Charlie Garland spent the day on the phone with contacts in various agencies. He had to call in a few favors and needed the director to call his counterpart in the Federal Bureau of Investigation to get what he wanted, but he finally had a name. Oswald Connors, junior senator from Idaho, had made the request to have Karl Hedrick removed from the Picketsville bombing case. Idaho. Of course, another Idaho association. Now all Charlie needed to discover was who made the call to Senator Connors and he’d have his man. He hoped.
The director of the FBI, in turn had to wonder why the director of the CIA was interested in a local, and only remotely possible, terrorist strike in Virginia. That agency did not stick its nose in for no reason. They wanted to know who sent the request. That meant they must know something about him. He scratched his ear and then ordered his people to pull any files they had on the junior senator from Idaho.
Karl Hedrick’s friend in records thought Karl had been given a raw deal when he was assigned a desk. He called Karl and told him so. Karl thanked him and, as an afterthought, asked if he would send a copy of what the director had asked for. That’s when he discovered the rumor about Senator Connors.
The senator, it was alleged, liked boys. Not as in he supported the Boy Scouts of America, or Big Brother, but as in the sixth-century BC Greek-sense. No reports of pederasty had been confirmed, nor had there been any accusations made—only rumors and gossip. Whether there was substance to them had not been determined. The file noted: evidence or not, the rumors should be taken seriously. The senator served on an oversight committee that had both the CIA and the FBI under its purview and, therefore, had access to sensitive classified material. Analysts at the Bureau felt because of that, he could be an easy target for possible blackmail and subsequently a threat to National Security. What all this had to do with his request to pull Karl from the case, he did not know, but he passed the information along to Charlie anyway.
***
For his part, Charlie did not like coincidences. He knew that they happened naturally and often. Much of Russian fiction was predicated on them. What were the chances that Lara would be domiciled in the same town in the middle of central Russia where Zhivago rode in to borrow a book? Or was it to buy a loaf of bread? Charlie couldn’t remember. This business with the attempt on Ike’s and Ruth’s lives seemed riddled with too many coincidences. The mysterious repeater tower was in Idaho. The junior senator with a penchant for interfering with investigations (and possibly young boys) also hailed from Idaho. And that ranch, mustn’t forget the ranch with the familiar-sounding name. The Idaho connection seemed too much a coincidence to dismiss.
So, two questions: if the FBI had files on the allegations about Connors’ behavior, who else knew? It would be fair to guess someone else did. Was it another Idaho link that would close the loop and encircle our master bad guy? That would certainly explain a lot. Charlie called a contact he knew and trusted at the New York Times and fed him just enough to set him on the hunt. Then, he had Alice run up a list of all of the senator’s contributors, both the ones declared on the disclosure forms and the darker ones buried in PACs. Somewhere in the list of righteous political movers and shakers lurked a very nasty piece of goods and Charlie wanted him. As soon as he had that information, he would set the dial under the pot to boil and that should make someone jump.
***
At first glance, the tape from the dash cam that recorded the shooting outside Buena Vista didn’t show much. The deputy approaches the car and as he leans in, he is shot point blank, and the car speeds off. The assailant’s license plates were missing. That, Frieze’s supervisor assumed, was the reason the deputy had pulled the car over in the first place. There were some other small irregularities regarding operating procedure used on approaching a suspicious vehicle. If the result had been anything other than lethal, Frieze might have had a “sit down” with the sheriff’s administrative assistant. But Frieze was dead and calling his sloppy technique into question at this point would be beating a dead horse. The PR person who made that statement had blushed and muttered something about there being no pun intended.
Before Frank could task Charlie Garland to secure the dash cam footage, the Rockbridge Sheriff’s Office, as a courtesy, sent a copy to Picketsville. A few eyebrows were raised at the time. What did the Picketsville Sheriff’s Office needed with it, anyway? It wasn’t in their jurisdiction and did not involve any of their people. They shrugged and reminded themselves that even hick cops got the courtesy nod once in a while. The chief was funny that way.
As he had done with the previous surveillance tape taken at the site of the bomb-planting, Frank called in as many deputies as were available to scan this new footage.
“What’s wrong with this picture?’ Frank asked them.
Charlie Picket scratched his grizzled head and asked, “What do you mean?”
“All of you went through the academy. Sometime or another you called in a 10-38 and made a stop like this one. What’s not right?”
“One correction, Frank,” Billy said. “The word I get from the County is he never called it in. He just made the stop, which is why they didn’t know about the shooting for, like, two hours after it happened.”
“Okay, I’m guessing that’s real important, by the way. So, with that in mind, what else is wrong with this picture?”
“Umm, I’m not sure but shouldn’t he have readied for a confrontation? Like, he doesn’t unsnap the strap holding his piece on its holster,” the new kid said.
“Exactly. That’s drilled into us all the time. If you pull someone over, your never know what you are about to run into. You always have you gun free and safety off, right?”
The men murmured their assent.
“Next?”
“Crap, he’s got his hands in his pockets when he steps up to the driver’s side door.”
“Anyone like to guess what that means?”
“It means he knew the guy he pulled over,” three said at once.
“So we have a murder, yes, but not a random shooting. This was premeditated. Whoever was in that car knew our deputy and lured him to his death. So, who has a motive to shoot our fellow officer?”
“Oh shit,” said Billy. “He’s the cop at the 7-Eleven when Ike went in and the bomb was planted, so that means he, for sure, had to be implicated. He wasn’t just there by chance. He must have followed Ike there. So, it looks like someone in charge decided he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut and had him erased. Whoever these guys are, they sure play rough. Jesus, Frank, that raises another question.”
“Which is?”
“What if they know we’ve seen the tape? What if this guy was rubbed because someone found out we pulled the surveillance tape from the store and they were afraid we’d make the connection and get to him? If that, is it possible they, whoever they are, might be after us, too?”
“How do you figure?”
“We know what it means. Like, if somebody has eyes or ears on us, doesn’t it follow they know that and could come down here to make sure the rest of us don’t pass on what we know? Maybe punch one of us out to intimidate the rest into not saying anything?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. It’s a stretch but I guess it could be. So, everybody, if what Billy thinks is the connection, there’s a cop killer out there and one or two of us could have a target on our backs. All of you stay sharp. We don’t need any more of us going down.”
“Frank, you think that’s possible?” One of older deputies had a worried look. When the first of his six children arrived, he’d transferred in from the Baltimore Police Department because he believed Picketsville was not a high-crime duty station. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
“You’re good, Bob. First of all, you haven’t seen the tape and, second, for all practical purposes, aren’t tight with the investigation. No worries.”
Bob didn’t seem convinced. He had less than five years to his twenty and pension and he wanted to be on the right side of the sod when he got there.
***
“You want a what?” Charlie had received some bizarre requests from Ike in his time but his insistence he needed a drone fly-over in the middle of nowhere took the cake. “Where? Idaho. Yes, of course, Idaho. That’s where you are and you want this because? Suspicious buildings? Ike, I love you like a brother, but if you think I am going to be responsible for the internecine warfare that will erupt when the other branches find out the Agency is doing domestic surveillance on the hotbed of conservative America, you are nuts.”
“Not the Agency, Charlie. A private contractor eager to demonstrate his wares to an unidentified government agency alleged to be in the market for a hi-res TV surveillance drone.”
“I see. And we need this why?”
“There is a ranch out here with too many men in full military attire who’re resident and some of whom are, even as we speak, searching our cabin. I may have footage for you to run some facial recognition scans in a few hours. At any rate, all of this activity is too much to dismiss as suspicious human nature. The place is called New Star, like fifty-one star, for God’s sake. Worse, since we arrived here we have been scrutinized, followed, photographed, and now our belongings are being searched. It is way over the top, Charlie. I want a peek into that ranch and the military arrangements of their buildings. So, can you fix it?”
“Why can’t you ever ask me for something easy, like a small nuclear device or the original Enigma Machine? Why don’t you just buy one from Radio Shack or something?”
“They are too obvious, have limited capability and wouldn’t last five minutes in the sky. I want one of those sneaky ones you told me about.”
“Sneaky? Like the thing that looks like an eagle? It’s just a rumor, Ike. Maybe you’d like an armored personnel carrier, too? They are real and available to every police department and sheriff’s office in the land. Why don’t you ever ask for something easy?”
“If the armored car looks like a buffalo, I’ll take it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, give me some time. By the way, we have a development at this end. Karl has been told to stand down. I have been pursuing who made the request and why. You might find it interesting to know it was Senator Connors.”
“The senator from Idaho. I’m not crazy about that being a coincidence, Charlie. Stay on that and get me some satellite pictures of the New Star Ranch. Sam will send you the GPS coordinates. Oh, and who is Martin Pangborn?”
Ike tapped off and turned to the two women. “Well that’s interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“Sam, your husband is in the doghouse again. He’s off the case. Before you ask, I don’t know why, but it’s hard not to believe it has something to do with the three of us.”
“Someone up there doesn’t like him. I’ll call and find out why. Do we get our drone?”
“Maybe. Charlie is not happy, but he’s working on it.”