Field of Fire

by James O. Born

  Duarte heard someone inside, then the door opened a crack, with the chain still latched.

  A woman in her early thirties peeked out. She just said, “Yes?” Her blond hair dripped past her ear, and she leaned down. Then Duarte saw a small child’s hand low on the door and realized what she was doing.

  Duarte said, “Mrs. Tserick?”

  Again the young woman said, “Yes.”

  Duarte opened his identification case and said, “We were hoping you might talk to us about your husband.”

  The woman paused and stared at both he and Caren. “Why? Is there something new?”

  “No, ma’am. We’re still working on the case.”

  She shut the door and fiddled with the chain. A moment later, the door opened to the cramped living room, with a small but separate kitchen. The child Duarte had glimpsed raced back toward a hallway that must have led to the bedrooms. He was still in a diaper, and had black hair. He’d seen a photo of Tserick—not the one in the crime scene photos—and he was extremely fair-skinned, with light blond hair. The woman was light too. The child was olive-skinned, with dark eyes.

  The woman said, “Have a seat,” and motioned to the couch with clean laundry stacked at one end. She flopped into a plastic-covered recliner as Caren settled on the couch and Duarte sat next to her.

  Duarte said, “Mrs. Tserick, we hate to intrude.”

  The woman smiled, revealing pretty teeth and clear brown eyes. “Call me Tammy, please,” she said in a thick Southern accent.

  Duarte cleared his throat, now aware of how attractive this woman—this widow—really was. “Tammy, I know you’ve talked to the local police, but we have some other questions. Questions about your husband.”

  “My husband? Why?” She thought about it, and added, “Like what?”

  “Like what he did for a living.”

  “He worked for the phone company.”

  “As what?”

  “As an employee.” Tammy looked confused.

  “In what capacity?”

  “I guess as a phone worker.”

  Duarte hesitated and Caren stepped in. “What job at the phone company did he do?”

  “Oh, I see. He was an electrician. He could get power to anything.”

  Duarte said, “Was he also involved in the union?”

  “What union?”

  “Did he help organize labor?”

  “What kind of labor? I don’t understand.”

  Caren leaned forward and said, “Did you ever tell the police why you thought someone would kill your husband?”

  “What would I tell them? I don’t know why he was killed.”

  Duarte watched the woman closely and noticed that she had started to fidget slightly in her chair.

  Caren said, “We’re looking into motives.”

  “Motive for what?”

  “To kill your husband.”

  “Oh, I have no idea. He never caused no trouble here in Seattle.”

  Duarte caught the comment about Seattle and started to ask about anywhere else that Tserick might have caused trouble when Tammy Tserick started to cry. Then sob.

  Caren stepped over and squatted near the recliner, trying to comfort the woman. “It’s all right,” said Caren softly.

  Once again, Duarte was glad he had the DoJ attorney. He would not have had the first clue how to deal with this sort of behavior. He had seen no crying in the army. And only a little in ATF.

  Caren obviously wanted to change the subject, and asked, “How long had you been married?”

  “A year.”

  Just then the little boy in diapers came waddling out from the hallway. He fell toward his mother’s long sundress and she wrapped her arms around him. She sniffled a little but the boy cheered her. The boy turned and smiled at Caren, who grinned back.

  Caren said, “Must be hard to make it as a single mother.”

  Tammy looked at her and said, “I’m not exactly a single mother.” She froze.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean”—she paused again and squeezed the boy—“Michael isn’t exactly Janni’s son. He knew it. It was no secret. But his daddy lives in Texas.”

  Duarte didn’t think this was any of their business, and even though the boy was young he didn’t like talking about the bombing in front of him. Duarte pressed on with questions about Janni Tserick’s employment and friends. For a wife, Tammy Tserick didn’t seem to know much about her husband or his activities.

  After Duarte had exhausted a number of avenues for questioning, Caren asked, “Do you work?”

  Tammy shrugged. “Sometimes I do some temp work, as a receptionist or secretary.”

  “What about when your husband was killed?”

  She thought about it, her face twisted in concentration. “No, I didn’t then.”

  “But you weren’t home when the bomb detonated?”

  “No, I was in Texas, visiting family. The police had to call me from a number they found on the kitchen phone list.”

  Caren took in the information.

  Tammy stood and stretched her lithe frame. “Is there anything else?”

  The investigators looked at each other and Duarte said, “No, ma’am, I think we covered it.” He got a phone number and info from her in case he needed to call with a follow-up.

  He looked down and smiled at young Michael. The shy boy hid his face behind his mother’s long dress.

  Mike Garretti spent the day as if he were Oneida Lawson. He watched him leave his little run-down house with the dirt front yard in West Covina at about seven in the morning and drive into work along I-10, then onto the 101 until he reached Universal Studios, where he entered through a gate in the rear. He knew Oneida would be working a legitimate job. He and Janni Tserick were decent guys. He never understood how they got involved in this mess. He still felt bad about Tserick. He had used enough C-4 to ensure the man never even realized what had happened to him.

  Garretti knew Oneida was a carpenter of some kind, and his source said he had been employed by a contractor for the studio for the past four months. He peered through a chain-link fence near a giant parking garage disguised to look like a forest if viewed from the studio. Garretti saw over a dozen construction types walking around as they worked on some structure that looked like an Egyptian pyramid only much smaller, maybe three stories tall.

  This would be the ideal place to get Oneida, and it would be on a work site—just as he’d been instructed. He’d let his employers fill in the rest. But this job had some logistical problems he had not yet encountered. The main one being that the work site, like the entire studio, had good security. Aside from the little construction zone, Garretti couldn’t even see the rest of the park. This was one he’d have to work hard on.

  He roamed around the area until four o’clock, then parked his rented Dodge down the street from the service entrance. He expected Oneida to leave work closer to five but was shocked when he saw the man’s Ford pickup with dented tailgate zip out of the gate and fly past him like he was late for an appointment. Garretti barely had time to bring his car around and follow his next victim.

  A couple of quick turns on the congested streets and Garretti almost gave up, then he realized that Oneida wasn’t heading back to his home in West Covina. Instead, he drove out north and west toward the 110 into Pasadena. Then, not far from the highway, Garretti saw the old pickup pull up to a high school.

  He watched, hoping this was another of Oneida’s jobs, so that Garretti could complete his assignment without risking the security and hassles of Universal Studios. He parked way back because he knew Oneida would immediately recognize him, and what his presence in California meant. If Salez hadn’t already warned him. Garretti knew Oneida was the toughest of the bunch and probably wouldn’t run even if he knew someone was after him.

  Over the next hour, Garretti watched the truck; then he saw a group of students running in a formation across a field just off the road and surrounded by a chain-l
ink fence. Then he saw the large frame of Oneida running behind them, shouting encouragement. Garretti smiled, and recalled the man’s devotion to football. He was a coach of some kind at this little private high school. He was focusing on the kids and wide-open. But that was the problem: the kids. Garretti was not going to risk killing another child. Especially not one out struggling in the Southern Californian sun trying to make a summer football team. Besides, it didn’t fit the profile. He’d have to do it at the studio, whether it was easy or not. He sighed and headed back to Burbank to get another look at the grounds and fence at Universal Studios.

  16

  CAREN LARSON STARED AT THE FOUR FEDERAL EXPRESS boxes filled with thousands of sheets of paper and a memo from Tom Colgan saying he and “Bob” thought there might be a link in the pages of intelligence investigations and statements from informants regarding the deaths they believed were related to labor difficulties. It would’ve been nice for one of them to call her and tell her the boxes were on their way instead of having a bellhop deliver them unannounced. She was more than a little offended that Deputy Attorney General Roberto “Bob” Morales or FBI Special Agent Tom Colgan thought she hadn’t figured out that the whole labor theory came from inside the department. She just didn’t understand why they were pushing it so hard. But it was definitely a priority for Bob Morales and, therefore, a priority for her. She knew that her career depended on her making the crimes fit the theory, but she didn’t know if they realized she was bright enough to see that they had other agendas.

  But what about Alex Duarte? He was very bright. What would happen if he figured it out? They didn’t own his soul like hers. She didn’t think the idealistic young ATF man would sell his soul. But she knew her bosses were interested in what his price might be if it came to that. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  There was a knock on her door. She popped up, knowing who it was but wondering what his reaction would be to the latest task.

  As the door opened, Duarte looked at her and immediately said, “What’s wrong?”

  She stepped to the side to reveal the boxes of records. “The Department of Justice has some ideas for us.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “Records. From investigations, intelligence—you name it.”

  “And?”

  “They think we might find a clue into the case by going through them.”

  He stepped fully into the room and said, “Good, let’s get started.”

  She appreciated his attitude, and couldn’t bring herself to tell him that it was a ploy to slow down the investigation for some reason. She wished she knew why, and wished she could share her fears with him. She couldn’t do either. She was too embarrassed to consider what he might think of her if she did tell him all she knew.

  Alberto Salez was glad to be back in Florida. The weather was hot, but at least it was more predictable than Virginia, and he didn’t stick out down here like he did in the white-bread state. If the U.S. was the melting pot of the world, Florida was the melting pot of the U.S. Between Central American workers, neighborhood after neighborhood of Islanders and all the European visitors, no one looked or sounded alike. Salez liked that feature of his adopted state. This time of year, there was also a load of cheap motel rooms he could rent by the week. He couldn’t go back to the extra bunk at the labor camp. That place had been great after a night of drinking with those guys—he didn’t have to do anything, just sleep in the soft cot and get up a little early in the morning and drive into the Sunrise Cafe. Now it was different. Cut off from the bunkhouse and his own apartment, he felt like fucking Osama bin Laden, unable to sleep in the same bed twice, or use the same phone twice without risk of someone listening.

  Now he was considering the best way to get into the labor camp out past Belle Glade and retrieve his file from the lovely but sad Maria Tannza. He hadn’t spoken to her in the week since her son was killed. She would probably not be happy to see him, and that meant she’d tell someone he had been there. He didn’t necessarily like the idea of killing the young teacher, but it would be easier than dodging that fucking ATF agent, Duarte. That son of a bitch had proven he wasn’t the forgiving type. Every time he reached up to his right ear, he thought about what he wouldn’t mind doing to the young ATF man. He figured if they both stayed in the area, he might get a chance one day.

  He sat low in the seat of his newly acquired Nissan pickup truck he’d bought from a farmhand near Boynton Beach. The nine-year-old truck had some wear and tear, as well as its share of rust, but the mechanical aspect was solid, and no one noticed it rolling down the road. For a three-pound bag of pot he had taken from one of his friend’s stashes, the truck was a good deal. What could he do? He needed transportation. He had left the Honda Element in the parking lot of the same gas station where he had met the owner and killed her. He had wiped the odd-looking vehicle clean inside and out. No one would lift a print from that thing. Not even those fags on the CSI show could do it. Salez had even bought a copy of the Palm Beach Post to see what the conjecture was about how a rotting corpse and another, fresher body from Georgia ended up at the gas station where her credit card was used the week before. The whole idea made him chuckle when he thought about it. The cops, as usual, weren’t talking.

  He decided to wait until dark to slip into the camp. Maybe no one would even notice him. Maybe Maria would be out and he wouldn’t have to deal with her. Maybe he’d figure out how to get that crazy Garretti off his ass and not have to worry about this shit at all. Maybe, but he doubted it.

  It was near eight o’clock when Duarte realized they had been working since early in the morning and he was getting tired. The hotel room at the Edgewater had a spectacular view of the water, and he found himself gazing at some of the passing ships and freighters. He had never seen ships like that pass by from any kind of living room. The cloudy sky gave the image a cinematic quality. He and Caren had shared a pizza in her room that looked out over the Puget Sound and had hardly made a dent in the records. Caren had picked up a six-pack of Budweiser too. He had surprised himself by drinking two. Duarte had to admit that Caren was a hard worker and didn’t complain about much. He liked that.

  Now he stood and stretched, knowing he’d have to have a hard workout in the morning to get his body back on track. Caren looked up and smiled, her eyes still alert but the exhaustion starting to show in her pretty face. She stood too, stretched her arms, then sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Wanna start again tomorrow?”

  He nodded.

  “You think this is worthwhile?”

  He said, “Don’t know until we get into them a little bit more.”

  “You like this kind of work?”

  “Not especially, but it needs to be done. We may find the link to the killer in the files.”

  She stared at him.

  He added, “Or maybe not.”

  “You are just so hard to figure out. Unless I’m asking about explosives or the Civil War, you hardly say a word. I just don’t know what to think.”

  He smiled but didn’t answer.

  “Why did the South even declare war? They could never win.”

  Duarte turned to her, his arguments already springing through his mind. “The South didn’t lose a battle until Gettysburg. Lee proved that tactics and superior skill could defeat much larger armies in battle. Lee just needed the right ground for a good field of fire and a clear mission, and he stood up to forces twice his size.”

  He stopped because she was laughing. Laughing at Robert E. Lee. When she didn’t stop, he said, “What’s so funny?”

  “I just proved my point. You need some work on your areas of interests if you want to attract women.” She patted the bed next to her.

  Duarte suddenly saw how good an attorney she was. He sat down a foot away from her, his hands folded in his lap, realizing she didn’t give a crap about the Civil War. He could still smell her subtle perfume, even over the beer on his breath.

  Caren said,
“What do you want out of this?”

  “Out of what?”

  “This case, this work, this bullshit.”

  She had a tone he had not heard from her before. A little caustic and bitter. He shrugged, his natural reaction to almost any inquiry. “Solve it. Move on. Nothing too much to ask.”

  “Solve it to help get a promotion? Like you claimed last week?”

  “Yeah, I guess. It’s also the right thing to do. Hector Tannza is only one of the victims. Someone’s got to stop this guy, and right now we’re the only ones trying.”

  She nodded. “You make sense. For a cop.” Then she shocked him by reaching over, wrapping a hand around his neck and kissing him long and hard on the lips. He responded but was still in a state of shock. When their lips parted, all he could say was: “Wow.”

  She smiled and said, “I agree.” Then she looked into his eyes and asked him, “What really interests you? You can tell me. I really want to know.”

  Duarte had been raised to be too polite to admit what interested him at that moment.

  Mike Garretti had figured the entire plan out while he had watched Oneida Lawson work with the linebackers on getting around the defensive linemen. The answer had been right in front of him all along, but he hadn’t noticed it. Then, looking through the chain-link fence, it hit him. He could enter the studio. Anyone could. It was called the Studio Tour. That would give him a recon of the whole studio, security and probably even the construction site. It sounded easy enough, and he had always wanted to take the famous tour.

  The ride on the little tourist train reminded him of the tram in Virginia where he had placed the charge under the driver’s seat. He was pretty good with simple C-4. Timers and releases—the basic stuff. Considering he’d never really been officially trained, he was confident with it. He considered himself the most proficient explosives expert in the U.S. military who actually worked as a personnel clerk. But like everything else, even the military, people’s views are colored by movies, and someone above him had suggested using a bomb that armed after the tram reached a certain speed. He wanted to shout: “When it reaches eight fucking miles an hour?” But he had remained professional. They paid him too much to act otherwise. He nodded without actually saying he would do it that way. Instead, he used a simple radio remote and watched to see who was on the tram. He waited for more than three hours until the fewest number of people were on the bus, then detonated the C-4. He knew it would be a big blast. He wanted to be sure it did the job, but he had hoped the two young women a few rows back and the heavy guy behind the driver would survive. As soon as he saw the intensity of the explosion, he realized that was a futile hope. Just the flash of the blast alone enveloped the whole vehicle. Maybe a whole stick was too much. Those deaths, coupled with the fiasco in Florida, made him more cautious here. This would be a tricky one, but they weren’t paying him to just roll up next to Oneida and put a bullet in the back of his brain. There was a bigger picture that he was missing. There was a role for these bombings and he had no clue what they meant. He did, however, know they were paying him cash, to do it their way, and he liked having a good safety net for his retirement.