Chapter 8

Mac wrote a follo’ to the shooting the day before. He made his calls. And when they were off deadline, he went across the street for coffee with Janet. Coffee for her and Mountain Dew for him. As always. Routines were comfortable, Mac thought. Until you became predictable. Predictable made it easy for your enemies to track you. Had he become predictable?

Janet drank the first sip of her coffee and sighed. Mac shook his head. He’d seen women get off with less expression of pleasure.

“Timothy called,” she said after the second sip. “He asked about you. Asked if you and Kate had broken up?”

“No one seems to be sure,” Janet said, and laughed at the expression on Mac’s face. “Face it, gossip runs wild in church circles just as it does at the cop shop.”

A shadow passed over Janet’s face. “And the newsroom,” she agreed. “So... Kate?”

“Not even to invite me to Sunday dinner?” he asked, with an arched brow. “That seems passive enough.”

He thought about that. Yes, he was, he realized. “I wanted it to be real,” he said out loud. “And it wasn’t.” He shrugged. “So yeah, I guess I’m done. So, changing the subject? This gun thing is bugging me.”

He walked her through it. The stable, ordinary men going off their rockers because they were becoming immersed in this cult of gun ownership and the coming crisis where society breaks down, and only the strong will survive.

“Have you read some of the studies done about the effect of Fox News?” she asked.

“College,” he said. “I remember the study that said Fox viewers still believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Al Qaeda was funded by Iraq.”

“Consumers of right-wing media like Fox and some of the online sites still get most of the current event quizzes wrong. They live in their own news bubble. It’s remarkably easy to happen,” Janet said. “It’s also remarkably easy to create for other people. Not unlike what my dad created for the people of Jehovah’s Valley.”

It was the first time he’d heard her mention her father since the events of last fall. He didn’t comment, didn’t know what to say. “You think that’s what the Sensei is doing? Creating an alternative reality, a news bubble where there is going to be a catastrophe of some kind and a breakdown of society. When SHTF — shit hits the fan,” he said slowly. “Create the filter, and modern news and events support it.”

Janet nodded. “It worries me,” she admitted. “The whole societal trend toward these bubbles. That’s what a local newspaper should bridge, it should tell stories that matter in such a way that engages people and brings them together, makes them see what’s really going on.”

She sighed. “Instead, the broad-based daily newspaper is dying. Especially the metros. And we need them.”

She shook her head. “Ready to go up and see the constitutionalist sheriff yet? Spend a day?”

“He’s in Skagit?” Mac said slowly. “That’s where they went for their wilderness training. And the guy from yesterday came back bragging about being blooded.” The term both scared him and made him roll his eyes. People watched too many movies.

“Did he?” she said thoughtfully. “Go see. Stay over if you need to. Take along that reading list I sent you. Bundy in Nevada is especially interesting. But you also need to do a deep dive into right-wing media and conspiracy theories. Start with Alex Jones and Breitbart.”

Mac went home and packed a duffel to spend the night in Mount Vernon, the county seat of Skagit County. He looked at the map, and decided Sedro-Woolley was probably the jumping off point for the wilderness training. He might go up there too.

“Mac? We’re sending a photog up with you. Swing by Angie Wilson’s place and pick her up. She says you know where she lives,” Janet said.

“We’re sending a photog with you,” she repeated. “You’ve worked with Angie before. She’s very good.”

“Janet,” he began. Stopped how to say it that didn’t sound sexist to a boss who wouldn’t appreciate sexist. At all. “She has a fuchsia streak in her hair. I’m going up to talk with good ol’ boys.”

“I’ll tell her,” Janet said. Someone shouted something in the background, and she hung up.

I’ll tell her? What did that mean? He shrugged. Guess he wasn’t going to Mount Vernon by himself. He hesitated. Then he found the box of condoms in his nightstand drawer and stashed them in the bottom of his bag.

Apparently, what “I’ll tell her” meant was that Angie didn’t have a fuchsia streak in her hair when he picked her up outside her apartment building 30 minutes later. Her hair was still damp, but it was now a uniform brown.

She laughed. “Easy come, easy go. Easy to come back,” she assured him. “Thanks for the head’s up by the way. I really want to do this shoot, and I didn’t think about how that streak might be perceived.”

Mac stowed her small suitcase in the back of the truck next to his duffel bag. Her camera bag went into the front with her. Fair enough, he thought. His backpack was up front too.

“So, what do you know about this assignment?” he asked, before starting up the 4-Runner.

“Not much. Just that Janet wants a feature on the constitutionalist sheriff in Skagit County, and you’ve got a line on a story about a bunch of middle-class white guys who are stockpiling weapons.”

“That’s about all I’ve got,” he said. “And a bunch of reading material Janet gave me, that I haven’t gotten to.”

“I’ll read on my phone,” she responded. He gave her his login information, and minutes later she was scrolling through his inbox.

He caught her pained expression out of the corner of his eye. “What? Yesterday was that hostage shooting case, then I talked to the wife, and then I went drinking with the boys from Special Projects. And I had to do the Facebook shit; Shorty tells me is important to keep up an online identity so I can figure out who this Sensei fucker is.”

He shrugged. “I wrote the story. And Janet and I talked and she sent me on this trip. Why? What did I miss?”

“I won’t open it,” she said, still laughing at him. “But there is a three-day-old email from your girlfriend, with a subject line that says Sunday dinner. You, my friend, are up shit creek. Three days?”

He grunted. He probably wouldn’t even be home by then, he thought. “I’ll deal with it later,” he mumbled. “Doubt we’ll be back by then anyway.”

She laughed some more, and then scrolled down to Janet’s reading list, and started clicking through things and settled in to read.

“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “My parents were big on road trips. And the question ‘Are we there yet?’ And the whiny ‘I’m bored,” were not allowed. So, I learned to read in a moving car.”

“Two brothers and a sister. I’m in the middle,” she answered. “Mac, this stuff is incredible. In 2005 the FBI issued a report about the rise in white extremists’ intentions to infiltrate the military and law enforcement. In 2005! Then in 2009, a DHS analyst wrote about the rise in white extremism. He said it was fueled by the economic downturn — was that what they called the Great Recession in bureaucrat language? — and the election of an African American president. Additionally, proposed gun regulations were also driving the increase.

“He blamed the rise in part on far-right rhetoric and conspiracy theorists. And wow, there was so much pushback, they retracted the report and gutted his office! Listen to this, from a Wire article a few years ago:

“In April 2009, he warned that the election of the first African-American president, combined with recession-era economic anxieties, could fuel a rise in far-right violence. "DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities," he wrote.

“Yeah,” she said absently. “He wrote a book about it after he resigned — forced out really. Apparently, the report was leaked out on white supremacist sites, and then it filtered back to right-wing media who characterized it as an attack on all Americans who were skeptical of the federal government. A group called the Oath Keepers?”

“Yeah,” Mac said. “Them I know about. They recruit vets, cops, first responders. Far right bullshit, about needing to defend the Constitution from enemies, foreign and abroad. And they create the kind of paranoia we just saw. The founder, Rhoades? He’s a real piece of shit. And if he turned out to be this Sensei — it wouldn’t surprise me. Or MLK4Whites.”

“The Wire article says that in 2006, 40 members of Congress urged then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to launch a full-scale investigation and implement a zero-tolerance policy toward white supremacists in the military,” Angie said, skimming the article. “Listen to this: ‘Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow service members and the public,’ U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, wrote in a separate open letter to Rumsfeld. ‘We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today's racist extremist may become tomorrow's domestic terrorist.’ Mac, that was seven years ago! Nobody’s done shit about it, have they?”

“Probably not,” Mac muttered, only half listening. Traffic was damned heavy. He frowned.

“Or this from Southern Poverty Law Center,” Angie said, “In 2008, a researcher into white supremacists infiltrating the military had this exchange with a guy in the military: "Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don't, everyone who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand n———. Yes, I have killed women, yes, I have killed children and yes, I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I'm so proud of my kills is because by killing brown people at home, many white people will live to see a new dawn."

The researcher was getting his master’s at Columbia, she said, he published it as a book too. “Mac, people have known about this! He says the military needed soldiers, so they didn’t vet them as much. So now we have white supremacists with military training?”

She set her phone aside. “Mac they’ve known white supremacists were increasing, and that they’ve infiltrated military and police, and they’ve known it since 2005 or so. So why is there no alarm?”

“I know an FBI analyst who works this shit,” Mac said slowly. “She says it’s because it’s hard to distinguish the right-wing militias from Republican supporters. It’s a slippery slope, and as soon as someone starts down it, the right-wing media start yelling that they’re coming to take your guns. OK, she’s got a PhD and specializes in religious terrorism so she says it better, but that’s what it boils down to.”

He considered that. Had he? Had he blown it off? He frowned. “I guess I did,” he said. “But I didn’t hang with white guys, I hung out with Black Marines. And Latinos. Those were the guys I grew up with, and felt comfortable with. I think most of the guys thought I was just a light-skinned Black guy — couldn’t speak enough Spanish to pass as Latino. They called me Shadow – reverse humor, you know?”

“Are you just a light-skinned Black guy?” she asked. “Or are you white?”

“Only my mother knows for sure — and she’s not sure,” he quipped. He sighed. “I don’t know,” he said with more honesty than he usually gave such inquiries. “My mother is... well, Lindy says she’s got a borderline personality disorder. Let’s just say she’s not the most stable person in the world. And she slept around. A lot. And by the time I was born? She didn’t know who the father was — not even a short list, I don’t think. Lindy says she thinks he was a Mexican national working on his master’s at the U. But she doesn’t remember his name.”

“So, it’s not a big deal,” he said finally. “I was raised with my cousin — Lindy’s son — by her ex, who is a Black man, and then by her. And I ran with Toby’s friends in the gangs in San Diego, which is where I got the nickname Shadow, because I was a white kid shadowing my Black cousin, and it followed me into the military.”

“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “But more because every time I turn around some form is asking me for my race. We label people all the time. And I get why, I do. But people like me? What do we do?” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment, and then laughed.

“When I was in college, an advisor was helping me get some financial aid, and she was looking at all the journalism scholarships, and then she called someone in Affirmative Action to ask what I was eligible for. She described me as having a white mother, a Mexican-American biological father, and raised by a Black stepfather, which is true enough — or one version of true enough. The answer came back that I wasn’t eligible for any of them. I was considered white. That Mexican-American — Latino — is a cultural designation: I have to be raised in it. Black is a racial designation — genetics. So, if my biological father was Black, and I was raised by a Mexican-American stepfather, I would be both.”

Angie squinted as if that made her head hurt as she parsed through it. “That’s fucked up,” she said finally.

She laughed. “Maybe both. And you’re not sure your biological father wasn’t Black?”

“Nope,” he agreed. “Lindy hasn’t said, but I think she was relieved that I looked white when I was born, because she wasn’t sure her husband wasn’t my father. But if that were true, I’d probably look more like her son, and he’s obviously Black.”

“Well, that, and Lindy discovered she liked girls about then,” Mac said and laughed. “So back to the reading material? Yeah, those shits were there, but maybe one out of 20? A lot of racist white guys, babe. But you would run into a few with suspicious tats, or who sounded like the guy you just read about. Thing is, it’s easy to ignore that one out of 20, right? There’s at least one out of 20 at the Examiner that I think are racist assholes too.” He stopped, and considered that last comment.

“But that’s still a hell of a lot of vets you’re sending back into civilian society who are disaffected, racists, and now well-trained,” he pointed out.

He considered that. “Do you believe that we’re headed north to investigate a sheriff who may be involved in training hundreds of men to rise up against the U.S. government and take back the country when shit hits the fan? Think about it. Do you believe that?”

She looked out the window for a while. Then she sighed, and turned back to him. “No,” she said. “That seems unbelievable.”

“And yet? You just read those reports. You were there at the house when that guy took his family hostage. You’ve been online lurking in my Facebook feed,” and he paused to grin at her. She laughed and nodded. She had been. “And you can’t believe in it either. Why not?”

She thought about it. “Because I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I don’t believe they faked 9/11 or faked Sandy Hook. And so, I blow this off too?” she said slowly. “Because it sounds like a liberal version of faking the moon landing.”

Mac nodded and looked at her. “But maybe? Maybe it isn’t paranoia, and they really are out to get you.”

They were past Everett by then and the traffic hadn’t thinned out. Mac frowned. “Angie? Can you look? Is there some kind of festival up here this weekend?”

She looked up from what she was reading and saw all the traffic. She did a Google search and started laughing.

Mac groaned. Couple of years back his aunt and her friends had talked him into being their driver for a tour of the Tulip Festival so that they could all drink. Someone rented a van, and he drove, and they drank and admired the tulips.

Acres and acres of tulips. Most in rows. Brightly colored rows for as far as you could see along back country roads. Periodically, they’d see a farm offering garden tours or garden décor or cut tulips, and he’d pull over so they could explore. And drink.

They had lunch at a cute shop somewhere around La Conner, maybe in La Conner for all he knew. He was just the driver. The driver for six women, ranging in age from 50 to 70, who thought he was “cute.”

Some 100,000 people that weekend alone, Mac heard later, visited the Tulip Festival.

“Oh good,” she said. “Have Angie take some extra photos of it will you? And if you see any good deals on bulbs, order me some. I’ll need them next fall for my garden.”

When he’d unclenched his teeth and calmed down enough to be able to talk, he said, “Will you look at Mount Vernon and see if we can find motel rooms? It might be difficult.”

Angie checked. “Not for under $130 a night,” she said troubled. “Even the campgrounds start at $100.”

“They’re booked completely. There’s something called the Crocus Motel in Burlington,” she said.

“Janet, what’s the max we’ll get reimbursed?” he asked when she picked up.

“$100 per day, per person,” she said. “I didn’t think about that. Let me see what we can do from here.”

“Sometimes,” he said morosely. “Conversations get shorter if she’s got breaking stories going on. Which my guess? Something is.”

And he was here, driving north into the Tulip Festival instead of being in the newsroom where there was a breaking story. Better not be a good cop story, he thought grimly.

Calm down, he told himself. You’re driving north with a woman you’ve wanted to get to know better for months. Take a deep breath.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s do this. We’ll trust Janet to find us lodging. Find a number for the sheriff and let’s set up an appointment for right after lunch. And then we can settle back and look at tulips for the next couple hours.”

“Sheriff Norton, this is Angie Wilson of the Seattle Examiner. We’d like to set up an interview with you for right after lunch.”

She listened, then responded, “I’m with Mac Davis. He’s the reporter, but he’s driving, and I’m doing the phone work. I’m the news photographer.”

She listened again, and then put him on hold. “He wants to know what the story is about.”

“Sheriff, Mac Davis. My editor wants a profile of you focusing on the rising interest in the constitutionalist sheriff’s association.”

“You do realize this is the last weekend of the Tulip Festival?” Sheriff Norton said. He had a nice, John Wayne, kind of voice.

“Yes, sir,” Mac said. “I’m currently stuck in traffic on I-5. That’s why I thought we’d better call ahead.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll wait for you. I usually take a two-hour shift and drive through part of the county every day. You all can join me. Give you a chance to see the tulips.”

Sheriff Norton laughed as if he heard exactly how much Mac wanted to see tulips and hung up.

And so, he told her about driving Lindy and her friends around for 15 hours while they celebrated and looked at tulips.

Angie laughed. And laughed some more. She went back to reading, but periodically she’d look at Mac and laugh.

Mount Vernon was a pretty town, Mac acknowledged. Its main street was lined with trees, and red brick buildings with white pediments and trim. Planters everywhere were filled with tulips. People filled the sidewalks, window-shopping, taking a break from the tulip fields. Mac pulled into a parking spot near the court house, and he and Angie went looking for lunch.

“Here,” she said, and took his arm to pull him into an old-school café with dim lighting, and cracked Naugahyde booths. There was no waiting. Mac wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or alarmed.

“I emailed my Dad,” she said. “And unlike you, he responds promptly. He recommended it. He’s been up here often. Said it’s got good burgers and fries, and wasn’t likely to be all gussied up for the festival.”

“Well, he’s right about the last,” Mac conceded. “Let’s hope he’s right about the burgers.”

Turned out he was. Mac took a bite, and nodded. “Thank your Dad for me,” he said. “When Lindy dragged me up here, we ate at a ‘cute’ outdoor café with those damn white wire chairs for lunch, and then for dinner, they found a steak house with dancing afterward.”

The steak house had good food, but he’d held his breath the entire evening. He decided later that the cowboys were too surprised by Lindy and her lesbian friends dancing together that they didn’t snap out of it in time to cause trouble.

That, and he may have stood guard by the bar, with full Marine tats showing on his arms.

Mac looked at her skeptically. “If you’re gay, I’ll be glad to introduce you,” he said. “If you’re not? I usually don’t take women home to meet my aunt until I’m sure they can handle it. They’ve run for the hills on occasion.”

Which reminded him of Kate, who apparently had wanted to run for the hills, and he called up the email on his phone and read it. It was indeed an invite to Sunday dinner. He sent her a response, apologizing for the delay in responding because of work, and that he would be out of town on assignment.