but he had to admit it wasn’t effective. All it did, Sabrina had pointed out, was circle the house in confused patterns, bouncing off the walls like a drunk man.
Or like an anxious man pacing away a sleepless night.
Jay taped the tracking chip to the top of the vacuum, turned it on, and released it. The device spun away. It bounced from wall to wall, and, just like Jay had, remained on the ground floor.
He had an hour, at least. He listened for a few minutes to make sure the device was running problem-free, and then he crawled to the front door and slipped out into the cold night.
25
Mark worked on Eli Pate late into the night, gathering intelligence on him before they flew out of Miami to try to find him. Lynn Deschaine already had plenty of knowledge about Pate, but that didn’t keep Mark from digging and, maybe, truth be told, digging a little competitively. She had resources that he didn’t, but he didn’t want to have to rely on those resources to do his job. There was another cloud on the horizon with Lynn, and that was the collision of goals. She thought that they were both looking for Janell Cole and company, and that much was accurate. What Mark intended to do once he found them—found Garland, at least—was another matter.
He suppressed that and focused on Eli Pate. When they arrived in Billings, Mark wanted to know everything about him that he could.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much out there—except for the surprising discovery that he seemed to be operating under his own name. What that suggested—the fact that he kept his own name, and people like Doug Oriel renamed themselves to match it—was both interesting and alarming.
Eli Pate was forty-one, his Social Security number had been issued in Kentucky, and his address history painted the portrait of a nomad, with short stints in seventeen states. There was no record of Eli having a phone in the past three years. He also had no active driver’s license. The last one Mark could find was more than a decade old, issued by the state of Idaho. In the photo, he looked whip-thin and mean, with brown hair that hung down around his shoulders and hostile eyes like flint chips. The last address on record in any of Mark’s databases was the same one that Lynn had, a PO box in Lovell.
He didn’t like seeing the name of the town. He knew it was the memories he connected to it that were to blame for that, but still, it troubled him. Lynn’s recognition of the phrase rise the dark troubled him too. When Ridley Barnes had vanished in Indiana, wading off into the unknown depths of an elaborate cave system, he’d left Mark with a strange set of promises. One of them had lingered in Mark’s mind ever since, Ridley’s last words: She doesn’t want you yet.
He’d meant the cave. Everyone knew that in Ridley’s disturbed mind, the place had a personality, and Mark understood that. Still, he often found himself thinking about Lauren, some small, absurd part of him always wondering, What do you mean, she doesn’t want me yet, Ridley? What’s left for me to
do?
That question had made sense, though. Mark was already focused on Lauren’s unfinished business—Garland Webb. It was natural that he’d bridge Ridley’s final, raving words to that mission. He could bridge anything to that mission. The other words had been easier to discard, because they’d had no such connection. In fact, Mark hadn’t thought of them much at all until today.
When things go dark, Ridley had told Mark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.
Madness, of course. Ridley had left his rational mind somewhere in that cave years earlier, and by the time he’d said that to Mark, he was also wounded and hypothermic. He’d had no idea what he was saying.
Still, his words rose in Mark’s mind tonight.
It was deep into the night, and the flight to Billings, with a layover in Minneapolis, left at seven in the morning, but still Mark kept searching. Even after he’d taken a second Ambien and knew that he didn’t have the focus for the work, he kept at it. At first he drifted into searches involving Eli’s name and terms related to electricity and energy. Nothing. Then he tried Janell Cole and Doug Oriel, and eventually, half asleep, without any real consideration, he ran a search for recent news using the words Wyoming and power grid.
Most of the first-page results were related to efforts to bring enough power to the oil fields to keep up with the drilling needs, but there was one floater from the Billings Gazette with a two-day-old date.
Outages in Wyoming and Montana Result of Vandalism
According to the article, communities including Red Lodge and Laurel, Montana, and Lovell and Powell, Wyoming, had lost power for most of a day after someone had felled trees on the high-voltage lines in rural locations.
Employees of the Beartooth Power Alliance who repaired the damage were left convinced that a crime had occurred.
“I’ve never seen anything so intentionally malicious,” lineman Jay Baldwin, 34, of Red Lodge said. “The location and manner in which those trees were brought down doesn’t really leave any question about an accident. Someone intended to knock some lights out, and they did.”
Rise the Dark Page 13
