by Jen Blood
“But they did,” I said. “Because getting Diggs was worth the risk.” My voice cracked. I thought of Diggs’ words after Wyatt’s funeral: I’m the one who got away. The only one who never bought into any of this… Of course Barnel would come for him.
Einstein whined and followed me into Diggs’ room, sniffing at the glass on the floor. I pulled him back to keep him from getting cut. Grace stood in the doorway watching us, head and tail down. She wouldn’t cross the threshold.
“Do we know how long ago they took him?” I asked.
“Forty-five minutes, maybe,” Agent Keith said. I hadn’t even realized he was there.
“We have people out there, though,” I said. I was starting to feel unhinged. “Right? The National Guard is checking vehicles; there are eyes on every street corner. Someone must have seen something.”
Juarez didn’t say anything. No one said anything.
“What?” I finally demanded.
“A woman reported two men in black loading a blond male into a truck. He was unconscious,” Juarez finally said.
“Well—that’s good, then. When? Where did they go? Do we have someone following them?”
Juarez looked ready to punch something. Buddy shifted uncomfortably.
“It seems like maybe the call went to voicemail,” the deputy said. “We don’t have nobody answering phones right now… And with the electricity out and a cell tower down, communication’s not what it usually is.”
“Right,” I said. “What with the end of the world and all. So, does anyone have anything at all? Any idea where they might have gone?”
No one spoke. Juarez looked at me uneasily, as did everyone else in the room. I started to say something more when he noticed the file on Diggs’ bed and moved to pick it up. I grabbed it before he could.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Just a story he’s—we’re working on,” I said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“You’re sure about that?”
I nodded. He didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t push it for the moment.
“So, what do we do next?” I asked. “Search houses? Bring in helicopters? Search and rescue?”
“Maybe you should get dressed,” Juarez suggested gently. For the first time, I realized I was standing there in bare feet, blue jeans, and Juarez’s t-shirt. “And then we can take it from there.”
06:40:09
For the next three hours, nothing happened. I don’t mean to say no one did anything: they searched vehicles; ransacked houses; went through Barnel’s compound with a fine-tooth comb. Jessie Barnel was still unconscious. The kids who’d been rescued from the cellar didn’t seem to know anything about anything, except some loons in black had taken them into the woods, locked them in a cellar, and then played UNO with them until all hell broke loose and people started dying.
We went back to Mae’s house, but it was deserted. I peered in the windows, searching for some sign of life. There was none. George was still gone, his bunnies staring listlessly out at us. I opened the cage and put more pellets in, checking to make sure they had enough water.
The window was still broken out in George’s shed. I thought of Diggs in my arms as we rode to the hospital our first night in Justice, his hand in mine.
“No one’s here,” Juarez said.
“I know.”
“They’re staying with Ashley. Do you want to talk to her?”
I really didn’t. I had no idea what else to do, though. I was panicking, I knew—there were too many angles to the story, too many players, and only two possible outcomes:
We either stopped this from happening at midnight, or we didn’t. Diggs lived, or he died. I took a deep breath.
“Whenever Diggs and I are working on a story that seems too big, we take a step back and try to deconstruct the whole thing.”
“Sounds like a good approach,” Juarez said. He sat on the front steps of George’s cabin and patted a spot beside him. “Where do we start?”
I got out my pen and spiral notebook, something that never fails to amuse Juarez. He didn’t look amused today, though. I sat beside him and stared at the blank page in front of me.
“Jessie said Reverend Barnel was going back to the beginning,” I began, thinking of her words during the standoff.
“Yeah—Allie’s on that, actually. They have a transcript of the whole thing. We’re assuming he was talking about Billy Thomas and the murders in 1963, since Billy was the first victim who turned up with the inverted cross, and everything Barnel’s set up revolves around the fifty-year anniversary of his death.”
“Billy took the girls while they were in city hall, right? And that would certainly be a public enough target—I mean, blowing up that place would be one hell of a statement, regardless of whether it’s full or empty.” I stopped. “Of course, now that Barnel’s taking all these people, I guess it doesn’t really matter whether the town’s been evacuated. He’s chosen the people he thinks should pay for their sins, and they’re the ones who’ll presumably die in this thing.”
Jack lay his hand over mine, twisting our fingers together. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yeah. I’m fine. I just want to find him.” I amended that at the look in his eye. “Them, I mean. Everyone.”
He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was watching me. I felt like I was under a microscope since Diggs had been taken; like Juarez was analyzing my every reaction, and I had no idea how to reassure him that I was still his when the only thing I could seem to think of was the feel of Diggs’ body pressed to mine and his breath in my ear. The thousands of conversations we’d had over the years and the thousands more I’d always assumed we would have.
“So, what about city hall?” I prompted again.
“They’re already on it. They’ve got bomb-sniffing dogs going through the place, but so far no one’s found anything.”
“Okay,” I said. “What about where Billy was born? Or the place where Barnel branded him?”
“They’re looking at all of it,” Jack said with infinite patience. “They’ve got his file, baby. They’re going over Jessie Barnel’s transcript. They’re looking through everything at the compound.”
“What about the dynamite?” I asked. “I mean, people don’t just give up that many explosives, right? Someone had to get them from somewhere.”
“Everything was homemade—it’s easier to get hold of that stuff than something like C4. Fertilizer, household cleaners, found items… There’s no way to trace most of it.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said. I pushed my notebook aside and stood. “I don’t understand where the hell everyone’s gone. It’s not like this is a huge place—how are all these people just vanishing right under our noses? You’d think we were trying to find Bin Laden, for Christ’s sake.”
Jack picked up my notebook and pen and started writing.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You said you and Diggs deconstruct, right? We haven’t really done that yet.”
Right.
I nodded and forced some air into my lungs. This was just another puzzle, I reminded myself. I was good at puzzles.
“Okay, so…key players,” I said.
“Jesup Barnel,” Juarez said immediately. I nodded. He wrote it down.
“And whether or not Barnel had anything to do with their deaths, those first confirmed victims with the inverted crosses…”
“Billy Thomas, Marty Reynolds, Wyatt Durham, and Roger Burkett,” Juarez said.
I thought about that for a minute. “What do we know about Marty Reynolds?” I asked.
“He was a bad guy who may or may not have killed his wife.”
“But I still don’t understand that,” I said. “There are two thousand, three hundred and eighty-six guys on Barnel’s list—and plenty of those guys have criminal records. Why Reynolds and no one else? Why no deaths from 1963 to 2002, then Reynolds gets axed and there’s not another victim for
eleven years?”
Juarez was looking at me strangely.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s a very specific number,” he said. “Twenty-three hundred and eighty-six. How did you know that?”
“Diggs’ files,” I said carelessly. “He’s been keeping tabs on Barnel for years…” I stopped. I was an idiot.
“These files—they’re on his computer?”
“They are,” I agreed. “Back at the hotel.”
Jack got on the horn to his people to tell them to grab Diggs’ computer. When he hung up, he came back over while I stared at George’s rabbits and tried to quell a growing sense of impending doom. He started to put his arms around me, but I shrugged away. There wasn’t time to sit around and be comforted—not when Diggs was missing and the clock was running down.
“We should get back to HQ,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of ideas I want to check out.”
◊◊◊◊◊
06:02:10
Command Central was buzzing when we got there: more troops, more equipment, more intensity. I walked down the school hallway to the dancing tiger on the wall and stood outside the war room for a minute, thinking of Diggs. He was still alive—I was sure of that. Barnel wanted us to know his victims, those sinners who’d strayed from his path to glory. He had something planned.
I just didn’t know what it could be.
Something big, we all assumed. Something to rock Justice to its foundation. Something that took him back to the beginning; back when it all went wrong.
Blaze nodded me into the room, and I pushed those thoughts aside for the moment. She looked exhausted. Clearly, that three-hour nap she’d given the troops hadn’t extended to her.
There was a place of honor waiting for me at the front of the room. Jack nodded at me and I sat, feeling strangely out of place without Diggs beside me. I spotted his laptop on a desk off to the side, with a computer tech tapping away on it. I bristled, thinking of how much Diggs would hate that. Blaze followed my gaze.
“We’re having a hard time getting in there,” she said. “He has good security. So far we haven’t been able to figure out his password.”
I stood and went over. The computer tech was a woman, fifties to sixties, plump and blonde and efficient.
“I’ve got it.”
“You know the password?” she asked.
“Yeah.” She wasn’t moving. “Just let me in there and I’ll get you what you need.”
“We’ll need to scan the full hard drive,” she said.
“Not without his permission, you won’t.”
“You’re not authorized to work with our equipment.”
Clearly, the woman had a death wish. “It’s not your equipment, you—” Juarez intervened before I pulled her away from Diggs’ computer by her bleached blonde hair.
“It’s all right, Mandy,” he said. “Let her take over.”
Mandy got up, purposely bumping into me when she brushed past. Juarez grabbed my arm before I went after her.
“Let it go,” he said under his breath.
Right. Instead of beating up the technology Nazi, I took her seat and got to work.
It only took two tries to get in. Juarez looked at me in surprise. I shrugged.
“Lucky guess.”
Blaze came over and looked over my shoulder. I stopped typing and turned around.
“I’ll let you know when I find anything,” I said.
“There may be files you’re not familiar with that are relevant to this investigation.”
I didn’t budge. Diggs’ entire world was on his computer—he didn’t let anyone in there. Not even me. Certainly not Big Brother.
“Can you give us a second?” Juarez asked Blaze. She nodded and walked away. I didn’t even look at him as he pulled up a chair beside me.
“We need to get in there, Erin,” he said. “We have programs that will scan the files in a matter of minutes. It won’t even be people looking at them.”
“Not at first,” I said. “But what about when the keywords you’re looking for come up? Then, people will be going through everything here. And what happens when national security keywords that don’t have anything to do with Barnel start popping up? His work is important too, Jack.”
“Erin,” he said seriously. He leaned forward in his chair and took my hands in his. There were maybe a dozen people in the room, and I realized that all of them were waiting for me. “This isn’t negotiable. We’ll be as sensitive as we can be, but I can’t make any promises. You can oversee things if you like—let us know if there’s a file that we think is pertinent but you know isn’t. That’s the best I can do.”
I pulled my hands away and nodded. I got up abruptly, nearly knocking my chair over in the process. “Yeah, you’re right. Go ahead.”
Mandy came back over, just a trace of a smug smile on her lips when she reclaimed her chair. We had six hours to find Diggs—there wasn’t time for me to get into it with her now. Jack put his hand on my shoulder while I stood by, arms crossed over my stomach, watching as they picked Diggs’ life apart.
I excused myself after a few minutes and commandeered a computer, intent on doing a little investigating of my own.
I started with Marty Reynolds—the anomaly in all this. I knew why Billy Thomas was dead; I knew why Wyatt was dead. I wasn’t completely clear on the reason for Roger Burkett’s death, but the fact that it came on the heels of all this other violence suggested it had something to do with Barnel and Company’s grand plan. But Marty Reynolds just seemed so random.
After I’d done some digging, though, I found I wasn’t any clearer on motivation. He had a lengthy rap sheet: drugs, violence, everything we’d already found before. On a whim, I pulled up his wife—the woman he was suspected of killing. I found a photo of Glenda Reynolds online from an article in 2001 about the local Qwik E Mart, where Glenda worked as a cashier. She was surprisingly pretty: tall and slender, with long dark hair and striking eyes. Twenty-three at the time, she was younger than her husband by seventeen years.
I didn’t find her maiden name until I pulled up the marriage announcement in the local paper, dated July 15, 1999. Glenda Clifton to Marry Marty Reynolds Saturday, July 18. Clifton didn’t ring any bells for me, but I looked her up anyway. She’d been Junior Miss Kentucky Stars in ’90, won blue ribbons in 4-H for horsemanship four years running, and made straight A’s up until her junior year in high school. She dropped off the map in ’92, no longer mentioned in any archived articles I could find online. If this were a real investigation with a manageable deadline involved, I’d head to the local library from there and look up hard copies of everything I could find.
Since the world was ending in six hours, however, I didn’t really have that luxury.
Instead, I managed to find Glenda’s birth certificate and Googled her parents.
Pay dirt.
Glenda’s father was killed in a car accident in 1991. That year, I found an article on Jesup Barnel, with Glenda’s mother pictured with a group of six others listed as new members of Barnel’s church. Then, I looked for articles and images from Barnel’s church youth group, since Glenda would be about the right age for that.
The fifth photo I pulled up told the story I’d been looking for:
Jesup Barnel stood with about fifteen teenagers, all of them looking appropriately pious. Glenda Reynolds had changed since her days as Miss Kentucky Stars. Now, she wore her hair shorter and her dress much longer. She stood beside Jesup Barnel, his arm around her shoulders in an unmistakably proprietary way. Glenda’s own posture was tense, and you couldn’t miss the way she tried to hold herself apart from the reverend.
I had no proof, but I was still willing to stake my reputation on it: Jesup Barnel had been sleeping with Glenda Reynolds, back when she was still Glenda Clifton. And Glenda, sixteen at the time, hadn’t been happy about it.
I called Juarez and Blaze over and they listened to my theory. Blaze hedged as soon as I was finished.
“And what are those leads, exactly?” I asked. I was well aware of the edge to my voice.
“We’re looking at Billy Thomas’s childhood home right now.”
“What about Barnel’s childhood home?” I asked. “For all we know, going back to the beginning means going back to Barnel’s roots.”
“We’ve got agents there now,” Jack said. “Erin, you need to believe that we know what we’re doing here.”
“What about Diggs’ files? Have you found anything?”
I followed Blaze back to the Tech Nazi’s desk. The Nazi was immersed in her task of dissecting Diggs’ personal life. She didn’t look especially pleased to be interrupted. Or to have to admit, once again, that she might need my help.
“I’ve set aside a dozen folders here that look suspicious, but we haven’t found a direct relationship to Jesup Barnel.” She looked me up and down for a minute. “You’re Solomon?”
“Yeah,” I said. I pushed her out of the way and sat down. “Why?”
“No reason,” she said. “You just take up an awful lot of space on his hard drive.”
Juarez stood beside me, hovering just over my shoulder. He glanced at me, then back at the computer, doing his best to pretend none of this pertained to him. Or us.
“We’ve known each other a long time,” I said. I refused to give her the satisfaction of trying to justify it beyond that.
“So I gathered,” the woman said. She walked away.
“You really know how to get on people’s good sides, you know that?” Juarez asked.
“I’m not going for Miss Congeniality here. I just want to find Diggs.”
“Yeah,” Juarez said. “I got that.”
He left me to my work.
