Divine Justice (22 page)

Neither the people behind the counter nor the customers were the observant type apparently, or else didn’t like to volunteer any information about anybody. All he got in response to the artist’s comp were dull shakes of the head. Even the flash of Knox’s creds had not helped matters. In fact, it might have hurt. Knox had to keep in mind that around here the federal government was probably only a bit more popular than Osama bin Laden.

There was a bus station, he found, though it was now closed and wouldn’t reopen for a while. Apparently folks up here didn’t need to travel every day.

Knox sat in his truck and studied his map. The terrain around here was rugged and the towns few and far between with the roads connecting them two-lane and serpentine. He decided to find a place to sleep and start anew in the morning. He would have to come back to the bus station when it reopened. He’d asked around about the people that worked there, but they operated on some sort of circuit basis and wouldn’t be back in town for a couple days. Yet Knox was counting on the bus station to pop for him if nothing else turned up in the meantime. There were probably limited ways out of this dump, and a bus was at least one of the more promising ones. Carr might have taken one after losing his ride on the train.

The motel was yellow-painted concrete and crummy, the rates so low they were easily covered by his government per diem. Crackers and a soda constituted room service that he grabbed out of the vending machine outside the tiny office. He showed the artist’s comp to the manager but the man shook his head and went back to his TV and can of Bud. Knox spent another hour roaming the streets, showing the picture to passersby and shop owners. Either no one had seen the man or else they wouldn’t confess to it.

Knox sat fully clothed on the bed in his room, crunching his miniature cheese and peanut butter sandwiches and sipping his diet Coke. He channel-hopped from wars to natural disasters to corruption scandals to ESPN, NASCAR, and finally settled on the TV Land channel watching, of all things, a decades-old episode of
Happy Days
.

Carr was the hunted and Knox the hunter. Those were the official roles anyway. In reality those identities could be switched at any time, and with Carr’s skill level, the odds that they would reverse at some point were pretty good. And after what he had learned, Knox had quite the misgivings about his exposed rear flank, because there lurked the master of the ambush and blame game, Macklin Hayes.

He pulled out his phone and punched in the number.

“Hello?”

“Melanie, it’s Dad.”

“Hey, I was just thinking of you. Do you want to get together tomorrow night? I’ve got center orchestra seats.
Wicked
is playing.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie, I can’t. I’m out of town.”

“Where are you? Paris? Amsterdam? Kabul? Tikrit?” Her tone sounded light and upbeat, but Knox knew his daughter well enough to sense the anxiety behind the casual words.

“I’m a little west of you. And a little rural.”

“Terrorists hiding out in the hollers, Dad?”

“You never know, honey. Have you heard from your brother lately?”

“I got an e-mail from him this morning. He sounds good. He sent some pictures. There was some bad news, though. His deployment was supposed to be up in four weeks but they just got notice of extension for another six months. Apparently the Taliban is really coming back with a vengeance. Mark said they’re pulling twenty thousand troops from Iraq to send to Afghanistan and he might end up there.”

Knox swore under his breath. “I know he can’t say exactly where he is, but is he in the line of fire at his current position?”

“He only said he was keeping his head down and trying to do his job.”

Knox slumped back on the bed. “Look, what do you say we all plan to do something together when he gets back? Go away somewhere. Maybe the Mediterranean. Just the three of us. Wind down and take a breather. My dime.”

“That sounds great. But the Med is expensive and I probably make more money than you. How about I chip in too? Mark’s the poor one. Serving his country doesn’t even get him minimum wage.”

“Nope,
my
dime. And you need to save your dollars.”

“Why?”

“To take care of me in my old age. I won’t be doing this crap forever.”

There was a change in his tone when he said this and his daughter was quick to pick up on it.

“Dad, is everything okay?”

“Fine, sweetie. And a piece of advice, you don’t waste premium theater tickets on old farts like me. You get a nice young man to join you in seeing
Wicked
. I want grandchildren, okay? I’m not getting any younger here.”

“Okay, sure.”

“I’ll talk to you soon, honey.”

“Good-bye, Dad. And . . . take care of yourself.”

“Always.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Knox didn’t want to hesitate, but for some reason he did. “Everything will be fine, Mel.”

Knox clicked off and dropped the phone on the bed. Now he felt worse than he did before he’d called. He knew he’d frightened his daughter and there was nothing he could do about it now. Maybe he wanted to scare her. Or at least prepare her for when he didn’t come back home, or even for when she might have to come and ID his body.

He looked around the dismal interior of his room. How many crappy hole-in-the-walls, how many effed-up towns, how many shitty countries had he spent the majority of his life in? The answer was clear: way too many.

He lay back on the bed feeling lonelier than he ever had.

Wicked? Yeah, I can tell you all about wicked, honey. But then I’m afraid you’d hate your old man, and I’d rather eat a machine-gun round.

His cell phone buzzed.

It was Hayes. He knew without even looking. He didn’t want to answer it but he had to. Official protocol, meaning he didn’t want to be transferred to undercover duty in, say, Tehran or Pyongyang.

“Joe Knox.”

Hayes snapped, “Where are you?”

“On the hunt.”

“On the hunt precisely where?”

“Southwest Virginia.”

“That’s not precise enough.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure where I am and the reception up here is lousy, sir, I can barely hear you.”

Hayes raised his voice a few notches. “Have you sighted him yet?”

“If I had I would’ve already called you. I’m just trying to run some leads down and get a more pinpoint location.”

“Why didn’t you have the chopper take you all the way in?”

Because then you’d know exactly where I was.
“A bird dropping a fed in the middle of this place would’ve aroused a little bit of suspicion. If Carr was around he wouldn’t have been much longer. I’m going to poke around and then get back to you.”

“I’m not exactly on board with how you’re handling this, Knox.”

“Flying by the seat of my pants, sir. Doing the best I can, what with all the
prohibitions
on what I can look at or the roads I can go down.”

“The minute you know anything, Knox. The very minute!” He clicked off.

Knox looked up in time to see the Fonz deliver his trademark line on TV.

“Sit on it, asshole,” Knox said in his best Arthur Fonzarelli voice.

CHAPTER 42

A
NNABELLE AND
C
ALEB
marched into Union Station and went straight up to the clerk that Knox had talked to. Annabelle flashed her fake FBI badge.

“Agents Hunter and Kelso. Was there a man in here earlier asking questions and showing you a photo? He would’ve identified himself as Joe Knox? Said he was with Homeland Security?”

“Yes, that’s right,” the woman said nervously.

Annabelle let out an audible sigh. “Then we have a big problem.”

The woman looked anxiously at her. “What was the problem? We helped Agent Knox as best we could.”

Caleb spoke up. “The problem is his name isn’t Knox and he isn’t with Homeland Security.”

The woman blanched. “Omigod.”

Annabelle said, “Omigod is right. I need to speak to everybody he talked to, right now!”

A few minutes later Annabelle and Caleb were seated in the supervisor’s office. The train attendant was there too, having stayed behind at the station to catch up on some paperwork and been summoned when Annabelle had made her demand of the manager.

“We thought he was a fed.”

“I’m sure. He probably told you not to say anything to anyone about what he’d told you, right?” said Annabelle.

“That’s right, he did.”

“Standard operating bullshit, I’m afraid.”

“But his credentials looked authentic,” the Amtrak supervisor said.

Caleb held out his creds so they could look at them closely. They were still a bit warm from Annabelle having just created them in the van on the way over. “
I’m
with Homeland Security. Did you note that in the upper-right-hand corner of the picture there’s a small ‘e’ done in reverse like there is in mine?”

The train men looked at each other and shook their heads. The supervisor said, “I didn’t know to look for that.”

“That’s because it’s a secret,” Annabelle chimed in. “To prevent people from successfully duplicating our creds. It’s a double-edged sword, I know. It’s a secret so the public isn’t supposed to know. But I thought a notice had gone out to certain levels of the federal government about it. You’re a federal agency, right?”

“Quasi-governmental,” the supervisor replied. He added, “And let me tell you, nobody from the federal government tells us shit about anything. Hell, a lot of them question why the country needs trains at all. What with the highways suffocated and the skies filled to overflowing and every civilized country in the world building trains and rails at record paces, you’d think they could figure it out for themselves.”

“We’ll put in a good word for Amtrak at the next budget meeting,” Caleb said sarcastically. “But right now we need to find this jerk-off, fast.”

“Wait a minute, aren’t you guys supposed to wear jackets with your acronym on the back?” the train conductor said.

“Yeah,” Annabelle said impatiently. “When we’re knocking down somebody’s freaking door to make an arrest! Not when we’re undercover trying to nail a spy.”

Caleb gave her a sharp and totally choreographed glance along with a quick shake of the head.

“He’s a spy?” exclaimed the supervisor.

“Yeah, he is,” she admitted. “Now, I need to know exactly what you told him.”

The two men filled her in while Caleb took notes. When they were done, she said, “I don’t blame you for what happened. And hopefully we’ll be able to run him down with the intel you just gave us.”

“Wish us luck,” Caleb said sourly. “We’re going to need it because he’s got quite a head start.”

The pair quickly left and returned to the van.

“Nice job in there, Caleb,” Annabelle said admiringly.

“I was in the thespian club in college. I had dreams, you know. Not Hollywood, God forbid. The stage.”

“So you wanted to be on Broadway but ended up a librarian? How come?”

“I loved acting but there was a downside I could never get over.”

“What was that?”

“Stage fright. I was sick for hours before every performance. I lost so much weight and went through so many costumes I finally had to give it up.”

“Well, today you were a star.”

CHAPTER 43

T
HE INTERVIEW
with Charlie Trimble was going better than Stone had expected. His questions were polite but prepared. And then it began to change. The reporter sat in his old swivel chair, a piercing expression in his gaze, one that was making Stone extremely uncomfortable.

“You seem familiar to me, Ben. Have we met before?”

“I don’t see how.”

“You ever been in Washington?”

“Never.”

Trimble sat back and drummed his fingers on his desk. “Why’d you come here?”

“Just making sure Danny was okay.”

“That’s all?”

“Why not?”

Before Trimble could launch another question, Stone pounced. “What do you know about Debby Randolph’s and Rory Peterson’s deaths?”

At first, Trimble seemed taken aback by this, but his expression became bemused. “Why do you want to know?”

“Some people tried to kill Danny. I think somebody tried to OD Willie.”

“I talked to Bob Coombs about that. Do you have any proof?”

“Just what Willie told me and what the doctors found in his system.”

“Willie’s a drug user, not the most reliable people in the world.”

“Have you talked to him about that?” Stone asked sharply. Trimble shook his head. “Then you’re not really in a position to gauge his credibility, are you?”

Trimble’s face flushed but then he smiled. “You make a good point. I do need to talk to him.”

“So getting back to my question. Danny and Willie both are targets. They both knew Debby. Willie was engaged to marry her.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No one apparently did. Debby supposedly commits suicide. Willie thinks that’s impossible. He talked to her the night before she was found dead. She sounded great.”

“Sheriff Tyree looked into all that. It did seem crazy that Debby would do that, but all the evidence pointed to suicide.”

“It’s pretty easy to make murder seem like suicide if you know what you’re doing.”

Trimble shot him a penetrating look. “You know about such things?”

“I’m just trying to get to the truth, Mr. Trimble.”

“Call me Charlie. And why are you so set on doing that? You’ve only been here a short while.”

Stone rubbed his shoulder and then his head. “Let’s put it this way, I don’t like being pushed around.”
And then there’s Abby.
“How was Peterson killed?” he asked.

“Gunshot. Probably during a robbery. There was a safe in his office that had been forced. Cash, some files, and his computer were stolen. Tyree’s been working that one too, but he’s not come up with much, at least that he’s confided in me. He’s the entire police force, you know.”

“He could call in the state police.”

“He might do that.” Trimble smiled. “Or maybe his brother.”