Whack Job (20 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

“Rabbit”

Tuesday afternoon.

Hornbuckle had been haunting the Nuggets chat rooms for two days. Spider was all over the place offering advice to players and coaches, calling games, arguing with other fans. But was it the right Spider? There were spiders on the football, hockey and baseball chat rooms as well. He was monitoring a discussion on the NBA site when the following exchange occurred:

Quizguts: Hey--26 points--not too shabby!

Spider: Afflalo still sucks dead squirrel meat.

Spider appeared to be friends with one Quizguts, sex and age unknown. Spider and Quizguts had been going back and forth for days about man-on-man vs. zone. Finally, they agreed to meet at three p.m. Tuesday. Code language indicated they might be making a transaction.

Now that Colorado had legalized medical marijuana, dispensaries had sprung up on the fringes of every town that didn’t specifically ban them. Fort Collins had recently booted all their MMJ shops, many of which moved to Boulder.

Boulder would
never
boot its MMJ shops.

The MMJ situation made Hornbuckle sick to his stomach. Everybody knew that the medical part was a load of horse shit. Too many people in Colorado enjoyed getting high. Too many people were making big bucks off home grows. Once the state got a taste of the tax revenue Katy bar the door.

Kleiser was meeting Quizguts at the Full Throttle Coffee and Internet Bar in Arvada. Kleiser was a child of the suburbs. Strip malls and internet cafes were his native habitat. Hornbuckle tied a blue bandanna around the top of his head and wore mirrored gargoyles and baggy saggy cargo pants. He looked like a gang banger. He wore an Avalanche hoodie with a voluminous front pocket in which he stashed a .25 automatic.

He carried his laptop in an REI backpack. He went through a McDonald’s on the way, stuffing two double cheeseburgers down his gullet while he drove. Hornbuckle cruised the Full Throttle on Schenk Blvd., a bistro-bright coffee shop with blinding yellow trim and a number of round black tables on the sidewalk, separated from the hoi polloi by a wrought-iron fence.

Hornbuckle parked around the corner in front of a tattoo parlor. His ankle throbbed with every step. Punks rolled by on bikes and boards. A gangly youth on a long board headed his way with a cig dangling from his lower lip. Hornbuckle walked straight at him, daring the kid to run into him. The pierced and inked punk jumped off his Hellboy board at the last minute, executing a crude twist and bonk that brought the board down on the edge and sent him stumbling into the wall of an insurance agency. That punk was pissed. He rounded on Hornbuckle.

“Hey asshole!”

Hornbuckle stopped and turned. The punk took one look into his fathomless gray eyes, lowered his eyesight, grabbed his board and pedaled away like a one-legged soap box derby car. Halfway down the block he turned, raised his middle finger and fired his Carpathian shot: “Fuck you!”

It put a spring in Hornbuckle’s step and a smile on his face. A half dozen students and punks occupied the outdoor tables. Hornbuckle went inside, stood in line behind a girl with a nice ass, ordered a double cappuccino with whipped cream and retreated to the corner table in the back from where he could see the entire cafe and out into the street. Above him hung a framed Toulouse-Lautrec print of a woman riding an old-fashioned bicycle with an enormous front wheel.

Typical socialist watering hole. Stacks of
Westword
and other seditious free newspapers sat on the cold fireplace mantle. Hornbuckle picked one up. It was filled with ads for marijuana dispensaries and sex services.

Framed quotes from Gandhi and Chairman Mao hung on the wall as if the joint had been preserved since the sixties. Of course, the wireless, iPads, Blackberries, Nooks and laptops were new. Hornbuckle brought out his own laptop and spooled up, switching quickly from its FBI home page although he was in no one’s line of sight.

Behind his hunter’s blind Hornbuckle scanned the patrons dropping them into slots. Earnest pre-med. Junkie/musician. Eco-activist. Hornbuckle hit his hot spots: stratfor.com, MEMRI.com, hackersanonymous.com.
Drudge
and
Huffpo
. The horse had left the barn. Americans now lived in fear that anyone at any time could burst into flames. An editorial on one of the left wing hate sites said that the plague of spontaneous human combustions was Gaia’s Revenge. All the victims were white heterosexual males except for two conservative black men reviled by the black community, and in that sense the burnings were to be welcomed.

BURN BABY BURN!
read the headline.

Another site theorized that it was a sexually-transmitted disease.

The over-all consensus favored terrorists.

According to
Drudge
, hardware stores and Walmart were selling out of fire extinguishers and couldn’t keep up with demand.

Hornbuckle looked up. A strapping young man in a Nuggets hoodie wearing wrap-around shades and carrying a backpack stood at the counter. The afternoon sun hung in the window behind the man whose face was hidden in shadow inside the hood. Hornbuckle’s pulse quickened. He quickly closed his laptop, slipped it into the backpack and hitched the backpack over one shoulder.

Hoodie took his drink and went outside taking a seat at a table against the window. It was either Spider or Quizguts, and the other would be along in a minute. Hornbuckle dawdled at the magazine rack, one eye out front. And here came the other cruising up an on long board like the Silver Surfer. Hornbuckle was glad he waited because the board punk was Kleiser, skull gleaming. Kleiser wore a wife beater exposing the extensive tribal tattoo on his left arm.

Easy as pie.

Hornbuckle sauntered toward the door as Kleiser entered. Hornbuckle put a hand on his shoulder. “Black Widow?”

Kleiser looked at him with an expression of shock. Gripping Kleiser by the arm Hornbuckle turned him around and marched him out of the coffee shop. The man in the Nuggets hoodie stared.

“Special Agent Hornbuckle, FBI. Let’s take a walk.”
With a Vulcan death grip on Kleiser, Hornbuckle marched him out of the wrought iron enclosure and steered him down the sidewalk toward his car.

“How do I know you’re a federal agent?” Kleiser whined.

Hornbuckle reached into his front pant pocket for his badge. He had a split second adumbration of disaster before his backpack was ripped savagely from his shoulder throwing him off-balance and breaking the strap.

The board punk whom Hornbuckle had stopped sprinted diagonally across the street between traffic. The laptop contained highly classified information.

“Shit!” shouted Hornbuckle giving chase.

***

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

“The Antiseptic Crib”

Tuesday afternoon and evening.

Alvarez drove to his home across the street from the Botanical Gardens in his Ford Explorer. Otto rode shotgun. Alvarez had three kids. The two older boys were out but fourteen-year-old Carrie was home on the broad veranda tweeting, texting and Facebooking in a chain-supported rocker. Like the window surrounds and details, the balustrade and rocker were painted forest green. A kidney of perfect lawn surrounded a mound of small fir and a couple aspen.

Alvarez spent a few minutes with his daughter while Otto fetched Steve. In the backyard, Steve was trying to hump one of the English setters, who turned on him and snarled. Steve was fixed but he tried to hump other dogs. Otto wondered if Steve could achieve orgasm, and whether it was wrong for him to think of jacking off his dog.

He put Steve in the vehicle. Alvarez came out the front door with a bulging gym bag. They stopped at Petco where Otto picked up a bag of Science Diet for Dogs. They drove up through Lyons and Estes Park, through a brief rain shower. It was three-thirty when they arrived at the lodge. A Larimer County Deputy waited at the gate to check their identification. He phoned the lodge to let them know.

The parking lot contained an FBI crime lab and several unmarked vehicles. Three expensive luxury vehicles including Goldfarb’s rented Infiniti remained cordoned off with yellow tape.

Lon Barnett was happy to cede control of the operation to Otto.

“Any sign of Goldfarb, Witherspoon or Casey?” Otto asked.

“Nada,” Barnett said.

“What about Gabe Winner?”

“I think he got a ride down with one of the other campers,” Barnett said.

Otto went inside, Steve at his heels. Alvarez and Barnett remained on the front deck comparing notes. Otto used the land-line behind the counter to call Winner. It went straight to voice mail. He phoned Stella and it went straight to voice mail. Otto left a message to call him back.

Alvarez and Barnett entered the lodge. Barnett motioned for Otto to join them at some overstuffed furniture in front of the massive fireplace. Otto filled a plastic ice bucket with water and set it down next to his chair. Barnett pulled out an iPad and brought them up to speed.

“I’ve talked to the ten staff members who were here when I arrived last night. They all pretty much describe the same thing, which is what Otto told us. We have not yet entered Witherspoon’s or Casey’s private quarters. Figured I’d leave that to you.”

“What about his computer?” Otto said.

“Haven’t touched it.”

“Will the employees submit to X-rays or EMR scans?” Alvarez said.

“I imagine they would.”

“Can we arrange that ASAP? Lon, can you think of a facility that could do this for us?” Otto said.

“We have a good working relationship with St. Mary’s. They have state-of-the-art equipment.”

“Are the employees still here?” Alvarez asked.

“No. We let them go last night.”

Steve licked Barnett’s pants.

“Steve! Don’t lick the pants.”

Barnett pushed the dog gently away. “Is he a tracker?”

“He can track a snowflake through a blizzard. I have a feeling Witherspoon, at least, is still on the property.”

“We checked every cabin,” Barnett said, “and every guest room in the main house. We checked the outbuildings too. If they’re here, they’re well hidden.”

“It’s a big place,” Otto said. “Plenty of room to hide.”

“I’ll show you to Witherspoon’s quarters and you can take it from there.”

“Otto,” Alvarez said. “you take the apartment. I’ll take the computer.”

The caretaker’s apartment was on the third floor of the three-story lodge overlooking the lake. Otto bade Steve sit while he examined the room from the open door, seeking tell-tale signs of improvised explosive devices through long habit. He entered the apartment followed by Steve. It consisted of a living room/kitchenette, a separate bathroom and a bedroom.

The living room was ten by twelve with a picture window overlooking the lake. Mt. Archimedes gleamed gold in the late afternoon sun. An old plaid fabric sofa faced a wall-mounted LCD HD TV. Otto recalled seeing the dish on the roof. The old coffee table in front of the sofa held several issues of
Reader’s Digest
and
National Geographic
from the sixties. There was also one recent issue of
Vibe
. The place was immaculate. The walls were decorated with historic photos of the Grove from the beginning: Teddy Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Harry Houdini, Nicola Tesla, Charles Lindbergh, all the way up to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Witherspoon began appearing in the photos in the early seventies.

There was nothing else of a personal nature. No photos of loved ones or Witherspoon’s childhood. The room had a peculiar antiseptic quality as if it had been preserved for future generations.

Steve roamed the apartment sniffing.

Otto looked in the refrigerator. It contained a bottle of quinine water and a box of baking soda. That was all. The freezer contained a pair of desiccated ice trays. The kitchen cupboards held a few mismatched dishes but the stove was spotless as was the floor. Witherspoon must have taken all his meals in the main kitchen or dining hall. Otto checked beneath the sink and found cleanser, Pine sol, window cleaning liquid and a half dozen other cleaning agents as well as a neatly stacked pile of clean rags.

The bed in the small bedroom was tightly made in military fashion with an olive drab blanket and white sheets. The bedroom closet held a number of suits and smelled of moth balls. The cheap laminate dresser contained dozens of identical black socks, boxer shorts and T-shirts. Nothing out of the ordinary. No pictures of family or friends, no porno, not even a radio. No books or magazines. It was a monk’s quarters.

Otto carefully searched the closet shelves, opening the shoe boxes, going through the pockets in all the suits, shirts, and pants. Not even stray pennies. He went into the bathroom and opened the mirrored cabinet over the sink. It contained toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss. That was it. No aspirin, no cold remedies, none of the prescription drugs one would expect to find in a man of Witherspoon’s age. Otto lifted the lid of the toilet tank. Nothing but water and float. He got on his knees and looked up underneath the sink counter for anything that might have been affixed to the underside. A wicker laundry hamper contained clothing. Otto chose a pair of boxer shorts and held it for Steve to sniff. Steve sniffed. Steve barooed. He had the scent.

On hands and knees, Otto looked beneath the bed. Nothing--not even dust bunnies. The lack of books and personal items was troubling, as if Witherspoon was only alive when he stood in front of others. Otto lay on the bed and slowly took in everything the caretaker saw. He stood on the bed and unscrewed the overhead lamp shade.

Satisfied that the room had given up its secrets Otto and Steve took the stairway down to the first floor, opening a door onto the corridor. Alvarez was intent on Witherspoon’s computer, spiral notepad at hand. Half the valley lay in shadow, including the lodge, as the sun sank.

“Room’s clean,” Otto said. “Find anything?”

“Mr. Witherspoon was well-versed on world affairs, which is damned odd considering that he was apolitical.”

“We don’t know that. This place tilts right.”

“If he had strong beliefs he kept them to himself. I’m still trying to crack the e-mail. I’m about ready to knock off for the day. What say you?”

Otto shrugged. “Might as well. We’re not going to find them at night.”

***