He hung up with Myers, and then called his own supervisor at MWA, Scott O'Neil, to apprise him of his intent to work the Pratt case with the FBI, and to request a memorandum of understanding between MWA and DCI to appease Myers.
"I can't assign you to that. And I can't forward the request for an MOU."
"Why not?"
"We don't have the resources."
"Resources? Are you shitting me?
"Nate—"
"I only have seven active cases. I spend half of each work day dusting the empty shelves in my office. Anyway, two weeks ago you were telling me to use up my budget on new office furniture before the end of the fiscal year so that it wouldn't look like we didn't need as much funding next year."
"It isn't our jurisdiction."
"We're talking about a close friend of mine."
"And think about how that looks."
"A friend of mine who was working the case jointly with me—with us. The same case that got him killed."
"You don't know whether—Look, Nate, I appreciate where you're coming from, but it's outside our jurisdiction."
"How is a .50 caliber Serbian military-grade weapon outside our jurisdiction?"
"We don't know the gun that killed Pratt was a .50."
"It was."
Silence. "Nate. . . ."
"Scott, this isn't like you. What the hell is going on?"
Arkin could hear O'Neil breathing through his nostrils, deliberatively.
"Scott."
"Look, Nate, we've been briefed on this. It's hands-off for MWA."
"What?"
"We can't touch it."
"This case, in particular?"
"Yes."
"How the hell—"
"We were briefed barely half an hour ago. Apprised of our previous joint involvement with DCI, and then instructed to stand down. It came from the political level. The deputy director's office."
"Did they say why?"
"No. They probably want to steer clear because it will be so hot, politically, since we're talking about the murder of a federal agent."
"Shit. Well, what if—what if we. . . ." He was at a loss.
"You know how these guys are. It's dead in the water, Nate."
*****
By noon, Arkin was back at the hospital, lying in the recliner next to Hannah's bed, staring at the ceiling of her room. She'd been weeping for Pratt since Arkin's arrival half an hour earlier. "What are you going to do?" she finally asked, unable to mask her fear.
"I have to secure that evidence—the name of that company. It's the key to all of this. To Pratt's murder. Maybe even to my being banished."
She just stared at him, her face the picture of worry and agony. He knew exactly what she was thinking.
"Hannah, look, I'm not going to take up the mantle of the Priest case, alright? But I have to secure that evidence before someone makes it disappear. Before they can cover their tracks and move their whole apparatus, hide and hair, to somewhere where we'll never catch the scent of them again and lose them forever, if they haven't done so already. I have to secure it for whoever is going to take up the case from here."
*****
An hour later, having reluctantly talked himself into doing so, and seeing no other option, Arkin went to one of the few payphones still functioning in Durango and placed a call to the automated DCI headquarters switchboard. Following the prompts, he entered the ten-digit code to direct his call to Killick's private encrypted line.
"Nate, I've been waiting for your call."
"I'm a little surprised I didn't hear from you first."
"What the hell happened?"
"You haven't been briefed?"
"Don't be an asshole. Of course I've been briefed. But not by anybody who had the background to read between the lines with this. What the fuck happened?"
"The Priest."
"What does the Priest have to do with it?"
"Pratt found the name of the company, Tom. The Canadian company we tracked the Priest assassinations back to years ago."
"You're kidding."
"It's what got him killed."
"How?"
"You have a mole."
"In DCI? Someone working for the Priest? Bullshit. We never even figured out if there really was a Priest, or if it wasn't our paranoid imaginations making connections that weren't really there."
"The only way I can figure this happened is that someone in DCI caught wind that Pratt was querying the Priest file in INDIGO, watched him, and then, when they saw what he'd found, decided he had to be taken out."
"You're out of your tree."
"It's more than plausible. And you need to handle this."
"Alright, alright. So what's the name of this mysterious Canadian company? Let's start there."
"It died with Pratt."
"Oh, come on! You are shitting me!"
"I don't have the name," Arkin said, his voice rising. "I don't have the address, the phone number, or even so much as a first initial."
Arkin told Killick about Pratt's voicemail. Then, without mentioning his earlier conversation with Myers, or his alarm over the orders communicated to Myers by Dragoslav Trlajic, he told Killick to task his INDIGO people with securing the information by any means necessary—even if they had to trawl every backup memory cache in the building.
"I'll do that. Okay, so where does that leave us?"
"It leaves you needing to watch your back until we can figure out a way to flush out your traitor."
"How do you propose to do that?"
"I need to think on it. The first thing you should do, after getting hold of the name of that Canadian company, is find out exactly who in your apparatus has the access they would have needed to be able to monitor what Pratt was looking at in INDIGO. There can't be that many. On my end, I'll run down every possible lead if it kills me."
"Now hold on, Nate. Don't go getting yourself into any sort of jurisdictional trouble."
"There's no issue. Pratt was killed with a .50 caliber. No doubt the same one used in Cortez."
Killick was quiet for a moment. "I think that, right now, you should let us handle this. Leave it to the cool heads. I'll keep you in the loop all the way, alright?"
"You'll give me the name of that company if you find it." It sounded more like an order than a request.
"Yes, yes."
"Okay. Alright. I'll hold off," Arkin said, sincerely hoping he could.
But he couldn't. Not entirely. That afternoon, the product of Pratt's last known subpoena arrived from the Wyoming Secretary of State. He opened it the moment he found it and began examining each and every annual report and filing document for both LLCs. But as he expected, there was nothing of apparent value. The sole named member/manager was the long-vanished Zhang Zhou. And there were no useful addresses or phone numbers. Just the name of a registered agent for service of process—a private company whose only relationship with the LLCs was to be contracted to accept legal and business documents on behalf of each. Probably some second-rate accountant in Cheyenne who was trying to prop up his business by holding himself out as a registered agent for hire. Another dead end.
NINETEEN
Seventy-two hours later, Morrison found Arkin staring out his office window.
"Hey, buddy. You doing alright?"
"I don't know, Bill. I really don't." He turned to face Morrison. "You try so hard to find something you can believe in. And then, when you think you have, you throw your heart and soul into it." He shook his head.
"Remember the big picture, Nate, for the sake of your health and sanity. Because in the end—"
"Spare me your existential despair today, will you? Go fast in your sweat lodge, or flagellate yourself, or do whatever it is you need to do to shake it off. Please. I'm already loaded down with as much as I can bear." He exhaled. "Sorry."
"It's alright."
"Want to know what's eating me?"
"In addition to the obvious?"
"Wou
ld it surprise you to learn that DCI still hasn't sent a team out here? Still hasn't sent anybody to help the FBI with the investigation of the murder of one of their own agents?" Morrison looked troubled. "What is it?"
"They were here yesterday."
"What?"
"I saw them going through Pratt's office. Two guys. Young. Really young. I just assumed they met with you at some point."
"Where are they now?"
"Came and went, far as I know."
"That can't be right."
After Morrison left, Arkin, with gut-wrenching reluctance, called Ella Pratt, only to learn that Morrison's suspicions were dead on. A team of two DCI agents had come and gone. They'd asked her very little. What had she seen? Did Pratt have any known enemies? Had they received any strange or threatening phone calls, or noticed anything out of the ordinary in their neighborhood in the days leading up the to the "incident." Was there any chance that Pratt could have been involved with drugs? Then they'd thanked her for her time—all of about 20 minutes—and left for the airport.
After hanging up with Ella, Arkin sat bewildered. By all indications, DCI had sent a two-man team of probationers out for a one-day survey of witnesses. That was it. After one of their own men had been gunned down, and when all indications were that he was killed by the very targets of a DCI investigation, that was all they'd bothered to do. They hadn't even spoken with Arkin—Pratt's close friend and joint case officer on the Cortez investigation. It was insane. Thirty seconds later, he was back on the phone with Killick.
"Have you lost your mind?"
"Calm down."
"You sent two neophytes out here with an eight-hour window to poke around? That's it? Are you kidding me?"
"The FBI spent two hours briefing them, and gave them a complete draft of their report. It's comprehensive."
"Oh, my ass. One of your own men was gunned down, Tom. What the hell is the matter with you?"
"There's no need to reinvent the wheel here. The FBI—"
"Please! Enough about the FBI. You know damn well Sheffield would never have left the investigation of the murder of one of his own people in the hands of those frat boys."
"Nate, get off your high horse. There are practical—"
"This is a damned disgrace."
Killick let the comment go. But the difficulty he had in constraining himself was evidenced by his heavy breathing, clearly audible over the phone.
After a few moments of silence, Arkin spoke. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Tom. I'm dealing with a lot."
"I know. How's Hannah?"
"She's not good."
"You guys are in our prayers."
"Thank you."
"Look, I have to run over to the Hill to testify before the Senate subcommittee on anal retentiveness, or some such thing. But call me tomorrow and I'll give you a rundown of a couple of the Bureau's 302s that you might find interesting."
"Alright, Tom."
"And get some sleep. You're a real dick when you're fatigued, you know that? All your proper Andover talk goes out the window, and you start cussing up a storm."
"Exeter, fucknuts."
"Whatever. All I'm saying is that you might as well have flushed all that prep school tuition money right down the fucking toilet if you're gonna talk like a redneck like me."
Arkin halfheartedly grinned into the phone, lacking the energy to laugh. But when he rang off, his face turned to stone as he looked out his window onto the dull grays and browns of the overcast late autumn day. The landscape looked dead, but for the never-ceasing movement of the river. He closed his eyes and soon fell asleep in his chair, his chin resting on his chest.
*****
More than an hour later, he awoke, with a stiff neck, to a gentle knock-knock and turned to again see Morrison standing in his doorway, now dressed in a dark suit and wearing a polished ATF badge, with a band of black tape across it, on his belt. "You ready?"
Arkin rose without a word.
They strode up the river trail in silence, crossing the Camino del Rio Bridge, and eventually arriving at the queuing area on 5th Street, just around the corner from Main. Both 5th and Main were closed to traffic. They shook hands with the rest of the honor guard pallbearers, and assumed their positions to either side of the cart that bore Pratt's flag-draped coffin.
As a troupe of bagpipers at the head of the procession began playing "Amazing Grace," Arkin looked around, astonished. Including the pallbearers, Pratt's honor guard was made up of at least forty officers. But that wasn't all. At least 200 officers, all in full dress uniforms, stood in formation behind the coffin cart. Arkin had never seen anything like it, even in the military. In addition to all the locals, the entire police force from Pratt's hometown of Eden, Utah, was on hand, along with strong contingents from towns as far away as Alamosa, Shiprock, Telluride, and Moab. Arkin had seen plenty of death in his lifetime and had borne witness to too many solemn memorial ceremonies to count. But the overwhelming tribute assembled in honor of his friend John Pratt brought tears to his eyes.
As they began the slow march up Main, lined on both sides with throngs of Durango's citizens, Arkin felt the weight of dark truths bearing down on his shoulders. Pratt was dead, and probably wouldn't be if Arkin had not directed him to the Priest case. And his sweet Hannah was suffering terribly. Was looking worse by the day. It was hard to imagine how things were ever going to get better.
*****
Later that afternoon, Arkin was back in his office when he got a frantic call from Paul Regan. "Nate, the state lab. Someone broke into the state lab."
"Did they get the bullet?"
"No. They tripped a motion sensor. Responding officers must have scared them off before they found it. But they were close. They'd started to rifle through the exact evidence locker it was in, but got chased off before opening the right drawer."
"Holy shit. Where is it now?"
"In the bombproof vault."
"Good. Good. How soon until they finish their analysis?"
"Two days. It's not on expedited status because, to cover our tracks, I didn't identify it as evidence for the Pratt case. But I have a buddy over there who is making it an unofficial priority. He says two days."
"Okay." He took a breath. "Okay. Good." But privately, he worried that two days wasn't soon enough.
*****
Almost at the same moment he hung up with Regan, his phone rang again. It was Scott O'Neil.
"Can you guess where I was just at?" O'Neil asked.
"Your grammar is atrocious, Scott, even for a hillbilly. Never finish a sentence with a preposition."
"No, really. Do you know where I just was?"
"Where were you?"
"I was in the deputy director's office, getting my ass handed to me by the interagency liaison, that cock Bruckmeier, along with the deputy director himself. And do you know why?"
"Because of your grammar?"
"Because I didn't communicate to my agents in the field that the Pratt investigation was hands-off. Which is funny, because I'm pretty sure I did."
"Scott—"
"Yes, I'm quite certain that I did communicate that message to my agents in the field. You know, I think that was the first time I've ever heard the deputy director use my name. In fact, I wasn't even sure if he knew my name, until now."
"Scott, I have been hands-off."
"Oh, yeah? Like when you opened a package of subpoenaed grand jury materials that were addressed to Pratt?"
How the hell did they know about that? "Those documents were for a joint grand jury file for the Cortez case."
"Yeah. And you had no ulterior motive in opening it. Nothing whatever to do with the Pratt case."
"Scott, come on."
"Yes, I thought so." O'Neil sighed as he spoke. "Like I said before, you know how these guys are. They didn't get to that level by doing what's right."
No, they did not, Arkin thought. They got there by going along, avoiding risk, and attributing their own fuckups to th
e honest suckers subordinate to them.
"Look, with you and me, it's water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned," O'Neil said.
"I appreciate that. Sorry you got blindsided."
"Nah. I would have done the same thing if I were in your shoes. But I'm telling you, as a friend, to stay away from this shit. They're red hot about it on the seventh floor. And if they catch you in flagrante, pursuing leads or whatever, I'm telling you, they are gonna fuck your shit up."
After O'Neil hung up, Arkin sat with the phone still pinned between his ear and shoulder, listening to the dead air on the line. Eventually, the "please hang up and dial again" recording kicked in. He muttered, "assholes," dropped the handset back into its cradle, closed his eyes, and once again fell asleep in his chair.
*****
Some time later, he awoke with a start as if something had jerked him back to consciousness. To his surprise, his mind was as clear as it had felt in days. As he gazed out his window and down upon the river, he realized the source of his new sense of clarity: without trying to, he'd come to a sort of resolution.
He reached into his pocket, took out his keys, and clumsily sorted through them until he found the one for his file drawers. As he tried to insert it into the lock, he dropped the whole set, and, in reaching down to pick them up again, realized his hand was trembling. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, found the proper key, and unlocked the uppermost file drawer. He opened a folder, extracted the grainy black-and-white 5x7 print Lucricia Burris had given him years earlier, and tacked it to the corkboard next to his desk so that the Priest's haunting, fanatical eyes were staring down at him. Arkin met the Priest's gaze. "That's right," he said to the photograph.
He took the Wyoming LLC filings back out and went over them once more, hoping to catch something he missed the first time around. But there was nothing else. Just the name and address of the agent for service of process: some schmuck named Dustin Drake. He sat there thinking. What could he do now? How could he track down the LLC owners? He couldn't subpoena Drake for contact information without it getting back to headquarters, and he couldn't risk losing his job with Hannah being in the hospital and needing his medical insurance coverage. Think!
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