Lynn left Mark in the bar for maybe ten minutes, then she slipped in and took the stool beside him and said, “I’m sorry.”
He nodded.
“That’s an awful thing.”
He nodded again. What the hell did you say? Yes, they shot her in the head, it’s an awful thing.
“So your case is really—”
“Of personal interest,” he finished for her. “Yeah. I don’t have a client, Lynn. I’ve got nobody to protect. I just want to find the woman.”
“You think she had something to do with your wife’s murder.”
“I think she knows the man who killed her. His name is Garland Webb. He walked out of prison and vanished. No contact with the parole office. I’ve got a witness to the, um, events of last night who says that Janell and the man she was with are on their way to meet Garland Webb. ”
He didn’t mention that the witness was a child who also believed Mark was attended by the ghost of a murdered man named Walter.
“Where did the events of last night take place?”
“Cassadaga. The house is one weird place. Someone’s very fond of painting on the walls. Mostly vortex symbols, but some words. Rise the dark, the dark will rise, things like that.”
Even in the dim light of the bar, Mark could see color drain from her face.
“Rise the dark?”
“That mean something to you?”
“Maybe.”
“Bullshit, maybe. You just reacted more visibly to that phrase than you did to learning they’d killed somebody. Why?” He didn’t want to admit his own interest in the phrase, not yet. He had to hold some cards back.
“Was there any reference to a place called Wardenclyffe?” she asked.
“No, but I saw it was her company name, and the vehicle is registered to the company. What does it mean?”
“It was the site of Nikola Tesla’s financial ruin, a place out on Long Island that has been a popular home to conspiracy theories over the years. But the name means something else to these people. It’s a place, a movement, something. Do you know anything about the man she’s living with?”
“The only man I know is the one who helped her burn the house down. He is a big bastard with a short temper and, as of yesterday, a broken nose. That one is on me. Myron and I got off to a bad start.”
“Myron. Do you know his last name?”
“I know what he told me, but it’s a false name. He was going by Myron Pate.”
Again her face showed recognition. Mark watched and remembered what the boy had said and played one of the last cards he had left.
“They’re off to meet Garland and a man named Eli,” he said.
“Eli Pate.” She said it immediately, and he didn’t question it. He’d heard no last name for Eli, and he’d assumed Myron’s was an alias, but the way she connected the names suggested it wasn’t a shot in the dark.
“They’re going to see him? That’s what you were told?”
“That’s what I was told. Who is Eli Pate?”
She studied his face. “You really don’t know?”
“My only interest is Garland Webb. Who is Pate?”
She slid off the stool and stood up. “I’ve got some pictures to show you. You might not recognize anyone other than Janell, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”
She took an iPad out of her bag and opened a photo album that was labeled with only a case-file number, no names, and began a slide show. Some photographs were facial close-ups that had clearly been pulled from driver’s license photos, some were lifted from social media sites, but there were also others in which the subject had obviously been unaware of the camera. Surveillance shots.
The first five photographs were of the same woman, and Mark had no idea who she was. Janell Cole followed, looking nothing like the woman he’d last seen leering at him in the flashlight beam. Here, she was the picture of the perfect young professional. There was another unfamiliar man, and then the screen filled with a close-up image of Myron Pate’s face.
“Stop. That’s the guy she’s traveling with.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. Who is he really?”
“His name is Doug Oriel.”
“If you tell me he’s another electrical engineer I’m really going to begin to lose respect for the profession.”
“Not an engineer.”
“Good.”
“He’s a demolitions specialist.”
Mark paused. “Ex-military?”
“No. His background is in construction. He recently attended a school near Cleveland where he obtained certifications in blasting concrete, underwater blasting, vibration and air-blast control, and delayed-timing methods.”
She rattled this list off like someone who’d prepped for a job-interview question. Myron, like Janell, had been on her mind a good deal.
“Did he work with your client company too?”
She shook her head. “We pulled surveillance photos that put them together. We aren’t sure how they met.”
She closed the cover on the tablet. For a while she watched the boat channel without seeming to see it and then she said, “How confident are you that they’re really going to Eli?”
“Very,” Mark said. It was true, though if he explained the boy to her she probably wouldn’t agree. “Do you know where he is?”
“Only a possible town. He maintains a post office box, and there’s been surveillance conducted there before, but without success. The box is still active, though. We’re told he sporadically appears to gather mail.”
“Who is he?”
She hesitated, and he said, “Lynn, come on. I just signed my soul over to you. I thought we were past this.”
She nodded, almost to herself. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you the gist.”
The gist took them about twenty minutes. The gist started with a power company in Georgia and ran to the FBI. The gist was the type of scare that some in the electrical industry and some in national security roles had been warning the nation of for decades.
The Pinkertons had been brought in by the Georgia power company after its prized young systems engineer Janell Cole quit her job and took some highly sensitive data with her. By the time the company realized it had been hacked, she’d left not just the building, but the city. Lynn had been tracking her ever since. “I’m in regular communication with Homeland Security and the FBI,” she said, “but I don’t think you need to be very astute to understand why the FBI is interested in a missing grid-systems engineer and a guy who specializes in industrial demolition.”
“No,” Mark said, “I don’t think there’s much of a reach there. But what’s their affiliation? Is there a shared group, some sort of right-wing fringe deal, religious fanatics, environmental nuts, or…”
She shook her head. “No affiliation is clear yet.”
“What’s Eli Pate’s role?”
“Online communication suggests he’s a recruiter. We wondered if Janell would head his way at some point, but she didn’t seem to be. Until now.”
“Where is his way?”
“The post office box is in Lovell, Wyoming.”
Mark set his beer down and stared at her. “Lovell?”
“You know the place? Did they talk about it?”
“They didn’t talk about it, but yeah, I know the place.” He felt queasy suddenly, the beer stirring in his stomach. Lovell, Wyoming, was not a coincidence kind of town. Anything was possible, he knew that, but it didn’t feel right.
It’s the Cassadaga effect. The freaks got in your head, and now you’re superstitious, jumping to silly conclusions, having silly fears.
“How do you know the place?” Lynn asked.
“I lived there when I was a kid, but I lived a lot of places when I was a kid. It’s not as odd as it seems, not when you’ve gone through as many small towns in your life as I have.” He was saying this more for himself than for her. “There’s nothing in Lovell to draw anyone, though, so what in the hell brought him there?”
“Probably the nothingness,” Lynn said. “But if they’re headed to him, that’s his last known address.”
Cassadaga had occupied pole position of the places Mark didn’t want to see for a long time. Wyoming, though, was one of the places he’d already promised himself he would never see again. But if Garland Webb had headed west, then Mark would too.
“I can go and tell you what I find,” he said.
“I don’t want to ask anyone else to do my work,” she said. “I’d like to go myself, if I can get the budget approved to fly into Wyoming.”
“Are we doing this together, then? It’s going to be odd if we’re working on top of each other, overlapping questions and suspects.”
“Working together is fine with me. It helps me. You’ve seen her recently, you’ve seen him, and you apparently know that part of the world.”
“Yes, I know that part of the world.” Mark’s voice was empty, the words clipped. “And you don’t get to Lovell by flying into Wyoming. You fly into Montana. Billings is the closest airport. Or you can start from Bozeman, but the drive to Lovell is longer.”
Such familiar names, familiar places. He could picture them all easily. He didn’t want to see them again.
He thought of the boy who’d told him that if he went to the mountains he might not survive. Only a few hours ago, there had been no mountains involved. Now here he was, discussing a return to them.
“If they’re driving,” he said, “we’ll beat them to Wyoming.”
“They’ll be driving. They pay cash and they drive. They stay away from airports. So, yes, we’ll be ahead of them.”
“I wonder where they are now,” Mark said, picturing the red truck headed northwest on the interstate, slicing through an oblivious nation, at least one murdered woman left in their wake already.
“I’ve been wondering that every day for months,” Lynn said. “This is the first time I might have an idea.”