The White River Killer: A Mystery Novel (24 page)

He turned away from them and reached for the door handle.
C’mon, they couldn’t stop you when you played for the Timberjacks. The two jokers outside are blocking the goal line. This is no different . . . No different.

A new noise, sharp and metallic, filtered through the rush of water crashing down from the ceiling. Hubbard’s brow creased, and his head tilted up.
What now?
The water pressure began to falter. Their heads focused on the ceiling as the water slowly decreased in force in stages until no more came down. An unearthly calm descended in the shelter, punctuated only by the sound of their nervous breathing.

Minutes passed. Still nothing. Maria turned to Hubbard, wanting to understand.

“It’s over,” he said. “I don’t know why, but it’s over.”

It was almost three hours since the attack. The first of a legion of law enforcement officers to arrive on the scene was Eddie, who nervously called Toil when he saw the damage to Hubbard’s home. Toil arrived, angry at first from being pulled from his fields, but he quickly calmed when he saw that Eddie wasn’t exaggerating. The state police arrived twenty minutes after that. Hubbard was pleased to see that Connors wasn’t among the squad of troopers. Somehow Ramirez heard about the incident, sending a symbolic FBI agent to poke around impotently on a case where they had no jurisdiction.

After they were interviewed separately and together, Hubbard received permission from the troopers to call Mrs. Gibbons. She arrived, and whisked Emily away from the crime scene to the safety of her house and the healing companionship of her three girls.

Hubbard and Maria sat on the front steps and watched the state police take photos, mark bullet holes with tiny flags, and dust everywhere for prints.

Hubbard’s relief when he knew the shooters had left slowly evaporated. As he sat on the porch, he could think clearly without the prospect of imminent death. He replayed the sequence of the attack on his home again and again in his head. It didn’t add up.

Maria shifted her position on the porch. A trooper with the state police seemed to pick up on her nervousness, shifting his position to stare directly at her. Hubbard realized with a start that he hadn’t considered her immigration status. He slipped her his truck keys, whispering to her in French. “Why don’t you . . .”

He let the words fade away when the Latino trooper approached her and bent down, whispering something in Spanish into her ear. Maria nodded. After he walked away, Hubbard asked her what he said.

Maria glanced around her, afraid of being overheard.

Hubbard smiled. “Don’t worry. I don’t think any of the troopers speak French.”

Maria nodded. “He said they wouldn’t ask for my papers. That’s not what they’re here to do. If I’d be cool, everything would be okay.”

That was great news, if it was true.

The state police seemed to be wrapping up, which gave Hubbard the opportunity to walk to the center of his lawn and see the scene as the shooters saw it. He stood at the approximate point where the first shots had been fired. His eyes went from the broken living room window to the bullet holes on his porch roof. He was so immersed in his thoughts that he didn’t notice that Eddie had walked up and stood at his side.

“Did you hear about what happened to the female FBI lady?”

“Hmmm? No, I guess I haven’t.”

“She ordered a whole bunch of drinks at John Dugan’s place,
almost fifteen hundred dollars’ worth
, and then she refused to pay for ’em. Big John called the sheriff to come settle it. Toil said she was crazy wild, refusing to pay anything, so the sheriff had to call the state police. She wouldn’t listen to reason so the state police had to fetch Special Agent Ramirez from his motel. By the end of the night, Dugan’s place was full of cops and federal agents.”

Eddie shook his head and raised his eyebrows to emphasize his meaning. “Ramirez wasn’t too happy with her. The sheriff said their boss turned as red as a boiled lobster. He ended up ordering the FBI lady to go back home to Washington. I guess he wants her to dry out.
Boy
, some people don’t know when they’ve had too much.” Eddie grimaced at his choice of words. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Hubbard said. Eddie’s words reminded him how eager the FBI was to stop his investigation.

Eddie stood shoulder to shoulder with Hubbard to share his view of the farmhouse. “You’re lucky they didn’t get you with the first shot,” Eddie said.

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

Hubbard pointed at his home’s front door. “Eddie, imagine there was a ten point buck standing on my front porch, right at the door. If you had your rifle, do you think you could hit him?”

Eddie raised his hands like he was aiming a gun. “Yeah. Sure thing.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Those guys didn’t know how to shoot straight.”

“I think every bullet landed exactly where they wanted. That’s the point.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Where’s that FBI agent that Ramirez sent over here?”

“I think he’s leaving. That’s him heading to his car.” Eddie pointed to the farthest car of the seven vehicles parked on Hubbard’s battered lawn.

“I have to catch him, Eddie. I’ll talk to you later.”

Hubbard waved his arm, trying to get the attention of the young agent heading for his vehicle. The sandy-haired man was thin and wore a tight fitting jacket that revealed the outline of his shoulder holster. It was the same message-taking agent he saw in the sheriff’s office earlier in the week. The agent scowled back at Hubbard, who was trotting toward him. The agent put his hand on the door handle, as if he intended to get into the car before Hubbard could reach him.

“Agent!”

The fed put both hands on his hips and looked at the ground as if he was enduring the biggest inconvenience of his week. When Hubbard was a few yards away, the agent looked directly at him.

“So, Hubbard, you got a jealous husband hunting you down? Some kind of lover’s triangle, pretty boy?”

Hubbard stopped in front of the agent. “Is Ramirez in the sheriff’s office?”

“I don’t work for you.
You
find him.” The agent pretended to check some notes from his pocket.

“Look at me,” Hubbard snapped.

The agent ignored him.

“I—said—look at me.”

The agent slowly looked up and arched an eyebrow at Hubbard. “You want to begin something with me? Assault a federal agent in the performance of his duties? Is that what you want?
It’s a felony
,
tough guy
. So step right up and take your best shot.”

“No. I want you to deliver a message for me.”

“I’m not your errand boy.”

“Today you are. Tell Ramirez to get all the other agents out of the sherriff’s office. I’m coming to see him in a half-hour for a private visit. It’s just going to be him and me—
no one else
.”

“
Special Agent-in-Charge Ramirez
is not going to take orders from some hillbilly who—”

“Yes, he will. Tell him I know Amir Abadi’s real identity. Tell him that if he doesn’t have that office cleared when I get there, I’ll call my friends at the Arab News Network and clue them in. They’ll let the whole world know who the kid was. All your work here, trying to bottle this up in the backwoods will be all for naught.”

The agent maintained a stoic façade, but the color drained from his face and he became a pasty white. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

There had been a large probability Hubbard would look like a fool with this wild bluff. He tried to hide his relief at the newbie agent’s reaction. The junior fed’s boss, Agent Ramirez, was too experienced to be caught off guard like this. Now Hubbard was confident his speculation was close to the truth, although he still had no proof of anything. He looked at his watch. He would play this out and see how far he could go.

“Agent, you’re using up your half-hour talking to me. Shouldn’t you be on the road?”

27

T
RUTH OR
D
ARE

I
N SPITE OF HIS DRAMATIC
thirty-minute deadline, it took Hubbard some time to get on the road to Hayslip. First, he had to tell the young Latino trooper several times that Maria would
not
feel safer if he stuck around for a while. Second, he had to ensure that the dawdling officer, taking time to check the air pressure on all his tires, actually left his property.

When the trooper was gone, he offered to drop her at the trailer she shared with Luis, but she preferred to stay at the farmhouse. They needed to talk, she said. That was hard to argue with. After the kiss, their relationship had entered new territory. Hubbard assured himself that this was nothing to get nervous about, they would take it slow, get to know each other better, and not rush into anything. It might take a year to sort things out. Maybe longer. Slow and steady. He was sure she’d feel the same way.

Maria was intrigued that Hubbard thought he knew who was behind the attack and what their motive was. He needed to go to town, meet Ramirez, and confirm his suspicions.

Standing by his truck, there was an awkward moment when he didn’t exactly know how to leave her. Kiss? Handshake? Tip of his cap? She must have sensed his uncertainty. “We’ll talk when you get back.”

Now he was on the road, wondering how he was going to handle this meeting with Ramirez. When Hubbard had first considered the identity of the two masked men, his first thoughts were that Luis and his pal Pablo were behind it. His on-and-off belief that he saw Luis wearing a Rolex had briefly returned. But even though he thought Luis was capable of almost anything, he recognized that Luis truly cared about his sister. She was the only family he had. Luis could have easily timed an assault on the house for an evening hour when his sister was gone. He didn’t have to risk firing bullets in her direction.

Hubbard pulled into the town square. There were no vehicles parked in front of the sheriff’s office. He got out of his truck and took a moment to look around the square. Everything seemed normal, just another quiet afternoon in Hayslip, a man leaving the hardware store with a small paper sack and Susan Gordon, a girl he had a thing with one night that he didn’t clearly remember, and her new husband, window-shopping in front of the
Blessed Event
baby store.

The agents were either gone, or Ramirez didn’t get the message, or his crew was waiting inside to pounce on him as soon as he came in the door.
Which is it?

Hubbard approached the office door and he could see through the glass into the office. Ramirez was sitting behind the sheriff’s desk, obviously waiting for him to arrive, no paperwork cluttered the desk. There was no one else in Toil’s office.

He opened the door and held it there for a moment. “I’m surprised you didn’t leave the office door open for me. Doesn’t the FBI rely on a big, mossy stone to prop doors open? I guess that tactic is reserved for special occasions.”

The intensity of Ramirez’s glare proved that his bluff had hit a nerve. Now he had to make his wild-ass speculation pay off.

“First, some ground rules,” Ramirez said. “Everything we say here is off the record.”

“Sure. I’m not much for the record anyway.”

“Good. We understand each other. Now, whatever you think you know, you’re wrong.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“There’s nothing
for
you to say. The kid was Amir Abadi. Do you want to see his birth certificate? School records? I can get them. That’s it, end of story.”

“Sounds convincing. Excuse me; I’m going to make some calls to the media.”

Hubbard made a move toward the door.

“Wait . . . wait. Sit down.”

After a moment of consideration, Hubbard sat in the oak chair in front of the desk.

Ramirez leaned forward. “Your speculation could do a lot of damage to American interests.”

“I don’t see how it can if you have Amir’s birth certificate and school records. I bet you can even produce a family member on demand.”

“Certainly, we could. No problem.”

“Sure.” Hubbard nodded in agreement. “Um, by the way. Can you tell me why his family doesn’t want his body shipped back home? What did that young man do that was so offensive to his family that—”

Ramirez’s brow creased and his hand hit the desk. “Who told you that? Your friend Connors?”

“I’ll deny it if I’m forced to testify.”

Ramirez rubbed his forehead. “I hate small towns. Is he your fifth cousin or something?”

“Don’t pull family into this.”

“Okay, who do you think Amir was? Let me ease your mind.”

“Well, his identity had me confused for a bit. Why did young Amir Abadi rate all this attention from the FBI? Was he a suspected terrorist? It didn’t seem likely after talking to his friends. And why did a guy who loved photography hate to have his own picture taken? Also, why did somebody whose family could afford to send him anywhere, send him to small college in Arkansas?”

“And I bet you came up with a fanciful explanation for it all.”

“Yeah.
He was hiding
. Not from some shadowy overseas group, but from his fellow students and the good people of Monticello, hiding in plain sight. Hiding with the help of the FBI and the United States embassy in Cairo.”

Ramirez took a deep breath. “You’re on very dangerous ground.”

“How can this be any more dangerous than what happened at my house earlier today.”

Ramirez stood and leaned across the desk, supporting himself on two straight arms. “You’re kidding. You think my agents did that? Are you accusing agents of the Federal—”

Hubbard stood in response, his hands turned into fists. “Of course, it was your people. That attack wasn’t intended to kill me. If the two men wanted me dead they would have simply drove up, rang the doorbell, and killed when I answered the door. They wouldn’t have taken a long stroll across my front lawn, aiming their shots over my head. Both of them missed me when I was a six-foot sitting duck. No, it was
your
people. You terrorized my daughter and my housekeeper just to make a point.”

“We don’t do that. That’s not who we are. That’s not who I am.”

“So what was that exercise at John Dugan’s bar or the break-in at my house, leaving my front door wide open.”

Ramirez stood straight and walked a few steps away from the desk, keeping his back to Hubbard. After a long moment, he turned back to him. “We had an agent who went beyond her scope of authority . . . Agent Longinotti had a very useful capability to manipulate people. It’s very valuable for interrogations. Unfortunately, she used that talent on her fellow agents. She mounted her own rogue operation in some misguided effort to advance her career.
I didn’t authorize it.
Longinotti is back in Washington with three other agents. Their careers are over. Once the investigation is complete, my career may be over as well.”

Ramirez’s face had lost its anger. “I apologize. I didn’t know . . . But, I want you to know this: my apology is off the record. It never happened.”

“Your words warm my heart. And does your apology include shooting up my house?”

“We didn’t do that.”

“And how would you know? Things happen without your knowledge.”

“The three agents left here yesterday. I had a meeting with all my field agents this morning. All of them. That slack-jawed deputy was here for most of it. He can attest to that . . . to the best of his ability to attest to anything.”

“Your agents are the only ones who would benefit—”

“Oh, and no one local stands to profit from the new interstate highway if it stays under wraps for a while longer . . . No, need to look surprised. You’re not the only one who can uncover secrets. The Bureau has a little experience in that arena.”

“Why do you think it would be related—?”

“Oh, come on. We know you’re helping that old lady on the farm. So you must know that her land is now worth a fortune. A variety of shell corporations are buying up property all along the new route. Whoever is behind this is getting bargain prices now, but in the next few weeks the land value will skyrocket and the opportunity is gone. You’re threatening the whole deal by poking around.”

Ramirez walked around the desk to face Hubbard. “Are there any names of locals who might be involved in this land grab that pop into your mind? That’s who Amir was working for. Maybe he found out what was happening. Maybe that’s why he was killed. We’ve turned it all over to the Arkansas State Police.”

Hubbard tried to manage a calm exterior, but it was difficult to maintain. The memory of his uncle’s interest in stopping his investigation sent a chill down his spine. What was the man capable of? Maybe now he had his answer. He had to focus to get what he came for. “I don’t know what to believe, but I’m willing to make a deal.”

“A deal? What kind of deal?”

“I won’t contact the media and tell them what I know. But in return, I want the FBI to leave Hayslip. I don’t want anyone following me anymore. I’m not risking anything more happening with my little girl in the house.”

“You have nothing to bargain with.”

“I forgot to finish, didn’t I. Why would the government and Amir go to such lengths to hide his identity? The good people of Monticello have many fine qualities, but knowing the subtleties of Arab politics is not one of them. In fact, I think there’s only a few Arabs so well-known that they all would recognize the name. And only one of them is the spitting image of Amir. That’s why you altered the photograph, so no one would make the connection. Before he was killed by Navy Seals, he had eighteen children by three wives. Who would have thought that one of them would end up in Monticello, Arkansas, thanks to the United States government?

“That’s insane. What a crazy, far-fetched theory. What have you been smoking?”

“Maybe so, but it sure explains the reluctance to have his identity revealed and the lengths you guys will go to keep him hidden—even after he’s dead.”

“It’s stupid. It’s wrong. It’s fantasy.”

“Thanks for your time. I have a call to make.”

Hubbard turned and headed for the door, trying to keep his shoulders up. His theory now sounded crazy, even to him. He made it all the way to the door before Ramirez spoke.

“Wait.”

Hubbard stopped. He slowly turned back to Ramirez. The expression on the agent’s face told him what he needed to know.

“We were planning on leaving anyway. So you have a deal. I’m not confirming anything.”

“Okay, we have a deal. But, theoretically, why would the U.S. government care about the education of a mass-murderer’s son?”

Ramirez walked back to his desk. “Americans are all so naïve. We’re going to be fighting one group or the other in the Middle East for decades. It’s in our national interest to have good relations with one of the most important families in Egypt. They’re not
all
terrorists and we believe we can build a relationship with a powerful, well-connected Egyptian family. That’s why we helped Amir go to college in America under an assumed name . . . It just went horribly wrong.” Ramirez shook his head. “Look, I love my country . . . Sometimes you just have to trust that someone in charge knows what he’s doing. And things that look bad on the surface are being done for a greater good.”

“That’s a nice thought.” Hubbard took a step forward. “Why didn’t his family want his body?”

“Hell if I know.”

Hubbard studied Ramirez’s face. He believed the agent was telling him the truth. He didn’t know. Hubbard nodded and turned to leave. He stopped to hear Ramirez’s parting shot.

“I want you to know one thing. If this crazy theory
that I’m not confirming
gets to the media, I’ll know where it came from. An INS team will hit your farm and your lovely housekeeper will land in a holding cell in El Paso for a few months before she’s deported. Her stay in a cramped jail
will not
be pleasant . . .
Housekeeper
. That’s what you call Maria, right? That’s what she is to you, your housekeeper?”

Hubbard felt his body tense and he spun around. “Don’t come near her.”

“Then you keep your mouth shut and pray no one else comes up with the same uninformed idea that you did, because the effect on your
housekeeper
will be the same. Do you understand?”

Hubbard fought the rage that was tearing at him. There was only one thing he could do to protect Maria. “I hear you.”

Hubbard left the sheriff’s office not knowing if he had really won anything from the encounter. He did, however, know what Ramirez had gained.

His silence.