He brushed back a strand of Claire’s blond hair and kissed her, but she didn’t wake up. He promised himself to call her later in the morning.
He left the long-suffering Escort in the driveway and walked to The Bullet in the indifferent, dewy shadow of morning. He smelled new-mown grass. Sprinklers pulsed, dogs barked somewhere in the distance, and a lumbering Garvis Creamery truck passed him, making its milk rounds. The driver saw him and raised two fingers from the steering wheel, more an acknowledgement than a wave.
Morgan slipped his key in the brass lock of the newspaper office door. As he opened the door, he caught the comforting smell of ink, an odor the color of night. He turned on the lights and started a pot of coffee before he booted up his computer. He looked forward to two or three hours to work unmolested before the workday started. He wanted to be at the court clerk’s office when it opened, to satisfy his curiosity about the relationship between Malachi Pierce and Simeon Fenwick.
The phone rang a few minutes after seven.
It was Jerry Overton. The normally laconic ATF agent skipped saying hello altogether.
“The Cubs are playing at Wrigley today,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day and I got tickets. Field level, third base. Pick you up at O’Hare. We’ll grab some burgers at Murphy’s Bleachers. Man, I can almost taste an Old Style now. It’s all on you. Whaddya say?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll just shut down the paper this week so I can watch the Cubs lose,” Morgan said. “Actually, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Who are they playing?”
Overton laughed.
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not,” Morgan said. “But the way things are going here right now, I don’t think I could get there before October. And what good Cub fan really expects to see baseball in Wrigley in October?”
“Good point.”
There was more to this call than baseball, Morgan knew.
“Is that it? Just an invitation to see the Cubbies lose? Been there, done that. What’s up?” he asked his old friend.
“You know I can’t confirm or deny any open investigations,” he said.
Overton’s stiff-arm reply puzzled Morgan.
“I didn’t ask ...”
The tone of Overton’s voice turned abruptly official.
“But I have a few questions about the matter you reported to me last Friday.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“Just listen to my questions,” Overton told him. “Sometimes you don’t know what’s important. Just listen carefully. It might help us help you. Do you understand?”
Morgan didn’t.
“Whatever you say,” Morgan acquiesced. “You’re the cop. What do you need to know?”
Overton started his inquiry in left field.
“Do you have any information linking Malachi Pierce to the Fourth Sign?” he asked Morgan.
“The Fourth Sign? P.D. Comeaux’s freaky militia buddies? How the hell would I know? No, I don’t know anything about that. Is it true? Is he tied up with those crazies?”
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t comment on that. I’m merely conducting an official inquiry here in response to your report of suspicious activity. If you’d just listen to my questions, then we might be able to help.” Overton was more emphatic. “Do you understand?”
“But I didn’t really make a report ...”
“Have you seen any evidence that would make you believe that Mr. Pierce is involved in illicit gun sales and explosives manufacturing?”
“Bombs? I told you what I know, Jerry. Some people hear explosions out on Pierce’s land. Maybe he’s just blowing out stumps. I just don’t know.”
“Any recent threats against government agencies or public officials?
“He seems the type that would, but, no, I haven’t seen anything beyond the usual black-helicopter crap in his letter. The only real threat I saw was against me.”
“Extortion by threat of violence?”
“No.”
“Harboring fugitives?”
“No.”
“Conspiracy to receive stolen military property like, say, automatic weapons, rocket launchers and explosives?”
“Jesus. No.”
“Tax evasion by funneling income from gun sales through his church?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that. But, hey, how did you know about his church? I never mentioned it.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“That much is in the public record, Jeff. You can look it up yourself. But at least you’re listening. That’s good.”
At that moment, Morgan knew.
It was no slip of the tongue and this was no interview. Overton was telling him everything he wanted to know, the only way a straight-arrow federal agent could without dishonoring his code.
His questions were, in fact, answers.
“I understand now, Jerry.”
“Good.”
“Is there anything else you need to ask?”
“Yes. In regard to your fears about your family’s safety, have you taken precautions?”
“Should I?”
“Generally speaking, it’s always wise to be safe, Jeff. You’ve been around the block. You know how it is these days. And you know these guys.”
Morgan nervously scribbled Comeaux’s name on the back of a blank ad invoice and retraced it unconsciously until the ink had soaked through to the desk blotter beneath it.
“Is the Fourth Sign somehow involved in this?”
“Jeff, c’mon. You know it’s against the law for us to keep files on groups. Just individuals who are suspected or convicted of specific crimes. Sometimes these individuals have something in common, say, like membership in the same club. But if you asked about any one of them, I couldn’t tell you one way or the other.”
“You mean like P.D. Comeaux?”
“Yes. That’s a good example,” Overton said. He spoke deliberately. “If he or other members of the Fourth Sign were involved somehow, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Understand?”
“Are they?”
“Like I said, Jeff, if they were, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I just can’t say.”
“I understand,” Morgan said.
Overton sounded a note of caution.
“You already know about the Fourth Sign from the Comeaux case and you know without me telling you that these aren’t just bad dudes. They’re crazy bad dudes. Don’t turn your back on them.”
By saying nothing, Jerry Overton revealed much.
At the time of P.D. Comeaux’s arrest in 1993, the Fourth Sign wasn’t even a blip on the FBI’s radical-right radar screen, much less the ATF’s. Mostly, it was just a small, secret society of angry Bible-Belt farmers on the verge of bankruptcy, seeking conspiracies that weren’t there, rationalizing their plights irrationally and peddling a poor man’s gospel. They believed the government was engaged in a global and domestic conspiracy to create a “New World Order” that would enslave ordinary citizens by taking away their means to revolt, namely their land and their guns. And when they searched their Bibles for answers, they came to believe even more fervently that one-world government was the last prophesied sign from God before Armageddon, the “fourth sign.”
Nobody cared. The Christian Identity movement hadn’t yet bubbled to the surface of the national consciousness. Its followers considered themselves soldiers in a war against the United States government, practicing an Aryan theology that saw racial minorities as sub-human “mud people,” Jews as Satan’s children and a New World Order as a precursor to tyranny.
At its core, the Fourth Sign was among scores of obscure and loosely organized Christian Identity bands mixing ultra-fundamentalist zealots and anti-government paranoiacs in a combustible, fuming frenzy that produced more smoke than fire.
But Comeaux was the spark that ignited a wildfire.
Before his arrest, he’d attended a few secret meetings at a small church near Dixon, Illinoi
s, but mostly kept to the back pews. He put his faith in violence and fear, not talk. His heart burned with a savagery far more advanced than anyone had dreamed.
Once he was jailed, the word went out. He became a martyr. To the Fourth Sign’s believers, he was no serial killer, but a casualty of a government conspiracy designed to uproot true patriots. Even if Comeaux were truly guilty, some said, he should be sainted for exterminating the vermin whores that dragged America toward Hell by its private parts. Offshoots of the Fourth Sign sprung up all across the forgotten interior, its demented gospel spread via the Internet and rallied by the whispered name of P.D. Comeaux.
The heart of the Fourth Sign beat somewhere in the Midwest, Morgan knew from his follow-up investigation in Comeaux, but its leadership was shadowy. It gathered money from its far-flung members through a series of drop-boxes rented by mysterious groups with names like The Millennium Institute and The Rapture Forum, most of the money going to an ever-expanding arsenal of legal and illegal weaponry. ATF intelligence suggested the organization’s more militant factions — radicals for whom The Order and the Aryan Nations were not radical enough — financed themselves by declaring their own war on drugs, robbing and murdering dealers from Tulsa to Detroit.
On the day of closing arguments in Comeaux’s South Dakota trial, a sophisticated pipe-bomb filled with roofing tacks, packed in a shoebox between two plastic bags of human feces, was mailed to the county prosecutor’s office. When it exploded, it decapitated a legal secretary and badly mutilated a law-school intern, whose wounds became lethally infected by the excrement and dirty shrapnel blasted deep into him. The day before the student died in excruciating pain, an anonymous caller with a Western accent told a sheriff’s dispatcher that the bomb had been sent by the Fourth Sign.
“And the shit inside came right out of the ass of Saint P.D. hisself. Consider yourself baptized,” he cackled, then hung up.
Nobody was ever arrested, nor was it ever known if P.D. Comeaux had actually smuggled his own waste out of the county jail, but the Fourth Sign was quickly added to the feds’ short list of America’s most deadly domestic terror groups.
All this, Morgan already knew. It was frightening enough. But what he didn’t know scared him most.
“Jeff, call me if anything comes up. You’ve got my number, here or at home,” Jerry Overton said. His voice was gravely serious. “I mean it. Anything.”
“Don’t worry, I will,” Morgan said. “And, hey, I’ll take a raincheck on that Cubs game. I guess I owe you one for sure, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it,” his old friend said. “Right now, you just take care of yourself and Claire. I learned a long time ago there are two things not worth waiting for: The Cubs getting to the World Series, and you buying a round of beers.”
Morgan laughed.
“Dare to dream, Jerry,” he said. “The Cubs might surprise you.”
Morgan sat on a hard bench in the dark hallway outside the district court clerk’s office, leaning against the cool wall. It soothed him after the walk to the courthouse in the hot morning air. He heard women’s voices inside the third-floor office, the lights were on, but the frosted-glass door was still locked.
He hadn’t planned to spend much time checking on Malachi Pierce’s court records, if they existed at all. He had a full day ahead, hoping against hope that he could finally get the paper out on time. He had too many stories to write, and so did his reporters. He wanted to finish four or five pages today, but that seemed increasingly unlikely without stories to fill them. He still hadn’t decided whether to endorse candidates in the upcoming election, a task that hung like an albatross around his neck. And he expected more fallout from the Chamber’s boycott as the week wore on. Later today, maybe tomorrow, he’d look in on Neeley Gilmartin.
Before it had started, the day seemed over.
Morgan checked his watch.
Eight-ten.
He had already decided to knock when the latch clacked noisily. The little bell on the other side of the door tinkled as a pretty, middle-aged woman poked her blond-streaked head out into the hall and looked around as if she were hiding from someone. The smell of morning coffee wafted out of the office into the sterile hallway.
Inside, some of the women were gathered around a desk, cooing over photographs of someone’s new grandchild. The fluorescent blue light almost hurt his eyes after sitting in the darkened hall. A fresh pot was gurgling in a drip coffeemaker on top of some filing cabinets. Morgan could almost taste it.
“Can I help you?” the tall woman with frosted hair asked him as she propped the door open. Her face was younger and more friendly than her saucer-sized glasses and high-collared business suit made her look. Except for her bright red lipstick, she wore little makeup and didn’t seem to miss it. Her hips were slender, her legs long. Morgan guessed she was, at best, only a few years older than him, maybe forty-two. And he felt as if he should know her.
“I just came to look at the card files,” he told her, “but I could sure use a cup of that coffee.”
The clerk smiled and touched his forearm.
“The cups are on the cabinet,” she said warmly. “You help yourself, then I’ll show you the case cards.”
Morgan poured the strong black coffee into a Styrofoam cup, then emptied two pink packets of sweetener into it and stirred it with a plastic spoon. It was almost too hot to drink, so he pursed his lips and blew lightly across it, scattering tiny corkscrews of steam.
In the cool, dim vault, the clerk showed Morgan the familiar card files in their dented drawers. He slid open the drawer labeled “P-Q-R” and ran his fingers along the tops of the frayed, worn cards.
Peters. Pettit. Peyton. Phelps. Phillips. Pilcher.
Nothing.
Morgan thumbed through a few more cards, but none were out of place. Despite his suspicions, it appeared that Malachi Pierce had steered clear of serious legal problems in Perry County. He closed the drawer and slipped his notebook back in his shirt pocket. Dead end. Cross that one off the list.
“No luck?” the friendly clerk asked him. She’d busied herself with a stack of blue folders while he worked.
“I’m afraid not,” Morgan said. “Sometimes it just isn’t there.”
“Tell me about it. We hunt for files around here every day and I swear there are some that just walk off,” she said. “You look familiar to me. Have we met?”
“I’m Jeff Morgan,” he said, not sure if he should offer his hand. “I’m the editor at The Bullet.”
The clerk’s lips formed a wet, red O.
“Good Lord,” she said, astonished. “I heard you were back in town. You don’t remember me, do you? That’s okay, I mean, jeez, because I didn’t recognize you right off either. My goodness, it’s been more than twenty years. I was a year ahead of you in school, I think. I worked for your dad the summer before I went to college and I used to see you in the shop.”
Morgan swept away the cobwebs of his memory.
“Cassie ... don’t tell me ... your mother cleaned the hardware store on weekends. God, I’m so bad with names. Cassie ... Miller. Right?”
“Millen. Well, not anymore since I got married, but that’s close enough,” she said. “You were Class of Seventy-five, right?”
“Exactly,” Morgan said. “And you were ...”
“Seventy-three and seventy-four. God, that was a year. That was the year we lost the football championship by one point and then lost the basketball championship by one point. You remember all that?”
Morgan laughed.
“How could I forget? That was the year I got up the guts for the first time to ask a girl on a date. She said yes, and I couldn’t believe it. We had big plans to go to a Jim Croce concert in Rapid City, then the poor guy dies in a plane crash a week before. I was bummed. We just never got around to going out after that and it was another year before I felt brave enough to ask somebody else out. It was an unlucky year all around.”
“Just think how Jim
Croce felt.”
They laughed together. Cassie’s eyes sparkled and, for a moment, Morgan could imagine the fresh-faced teen-ager he’d surely have seen at his father’s cashier counter that summer before his senior year, a lusty summer when almost no female escaped his notice.
Cassie brought him up to date on her life since high school: Her father had abandoned the family in her senior year, so her mother took cleaning jobs to support the family. As one of the top ten students in her class, she had been accepted at Stanford, but after her father left, her college plans changed like everything else in her life. She ended up at the University of Wyoming, majoring in marketing. She graduated, came back to Winchester, married a small-town Presbyterian preacher and quickly had two children, who were both now in junior high school.
“So you work here now?” he asked her.
“Sort of.”
“Part-time?”
Cassie smiled demurely.
“No,” she said. “I’m the clerk of district court. Duly elected and sworn to uphold the constitution of the State of Wyoming. And I make the coffee.”
Morgan’s eyes widened. He knew from the name on the door and in his own paper’s election stories she was now Cassandra Gainsforth.
“The clerk? You’re Cassandra Gainsforth?”
Cassie nodded.
“Twelve years now. As the clerk, that is. Fifteen years as Cassandra Gainsforth,” she said, displaying a diamond ring on her left hand that was easily three times the size of the one Morgan gave to Claire.
“Well, Jeez ...” Morgan caught himself before he took the Lord’s name in vain. “I mean, gosh, I am impressed. And a little embarrassed.”
“Happens all the time. Everybody gets nervous around the preacher’s wife. You should hear the language around here. I don’t mind.”
“No, I mean, I didn’t recognize you and all. I’ve been away too long. Let me congratulate you, belatedly, on the election and the marriage.”
The Deadline Page 20
