“IT’S ODD,” she admitted once their trash had been taken by an assistant whose name, after four months, Rachel still couldn’t remember. “You keep referring to my ‘report’—it was hardly that. A collection of notes. An attempt at a narrative. There’s no way what I wrote could be considered a report.”
“Why not?” Vale asked, pressing RECORD again.
“My information was too fragmented. I obviously never got the chance to speak to Bishop or Mittag, and I was only able to get a few minutes with OSWALD—Kevin Moore. I made mistakes, certainly, but I never imagined that I wouldn’t be able to sit down with Bishop and ask all the questions that needed to be answered. The Massive investigation ended with more questions than it had begun with.”
“Such as?” Johnson asked.
“Such as, why shoot those politicians? Where did the Brigade get its funding? We tracked it to Magellan Holdings but ran into a dead end. Has that led any further?”
She gave them a moment to answer her question, but they just stared back at her, waiting.
“But maybe the most important question is: Who was sharing information with Sam Schumer?”
“Schumer?” Vale asked, now that Rachel had broached a subject she was authorized to engage with. “Is this about him finding out about Bishop’s murder before us?”
“Exactly.”
Johnson nodded slowly, as if she’d brought up a very important point. Vale vaped, that green ember pulsing. But neither wanted to follow up on her important point, so Rachel said, “Bishop was killed in an empty field, outside of a tiny town in the literal center of the country. We only learned about it because a passerby noticed Mittag and some others standing around. We hadn’t even verified his death by the time Schumer posted the news.”
Vale nodded, as if she agreed that it was a mystery, then said, “Schumer has a hotline for calling in tips. Whoever called the Lebanon police could have called him. Or one of the officers might’ve called. He’s got quite a following out there.”
“The anonymous caller didn’t mention a murder, just Mittag and three others, talking. And we asked the police officers—they didn’t call Schumer.”
“But it was news in the station, certainly.”
Rachel didn’t want to argue the point so long after the fact, but Johnson and Vale really wanted her opinion. “I didn’t think that was what happened. The only thing that made sense to me was that Schumer had a source within Massive. That he was communicating with the group. Which meant that he was privy to information we didn’t have access to, and maybe he had been all along.”
“So you went to Sam Schumer,” Johnson said as he rubbed his face. Exhaustion seemed to be settling in.
Rachel didn’t check the time, and there were no windows to gauge the hour, but she guessed they had been talking six hours by then. Vale puffed on her e-cigarette, and Rachel told them about her phone call with Schumer, remembering the cigarette stink of that back room in the sheriff’s office as, over the phone, Schumer told her about his “ace in the hole.”
“His other source was FBI?” Vale asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
She shook her head. “I’m saying that Sam Schumer had a source in Massive but wasn’t about to admit it. So he lied. It’s second nature to him.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“No,” Rachel said. “I’m not a hundred percent about anything. I just know the alternative is unthinkable.”
Johnson woke up a little. “How so?”
“Because if Schumer’s source really was FBI, then the timing damns us. How else could we have known he was dead? It would mean that we killed Martin Bishop, not his own people. And if that’s true, those crowds out there, who already suspect this, are going to set fire to this country.”
That earned a moment of silence. Vale turned the e-cigarette in her fingers like a baton while Johnson stared at Rachel, chewing his lip. Finally, he said, “We might as well move on to Watertown.”
“Yes,” Vale said quietly.
Rachel stared at the pulsing green light, then shrugged. “OSWALD had given Janet Fordham the location of Benjamin Mittag, so there was nothing to do but fly straight to South Dakota.”
Johnson scratched the corner of his mouth. “Was that the only information OSWALD shared?”
She shook her head. “Fordham said he was upset. He asked if we had killed Bishop. Later, he told me about the long-range rifle shot, from a white pickup truck.”
Johnson and Vale exchanged looks, as if each wanted the other to speak first.
“What?” said Rachel.
Johnson finally succumbed, stretching in his chair. “Weird thing. The Bureau’s worried that if that detail—the white pickup—goes into the final report it’s going to open a can of worms. Martin Bishop dead from infighting—that story makes sense. It’s something you can hang your hat on. But this, a deus ex machina bullet coming from the cornfields to—”
“Wheat,” Vale cut in.
“What?”
“Wheat fields, not cornfields.”
Johnson, irritated, shook his head. “Whatever. A magic bullet suddenly gets rid of public enemy number one. How’s that going to look? It’s going to be the seed of a thousand conspiracy theories. You said it yourself—it would be unthinkable.”
Rachel finally understood what was going on here. “What does it say in the report?”
“It doesn’t,” said Johnson. “It’s concluded that Mittag killed Bishop. The report doesn’t mess with details. And you can see why, right?”
Rachel didn’t bother answering. She had a feeling that this was why they’d flown across the country to spend all day with her in this room. To get her to this point in the story.
“Who killed him?” she asked.
“We don’t know,” Johnson said. “Whoever it was, though, did us quite a solid.”
“It’s not like we’re not investigating,” Vale said. “We’ve got a team puzzling through it as we speak. But for now, for the public, it would be dangerous to present questions we can’t answer.”
“Yes,” Rachel said.
Vale leaned closer, smiling. “Yes?”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“So you’re on board?”
“On board?”
Vale’s smile faded; she looked at Johnson, who said, “Can we depend on you to not go telling the press about that big, glaring hole in the report?”
Ah. There it was. Rachel lowered her head to give them a good, strong look. “Like I said before, I don’t talk to the press. Not anymore.”