Chapter 12

As soon as Connor heard the tires of the unmarked SLED car pull out of the gravel lot, he carried his laptop down to one of the cheap bar tables and Googled Lomax Industries. It wasn’t hard to find, since the firm was one of the oldest and largest chicken producers in the South, with its headquarters upstate in a small town outside Spartanburg. Statewide, South Carolina poultry farmers raised more than two hundred million chickens for market each year, and Lomax by far was the biggest of them. It operated four processing plants and employed several hundred workers across six counties.

Colton Lomax—aka Colt—served as chairman of the public company that his grandfather founded on ten acres back in the fifties. In the early years, the company’s focus was selling whole chickens and fryer parts to grocery stores around the state. When Colt assumed control in the late nineties, he expanded the firm’s business model to also serve the fast-food industry. Since then, he’d increased production over a thousand percent, with plans to more than double that output over the next five years. An initial public offering had netted the company almost a quarter billion dollars when institutional investors caused the IPO price to jump forty percent the first day.

A drop-down menu under the “About Us” tab on the company’s website brought Connor a link that said “Where We Are.” A quick click led him to another page, this one a map of the South Carolina-North Carolina-Georgia tri-state area, marked with several dozen dots of various colors. They were spread out across the entire region, and a legend at the bottom explained what the colors meant. Red indicated farms that were actively raising poultry, blue marked the processing plans where chickens were packaged, while green revealed “sites of future expansion.” The farms were scattered throughout all three states, while most of the “production for market” occurred in the upstate area around Spartanburg. Which made sense, considering that was where the firm was founded.

The green dots were what caught Connor’s attention. As with the farms, most of the “future expansion” sites were dispersed across all three states, generally located within an hour of a major city. Atlanta, Augusta, Raleigh. Columbia, and Greenville. Easy access to highways and railroads, he figured, good routes to transportation hubs and the greater markets beyond.

What he found odd was that five of the dots were concentrated in a small area south of Florence and west of Georgetown. Very rural and, based on his own recent experience, nowhere near a railroad or highway adequate for a near-constant stream of eighteen-wheelers. And all of them between the small communities of Lane and Andrews.

Andrews again. Coincidence?

One of the programs to which Connor did not have access from his laptop was the database of county and state property records. He could try to sneak into Citadel Security’s main office suite on East Bay Street and access the mainframe, but it wasn’t worth the risk if he got caught. He’d been warned once before that if he tried that stunt again, it would be grounds for termination.

Instead, he scrolled through the contacts on his phone, tapped in the number for Caitlin Thomas. She was the desk jockey who supervised Citadel’s digital databases, and was a master at finessing the most guarded information out of any digital drive or cloud. Or, as she had once so graphically described it, “No one is better than coaxing a weevil out of a boar’s ass.” In this capacity she had assisted Connor in several previous cases—both on and off the books—and seemed to savor the hunt, while thriving on danger. The more the better.

“I’m royally pissed at you,” she said when she answered his call.

“What did I do now?” he asked.

“You almost got yourself killed. What sort of friend does that?”

“Definitely not my intention,” Connor replied. “But thank you for caring.”

“I’ll let it go, this time.” She let him hang there a minute, then said, “Seriously…how are you doing? You gave us all quite a scare.”

“Just fine, considering the alternative.” He then launched into an abridged version of the accident, much of which it appeared she already knew. As the queen of research, not one byte of data escaped her capacity to delve, probe, or pry. She regularly surfed a full spectrum of sites for the latest news and rumors, and her near-eidetic memory filled her head with trivial garbage—or, in her words again, “a useless but sizeable pile of horseshit.” Whatever had been reported about the shoot-out and Willis’ Ronson’s death, she would have been all over it.

“What do you need?” she asked when he finished.

“Am I that transparent?”

“As a sheet of glass,” she replied. “Spill it.”

Connor could have been hurt, but Caitlin was telling the truth. Nine times out of ten when he called, it was because he needed her to run a search for him. The tenth time would have been when he dropped by her desk in the company cube farm to give her a rose or a Kit Kat, his way of thanking her for doing the impossible.

“I need you to do a property search,” he said. “If you have time.”

“Not really,” she told him. “But fuck it. I’m in the car, so text me the details. When I get in, I’ll see what I can do.”

Connor stepped out of the shower just as his phone stopped ringing. He checked the screen, didn’t recognize the number, and set it down again. He toweled off, then inspected the deep furrow on the back of his hand. Six original sutures, four remaining, neat little spiders of thread poking out from a wound that appeared to be closing up well. No redness, no infection, but the compass rose tattoo would forever be bisected by a permanent scar. He considered leaving it open to the air, but the discharge nurse had made it clear that he needed to keep it free from bacteria, so he wrapped a clean strip of gauze around it, awkwardly taping it with one hand.

As he was finishing up his phone chimed, signaling that whoever had called had left him a message. A long one, judging by the time interval. He got dressed, grabbed a banana off the counter in the kitchen, and took it out onto his landing to eat it. The tide was out, and the beach seemed to extend halfway to the horizon. In the distance he spotted a point of sail, a boat slicing southward through the open ocean rather than along the Intracoastal Waterway. Closer in, a squadron of pelicans was gliding along the water’s edge, one of them occasionally breaking formation and plunging into the water with a splash.

He peeled the banana just enough to take a bite, then tapped the voicemail app. Someone nearby was power-washing a house, so the audio was hard to make out, but about two seconds into the message he realized it was Donna Ronson.

“Hey, Mr. Connor,” she began. “You know, the strangest thing just happened, and for a minute I figured it was one of those scams. Assholes hacking into my phone account, or sending me a coupon for a gift card. Shit like that. Anyway, I was just going through texts on my phone…I realized I hadn’t looked at them for a few days, not since, well, since the accident, and so I was scrolling through them, and I found this thing that at first I figured was more bullshit. It was from some number I didn’t recognize, with a whole bunch of random letters and characters, and it seemed to me it was one of those virus things. I was getting ready to hit delete when I saw…well, there was a specific word in it that Will used to call me, a long time ago up in Florence, when we was first dating. A secret nickname kind of thing, and whenever we was on the phone and getting ready to hang up, we’d both say it. I know it sounds corny, but that’s how it was. I know I’m rambling on too long, and you may not get this whole message, but the thing is, I’m positive this text came from Will. He must’ve sent it from someone else’s phone, but it was him. I know it. And here’s the thing: there was two files attached to it. Big ones I can’t open, on account this phone is an old piece of crap and I don’t really trust it. But I figure maybe you can do something, so I’m texting it to you. Might take a while, since they’re big files, but if you get them, take a look, will you? Okay, that’s it. By the way, this is Donna Ronson, if you’ve haven’t figured it out. Bye.”

Long message was right, and when it finished Connor saved it, just in case he needed to listen to it again. He checked his SMS app, saw that nothing from Mrs. Ronson had arrived yet, wondered if whatever she’d been talking about had gotten clogged coming down the 5G pipeline. He considered calling her back to let her know he’d received her voicemail, but decided to wait a few minutes, give the follow-up text time to show up.

Eventually it did.

She’d deleted whatever had been their secret word way back when, because the message contained only the two very large files she’d mentioned. Both were formatted with an extension that indicated they were videos that could be viewed on most mobile devices. Donna Ronson either didn’t know this, or was rightfully suspicious that some kind of malware embedded in the text might cause permanent damage to her phone.

Connor shared the same misgivings, but figured if his phone froze up, he had the cracked device Burdette had returned to him. He briefly considered calling her back before he viewed them, but she had not actually asked him to do that. He also realized that maybe Willis Ronson had grown lustful toward his wife while he was holed up in the motel, and maybe had shot her a porno. But he ruled that out almost as quickly as it had come to him, since Mrs. Ronson had said the message had come from a phone she didn’t recognize. Which possibly meant a third party was involved.

He finished off the banana, then clicked on the first file and waited while it opened a digital player on his screen.

It was, indeed, a video, and a poorly shot one. The time bar at the bottom indicated it was just under fifteen minutes in length, and for the first five or ten seconds all Connor caught was a blur of motion as the cameraman—maybe Ronson himself—seemed unable to hold the thing steady. Maybe he was trying to hide it somewhere it couldn’t be detected: a buttonhole, possibly a belt buckle. Definitely an article of clothing, since the following frames were shot POV—point of view—as the person took a step, pivoted right and left, then took another step. A Steadicam it was not.

There was just enough light so Connor could see that Ronson was riding in some sort of vehicle. People seemed to be seated in front and in back of him, staring ahead or out a side window in grim silence. The lens only picked up two or three of them, mostly silhouettes in the bad lighting, no recognizable features other than beards and stringy hair and camo-patterned baseball caps. No voices, either. Evidently the camera either was not equipped with audio, or the feature hadn’t been turned on.

Trees and phone poles and highway signs flashed by, along with an occasional dirt road marked by a mail box or sign post. Now and then a car would rush past in the opposite direction. Judging from the short shadows, Connor figured the video was shot in either late morning or early afternoon.

After a few minutes the image made a fast cut to another stretch of road. It appeared to be shot from inside the same vehicle, because the facial hair and ball caps appeared the same. The pines and oaks seemed to be rolling by a bit more slowly, and Connor guessed the vehicle was getting ready to exit the highway. Sure enough, it eventually turned onto another road, this one narrower and apparently unpaved, and a minute later it slowed down once more, this time almost to a complete stop.

The camera made a partial pan from left to right, and came to rest on a one-lane driveway leading away from the hard scrabble road. A metal gate stretched across the dirt lane from one concrete post to another, both of them flanked by trees and allowing no room on either side for anything other than a thin person to squeeze through. A few seconds later a man—Connor guessed it was the driver—walked into the shot as he fished a ring of keys out of his pocket. He unlocked the gate, swung it open far enough for the bus to pass through, then walked out of frame again.

The camera started moving once more, slowly, and pulled through the open gate down the road far less travelled. Connor expected it to stop again while the driver got out and re-locked the gate, but instead the video made a jerky, fast-cut forward in time.

Judging from the shadows it now seemed later in the day. Or early the following morning. No time/date stamp, so Connor couldn’t tell. The quick cut now appeared to show Ronson—or whoever was holding the camera—working his way through a forest of second-growth pines and oaks and cypress. The lighting was dark, the setting gloomy, almost funereal. He didn’t appear to be following any sort of trail and, at one point, he began darting from one tree to the next. As he moved, the camera would jerk, and Connor could see the barrel of what appeared to be a gun. Actually, he could swear it was an M4, just like the weapon he carried during his time in the desert.

As the camera lurched its way through the woods, it caught the motion of several other men running back and forth in front of the lens. Some appeared closer than others, and each was dressed in digital camo pants and jackets. Similar rifles were slung across their chests, ammo belts draped over their shoulders. Weighed down by helmets, goggles, and heavy boots as they humped over fallen tree trunks and slogged through mire. Still no audio, so Connor couldn’t hear what was being said, but from time to time a flutter of rapid-fire flashes would burst from the barrel of a nearby gun. Which brought more jerk-action: running, stumbling, climbing, and then a bright blast directly in front of the lens. At that point the frenzied motion ceased, the camera slowly tilted up to the sky, and the picture froze on the top of a scraggly pine until it cut to black.

With the first video played out, Connor retreated to the kitchen to grab another cup of coffee. He offered a rawhide chew to Clooney, then wandered back outside and settled in to watch the second file.

As with the first recording, this one also started on a bus filled with men in military fatigues. This time, however, they were covered with mud and grime, with weary faces and downcast eyes lacking expression or enthusiasm. Almost defeated. And again, no audio.

A blur of trees and gnarled scrub flashed by outside the window until, once again, the bus slowed and turned from one road onto another. It then continued for another mile or so, hung a left, then another left before coming to a stop.

Another gate, but this time it seemed to operate automatically. The bus passed through an opening in a high hurricane fence, with razor wire spooled on top. The gate appeared to be the sort that rolled aside on tracks to one side, probably at the touch of a remote control, and the lens picked up a peek of a small sign as the bus rolled through. Whatever was written on it was obscured by shadows and the angle at which the camera was positioned.

Another minute or so of the same trees and low brush followed, but by now the road was so narrow that the branches seemed to scrape the glass. Eventually it came to an end, and the bus circled through a large field that looked as if had been bulldozed out of the woods. When it came to a stop, the lens pivoted ninety degrees, facing forward, settling on the guy slouched in the seat in front of him. Something seemed to catch the guy’s attention and then, almost all at once, the tired men clad in dirty military garb rose to their feet. So did Ronson—Connor’s best assumption—and they all began to move toward the front of the bus.

A lot of jostling and flaring tempers followed as the group filed down the aisle and descended a set of stairs set at the right-hand side of the vehicle. As they exited, they fell into a single line that dragged, rather than marched, toward a mound of earth near the edge of the clearing. As the line of men approached it, Connor spotted a pair of steel doors that had been swung open, revealing an expanse of darkness beyond. Uniformed guards were stationed on either side, guns held tight across their chests as the squad of soldiers entered. One of the sentries was bald, with ears that stuck out like wings, almost no chin. The other was a few inches shorter, burly almost to the point of being fat.

The camera slowly moved inside and the light shifted. The only thing that was visible was a narrow doorway, which opened into a small, darkened room. Ronson—by now Connor couldn’t imagine who else it could be—took a tentative step into a tunnel of some sort. Bare bulbs in wire cages overhead barely illuminated the passageway, and another doorway in the distance had the appearance of the rusted hatchway of an old submarine.

As the lens approached it, however, Connor realized he was looking at the rear emergency exit of an old school bus. Even in the murk he could see it was painted the yellow-orange he remembered from his Michigan childhood, streaked with grime and pocked with rusty orange peel. All but the shortest of the men had to duck as they passed through the entrance and, once inside, they staggered down an aisle lined with tiers of bunks along both walls. It reminded Connor of the POW barracks in The Great Escape.

At the front of the bus the camera made a sharp turn where the main door appeared to have been removed. It descended yet another set of steps, then abruptly climbed back up into the rear of yet another bus. This routine was repeated for the next sixty seconds or so, as the hidden lens continued to record the tight confines of what appeared to be an underground warren of old buses. Some were lined with berths piled three high, while others were furnished with makeshift tables and cheap folding chairs. One appeared to be fitted with toilets from back to front; Connor doubted there was indoor plumbing or running water, which meant the stench had to be horrific.

What the hell was this place?

Once more, the video eventually cut to black. No warning, no more jostling of the camera. It just ended, and the time tracker at the bottom of the onscreen app said the playback was done. An icon offered him the chance to replay the silent footage if Connor chose to, but he’d seen enough.

Time to hand it over to SLED. Let Burdette figure out what it was, and what to do with it.

But not before Connor copied both files onto the hard drive of his laptop.