Cop shop, Rock Springs, Wyoming
It was as if her name was Detective. Her last name was Murphy, but people just called her Detective. To look at her was to know why: she had that glare of butch aggression, a face unsoftened by makeup or internal mirth, family, love. If she’d ever had any of them, it was a long time ago. You wouldn’t think life in a city of twenty-six thousand would have eroded her softer components so relentlessly, but it made sense when you realized this was her second department, after fifteen very tough years in Salt Lake City Metro. She’s come to Rock Springs for the landscape and the peace and quiet. She’s found one—the landscape was everywhere—but not the other two.
“Detective, for some reason Rock Springs has the highest rate of homeless depletion in America,” said Nick.
“I’m surprised anybody keeps tabs,” she said.
“I’m not too sure that the figures are reliable, with the single exception of yours. But it’s clear from the report your chief forwarded that you’re the only one paying attention.”
She lit a Marlboro, offered one each to Nick and Bob, who each declined, and took a deep draught. She wore jeans, packed a Smith .357 four-inch on her right hip, a plaid shirt, a five-pointed law enforcement star, boots that had been through fertilizer a time or two.
The three sat on a bench outside Rock Springs’s main station, a nineteenth-century brick extravaganza, from which men with Colts and Winchesters had gone to enforce the law a century before. She would have been happy among them.
“It’s mostly Indians,” she said. “They get in all kinds of trouble. You tell me why. But I’ll tell you how. Meth, speed, coke, Mexican Mud, now opioids. They’re always doing something to fuck themselves up, and if it’s off the res, it’s on us to clean it up. Such beautiful folks too. But you want to hear about our hobos. Oh, wait, can’t call ’em that. Our homeless.”
“You say that of a population you estimate at over seventy-five, at least six have gone missing in the last three months. Not moseyed away, not died in ditches, not frozen, or hit by big rigs on the interstate, but just vanished—one day here, the next day not?”
“Yep, totally. It actually stopped for a while, then, the last few days, another guy ups and vanishes. Then comes your alert.”
Bob and Nick looked at each other. Without having to say it, each man thought of Mr. Gold’s inquiry about whether Juba would refresh his skills with another run-through.
Detective continued. “By my calculations, Rock Springs is weird. Used to be a hard-bitten coal town, but, of late, it’s shared in the tourist boom. That’s why you see all the cornball Old West cowboy shit around. Anyhow, with tourists, you get homeless, as old-school settlers are too judgmental to give nickels and dimes to the scarecrows. But the tourist hands over five-spots just so they won’t have to look at them. So they’re drawn here in the warmer months. Progressive city council, so we can’t get rough with ’em. They hang on somehow. I got to know a few, that’s why I can tell what’s going on. They talk to me. I try to talk for them, but nobody listens.”
“We’re listening.”
“It started about three months ago. I picked up on it fast. ‘Where’s Paul?’ I had to know, because one day Paul was gone.”
“Paul was special?”
“Most of them are self-made wrecks. Paul was wrecked by fate. He had no character flaws. It’s just that God decided it was time to squash a bug, and Paul lost the bug lottery.”
“What was his deal?” asked Nick.
“Paul Finley. Beloved English teacher at Rock Springs High. By all accounts, smart, funny, generous, forgiving, concerned. One day, he backs out of his garage and kills his daughter. I guess some folks can come back from that, but he wasn’t one of them. He just starts falling through pathologies. Drunk, unemployed, suicidal, drug-addicted, divorced, on the streets. We tried hard—and I mean everybody—to help out. But he couldn’t make it back. Last time I saw him, he was sawing away on a Robitussin-and-Ripple high in an alley behind North’s, the restaurant. Maybe if I’d pulled him in that night. But I didn’t.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Gone. I noticed a few days later and asked. Nope, just gone. No one knew where.”
“Is that odd?”
“It is. These folks don’t have homes, but they do have a kind of community. They talk. Nobody leaves without good-byes, advice on where it’s better, towns that are softer, the weather easier, blue less inclined to hit. But Paul was just gone.”
They waited. She took a few puffs.
“Jerry was next. Followed by Husky. Finally, Frank. Same deal, just gone. No one saw a thing. I got an old wheezer named Big Bill to talk. He said he saw three guys come into the alley—the homeless bomb out most nights in an alley that runs two blocks behind the North Street restaurants—give Frank an injection, and load the guy into an SUV. It took about thirty seconds. They’d done it before. Then it stopped.”
“And you say it started up again?”
“Charlie Two-Toes. Lakota Sioux, proud when sober, a mess when drunk, which was most of the time. Gone, no trace. I keep trying to tell people. I sort of want to get a night watch set up, or something, but there’s not much interest. It’s a ‘Good riddance’ sort of thing.”
They were silent. She lit another cigarette. Over the buildings, mountains filled the day with snowy grandeur and cheap irony.
“Say,” she finally said, “what is this all about anyway? Nobody gave a damn, and suddenly big actors from the FBI come to town, including this one here who doesn’t say a thing but has SWAT eyes.”
“I do talk,” said Swagger, “but not this time.”
“So you can’t tell me a thing?”
“We’d love to tell you the Bureau had opened a new project to examine crime against the homeless on a national scale,” said Nick, “but that wouldn’t be true. I can only say, this touches on a national security issue that demands immediate attention. Yours is the best break we’ve gotten. Thank you for paying attention and caring.”
“It’s just such a downer to see the waste. Most of them were something, could still be something, but they just somehow lost whatever will it takes to play the game. They floated until they went under.”
“Can you give me a little insight on the area?”
“Sure. Glad to help.”
Swagger said, “We’re looking for a certain place. It would be big and private. Someone rich would own it. It would be way out of any town. The owners would probably keep a real low profile. You could drive by it a hundred times and never notice it.”
“All the big rich are up 191 in Sublette country toward Jackson Hole. Forty miles up, maybe. Some historic spreads, like the Hanson Ranch. It’s now owned by some Southern California corporation for executive retreats, but it was built on coal-and-railroad money. Huge. Goes on and on and on. You could do anything there, and nobody’d know a thing.”
“Does the region have a name?”
“It’s called Pine Valley. Little town at the center, some posh restaurants. There’s a private airport where the haircuts jet in from their other places in the Caribbean or the South of France. They don’t hang out much at the 7-Eleven, so I can’t tell you too much more.”
“That’s very helpful, Detective. I’ll send your chief a letter.”
“He’d just throw it away. I’m a pain in the ass.”
The drones, flying at sunset high enough to disperse their engine noise, always out of the direct rays of the sun so they didn’t sparkle, came back with the goods, from five thousand feet that looked, under magnification, to be more like five hundred. Swagger went through the images at Hill Air Force Base, in Ogden, Utah, just west of Salt Lake City, which was the nearest spot with the necessary technology.
“Do you see it?” asked Neill, who’d masterminded the aerial recon with his usual nonchalant genius while making smart-guy comments the whole time.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Swagger. “I’ve got it down to two.”
He gave his two selections. Neill punched buttons at a keyboard, the two images came up side by side on a giant screen more usually given to the display of Russian bombers on Siberian tarmacs. To the uninitiated, it was just a blur and smear in odd shades, imprimatured by a digital display at one corner that expressed latitude and longitude, altitude, time, weather. But Swagger got it, homed in on one, homed in further on a specific area and requested the blowup.
“I’m seeing what looks like, um, a post? It’s not a natural structure. It’s clearly man-built. Is that what everybody else sees? Can you bring it up more?”
Neill diddled—clickety-click, clickety-clack—and selected the piece of picture in which the post-like thing was featured, brought it to center screen, and blew it up nice and big.
They were in the darkened theater of an air force room, decorated with photos of supersonic fighters, gray-haired generals, and flags. The screen was the only thing that differentiated the chamber from a Kiwanis Club.
Nick said to Colonel Nickel, who was the USAF representative at the meet, “Colonel, wouldn’t you have some guys who can read these things at a high level? Any chance you’d loan us their eyes for a few minutes?”
“Sure,” said the colonel. “Always happy to pitch in.”
He disappeared quickly, leaving the hard core alone.
“If we can get NSA on them hard,” said Nick, “maybe we can pick up some commo linked to a foreign intelligence service. With that, we can go to FISA. If we get a FISA warrant, we can go prime time on their asses.”
“That works,” said Neill.
“It better, because that’s going to be your job. Bob, tell me what you’re seeing.”
“The post is at the end of a meadow that’s over a mile long. It’s situated east-west, to make the sun less a problem. The trees and gentle incline work as a natural wind barrier. There are car tire tracks all over it, signifying recent activity. Somewhere in the far trees, there’s got to be a shooting platform. That’s key, because if we can measure the range from platform to target and weigh that against the possibles, we can find a match and identify the target. But I’m sure it’s a mile-long shooting range with a post at one end to mount targets.”
“So if your read is verified, we might raid.”
“You’d need two elements, in coordination. A chopper insert of aggressors and a simultaneous penetration off the highway, with backup, communications, more ammo, medical, all the necessities. It’s straight SEAL work. Too bad we can’t get ’em.”
“Sounds like Mogadishu,” said Neill.
“I hope we do better than Mogadishu,” said Bob.
Nick was thinking out loud. “We’ll start with Counterterrorism’s teams and fill in with SWAT people from a lot of field offices. Once we get FISAed up, we’ll get an okay to drop the airborne raid out of Salt Lake City, where we have the assets. I’ll get Ward Taylor involved, and, with Counterterrorism behind it, it’ll get moving. But it can’t happen tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or even—”
Staff Sergeant Abrahams arrived, in tow behind Colonel Nickel. Briefed, he laid his extremely gifted eyeballs on the two-dimensional imagery stolen from up above. He looked hard at the first image, then directed Neill to take him through the sequence so he could see it in the context of the larger plat of land upon which it was situated.
“Abrahams is the Da Vinci of photo interp,” said the colonel as Neill zoomed in on the image and then out. “He can tell you if the rubles in the bad guys’ pockets are heads or tails.”
“Sir,” said Abrahams, a rather dapper black NCO who looked like the leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, “not knowing what you’re looking for—”
“By design,” said Neill.
“I get that. Okay, I’d call that identified structure a post of some sort, apparently of wood—wood has a unique reflect pattern, which I see here. Relating its shadow to the time of day, I’d make it about six feet tall. I can even make out what I’d call some kind of cement at the base. The tire tracks are SUV weight; I’ve seen that same tread all over the Mideast wherever service Humvees and Agency Explorers do their work. Too deep, too wide, for regular passenger vehicle.”
“Anything else?” said Swagger. “Assume we’re dopes and have missed everything.”
“Well, there is some reflect in the center of the meadow. Meaning wet. Meaning marsh. Meaning mud. Meaning moisture. Meaning humidity. If this is where they put it, they put it in such a position where access to it—visual, ballistic, laser, infrared, radar, whatever—dealt with differing air densities, the humid air over the marsh being heavier than the dry air over the prairie. I don’t know if that was something intended or just happenstance, but my guess is, given the amount of drier land available and the many other possible access angles on the target, that it was on purpose. For whatever reason, they wanted to track the effect of the heavier air on their effort.”
He’s shooting over water, Bob thought.