The Vulture Page 6

  “Yeah, yeah, like you care. Charlie, even you don’t believe that. If this was a known terrorist organization, your people would be all over it, jurisdictional niceties or not.”

  “Well…okay. Listen, you should know this. Your old buddy, Samantha, is in Picketsville and working the wire, so to speak. So, that is good news. We have communicated. Both of us are looking for a phone.”

  “What phone?”

  “The FBI dumped the dead suspect bomber’s phone. There was nothing on it, which means somewhere out in the countryside there is a burn phone with stuff on it that could lead us to his employer.”

  “And you know that even if you find that needle in a haystack, it will probably lead to that tower in Idaho.”

  “Maybe, maybe not, but it would at least be a confirmation. Leave the tower to me. The larger question is: Do I tell Sam and the rest that you are alive?”

  “I will have to give that some thought. Lord knows I need a blanket, but how and who to tell?”

  “While you muddle over that, what did you do with the dead guy’s car?”

  “It’s parked out here under a tarp. Ruth and I were planning on whisking it away to Roanoke tomorrow night.”

  “Bad idea. Leave it to me. I will send a cleanup crew tomorrow. You wait for a wrong number on Ruth’s cell phone and then take a cross-country jaunt in your little Jeep. Ride some trail where no one ever goes—at least this time of year no one does. Where was your contact headed, by the way?”

  “Norfolk.”

  “Then that’s where the car will mysteriously appear. Okay, think about the ‘who and how.’ I will check back later—on Ruth’s phone. This one is going dead again.”

  Charlie hung up.

  Ike replaced the receiver and looked at Ruth. “You finished your soak?”

  “You got the wine?”

  “I do. Ditch the towel?”

  “Maybe later. Pour and tell me what the ‘Evil Genius of the Potomac’ had to say.”

  Chapter Ten

  Earlier that year and because he needed some serious physical exertion to cut the cobwebs away from some of the darker corners in his mind, Ike had cleared a wide pathway down the mountainside from his A-frame to the state park that borders his property. Ike described it as “exercise to exorcize.” The remark received a puzzled look and a raised eyebrow. He never repeated it. He’d had to stop at the edge of the state park. Three months later a state forestry crew asked for an easement through his land in order to access the meadow below. He’d agreed and that is how the path he’d started had been widened and wandered deep into the state forest before exiting out onto the open grassland to the east.

  Charlie called with his “wrong number.” Ike and Ruth, he said, needed to vacate the premises for two or three hours while the cleanup crew relocated Frank Holloway’s Buick to Norfolk. Ike told him where the license plates were hidden. Then he and Ruth packed a picnic of ham sandwiches, chips and dip, a bottle of Merlot that the liquor store guaranteed was not too dry, and set out in his Jeep, now painted a dull olive drab with streaks of black and tan. Ike had made a stab at camouflage. A bad stab, as it happened, but even so, parked in the brush it nearly disappeared. The Jeep bounced down the path toward the foot of the mountain. Near the point where the path broke into the open, Ike had created a small picnic area. He’d tidied up an existing clearing by removing the scrub and brush from the center and hauling the fallen tree trunks to its edge. Then he’d applied a chainsaw to the stumps to make places to sit. Assuming you didn’t mind a seat full of pine sap when you stood, they worked fairly well. He parked the Jeep and unloaded their supplies.

  “This is idyllic, Ike. Just smell that air.”

  “Pine sap.”

  “Whatever. Why haven’t we come here before?”

  “I don’t know. I guess neither time nor opportunity ever came together.”

  Ruth spread a blanket in a patch of sunshine and proceeded to shed her clothing. Ike watched, curious to see if, or where, she stopped. Finally, clad only in her panties she stretched out on the blanket.

  “Don’t get any ideas, Sheriff. This may be the last of the summer sun we will have and I am interested in having only it on my body this morning. Read your book.”

  “Right. In case you are interested, there are two of those round Band-Aids in the first aid kit that you might consider applying…um, strategically. I don’t know, but I imagine a burn there would be pretty uncomfortable.”

  “Coconut butter, Bub, and mind your own business.”

  “I like to think they are my business, but I won’t press the point—no pun intended.”

  “Read your book.”

  “Reading my book.”

  ***

  Charlie Garland sat at a picnic table in the park on the north side of Picketsville. He’d arranged his laptop and papers on the space in front of him. Passersby would assume he was a salesman, maybe between appointments, taking advantage of a warm fall day to work outside. The other three arrived within five minutes of each other in separate cars.

  “You called and I came,” Frank Sutherlin said. “I assume you called Sam and Karl as well?”

  “I did and you are wondering why.” The three took seats on the bench opposite Charlie and waited. “Okay. I called you because Ike said you were the three who could be trusted, at least at first.”

  “Ike said that? When? When did he say that to you and why? I mean, sure we want to get to the bottom of this damn thing, but why you and why bring it up now?” Karl frowned and drummed his fingers on the table’s rough planking. Having the CIA poke its nose in at this point could not be good news. The Bureau, when it found out would have a fit.

  “Okay. It’s good you’re sitting down because—”

  “Why didn’t he include Billy and Essie, for crying out loud? Those two are closer to him than any of us.”

  “Stay with me for a minute, please. There is a reason he left those two off the list and he said that you, Frank, would be the one to make the decision when and if to break the news to them.”

  “Break what news, Mr. Garland?”

  “Ike is not dead.” He waited for the words to sink in and then continued. “The car that took the bomb was his, but he wasn’t in it.”

  “He wasn’t…Wait, if he’s alive, who’s dead?”

  “A state NARC named Holloway and before you ask, Ike stays dead until we find out who ordered the hit.”

  “Because?…I don’t understand.”

  “The hit was too much, way over the top. If someone had just wanted Ike dead, a sniper could have just popped him or, I’m assuming it’s a ‘he,’ could have arranged a drive-by shooting. There are too many easy ways to kill a cop and you three know that better than anybody. That bomb…well, you all saw what it did. That bomb shattered the car and a half block of storefronts on both sides of the road. That was not just a hit. That was a declaration of war.”

  “Sent by whom? Why?”

  “If I knew that, we would not be having this chat, would we? That is what you all need to find out. I am CIA. As you know, Karl, having the Agency involved in a domestic murder will cause all kinds of not-nice, spiky memos to sail back and forth from the Bureau to the Agency. I can help, but only you people can be up front, you see?”

  “But you can use CIA resources on this? That’s against—”

  “The Picketsville Police Department, cooperating with the FBI will crack this thing. If asked, you may concede that you had the help of a private consultant who, because of the delicacy of his position, may not be identified.”

  Karl sat back and scratched his head. “Does your director know you’re doing this?”

  “The director feels a certain obligation to Ike for his past services.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “That is an evasion. Anything else before we get down to ca
ses?”

  “I guess not. What have you got so far?”

  Charlie told them about the radio repeater tower in Idaho and the death of the only suspect they had so far. Karl already knew about the shooting at the motel. He said he could probably requisition a team from Boise to check out the tower but would need a plausible reason to do it. Charlie smiled, pulled a burn phone from his pocket, and called him.

  “You don’t know me, but if you want to find the guy that killed the cop down there in Virginia, you should check out a radio tower in Idaho.”

  Charlie clicked off. “There you go. You just got an anonymous tip. It sounded real enough, don’t you think? Hey, it’s worth checking. Now, Sam, with that bit of information shared by the FBI with the local police, do you think you can zero in on some possible names in the general area covered by the transmission, assuming Karl’s buddies in Boise can determine it? You have NSA files that you can access. Somewhere in them there has to be a list of people you are tracking for whatever reason—good, bad, or political.”

  Sam thought a moment. She absently picked some lint from the pocket of her leather jacket and gave Charlie a half smile. “We don’t do political.”

  “Of course you don’t. Just look anyway.”

  “What do we do?” Frank asked.

  Charlie thought of Frank as a workhorse, strong, steady, and untiring. Also, he hoped, not like Orwell’s Boxer, but smart, intelligent, and aware. “There has to be something that everybody has missed so far. I don’t care how good the killer was, somebody saw something, heard something. There is evidence the FBI and the State Police have overlooked. You go find it.”

  “We can look, sure. Why not Billy and Essie?”

  “Ike said that if I were to include Billy in this conversation, no matter how much Billy promised not to, and to stop Essie from crying herself sick, he’d tell her.”

  “So?”

  “Essie, he said, hasn’t a disingenuous bone in her body. The minute she found out, she’d be grinning all over herself. If anyone is watching, he will guess why. Is Ike right?’

  “He’s right. The trouble is, I need Billy on this. You think we have watchers?”

  “I don’t know, but when in doubt…Figure something out about Billy. Are the rest of you straight about keeping the fact that Ike is alive quiet for a while?”

  “Ruth knows, right?”

  “She does.”

  “Okay. How do we get in touch with you, Garland?”

  “Sam will know how. Okay, we’re done here.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Frank had his feet up on Ike’s desk and his chin on his chest. He’d been that way since he’d returned from his meeting. Billy asked him who he’d met and what had happened to Sam, but Frank had only mumbled something about new evidence and had stalked into the office. Billy followed him in and sat. Frank was his older brother and he could read his moods. Something important had happened in the last hour and Billy wanted to know what that was. He took a seat in the corner, fingered the brim of his Stetson, and waited.

  “If you want to plant a bomb on a car, you have to have access to the car, right?” Frank said at last.

  “Right.”

  “Did you calculate the distance the car traveled before it blew and where it might have been if Ike had gone home instead of the other way?”

  “Yeah, we did. It would have exploded on the Calland campus, blown out windows in several buildings, possibly one of the dormitories.”

  “Or the president’s house?”

  “Oh, yeah. That too, I guess. Hey, you don’t think—?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Look, if we assume that having it go off on the campus or, more likely at the place where Ike lived, was a secondary objective, it means the bomb had to have been put in the car in the parking lot outside the restaurant. We have no evidence of that so it had to be someplace pretty close to it. The bomber could not have known where or how long Ike might drive in a given day, but he would figure that late at night, his next stop would be home. Sam looked at that surveillance tape a dozen times and if the device was placed on the car there, she would have spotted it. Whoever rigged it, couldn’t have known that Ike would make a stop on the way first, but it wouldn’t matter if home was the final destination. He had to rig it somewhere else, but not too far away.”

  “Yeah, I never thought of that. Wait, there’s another thing. If you’re right, the bomb had to be linked to the odometer, not on a timer, otherwise it would have blown while he was meeting the NARC. That means it would have to be a pretty sophisticated device.”

  “So, it had to be installed somewhere else. I’ll ask Sam to draw a circle with a twenty-mile radius with the restaurant at the center and then pull the surveillance tapes of every parking lot, gas station, and mall inside it.”

  “We should ask Ruth if she knew where Ike went that night,” Billy said.

  “Yeah, we should but I’m guessing she won’t know. Ike was careful about bringing work home, he said. “Ruth! Oh my God. Look, if that thing was set to go off at the university, it follows that whoever did this, wanted more than just Ike dead. He wanted to hurt Ruth as well, maybe even catch her in the blast.”

  “Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that. You think?”

  “If we’re right, they could be after her. We let her go off to the A-frame to have some time alone. If they’re keeping tabs on us, they know that. There’s nobody up there to protect her. Billy, grab a couple of deputies and get your butt up there. If she bitches, tell her what we figured out and bring her back here ASAP.”

  “What if she won’t come?”

  “Cuff her and drag her back.”

  ***

  Ike put down his book. His attention span had run its course after two hours. Now he was having an inner debate whether he should disobey Ruth’s declaration to leave her body to the sun alone when he heard the blast. Ruth sat up and looked at him, then reached for her blouse.

  “That came from up there, toward the A-frame.”

  Ike leapt to his feet. “Get dressed and follow me.” He grabbed the remnants of their picnic and blankets and tossed them into the Jeep. “Hurry.”

  Ruth pulled on her clothes and scurried to the Jeep. Ike attempted to fluff the grass crushed by her blanket and restore the site to some semblance of naturalness. He released the Jeep’s brake and pushed it toward a slope away from the area. He let it drift ten yards and into a thicket. Ruth had to duck to avoid being plucked out of her seat by a tree branch. Ike quickly arranged some scattered limbs around the rear of the Jeep. He put his finger to his lips and motioned to her to follow him. He led her deeper into the thicket and motioned her to squat down.

  “Ike, what just happened?” She whispered.

  “Shhh…someone is coming.”

  Two men wearing pricey Pierre Cardin shirts and slacks worked their way down the path toward them. One had a rifle in the crook of his arm, the second a large nickel-plated automatic in his hand.

  “Hunters?” Ruth whispered.

  “In those clothes and wearing three hundred-dollar loafers? I don’t think so. Scrunch down, wait, and see.”

  “Who then?”

  “Shhhh…”

  The man in front, tallish, pale blond hair and carrying the rifle, paused, bent over and studied the ground at his feet.

  “These tracks look fresh.”

  “According to the map, the state has an easement down through here. Besides, her car was still in the driveway.”

  “Where is she then?”

  The second man was short and heavy, the near opposite of his companion. Mutt and Jeff. “Probably out shopping with a friend or taking a walk. We can wait for her at the front of the driveway.”

  “Why not at what’s left of the house?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Hugo. She takes one look at that mess and sh
e’s off to the cops in a New York minute. We’ll catch her on the way out or the way in. We got her either way.”

  The men glared at the bushes and, satisfied no one was nearby, started back up the path. When they were well out of earshot, Ike sat back and turned to Ruth.

  “You get that?”

  “They were looking for me, and you don’t think they were here to help me because of something that happened at the A-frame?”

  “Hang on.” Ike grabbed the burn phone from the Jeep and dialed 9-1-1. “There’s been an explosion, maybe a gas leak.” He gave the address of the A-frame and hung up. “That ought to get some people here and make those guys think twice about hanging around.”

  “You’re saying they were not Good Samaritans?”

  “The guns and the reference to the cops pretty much blew that theory, don’t you think?”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that. Who wants me dead?”

  “No idea. Maybe not dead, maybe just bad hurt. So, it’s not just me they are after, whoever they are. It’s us. Who hates us that much? Me, I understand. As a cop and former field agent for Spook Central, I made a lot of people unhappy. But you…? You didn’t kick out a student with ‘connections,’ did you?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “I am. Now it appears we both need to disappear. Any suggestions where we might go?”

  “What happened to the house?”

  “Judging by the sound, I think the A-frame will be mostly pick-up sticks and twisted plumbing. In a minute I will skulk back and see.”

  “If you think I’m staying back here in the woods alone, you are nuts. You go, I go.”

  “They said they would wait by the road for you. I better go alone. Two people are far easier to spot than one.”

  “Nevertheless, I go. Hey, remember me? I’m your intrepid shooting partner from our fun-filled summer vacation on the island.”

  “We are unarmed and your buttons are in the wrong holes.”

  “It’s the latest from Elle—slovenly is the new chic. You have a revolver in the Jeep. I saw it.”