So much for White Patriots being scared off by the large number of counterprotesters. Josh supposed it had been a narrow hope, but still, he’d clung to it. Instead, the white supremacist crowd was triple what it had been three weeks ago—so perhaps they’d been galvanized by knowing they were opposed.
It didn’t matter, because they were still outnumbered by counterprotesters. Josh’s group couldn’t be contained by the original barricade placement, and so they’d been moved to the north side of the bridge encroaching on the south side of the platform set up for speakers. Counterprotesters lined the roadway, claiming the sidewalk on the far side of the grassy strip of park. These were the most vulnerable positions, and Josh and Arthur made sure there were protectors every twenty feet along that line.
Josh’s gaze went to the corner room of the hotel, where Maddie and Ava watched from above. He and Chase had given the women their binoculars, and they’d set up one of Raptor’s cameras with a high-powered zoom on a tripod. If they desired, they’d be able to count the freckles on the white supremacist speaker’s face, with the added benefit of not having to listen to the speeches.
The men—and all the speakers were men—who took the podium gave speeches that aligned with the beliefs of the activists who took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge a few years ago and the ones who staged protests in front of the capitol to regularly shut down state government. Those groups had been emboldened by their successes and acquittals, and Josh hoped the demonstration today would set them back a notch.
He scanned the line and saw a counterprotester step forward, pressing against the hastily strung-up police tape, shouting something at a White Patriot who was jeering from the crowd. Javonte nudged the counterprotester back, and the woman complied. Josh tapped his headset and said, “Well done, Javonte.”
The young man gave a thumbs-up without saying a word.
“I’ve got some WPs encroaching on the north end,” another volunteer said.
“Chase, how close are you?” Josh asked.
“On it,” the operative said.
The last hour had seen tiny skirmishes and encroachments just like that, but nothing too alarming. Josh kept his eyes on the walkway to the bridge, as at rallies in the past, attendees had tried to seize the bridge and shut down traffic.
A familiar head in the crowd caught his eye, and his stomach dropped.
Ava was at the window with her eye to the camera’s viewfinder, giving Maddie a play-by-play of the movement of the crowd. “It looks like things are getting pretty tense down there.”
Maddie hit Send on the email she’d composed for the museum and police in Norway. It had taken a while to write the emails as she’d had to look up her correspondence with Shields, but sure enough, he’d been in Oslo around the time the remains went missing and, most importantly, the day Josh had pried open the empty vault, the curator had been on his flight home. Two days later, she’d found the bag of bones in the closet. The bag contained one of Kocher’s note cards with the vault number and had been made to look like it had been misplaced after being put on display months or even years before, but had probably been placed there the previous day.
She understood their entire plan now: Shields stole the remains but wasn’t able to return to the US in time to fold them into the collection, so Kocher had probably glued several vaults shut, ensuring she would remember the sealed, empty repository, and even offering a reason why the bones weren’t put back. After she found the random bag of bones in the museum office—which she was bound to do at any point in the days she was working in the mansion—it was logical for her to return the remains to the empty vault. She’d done the work of folding it into the collection, essentially authenticating it, for Shields and Kocher. Once she’d served her purpose, Shields had taken a bone and sent it off for DNA testing, determined to prove Caucasians had been in North America for thousands of years in an attempt to undermine treaty rights and steal yet more reservation land.
Given that the remains would likely be returned to the tribes—because the original remains in that vault had definitely been stolen from government land—and reburied in a secret location before the DNA analysis came back, it was a perfect, untraceable way to get the DNA results on record without further testing. Plus, the skeletal remains’ original origins—Norway—meant the DNA test would come back white as white could be.
But Maddie had seen staining that looked more like iron than copper, which was odd for a Native American burial, and she’d taken a pollen sample from the bones. What story would the pollen tell?
She glanced at the dresser drawer where the sample was stored. She’d mail it today if she could, but it would have to wait for tomorrow. It would be weeks before the pollen analysis would come back, but when it did, it would be further proof of what Kocher and Shields had conspired to do.
“I can’t believe how many White Patriots there are,” Ava said, pulling Maggie’s attention away from her computer.
She rubbed a hand over her face. Reporting Oliver Shields’s crime to Norwegian authorities was just about the only thing that could have distracted her from the rally in the street below the hotel.
“I can’t either,” she replied as she closed the laptop and rose from the bed. “Or at least, I don’t want to believe it.” At the window, she scanned the thick crowd that filled the park and spilled out onto the street. “Where’s Josh?” She searched for his green shirt. It was easy to pick out the volunteers. The color was a distinctive Yale blue, and there were dozens of them along the perimeter of the rally, separating WPs from counterprotesters. With only a dozen green shirts, they were less easy to spot in the large, surging crowd.
“Last I looked, he was near the bridge—by the pedestrian stairs.”
Maddie scanned the ramp first, then spotted the stairs Ava mentioned. She picked up a pair of binoculars and zoomed in on that area, easily picking out Josh, whose muscles were on full display in the tight T-shirt.
Hot damn. That body is all mine.
She still couldn’t quite believe it.
She dialed in on his profile. She could see anger on his handsome features as he faced off with another man, who wore a surprisingly bulky coat considering it was a warm summer day. “Who’s he talking to?”
“Just a sec, I need to find him.”
The girl was probably watching Desmond. Maddie had learned today that the two had been texting each other for the last few days. Or maybe they were chatting on Discord. Whatever it was, they’d somehow found each other online, and a friendship—or something more—was blooming.
Ava tilted the camera toward the stairway, and Maddie watched as her delicate long blue fingernails adjusted the zoom. She let out a sharp gasp and jumped back from the tripod. “Oh my God, oh my God. Ohmygod!”
Her face showed stark, raw fear.
“Who is it?” But the moment Maddie said the words, she figured it out, and her heart squeezed for the girl.
“My dad,” Ava said in a bleak voice. “I guess he’s out of jail.”