Gone Dark (A Grale Thriller Book 2)

by Kirk Russell

  “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “Do I look like a nuclear scientist?”

  He smiled and left.

  22

  Tehachapi Mountains, California, April 28th

  At 4:30 the next morning a call came in to the LA FBI office reporting that a private security guard had been shot and killed in his pickup during an attack on a high-voltage transformer along the southern face of the Tehachapi Mountains. Hofter and I arrived in the early morning. We’d seen the dawn and nearer saw the smoke column from the fires.

  County sheriff’s deputies had secured an area surrounding the pickup. Firefighters streamed jets of water onto the fires. The power had been rerouted, the grid adjusted to account for the lost transformers. Two county detectives were there but waiting for a Bureau evidence-recovery team that was on its way. Shell casings and slugs would get collected from the transformers and from the body during autopsy.

  The security guard was a vet discharged a year ago, married with a kid, and with two jobs trying to make it all work. He was slumped in the driver’s seat, his shirt reddened and torn by bullet holes large enough to make me think it was the same weapon used to punch through the transformers’ steel casings.

  The victim’s wife arrived with her two-year-old boy. She collapsed, distraught and sobbing. The boy began to cry as well. I knelt beside her. Words and tears flowed from her.

  She kept repeating, “How could this happen here?”

  Her husband earned fifteen dollars an hour to guard the facility at night. There was no restroom. There was nothing up here but equipment. The utility required that any independent contractor providing security had to sign papers agreeing to hold the utility harmless should anything happen. Her husband had worried over that. Anger at the utility’s attitude and indifference spilled out of her.

  “They don’t care about anything except their money. People come up here, drink, and leave their trash. Look at it all. They don’t even clean up. Mike cleaned it up. He couldn’t stand it.” She looked at me and repeated the question she’d asked many times. “Who would do this?”

  I could tell her the shooter was caught on video approaching the truck from behind, but that wouldn’t help her at all. The shooter wore a hoodie that would make identification from the surveillance footage difficult. A rifle that could be an assault rifle became visible as he reached the tailgate, followed by muzzle flashes. He retreated the way he’d arrived, down the slope behind the truck. Another security camera—this one well down the access road—recorded a Chevy Tahoe passing by twelve minutes after the shooting. It was angled such that it did not cleanly record the license plates but delivered clean images of the vehicle’s left side and corner. The Tahoe’s paint was likely dark blue or black.

  A utility security manager arrived and sought out the victim’s wife. I overheard him start to talk procedure, his back to her husband’s pickup, with her numb and dead to his words and her boy crying. He moved in front of her as she tried to turn away. That was too much for me.

  “Lose yourself,” I said. “Find something else to do.”

  Black smoke from burning transformer oil rose for another hour into the clear morning sky before the fire crew shut it down. The last dark smoke folded east in the wind, and Mark and I got a good look at a bullet-pocked transformer casing. A utility manager told us it was 5/8˝steel. That made high-caliber armor-piercing bullets a good choice for damaging the copper coils inside. To me that said one type of weapon was used to kill the guard and take out the cameras, and a different weapon to punch through the steel.

  I suited up and glopped through oily water and foam the fire crew had used. I took photos and shot video and learned enough to say it was someone spraying bullets from a close range and without much gun skill or knowledge of electrical transformers. But enough rounds were shot—hundreds, judging from the casings—that they’d overwhelmed the transformers. Out here no one would have heard a thing.

  When I waded out of the oily water and took off the mask, I met the engineer in charge of the facility.

  He said, “I was told to get my ass up here, make a damage assessment, and talk to you.”

  By then the guard’s body was out of the pickup and bagged. The mother and child were gone, and a tow truck was standing by to load his pickup. Two news helicopters circled overhead. I talked louder so he could hear me above their noise.

  “Can you switch out these transformers, or are they custom made?” I asked.

  “They’re custom, so three months minimum to replace them. We’ll work around the problem.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  “More rolling blackouts. Nothing else we can do about it.”

  He was six foot one, my height, and with a buzz cut that reminded me of a 1960s astronaut. He talked shop for a while, and though I couldn’t follow a lot of it, I learned more, and he was generous in his explanations of what I didn’t get.

  When we left, the sky was the blue of a robin’s egg, and the transformer facility looked small from the highway. As we got back to LA, Mark surprised me by saying, “The guard’s wife loved him. My wife would never cry like that. She’d be on the phone to the life insurance company while I was still warm. Then for her friends and followers she’d Instagram a photo of me. I take that back. It would be a video.”

  “Catching your last breath?”

  “Yeah, something like that, the last heave and a close-up of my lips turning blue. I’m serious. She’s over me. She thought being married to an FBI agent would be exciting. It didn’t turn out that way. I’m late. I’m not home when I say I’ll be. I don’t come home because some dipshits blow up something. When I go off on some training thing, she thinks it’s a vacation I got that she missed. I get home late, exhausted. I shower, get in bed, and what does she do? Does she roll over toward me? No chance. She slides the other way. She’s turned mean and quick as a snake. The kids are scared to death of her.”

  He exhaled and sighed.

  “Other than that, are you guys good?” I asked.

  He laughed, smiled, and then laughed again. “Yeah, other than that we’re golden.”

  Later I heard an NPR report on three more blackouts and one happy story with a hacker in Portland who’d helped utility engineers overcome repeated attacks. The hacker had a one-man business but had come forward and volunteered. He’d showed up uninvited and became the feel-good story of the day, in striking contrast to the dead guard, destroyed transformers, and a school bus crash in Tennessee that killed seven kids when a stoplight stopped working due to a cyberattack and an 18-wheeler broadsided the bus.

  The guard’s death disturbed me on several levels. I saw a war vet in the night in his pickup, trying to make ends meet, with his wife and son at home. I’d heard the facility engineer disparage him for falling asleep. We’ve made our military all volunteer, and the result is the middle and lower-middle classes have stepped up and carried our water. They’ve done tour after tour as the rest of us put the wars out of mind. How many of us know the longest war in the history of this country is Afghanistan?

  Here’s this vet, home trying to figure out a way to make it working two jobs, and his wife gets berated after he gets shot and killed. I can’t live with that. I really can’t. At a minimum, I owe them finding his killer.

  23

  Late that morning from the LA office I returned a call from Sheriff Callan in Butte County, where we’d met Gary Farue at Tower 36. Callan’s office was in Oroville, an hour north of Sacramento. We’d become improbable phone buddies. He called sometimes just to talk about life. I took his calls because he didn’t linger on the line, and like a lot of cops, it was his habit to communicate information orally. He’d also left a message that I saw was his but hadn’t listened to yet.

  This morning he was sick with a throat thing that he’d had for a month but now burned like hell. Last night he’d tried whiskey and warm water. His wife thinks it’s strep, but her way of diagnosing is to type “sore throat” o
n Google.

  “Did you listen to my message?” he asked.

  “Talk me through it.”

  “This is coming from the same grow-field farmer who gave us the cell-tower shooter tip,” he said. “He thinks the sniper is camping in a back canyon not more than a mile from him.”

  “How would he know?”

  “He lives out of those woods. He’s a marijuana grower, a dope guy with a field somewhere else and not in my county. He camps up there because a friend of his was killed one night sleeping near his grow field.”

  “You know an awful lot about him.”

  “That doesn’t matter. What matters is he’s pretty sure it’s the same guy he saw come off Buckhorn Ridge. He’s gotten a good look at the guy coming and going.”

  Callan coughed and held the phone away. I heard his chair squeak, heard him catch his breath, then continue.

  “Are you hearing me?” he asked.

  “You’re saying he thinks the sniper who shot up Tower 36 camps in the area on and off.”

  “That’s right, and I know you don’t believe it, so here’s the next piece, which you’ll believe even less. He watched a man and a woman hike in yesterday late afternoon. There are only a few ways in and out of those canyons.”

  “Are you going to tell me she was blond?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re late. We’ve had ten thousand tips already. We’re on our way to identifying every blond woman in the state, so I’m just going to cut to it. You know this dope grower or you wouldn’t be calling me. Why is he credible to you?”

  “He’s my sister’s son. She died. I keep an eye on him. I’ve known him his whole life. I trust him.”

  “Your nephew is the anonymous caller?”

  “Didn’t I just say that?”

  “And he’s putting the Blond Bomber, her companion, and the Tower 36 sniper in the same woods. Is there a wooden sign with ‘Terror Camp’ and an arrow pointing toward the trail?”

  “You’re not listening. He’s not putting them together. He hasn’t seen them with the sniper. As far as he knows, they’re not even in the same canyon, and the sniper is only there on and off. He’s gone for days and then back. He must know he’s safe there. He probably leaves his gear hidden. There’s trailhead parking far enough back from the highway that the most likely thing to break into his vehicle would be a bear.”

  “Does your nephew know what he drives?”

  “No.”

  Callan coughed hard again and said, “Hold a minute.” He dropped his phone with a clack, and I heard him hacking as I texted Jace and Mark, Need to talk in the next ten minutes. I’ll call.

  “Sorry about that,” Callan said. “I was about to say I grew up near there. I know the area very well. There are three canyons with streams running through them. My brother and I used to camp there all the time. If I send deputies in to look, they’ll stick to the trails but tell me they climbed everywhere. You’ve got to get on the rock for a view into the canyons, and my deputies don’t do rock. A couple of them can barely climb stairs, and FBI agents aren’t much in the woods. No, they’re worthless, so I don’t think sending a posse of Bureau agents makes sense.”

  “You’d like me to come there.”

  “It’s actually federal land, so I might need you. And a spotter plane if you can get one. Or just get me permission and I’ll do it alone.”

  He would do it alone and have no problem with it. Jace labeled Callan a relic of a former age, but we all are at some point. My counterargument was that local law enforcement agencies that kept close tabs on their counties might be our best chance of stopping the physical attacks.

  “Your card says you’re a bomb tech,” Callan said. “Did you get that limp mishandling a bomb? You were dragging a little when we were up on Buckhorn Ridge. I’m asking if your leg is all right walking across rock.”

  “I have bomb injuries but made it back to active duty.”

  “I’m not asking about your career. I’m asking if you can cross a steep slope and climb open rock, not just loose talus.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “When is the last time you did that?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “How’d you get hurt?”

  “I was working as a bomb tech in Iraq. A motorcycle blew up in a market in Bagdad.”

  “You and I hike in and have a look, and we seal the exits with my deputies. The only road out goes through my county. We’ll go in as tree surveyors checking on spring growth. Plan on a long day. Call me back today if you’re one hundred percent on coming. I’m going either way. You decide. Yes or no.”

  Reacting without enough information is what I coach younger agents not to do. I’d have to drop everything, fly to Sacramento, and drive to Oroville or wherever Callan names as a rendezvous point. I guess he wasn’t looking for an answer just yet. He hung up.

  24

  That afternoon Samantha Clark showed up at the office asking for me, which raised a protocol issue, since I’m not working the Signal Hill officer slayings. LA County Sheriff’s detectives owned that investigation. Agents Sara Decca and Bruce Lorimar were assisting.

  “Check with Decca and Lorimar, then go say hello to her,” Fuentes said. “Let’s find out why she’s here.”

  I called Decca, who said, “I don’t like it, but it’s okay with us.”

  I shook hands with Clark. Fame and the subsequent notoriety hadn’t done her any favors. But few deal well with either. She was about the same height as Julia and dressed a similar way. I took in more of her, lean in tight jeans, a body-hugging shirt, and sandals, with her toenails painted lime green.

  “Call me Sam,” she said. “Everyone else does.”

  “All right, Sam.”

  “I know the shooting of the Long Beach officers is not your investigation, and the Sheriff’s Bureau detectives have told me not to talk to anyone else, but more came back to me last night. This will sound crazy, but I might be able to identify the gunman, but I don’t want to do this with LA County detectives or the FBI agents I’ve been interviewed by one too many times.”

  “They’re here, and at least one will need to be in the room.”

  “Can I be blunt?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Agent Decca is a bitch.”

  She said that with a vehemence I really didn’t like.

  “The other agent, her partner or whatever he is, is fine. I don’t remember his name. He was like a lamp on a side table, but I’m not dealing with her again.”

  Sara Decca I’ve known twenty years. Lorimar the lamp I didn’t know well, but he seemed like a capable guy.

  “It’s not my call,” I said. “Have you let the county detectives know you remember more?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll go talk to the agents. You okay waiting here?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “She’s the poster child for self-absorption,” Decca said after I told her and Lorimar why Clark was here. “Bullshit, her memory has come back. More like your niece moved to Long Beach and Clark sees some reason to reach out to you. How do you read it? Don’t tell me you believe her.”

  “Same as you, she’s after something.”

  When Lorimar walked into the interview room, he said, “Ms. Clark, thank you for caring enough to come in. That takes real courage.”

  “It’s not courage; I’m just remembering more.”

  Lorimar nodded. “It took my grandfather twenty years to remember how two good friends who were right next to him were killed during World War II. So I know it can happen.”

  She began to describe the man’s face as lean but not thin, eyes a little hooded from the bone at the eyebrow, a straight nose. She watched Lorimar with glances at me. Lorimar held a kind, sympathetic smile as I opened the file on my laptop that held six headshots Decca had just sent me. Clark would see three across the top, three on the bottom. One of them Decca had put in to make a point to me about what she thought of this interview
.

  I turned my laptop so Clark and Lorimar were looking at the screen. All six headshots showed. Only one was a mug shot. Two were from surveillance video and grainy black and white. Three were in color. Clark didn’t react to the differences. She looked at Lorimar watching her, then back at the screen and at me.

  “Click on any you want to enlarge,” I said.

  “Of course, we’re not saying any of these are the man you saw,” Lorimar said. “These six are based on your description and who the detectives have as possible shooters. We’re getting closer to him. We have other evidence we’re working.” That wasn’t true but Lorimar was right, we needed a little bump. “There are more headshots if you want to see more,” he said.

  She touched a face on the screen and tapped it with her finger as she thought it over.

  “I think this is him. It’s definitely not any of the others.”

  “Okay, let me get rid of them and enlarge him,” I said and turned the laptop around as Lorimar asked, “You’re ruling out the other five?”

  “Yes, yes, I am ruling them out.” Her voice lit up as she added, “I really think that’s him. You can’t know what this feels like. It’s been so awful to not remember and feel like the detectives doubt my honesty. It’s been very hard.”

  She bowed her head and wordlessly moved to a meek posture as if the thing was done, the burden lifted. She sighed. She exhaled. She was good. She almost had me believing she’d identified the shooter and felt redeemed.

  “I know the light wasn’t great,” I said. “What spilled from the restaurant and the Chevron is all you had.”

  I said that, then checked myself and shut up. That was Lorimar’s to say, not mine.