Blown (18 page)

Chapter 35

HILLSBORO, WEST VIRGINIA, 8:18 P.M.

Julie Cohen had been in the FBI’s Charleston, West Virginia, field office for ten months now. It wasn’t her first choice—she’d have liked San Francisco or Chicago—but she was only two years out of Quantico and options were limited. She’d been raised in the heart of Boston, a New Englander to the bone, and her roots were obvious in the flatness of her vowels. The Charleston locals called her a Yankee, and their tone was rarely friendly. There was a gulf looming at Julie’s feet that had as much to do with geography and culture as it did with law enforcement. Another woman might have treated the place with scorn. Julie was intelligent enough to recognize she had a good deal to learn.

This stormy Monday evening, for example, she’d have been utterly lost among the twisting roads surrounding Hillsboro if it weren’t for her boss, Stan Heyduk, directing her quietly from the passenger seat. It was a beautiful landscape, if you liked wilderness and farmland punctuated by mine shafts and the occasional gurgling stream, but in Julie’s eyes the rolling countryside was riddled with malice. She’d researched the region well before she reported for duty in Charleston last January. William Pierce’s three-hundred-acre compound and neo-Nazi radio station were here in Hillsboro, and she knew enough about Pierce to make her skin crawl. In his novel
The Turner Diaries
he had proclaimed that the bodies of Jews like herself should be heaped on bonfires on every street corner in America. She had a disturbing suspicion that the woman she was about to meet was one of Pierce’s fellow travelers. There was the name she’d chosen to give her son, for instance. Adolf Hitler Becker.

The isolation of the countryside, the rainswept darkness cut by her own frail headlights, oppressed Julie’s spirits as much as the knowledge of the distasteful duty that lay before her. She’d been brought along because a female agent was considered helpful in dealing with women. Julie was the last person to defer to male strength, but she was glad tonight for Heyduk and the guy in the Camry’s backseat who’d appeared suddenly by helicopter only half an hour ago—a Stanford Business grad named Jason Bovian who was not much older than herself. Bovian was on Tom Shephard’s 30 April Task Force at Headquarters, which meant Rebekah Becker had something to do with the ricin attack. He was eager and unafraid, his seat belt off and his head leaning over the front seat, eyes fixed intently on the road ahead. Bovian had reason to want this woman: Thirty-six hours after the start of the Marine Corps Marathon, four hundred fourteen people had now died. Nearly as many looked like they would never recover.

Julie shuddered involuntarily at the thought of the pictures she’d seen—wasted faces staring uncomprehendingly at the camera lens like refugees from a bewildering war. Everybody in the car tonight felt the same sense of urgency; it circulated like exhaust. They were all terrified of what Ricin Boy might do while they were driving.

Julie had briefed Bovian competently enough with the information she’d culled from state databases. Norm Wilhelm’s next of kin, Rebekah Becker, no longer lived at the address he’d given in Charleston, and the new residents could offer no forwarding address. Becker’s name was not listed in telephone directories. Julie had tried to summon the woman’s vitals through motor vehicle registrations or tax rolls: She’d found absolutely no trace of Rebekah’s existence. No Becker children were enrolled in state schools; no public utility accounts were paid by Becker checks. Julie tried credit reports and discovered that Rebekah Becker—or Rebekah Wilhelm, as she must once have been—had never borrowed money or held a credit card. She had never signed a mortgage. In all the most obvious ways of modern life, Rebekah Becker did not exist.

When Julie turned to criminal records, however, she unearthed a gold mine.

Rebekah W. Becker was listed as the mother of an eight-year-old boy who’d been accidentally shot to death by a state trooper thirteen months before. The child had been a passenger in a pickup pulled over for lack of registration. The driver—a man named Lanier Hodge—had opened fire on the trooper as he approached the truck. The police officer had been wounded in the left shoulder and the pickup sped off, igniting a high-speed cross-country chase that ended tragically in a hail of bullets. It was Hodge’s girlfriend who identified the bodies and sent the Charleston police to the Becker family compound a few hours later.

The Hillsboro address was in the criminal report. So was the name of Rebekah’s husband, Daniel Becker, and the fact that he was an old army buddy of Lanier Hodge’s. Hodge had taken the boy, Dolf, to a shooting range that afternoon for target practice. He’d been in tax revolt against the U.S. government and had refused to pay for his truck’s registration.

It was the first hint the FBI got of Ricin Boy’s name.

Daniel Becker. Private, First Class, U.S. Army, posted overseas in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1995. Held ten days by Croatian guerrilla forces and judged to be suffering resultant trauma by army doctors. Refused consideration for Special Forces. Honorably discharged 1998.

It was Tom Shephard, Bovian’s boss, who’d discovered that last nugget of information. He’d also learned, from anecdotal reports, that Becker was a rare hand with a gun. He’d come into the army knowing how to shoot with an accuracy that was attributed to his West Virginia boyhood. What his commanding officers remembered, however, was how much Daniel Becker liked hitting his targets. It was a source of pride. One of the few in his sorry life.

Tom was miles away from the car winding through the back roads of Hillsboro, standing over the body of a middle-aged man lying on the wet asphalt outside Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite. Gray-haired, staring wide-eyed at the sky, a ribbon of scarlet threading from his punctured chest and his high-crowned trucker’s hat lying where it had fallen a few feet away. Five more corpses lay inside the blood-spattered restaurant, but it was this man who most interested Tom. He was the last one killed, Shephard thought, and that meant he was a point of departure that must be studied and understood.

Tom crouched low, his eyes running the length of the rain-soaked corpse. From the man’s wallet he’d already learned the victim was Buford Sayles and that he drove eighteen-wheelers for Rac Transport. A thirty-one-year veteran of the road, bound for Ohio and then North Dakota. Parked next to the body was a beat-up old pickup with the keys still dangling in the ignition and a blanket Tom recognized in the rear of the cab.
Jozsef’s blanket.
There were prints all over the interior of the truck and the Bureau forensic people were lifting them now.

It was possible Sayles had witnessed the carnage inside Sunny’s and been shot for his pains. Possible the trucker had chased after Ricin Boy and tried to save the child confined in the backseat. Except for one thing. Buford Sayles’s eighteen-wheeler was gone. Tom had taken down the description and the registration given out by Rac Transport and thought he knew who was driving the big rig now.

He rose and turned back toward Sunny’s, his gut clenching sickly on the smell of blood. Two of the dead were Sayles’s age; the women were younger, maybe in their mid-thirties; and the final victim just a kid—twenty-three if he was a day. News reports—sensational and magnified by the killings’ possible terrorist link—had lured a silent crowd to the edge of the police barricade despite the rain. One of them was the waitress’s father. Tom would have to talk to him soon.

What to say?
Your daughter was smashed like a bug on this guy’s windshield, tossed out like a piece of trash for no reason. I’m sorry. Sorry for her kids.
He would manage something better, of course, but he could not drown out the fury that was building inside him, or the words of bigotry and violence threading through his brain.

. . . I applaud this man’s courage and only wish my family duties did not prevent me from riding out right now to join him . . . Four hundred dead in Washington is four hundred less of the vermin we’ll have to kill later to cleanse this nation . . . I wish he’d hit New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, too, maybe then all the fucking non-whites who’ve ruined this country would go back to the holes they crawled out of . . . If God had wanted those runners to survive he’d have given them the strength to do it. Burn in hell I say . . . Darien Atwood’s got the welcome mat out for all you Jew assholes on the ash heap . . .

Those postings and hundreds of others like them, some anonymous and some attributed to nicknames or handles of nauseating swagger, all vicious, filled the chat rooms of neo-Nazi Web sites the FBI had followed all day. Ricin Boy had a growing host of fans in America’s heartland, all waiting for his next move like children agog at exploits of Robin Hood. But none of them—not www.aryannations.org or www.posse-comitatus.org or www.americannaziparty.com or any of the thousands of white supremacist Web sites Tom’s Domestic Terrorism unit monitored—dropped a hint as to where the next blow would fall.

Somewhere down the highway,
Tom thought savagely,
beyond the next pool of blood.

He did not understand a world where the murder of a young mother was cause for high-five congratulations.

In the backseat of Julie Cohen’s car, Jason Bovian leafed through the Becker file. In the thirteen months since her son’s death, Rebekah Becker had attempted suicide three times. Twice with pills, once with a knife she’d used to hack at her wrists. Medical records were privileged information, but the local hospital, concerned about Becker’s mental state, had alerted West Virginia’s department of human services and requested outreach. Assessment attempts proved unsuccessful. Representatives of the department had twice driven up to the Becker house. Twice they’d been threatened with a gun.

Bovian frowned. The woman could kill herself and welcome provided he learned three things: Was her hair brown? Were her prints on the back door handle of Norm Wilhelm’s limo? And had she driven the gray K-car in a cop’s uniform while her husband fired at a defenseless paramedic that morning?

He glanced up as Julie eased the Camry to a stop. There it was in the headlights: a dripping steel cattle guard and security gate in front of a double-wide trailer mounted on cinder blocks, a clearing beyond maybe fifty feet square. A stockade fence twice as high as a man, razor wire spooled along the upper edge. A set of muddy tire tracks leading to the side of the house. There was a utility shed, and a snowmobile on a disengaged trailer; a child’s wading pool, cracked at one side; a dispirited plastic play structure that had once been orange. Several winters had weathered it to peach.

Bovian waited for the inevitable bark of a dog but none came. From the appearance of the Becker household, he should expect the steel gate facing them to be wired. The search warrant he’d brought was useless—unless Rebekah Becker herself opened the trailer to them.

She walked slowly down the driveway in her baggy old sweatshirt as though it were perfectly normal to find strangers at the end of the road. She carried a flashlight because it was dark and raining and she could not help remembering the other time, nine o’clock on an October night when her boy should’ve been safe in his own bed. She’d known, even as Daniel took the long walk from the trailer door to the police car pulled up in front of the barrier, that the news was bad. She’d known her Dolf was gone.
Killed by them sumbitches in the government who refuse to let honest folks live in peace.
She rolled her arms in the stretchy cotton fabric of the sweatshirt and plodded forward, thinking of her son’s face in the Charleston morgue.
Oh Sweet Jesus. What did I ever do wrong in this life to deserve pain like that?
It gnawed at her guts like a tapeworm.

No police car this time, just a cute little silver compact with West Virginia plates. A girl and two men getting out, all of them in suits.
Suits.
The girl ought to be home makin’ dinner for her man.
What are the suits doing in the driveway? Is it Daniel, Dearest Jesus? Is he caught already, him and that boy without his dinner?
For an instant Rebekah wished she’d just stayed in the house and pretended nobody was home. But Daniel had told her to act normal if anybody came. He didn’t want people getting suspicious.

“Mrs. Becker?” the girl called. She had dark hair cut to her chin and nice brown eyes. A real cute little thing. What she wanted with going door-to-door Rebekah did not know.

“Who’s asking?” she demanded.

“I’m Julie Cohen, FBI.” The girl reached into her raincoat and Rebekah flinched. But it was no gun—just a badge she was handing through the iron grille of the front gate.

Rebekah didn’t take it. She just stood there, frozen as stone, with her hands rolled in the sweatshirt.
Sweet Jesus. FBI. And the Leader’s boy taken off in a truck to God knows where. Daniel—

But Daniel had left hours ago. She was on her own.

“What you want?”

“Are you Rebekah Becker?”

“Maybe I am, maybe I ain’t.”

The FBI woman stuffed her badge back in her pocket.
Snake that she is, with her cute haircut and her foreign car. Nothing but a Federal.

This time one of the men stepped forward, nice-enough looking, with his clipped hair and blue eyes, another plastic badge in his hand. Rebekah didn’t bother to look at it. Meant nothing to her. The calling card of the Devil.

“Stan Heyduk, FBI—and this is Special Agent Jason Bovian,” he said, his voice curt. “We’re looking for Mrs. Becker. Her brother, Norman Wilhelm, was found dead this afternoon.”

The world tipped sideways, reeled like a drunken man, and Rebekah reached involuntarily for the steel gate, her worn hands gripping the top bar.
Daniel. You wouldn’t. Not Norm. Not my Norm.

“Dead?” she repeated stiffly. “How, dead?”