The Brea File (3 page)

As Thomason climbed down from his cab, he discovered for the first time that he had banged his left shoulder and arm against the door when he was bounced around in the cab. He flexed his fingers gingerly. Nothing broken. He looked around for the Ford. Its rear wheels and trunk stuck up out of a creek bed where the car had ditched. The trunk lid had popped open on impact and a white light glowed.

Thomason was registering the fact of light where there had been none before when a curious motorist pulled onto the shoulder a short distance above him. The newcomer’s headlights slanted across the field below, catching the ditched Ford and the open meadow beyond it.

That was how, Thomason explained a few minutes later to the Virginia state trooper, he happened to see the driver of the Ford loping through the tall grass toward the dark woods beyond the field.

* * * *

Paul Macimer, Special-Agent-in-Charge of the Washington Field Office, had been about to leave at the end of a fairly typical fourteen-hour day when the call came from Special Agent Stearns to report that an FBI vehicle en route between Dulles International and FBI Headquarters had been stolen. The agent on the night duty desk switched Steams over to his boss, feeling a twinge of sympathy as he did so. The RA office at the airport came within the jurisdiction of the Washington Field Office.

Macimer blistered the young agent’s ears before he caught himself. Stearns already sounded demoralized. Heaping on more coals wouldn’t help. “All right, see if you can find any witnesses,” he said finally. “I’ll send somebody out to drive you home.” He paused and added, “Try not to get lost. And report to me in this office on Monday morning.”

Stearns was going to have a lousy weekend, he thought, but he had earned it. The night he had an FBI car stolen from him would be one he would never forget.

At nine-thirty, when there had been no further report on the stolen vehicle, Macimer at last shrugged into his raincoat, said good night to the night duty agent and left the office. “If anything comes through on that car, I want to know it,” he said at the door. “No matter what time it is.”

He was almost home, which was in a Washington suburban development southwest of the city called the Meadows, when the call came through on his car radio. The stolen car had been found. A Virginia trooper named Edward Riggins was at the scene, just off Highway 17 north of U.S. 66. Macimer made a quick calculation. He had just crossed the Beltline himself. Route 17 was about forty miles west. “Patch me through to him,” Macimer said.

A moment later he was talking to Riggins. The state trooper had answered an accident emergency call at 10:09
P.M
. The driver of a Ford sedan involved in the accident, Maryland license number CAE-281, had fled the scene of the accident under suspicious circumstances. Acting upon this suspicious behavior, Riggins said with exaggerated formality, he had put through an inquiry to the NCIC-the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. At that time he had learned that the car was out of the FBI’s vehicle pool and had been reported stolen earlier that evening.

“Anything else I should know?”

“Yes, sir,” Riggins replied. “There are some cardboard file boxes in the trunk of the car. One of them has been broken open. It’s full of documents.” He paused significantly. “FBI documents, sir.”

“Sit on them,” Macimer said. “Don’t let anyone near that car. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

* * * *

Forty-five minutes later, from the highway overlooking the patch of meadow which had been cordoned off around the stolen vehicle, Macimer stared down at the car. Crazy kind of accident, he thought.

He read the statements given to Riggins by the truck driver and the motorist who had stopped. He questioned Thomason closely. “You’re sure the car was driving without lights when you ran it down?”

“I didn’t see any lights,” Thomason insisted, aggrieved. “I know how it sounds, like I’m makin’ excuses for not seeing him, but that’s the truth.”

“Can you describe him?”

The trucker shook his head. He stared balefully at his beached rig, which resembled a huge whale on its side. “Hell, he was halfway across that field before I saw him. He was tall, I guess. Kind of skinny. I could see his hair flying, so it must’ve been long.”

“What color was it?”

“Huh? Oh, dark… brown, maybe. And he was young.”

“What makes you say that if you only saw him running away from you at a distance?”

“Well, that’s just it. The way he was running. I mean, he was
flying
.” He glanced at Macimer. “Men our age, we’re joggers, not sprinters. We don’t run like that.”

Macimer smiled. “Not if we can help it.”

Accompanied by Riggins, Macimer climbed down through knee-deep wet grass to the creek where the runaway Ford’s flight had ended.

“You didn’t touch anything?” he asked Riggins.

“No, sir!” the trooper said. “I wouldn’t have seen those boxes if the trunk wasn’t open already when I got to it. I opened the trunk lid all the way to get a good look, but that’s all.”

“No one else has been near the car? You’re sure of that?”

“I got here before anyone went down to the car. Both the salesman in the car that pulled up, name of Woodruff, and Thomason swear to that. And I never let it out of my sight after I found those boxes.”

Macimer nodded thoughtfully. He gave the interior of the car a quick visual inspection. Then he came back to the open trunk and peered more closely at the four cartons inside. He gave a start as he read the shipping labels. The files were from the San Timoteo office.

San Timoteo. The PRC massacre.

San Timoteo was a small, sleepy farming town in northern California. It had known one brief, searing moment in the national spotlight before dropping back to obscurity.

Macimer remembered that the one-man Resident Agent’s office in San Timoteo had been shut down that spring, not long after the death of the RA, Vernon Lippert. The documents must have collected a little dust in the parent Sacramento office before being shipped back to Washington for disposition.

Something else nagged at his memory. He stared down at the opened carton, noting the knife slashes in the cardboard. It was this that triggered his memory. The San Timoteo office had been broken into after Lippert’s death. There had been a temporary flap over the incident, remindful of the Media office break-in a dozen years ago which had resulted in the theft and later leaking of FBI documents, with damaging revelations of domestic surveillance, unauthorized wiretaps, COINTELPRO operations. Nothing like that had come out of San Timoteo, but…

Could there be any connection?

Macimer doubted it. This night’s business had all the earmarks of a routine auto theft. Until the thief opened the car’s trunk, he had probably been unaware he had taken an FBI vehicle. The discovery must have scared hell out of him. Perhaps he might have tried to make something of the stolen files of documents if he’d had the chance later, but the accident had intervened.

Macimer felt a deep ache between his shoulder blades. It had been a long day, he was bone tired, but there was nothing for it. He would have to drive these documents back to Washington. He couldn’t leave them here.

“There’ll be some agents here shortly to look after the car,” he told Riggins. “Can you stay here until they arrive?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Macimer started to close the lid of the opened carton, noted one folder protruding slightly and pushed it down, his curious glance recording the name on the tab:
BREA
. It meant nothing to him. “Help me get these boxes up to my car…”

It would be long past midnight before he would get to bed this night.

The first Saturday evening in June was a fine time for a party, and a fine time was had by all—except one. Paul Macimer suspected that Jan’s silence on the drive home was a reflection of his own distracted performance through most of the evening.

He glanced sidelong at his wife. Jan was leaning back in the seat, her head against the padded rest, eyes closed. She looked quite beautiful in repose, her face appearing out of shadow in the repeated flicker of passing headlights like the images in a slow-motion film.

There had been a moment this evening on the Fishers’ patio as she turned toward him, the thrust of her bosom in profile, the line of hip and thigh modeled by the thin, silklike texture of her loose pants-and-blouse outfit, when Macimer had felt instant desire. Score one for twenty years of marriage…

Heading west of the Capital Beltway on Little River Turnpike, Macimer was driving in the center lane at freeway speed when the Long Valley Road exit loomed up. At the last moment he swung sharply across the intervening lane and raced into the off-ramp loop, tires biting out a protest. Jan’s eyes popped open. She grabbed the overhead passenger bar as the Buick leaned into the turn. Then the loop straightened out as the road dipped southward into a broad green valley.

Macimer’s glance flicked at the rearview mirror. The Chevrolet had not followed them down the off ramp.

He had probably been mistaken about the car being the same one he had noticed earlier when they were on their way to the Fishers’ place. A brown Chevrolet was a clone among cars.

His glance strayed again across Jan’s face. Her eyes were closed once more, but he knew she was awake.

Jan had enjoyed herself tonight. She had been the one sparking lively discussion of the President’s new energy plan, the latest GSA scandal, the male backlash she scornfully documented. She relished Washington society, where the outspoken opinions which had once raised eyebrows in Omaha and Atlanta were accepted, even cheered.

The Janet Houghton he had married twenty years ago had been a pale, undeveloped image of this animated woman at his side. She had been more awkward then, less confident, less defined. As she matured her features had grown leaner and more striking, the cheeks hollowing out under more prominent bones, the eyes seeming to grow larger and more dominant (was that a trick of makeup?), the mouth more certain of its generosity and humor. Her body at forty-one was firmer, sleeker, more elegant and more sensual, as if it had only become aware of itself belatedly and liked what it found. Her mind had followed the same direction, shedding unwanted fat and girlish softness while it sharpened the edge of its perceptions. Paul Macimer admired this woman he had married. And she could still awaken his love with a glance, a tilt of her head on slender neck, a gaze of thoughtful absorption at a fingertip burned on the stove, an unconscious frown as she examined a bill that had to be paid.

Macimer was conscious of a disturbing irony in these reflections. Their love had endured and deepened through all the normal crises of marriage for couples of their generation, including raising three children through particularly turbulent times. They were still good together. Even desire-at-a-glance was true for her as often as for him. But the isolating silence of their drive home tonight was not unusual. If anything, it was symptomatic of a steady drift.

Macimer had a remembered image of two giant ships moving very, very slowly apart in a harbor, so slowly that for a time it seemed as if they were not separating at all, until at last a small gap appeared. And then, once made, the rift widened swiftly with each passing second…

He shook off the vivid impression with irritation.

They weren’t in any real trouble. Couldn’t be. Jan was too independent and intelligent to fit meekly into a stereotyped role as the model FBI Wife, but Paul had never really expected her to. It was true there had been more arguments lately, more contention over seemingly small things, sharper disagreements over the children. Two nights ago he had overreacted when Jan expressed caustic concern that Chip, their eldest, was turning into what she called the Worst of Jock. But those were normal dips in the broad plain of any twenty-year marriage, he thought. Viewed from the perspective of distance, they weren’t visible at all.

Jan sat up, reacting to a familiar bump in the winding road that told her they were close to home. “Did you hear what Carole said about her appeal? She lost. She doesn’t even get visitation rights. Can you believe that?”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

A bright, articulate woman, at thirty-five a successful Washington interior designer, Carole Baumgartner had become Jan’s best friend. She was also an ardent feminist, and during the past year she had helped Jan to revive long-buried teaching ambitions, lost in the years of child rearing. At Carole’s urging Jan had taught an adult evening class at a local community college in what she called Workplace English. Most of her students were young black working women. Paul remembered the intensity in Jan’s voice one night when she said, “The hardest part is getting them to realize what they
can
do if they really want to.” The class, Macimer knew, had been good for Jan as well as her students. He was grateful to Carole for that, even if he wasn’t so sure of some of her other ideas.

The decision on Carole’s appeal, anxiously awaited in recent weeks, had to do with her attempt to contest the awarding of sole custody of her only child to her former husband. Just into her teens now, the girl had been ten years old when Carole walked out on her husband, determined to “find herself.” She had taken the child with her and fled her native North Carolina for the nation’s capital. Her daughter’s tenth birthday had coincided with Carole’s thirtieth—and with a traumatic feeling that her life was slipping out of her control. A conventional role as a cheerful domestic had begun to smother her, and in panic she had broken out.

Two years ago a private detective hired by the father had snatched the child from the street while she was on her way to school one morning. Unable to see her daughter since, Carole was not even sure where she was, the father having denied her any kind of access. At one time she had even appealed to Paul Macimer to become involved in the case. “It was a blatant kidnapping!” Carole had insisted. “Isn’t that one of the things the FBI is for?” It hadn’t been easy to explain that it was not a federal crime for one parent to steal his own child from another. Even the private detective who grabbed the girl could not be prosecuted under any federal law.