“Good Morning, gentlemen. What’ll it be?” Maybel asked.
“I’ll take the Maybel special with hash browns instead of grits and a glass of tea.” The first agent seemed shorter, probably about 5’5”, with a heart shaped face and beer belly.
“I’ll take the egg white burrito with no cheese and a cup of coffee.” The second agent was over six feet tall with very curly hair and a curved nose. His eyes were very hawkish and now staring at me.
I started fiddling with my silverware waiting for his piercing gaze to wander somewhere else. Maybel walked down the counter to me and asked, “Hey hon, what would you like this morning?”
“Good morning, Maybel. I’ll do an omelet with tomatoes and mushrooms. And a hot chocolate.”
“Want whip cream on that hot chocolate?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
The agents pulled small notebooks from inside their jacket and started discussing their plan for the day. I leaned sideways straining to hear their conversation and Maybel seemed very intent on cleaning the bar near them.
“Want to start today off by following up on the lead suspect?” Beer gut asked.
“Yes. The Charleston PD said she hasn’t been cooperating with the investigation, so we need to see what we can find out from her contacts at Sacred Care,” Hawk answered. “I’ve got a hunch that she’s the key to this whole attack.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Do you think it’s coincidence that she just happened to attack the police car at the exact moment someone was trying to get away with stolen bomb making supplies? Not to mention the fact that she claimed to have been hit by two Mexicans in an El Camino. How many Mexicans and El Caminos have you seen since we got here?”
“None.”
“Exactly. The very same El Camino she describes just happens to turn up as the lead piece of evidence in the explosion. I ran a quick database search and there are only three El Caminos registered in the entire state of West Virginia. Only one of them is registered in this county. And it was registered to a...” Hawk flipped through his notebook looking for the name. Maybel ignored the food waiting to be delivered as she scooted closer to hear the suspect’s name. “It’s registered to a Buck Taylor. He runs a bar on the outskirts of town.”
I can’t let them pin this on Buck.
Maybel turned away to grab the food and hide her shock. “Here’s your breakfast. Can I get you anything else?”
They shook their heads no.
I was trying to figure out a way to save Buck, when Hawk continued, “I went over to talk to Buck today and he still has the El Camino so it wasn’t him. The other two El Caminos are also still in working condition, so it looks like the attacker probably imported this car from another state.”
Maybel and I both released a sigh of relief making the agents give us a suspicious look. I pretended to ignore them and started slicing up my omelet.
“So, the car is a dead end?”
“Yeah, right now our biggest lead is Roberta Smith. I think she’s trying to get the police to follow up her lead on the hit-and-run to draw media attention to police racial profiling in order to get the case dismissed. Imagine if we started questioning all the Mexicans in West Virginia in conjunction with a bombing, solely based on the word of an elderly woman and the presence of an El Camino? The headlines would read Department of Homeland Security racially profiling victims based on car preference. That would be bad for us and the whole Department. We’ll let the FBI go down that road if they want. Our job is to determine if this was a deliberate attack against our infrastructure. If it wasn’t, we’re outta here.”
“Hey there!” Jake said, hopping on the stool next to me blocking my surveillance and annoying me.
“What do you want?” I snapped, trying to listen around him.
“Just meeting some DHS task force guys. Saw you sitting here by yourself and decided to take advantage...” He had a rakish look about him this morning. It must’ve been the pin striped suit and blue tie.
“Isn’t there somebody else you can bother? I’m working, um, I mean eating breakfast.”
He grabbed a slice of toast off my plate and start eating it.
“I love grape jelly. See we should be a couple. We have so much in common.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“I hope I’m not busting up a party?” Eric asked, grabbing the stool on the other side of me.
So much for my surveillance!
“You’re always busting up the party,” Jake retorted. “What are you doing here?”
“Meeting DHS task force reps. You?”
“Same.”
“That’s them right there,” I said, pointing at the only other people wearing suits in the diner. “In case your powers of deduction aren’t working too well today.”
“Yeah. I figured that was them. I just wanted to say hi to you,” Eric said, grabbing my last piece of toast. “I prefer Strawberry jelly, but this‘ll do.”
“The next person to grab food off my plate is gonna get stabbed with a fork!”
They both laughed at me, unaware that I was willing to maim someone over food.
“So Jake... any luck with the activists this morning?”
“Ha! Hardly. It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. They answered the door buck naked and took off running when we flashed our credentials. We had a quick look around the premises, but didn’t find anything noteworthy. It was almost like you sent us on a wild goose chase.”
“What? I would never do such a thing. I just thought they might be suspects because of their left wing views,” Eric replied, his eyes twinkling contrary to his words.
“It wasn’t that big of a deal. It only took an hour to determine they weren’t suspects. No harm, no foul.” The tension between them was making the hair on my arms stand up. I stabbed the last bite of my omelet and shoved it into my mouth.
“Where’s your partner?” I asked.
“Romero is working with the team questioning Ms. Smith. They thought his Spanish language skills might come in handy if her story turns out to be true. So, it’s just me and the Deputy today.”
“I reckon we should introduce ourselves,” Eric said, getting up and walking over to the agents.
“Good Morning! I’m Deputy Hodde and this here is Agent McCallister. We’re supposed to be working with you gentlemen this morning.”
Hawk grabbed his hand saying, “Jedd Washburne, Task Force Lead, DHS Infrastructure.”
“Robert Colson, DHS Infrastructure.”
“Nice to meet y’all. Do you want to drive or ride with me?”
“We’ll take our car and follow you over. Just give us a couple minutes. We need to pay for breakfast.”
“No problem. Just give us a holler when you’re ready to leave.” Eric walked back over and sat down next to me.
Jedd signaled to Maybel for the check.
“Here ya go, hon. Did you enjoy your breakfast?”
“I did. This was the best egg white burrito I’ve ever had. What’s your secret? Or can you share?” Jedd asked.
“It ain’t a secret. I separate the egg whites out and deep fry the yolks. Then I mix ‘em up with salsa, bacon, and a few other ingredients.”
Jedd turned green. “I thought it was an egg white special.”
“It is. I have to take the egg whites out so it’ll taste better.”
He slapped a twenty down on the counter. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks Maybel. It was a tasty breakfast,” Robert said, seeming to enjoy Jedd’s unhealthy breakfast choice.
“We’re off to the Sacred Care Nursing Home,” Jake said to me. “I should be back in time for our dinner date. Pizza at 7?”
“Me too,” Eric echoed.
I waved them away, licking the whip cream off my Hot Chocolate.
“Well, honey. You got them two men ‘bout ready to fight over you. Just be careful or you’ll lose ‘em both,” Maybel warned, giving me a hot chocolate refill.
“I’ve been trying to lose ‘em both, but they just won’t go away!”
“Why in the world would you want to get rid of a couple of handsome men like them?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Honey, everything to do with men is complicated. The easier they are to get, the easier they are to lose. Me and Earl fought something terrible the first couple years we knew each other. Then one day we woke up and realized that we hated each other so much that we’d fallen in love. I still remember the moment we realized that we were in love. We were having a screaming match outside the post office. He’d let the door shut when I was trying to carry an armload of packages inside. He was a gentleman, but it was more important to him to ruffle my feathers,” she recounted, chuckling at the memory. “Well, I let him have it calling him every name in the book. He grabbed me and kissed me to shut me up and we were inseparable after that. I still miss him.”
I smiled at her dysfunctional love story offering, “That’s a great story. My situation is a little different. I just need to be single for a while.”
“I understand. You girls nowadays are stronger than we were. You don’t need men to survive,” she said, patting my hand. “Enjoy your freedom.”
She moved down the bar clearing off the dirty plates to take them back to the kitchen. She came back to the front and began taking orders again.
“What can I get for y’all?”
I looked over where the agents had been seated to find Bob and Billy now occupying the seats.
“I’d like biscuits and gravy with eggs. And a chocolate milk,” Bob said.
“Me too,” Billy added.
They looked like two caricatures of Sherlock Holmes dressed in trench coats with plaid hats.
“Hey there, Shasta!” Bob greeted me.
“Um, you guys are all dressed up today. What are you up to?”
“It must be the hats. Everyone keeps commenting on them,” Billy beamed, tipping it proudly. “They’re called deerstalkers.”
I blinked at him.
“A-casue they’re popular with deer hunters. But we got ‘em cause they make us look like Sherlock Holmes.”
“We’re on official police business,” Bob interrupted. “We can’t tell you any more.”
“No problem.” I went back to ignoring them, but couldn’t help overhearing their conversation.
“Do you think they’ll find out that we didn’t pay taxes on our private investigator business?”
“Damn it, Bob. They’re the FBI. Not the IRS.”
“So, you don’t think they’ll figure it out?”
“The FBI doesn’t have anything to do with taxes!”
“Didn’t they arrest Al Capone for taxes?”
Good one, Bob!
“Yeah. But that was different. Just be quiet. I’m thinking.”
Maybel delivered their food and gave me my check in the same motion. I pulled a $20 bill from my wallet and waited on my change.
“I think we should go investigate the car and surrounding area for clues,” Bob said.
“That’s what I was thinking too. Let’s eat breakfast and head up there.”
Good. Maybe they’ll destroy all the evidence and Jake won’t be able to figure out it was us.
Maybel handed me my change and I left a few dollars laying on the counter. “Thanks. Have a good one.”
Ulyssa and I sat sipping Diet Cokes when Jake and Eric arrived.
“Sorry we’re late. We’d planned on only interviewing a few folks, but it turned into a circus,” Eric said, pulling up a chair at the table forcing Jake to sit next to Ulyssa. The waitress walked over for their drink orders.
“Coke, please,” Jake ordered.
“I’ll have a Sprite. Thanks.”
“What happened?” Ulyssa asked.
“Today totally ruined my impression of the elderly community. I used to think they were all sweet, but they’re all a bunch of freaks and criminals!” Jake said, genuinely disturbed by his visit to Sacred Care.
“No kidding! You name it and they’re doing it.”
Interesting. They never agreed on anything, so today must have been especially traumatic. I couldn’t help my curiosity. “What happened?”
Jake started the story saying, “We started by interviewing the staff to find out who Roberta may have been in cahoots with and they suggested we start with Cassandra Michaels. Things went downhill from there.”
“Michaels? Any relation to Sophie, the newspaper editor?” I asked.
“It’s her mom,” Eric answered.
“We started by asking a few benign questions, but it quickly became clear she was hiding something so I pressed her for more information. It turns out that she’s a sort of eco-terrorist, except that she used animals for terrorist activities.”
“What?”
“I guess she got real mad at the Social Security Administration a few years ago and released some bats inside the Charleston field office. Nobody saw her do it, but she confessed the whole thing to us today. Luckily, the statute of limitations has expired and we can’t prosecute her.”
“I don’t get how that’s ecoterrorism.”
Jake took a long drink of his soda then continued the saga, “The bats are an endangered species, so they had to shut the office down and hire specialists to remove them. Plus, it took an additional month for professionals to clean up the bat guano and return the place to a clean status.”
“Guano?”
“Bat droppings!”
Bletch. Bletch.
“Why would she do something like that?” Ulyssa asked.
“Apparently, she wasn’t happy that the SSA had sent a representative out to the nursing home to verify her mother’s age. I guess if you’re over 103 years old, it’s policy that they send someone to verify that you’re still alive. Cassandra took it as an insult to her family, thinking the SSA was calling them cheats and liars. I guess she didn’t realize it was standard policy, so she took matters into her own hands and released the bats. Her little attack created a severe backlog in benefits processing because the SSA headquarters had to manually create social security checks for two months until the field office resumed operations.”
“Wow. Sophie comes from a long line of nut jobs!” Ulyssa said.
“It took us two hours to get to the bottom of that story,” Eric added, “Then we had the issue with Jackie.”
“Worse than Cassandra?” I asked.
“Comparable. We reviewed the computer logs at the nursing home for evidence and found logs with Al Rahman as the username.”
“Al Rahman? Al Rahman?” Ulyssa asked, searching her brain for a match.
“He’s the Chief Operations Officer for Al Qaeda,” Eric answered, saving her mental strain.
“Yeah. You shoulda seen it... the DHS guys got real excited because they thought they had a lead on him using the chat logs. We heard all kinds of theories about how he’d probably been trying to recruit America’s elderly since they’re all pissed about Social Security and Healthcare benefits. They even went so far as to say that the elderly were a prime recruiting ground since they’d already lived their lives and would be more likely to die for a cause. After a bit of research we discovered the accounts were tied to Jackie LeMonte not an international terrorist cell,” Jake paused, taking another sip of his soda. “He confessed to using the name for certain suspicious online activities, such as surfing porn and purchasing questionable items.”
“Hahaha. That’s classic!” I said.
“Why in the world would Jackie pick a terrorist name though?” Ulyssa asked.
“He’d just taken a computer class and was looking for popular names so he could blend in. He pulled the name from Google trends, thinking Al was the first name and Rahman was the last name. He had no idea it was prominent terrorist name. In fact, he thought Rahman was Ramen and women would flock to him because he was the rich owner of a noodle empire. He almost had a heart attack when the DHS agents started accusing
him of conspiring with terrorist organizations. That interrogation took three hours, but you should have seen the DHS guys going nuts when they thought there was a tie between Al Qaeda and the explosion at the electric substation. It was phenomenal. Everything else paled in comparison to those two.”
“There’s more?” I asked.
“Yeah. But it was minor stuff. Disturbing at best,” Eric answered. “There was a lady who had the remains of her forty-two cats cremated and stored in a jar so they could be buried with her.”
Bletch.
“We found out about that because there was a big dispute between her and her roommate. I guess the roommate had complained to OSHA and some other government organizations because she felt that it was unsanitary to store animal ashes indoors. When she found out we were agents, she wouldn’t leave us alone until we pretended to file a complaint on her behalf. We told her that there is a complaint backlog in Washington and it usually takes 96 months to process. I don’t think she was too quick with the math because she seemed pretty pleased with the information.”
Jake picked up the conversation, “Don’t forget about the couple who were running a prescription pill drug ring. Rumor had it that Viagra was their biggest seller, but I didn’t even try to investigate that any further. I felt that was more a local police matter that didn’t require FBI oversight.”
“Whatever, coward. You were worried about getting beat-up by a seventy year old woman,” Eric retorted. “I think she coulda taken you. You’re kinda soft.”
Jake ignored him saying, “Bottom line, the DHS guys decided that this was no longer a matter of National Security and decided to disband their task force. They’ll be heading back to D.C. tomorrow.”
“Do you think it was the sordid stories of the elderly or the constant torture of the Game Show Network that made them downgrade the incident?” Eric joked.
“Whew. That’s a relief!” I exclaimed, quickly adding when they both stopped laughing to stare at me. “That it wasn’t an Al Qaeda terrorist attack.”
Fat Assassins (The Fat Adventure Series) Page 20
