The Killdeer Connection

by Tom Swyers

  He dug the business card out of his wallet and dialed up Julius Moore on the Spark’s Bluetooth.

  “Agent Moore here,” the man answered.

  “It’s David Thompson.”

  No response on the other end.

  “Hello, Julius, are you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Is it okay to call you Julius?”

  “Call me anything, Mr. Thompson. Where are you?”

  David believed Moore knew exactly where he was. But he didn’t mind giving up something he believed Moore already had to establish an element of trust. “Minneapolis. I’m driving to the airport as we speak.”

  “I see.”

  “Glad I caught you on the job. Wasn’t sure if you’d be in this early.”

  “We’re quite busy these days, Mr. Thompson. Why are you calling me?”

  “First, I wanted to say that I think you’re right about the terrorist angle. I think they’re behind Salar’s death and these bomb-train explosions.”

  “And what makes you say that, Mr. Thompson?”

  “I was followed all around North Dakota by a pair of terrorists driving a black Chevy Suburban. One of them pistol-whipped me in a park in Valley City right before that train blew up.”

  “Really? That’s not the story we got from Chief Barber. He said you didn’t know what happened to yourself there. Said something about you being chased by killdeers, falling down, and hitting your head.”

  David was taken back by how much Moore knew already about events that had taken place just last night. He wondered if Moore ever slept. “Yeah, I didn’t remember about the man until last night, after I saw Chief Barber in the hospital. I had a memory lapse due to the concussion.”

  “Uh-huh. He went back to see you last night and found that you’d checked yourself out. Why did you do that?”

  “I felt well enough to leave, and I wanted to follow some leads before going home.”

  “Have you told him any of this?”

  “Why, no. It just came to me last night, after I checked out of the hospital.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I don’t know what to believe at this point, Mr. Thompson. My job is to investigate every lead and see where it takes us.”

  “You know, I’d recognize the man in a lineup.”

  “There’s not going to be a lineup if nobody has the man’s description.”

  David went on to describe the swarthy man from the park in detail to Moore. “Did you get all that?”

  “Yes, I wrote it down. I’ll call Barber later with this. I’ll alert our Fargo office, too. We’ll check your story out.”

  “Another thing, Julius. Do you see the pattern here with the train explosions?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I can’t believe you haven’t picked up on it.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  David thought Moore was playing it close to the vest. Moore wasn’t going to show his cards yet—if at all. He wanted David to show his first. The FBI wanted to see what the lawyer knew. David didn’t think he had anything to lose by explaining his conclusions. He hoped that by sharing his thought processes, Moore would decide he had nothing to do with any of this.

  “Three of the explosions took place near where the three Killdeer Society members were slain. You know, Ronald Carson was in Sandpoint, Safferson was in Valley City, and Albertson was in Moorhead.”

  “Is that it?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Is that it?’ It’s a big deal.”

  “Is that all you know?”

  “Yes, on that topic, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Did you pass through Moorhead last night?”

  David really didn’t want to follow that line of questioning. He knew all too well that being a suspect in a crime often starts with being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had been his life story ever since discovering Harold Salar’s body. However, he had no choice but to answer and to tell the truth. It wasn’t as if there were a hundred ways to get from Valley City to Minneapolis. He’d had to go through Moorhead to get there, unless he planned to tour the back roads for a few extra hours. He had left no trace in Moorhead, but it had all been for naught.

  “Yes, I was there and saw the train on fire.”

  “You do know that the death toll is nineteen in Moorhead, six in Valley City, and two in South Heart?”

  “No, I had no idea about the death toll in Moorhead. I knew about the others, though. How about in Sandpoint?”

  “None there. They just blew up a bridge. So, Mr. Thompson, do you want me to believe that you had nothing to do with any of this?”

  “Well, the fact is, I had nothing to do with any of it, despite what you may think.”

  “It’s quite a coincidence that you were there in Moorhead, isn’t it?”

  “If you think I had something to do with it, perhaps you should find out my time of discharge from the hospital and see if there was any way I could have possibly been in Moorhead at the time of the initial explosion. Everything was well under way when I got there.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll do just that.”

  “Life is full of coincidences, Julius. I mean, who could have imagined that you had a granddaughter at the same school where my wife teaches?”

  No response.

  “You there, Julius?”

  “Yes, I’m here. Let’s not get off topic.”

  “Trust me, it isn’t off topic.”

  “You leave my granddaughter out of this.”

  “I can’t. That’s one of the reasons I called.”

  “Let me get this straight. Are you threatening my granddaughter?”

  “Have you lost your mind?!”

  “Why did you bring her into this conversation, then?”

  “Just calm down for a second—”

  “Get to the point.”

  “Harold Salar is linked to Albany, just as Carson is linked to Sandpoint, Safferson to Valley City, and Albertson to Moorhead.”

  “Salar lived in Indigo Valley. Trains don’t run through there.”

  “Yeah, but he hung around the trains in Albany. Safferson didn’t live in Valley City. She lived in Casselton, about a forty-minute drive away. But she was killed in Valley City’s Chautauqua Park, where she could easily observe the intersection of two main railway lines: the Burlington Northern line running east-west, and the Canadian Pacific line running north-south. I didn’t realize that Valley City was so important to hauling Bakken until I saw it for myself and did some research on it.”

  “I think Casselton had an oil-train explosion in 2013.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “How does Albany fit into the equation?”

  “It’s a major hub for Bakken crude. I know from one of my cases that about twenty-five percent of all Bakken shipped by rail finds its way to Albany. I don’t know the who or the why of it, but Albany seems in line to be next. Your granddaughter and my wife are in the blast zone, along with many other innocent people.”

  Moore took a deep breath, then let out a gusty sigh. “Do you have any personal knowledge that a train is going to blow up in Albany?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Is that a no?”

  “Correct. But I see a trend that makes me think Albany’s next. Now, is there anything you can do about it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, maybe look at the underbellies of those DOT-111s in the Port of Albany to check for explosives.”

  “Do you have any personal knowledge that Salar, Safferson, Carson, and Albertson were somehow involved in a conspiracy to blow up trains before they were killed?” Moore asked.

  “No. Are you saying they were all part of a terrorist cell?”

  “Salar was a Muslim,” Moore responded. “The dark-skinned man you described sounds like he could be a Muslim, too.”

  David was perplexed. Do you have to be a Muslim to be a terror
ist? But he was in no position to question Moore about his profiling. He just went along with it. “Why are they all dead, then? Do terrorists kill their own? I thought they were in the business of killing other people. You know—infidels.”

  “Perhaps they knew too much,” Moore said. “Maybe they got cold feet, became a threat to the mission somehow, and had to be eliminated.”

  “The other three names don’t sound Muslim to me.”

  “I told you that Safferson was a Muslim.”

  “If you say so. I don’t recall. I don’t know about the others, but Harold was no terrorist.”

  “How much did you really know about him? Did you know he was a hoarder before you went into his apartment?”

  “No.”

  “You and Salar shared one scene together, maybe a chapter in your lives, but he lived volumes.”

  “Trust me, I get that.” Moore was right. There was a lot David hadn’t known about Harold Salar, a lot that he had come to know and wished he hadn’t.

  “So, what do the killdeers have to do with all this?” Moore asked.

  “I don’t know. The ones I saw in Valley City were odd. They weren’t afraid of me. They seemed tame, like they were used to humans.”

  “Maybe they were trained.”

  “That never occurred to me. I guess it’s possible. I saw a big one perched in a tree. You don’t find them in trees normally.”

  “Maybe they’ve been trained to dive-bomb trains, to strafe them with explosives.”

  David eyes popped. Is he serious or just playing with me? That theory sounded a bit far-fetched. He wanted to say, You have quite an imagination. But he bit his tongue because he didn’t trust his instincts. It looked like he had been wrong about terrorist involvement and Moore had been right. He also sensed that the concussion was messing with his ability to think clearly. He wondered how the killdeer counts on the spreadsheets played into Moore’s theory, if he was being serious. Maybe they’re some kind of coded message.

  David had run out of time to talk. He had a plane to catch.

  “I’ve got to run, Julius. I just turned into the airport entrance. It sounds like the death toll is going up with each explosion. I hope you guys check out the trains going to Albany. That’s really why I called.”

  “Okay, Mr. Thompson. I’ll talk this over with my superiors.”

  “Thank you. I’ll talk to you soon,” David said before hanging up. He turned his phone off but kept it plugged in to the USB port. He wanted to get enough of a charge to call or text home before he boarded the plane.

  At the rental-car return in the terminal, he said goodbye to his Spark. A quick check of the cell didn’t show a text or phone message from Annie about picking him up at the airport. He reached for his bag. There was no room to pack the sleeping bag or the cooler.

  Then David spotted a homeless man hanging around near the concrete barrier that protected the terminal from vehicles driving through its large glass windows. He piled his stuff on top of his rollaway suitcase and wheeled it all over to the man.

  “This is for you, if you’d like to have it.”

  The man was white, in his fifties, sporting a scruffy beard, and bundled in a tattered overcoat. He smiled and put down his sign. The dingy cardboard had his life story written in all caps with a magic marker. There was no punctuation, no paragraphs, just a running commentary with a dash between each word. He extended his hand to David. His gloves had holes at the fingertips, revealing a second pair of tattered gloves underneath. David reached for his hand, and their eyes met. The man looked familiar somehow.

  “Thank you, sir. May God bless you,” he said.

  “May God bless both of us,” David said as he shook the man’s hand. He placed the cooler behind the barrier, and then set the sleeping bag on top. The man ran his hand over the fluffy material pinched it with a nod of approval. David turned and headed for the terminal entrance, drawn by the need to get on that plane.

  As he hurried away, David placed the man in his mind. He realized then that the vagrant looked a bit like an unkempt version of himself.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When David walked into the Terminal One of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, his heart sank. The place was jammed—people with long faces were standing shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall. Lines in the ticketing area wove back and forth, funneling people into a few clogged security checkpoints. He had exactly forty minutes to catch his flight.

  Job one: check in with his airline, and snag his boarding pass. Done! Now David had to swim through a sea of security. The bottleneck lay just ahead through the shoals of travelers. His nemeses were slow-moving bureaucrats sporting navy-blue button-down Oxford shirts and powder-blue latex gloves who blocked the route to board his flight. But he’d hit the lottery that day. His boarding pass read: You have been randomly selected for PreCheck status. That meant he had scored a spot in the security express lane. He wouldn’t have to tread water in a long line. Also, the security procedures would be less stringent.

  David liked to think that the acronym for the Transportation Safety Administration, or TSA, really meant “Take your Shoes off, Asshole.” So he was primed to perform his security-checkpoint routine, a circus act that opened with stepping on the back of one shoe with his other foot before kicking the loosened shoe in the air, catching it one-handed, and placing it in a tray on the conveyor belt. But as soon as he looked down at his feet, a TSA agent said that wasn’t part of PreCheck and invited him to walk through the screening device after placing his carry-on luggage on the conveyor belt.

  That’s when his good luck ran out. After making it through the screening device without setting off an alarm, he was told to step aside into a curtained-off area. David sat down in a plastic chair by a small table. He feared that everything had caught up with him, that he was about to be arrested. The only consolation was that they wouldn’t get Harold’s laptop.

  An older male TSA agent came into the area and placed David’s carry-on luggage atop the table. He raised his latex-covered hand and motioned to David with two fingers to come to the table. The last time David had seen that signal was from his doctor, right before his annual prostate exam. Not a good sign.

  The man slowly unzipped the bag, pushed some stuff around, and then pulled out David’s water bottle. He shook it like he was ringing a handbell, lifting his pinky in satisfaction.

  “Your water bottle has some liquid left inside,” he said, smiling. “TSA regulations prohibit more than three point four ounces in a container. I think there’s more than that in here.”

  David was relieved this was the only snag. He thought about making the problem disappear by finishing off the bottle right there, but he didn’t want to come off as a wiseass. He could not risk further delay or something worse.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot all about it.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s not the first time this has happened.”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “Go back outside of the security checkpoints, empty the bottle, and get back in line.”

  “You mean I have to go through security again?”

  “Yes, but you can return to the PreCheck line. The wait is just a few minutes.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  David retrieved his suitcase and headed back toward the secure-area exit. He was relieved, but at the same time, his experience had sowed a seed of anger that grew with every step he took.

  The airport had an army of TSA agents diligently making sure that no liquid in excess of 3.4 ounces, even water, got on the plane. Meanwhile, DOT-111 tank cars filled with 30,000 gallons of explosive fuel that nobody gave a damn about were rolling free. Just the graffiti alone on many of the tank cars revealed that anyone could walk right up to them as they snaked over thousands of miles of track through the backyards of America.

  Harold and David had covered this topic several times when they’d discussed the Ben Prior case. Harold had pointed out that the combined
total of jet fuel in the two airplanes that took out the World Trade Center in 2001 was less than 30,000 gallons, and that each of the bomb trains could take down more than one hundred World Trade Centers. The trains each carried about three million gallons of explosive fuel, the energy equivalent of 200 million sticks of dynamite. Dozens of these trains passed through communities like South Heart, Sandpoint, Valley City, and Moorhead every week.

  Ben had been offloading a DOT-111 when it had sprayed oil on him before he was set ablaze by a spark or something. Harold used to say that nobody would care enough about the risk posed by DOT-111s until they killed enough innocent people. He’d said that the forty-seven people who died in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013 from a DOT-111 explosion slid under the radar because it didn’t happen in the United States. Only Canadians died, not Americans. It wasn’t that Canadians didn’t count. It was just that they didn’t count as much.

  In Harold’s opinion, if two commercial jets had taken out a pair of high-rise buildings in another country and killed their people on September 11, 2001, nobody in the United States would care enough to invoke stricter airline-security measures because no Americans had died. But since the World Trade Center was located in the United States, people cared, and something was done. Harold had said the only effective argument against the powerful oil companies was dead Americans. Lots of them. The more, the better.

  Now that Americans were being killed by bomb trains every day and at an increasing rate, David wondered if that would generate enough of an uproar to mobilize forces against the oil industry. Harold’s scenario was starting to play out, but David had never considered that Harold might have had a role in that. It had not occurred to him that Harold and the Killdeer Society had anything to do with the explosions. Harold was his friend.

  David saw the back of a TSA agent sitting on a chair behind a desk and knew he had reached the security-area exit. He looped around to the entrance while drinking the rest of his water before returning to PreCheck security to repeat the same process with his empty bottle in hand. This time, they waved him through without a problem.