“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“Simple,” he said.
“We are what bureaucracies call us. Like law enforcement? We’re ‘subjects,” Pollsters? We’re ‘respondents.” Marketin’ people? We’re ‘focus groups.” Politicians? We’re ‘voters.” Your Internet provider? You’re a ‘subscriber.” IRS? We’re ‘clients.” Clients—do you love it? Ain’t no more ‘citizens.” Last time there were citizens, in the way you mean it, Special Agent, was during the Roman Empire. And maybe the French Revolution, when they got into their guillotine phase.”
She decided to shut up. She was in no shape for a philosophy discussion.
The coffee was wearing off and she was still very tired. She settled back in the seat and let him drive. Forty minutes later, they were
stopping next to Jared’s lonely driveway. Ransom turned in and parked the car out of sight of the county road. They walked down the dirt lane to the trailer, which Janet could see was sitting at an odd angle.
“This here is the residence of one Jared McGarand,” Ransom announced.
“What’s that smell?” Janet asked, although she already had an idea.
“That is most likely related to brother Jared’s final movement, if you get my meanin’. Under that end of the trailer, right there, where you see the jack handle stickin’ out. And if you check that vehicle over there, you’ll find one very expensive tag tracker on the back bumper.”
“The one you put on Kreiss’s truck?”
“That very one, Special Agent.”
“Okay, I give up. I assume there’s a dead guy under there. What the hell’s going on?”
“I was kinda hopin’ you could shed some light on that, seem’ as you had a meet with subject Edwin Kreiss, apparently right before he came out here and wasted this McGarand individual. Least I think he did. I haven’t gone and lifted that trailer up to make sure, but my nose is makin’ an educated guess here, okay?”
“About a dead body, or Kreiss doing it?”
He grinned and shrugged.
“I got nowhere at that meeting,” she said.
“I’ve already told Farnsworth this. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, I didn’t want to admit that Kreiss just totally blew me off, but that’s what he did. He also saw through the proposition that we might work together, you know, to catch the mysterious bomb makers while I helped him find his daughter.”
“Saw through it?”
“He said it was bullshit. That Washington being here was about him.”
“Oh boy,” Ransom said, blowing out a long sigh.
“Here we go again.”
“It was bullshit? Bellhouser and Foster’s bit about the bomb makers?”
“Truth?” Ransom said.
“I don’t have any idea. My assignment was to cooperate with those two. And to keep my bosses at the Agency informed as to what was goin’ down.”
“So if those two were conspiring to trap Kreiss in something, you wouldn’t necessarily know about it?”
Ransom hesitated before answering.
“Lemme just say that if somebody managed to take Ed Kreiss off the boards, my bosses wouldn’t exactly complain, okay?”
“Son of a bitch,” Janet said softly.
“Kreiss was right.”
“What’s his state of mind?”
She snorted.
“I offered to help him find his daughter, you know, as cover for the other little project. He said he didn’t need any help. He also said that if he found out someone had done something to his daughter, he’d catch them and put their severed heads out on pikes on the interstate.”
“That’s our Edwin,” Ransom said admiringly.
“Might be interestin’ to see if this dude under there is headless. On the other hand,” he said, squatting down on his haunches, “might not be much left to mount.” He stood back up.
“Now, you had this meetin’ with Kreiss, he told you to buzz off, then you go home and he comes out here and does a number on this vie here, which we assume is subject Jared McGarand. You go to your weekend class the next mornin’, then you go to the arsenal for your little field trip, and you encounter—Edwin Kreiss. Tell you anythin’?”
“That Kreiss might have found out something from this Jared whatever about his daughter. And that something points back to the arsenal. But—” Ransom cocked his head.
“Yeah, but what?”
“But Kreiss already suspected the kids had gone to the arsenal.”
“At night? Why’s he there at night? And didn’t he tell you he was goin’ back there last night? After he rescued you?”
“Yes.” The smell was making her queasy. She backed away from the mess under the trailer.
“Can we go now? And shouldn’t we call in local law?”
“Yes, we can go now and, no, we will not call in local law. We don’t have anythin’ to do with local law and local homicides, seem’ as we never operate domestically.”
“Oh, right,” she said sarcastically.
“But we do.”
“And you would tell the cops what, exactly?”
“That there’s a dead body under this trailer.”
“Which you found out about in the company of an Agency person, while investigatin’ a missin’ persons case that you’ve already shipped off to Washington. How you feel about explainin’ why you did all that to the local shareef? Or to Farnsworth?”
She took a deep breath. Ransom was right.
“See, here’s the thing, Special Agent. I buy Kreiss goin’ out to that
arsenal durin’ the day, snoopin’ around, lookin’ for Injun signs. But if he’s goin’ at night, he’s goin’ covert. Wearin’ some of those nifty black ninja threads, right? … Thought so. My guess is that he found this guy out there at the arsenal.”
“If he did, and followed him back here, it was because he figured this guy might know what happened to his daughter. He’d want to talk to him, not snuff him.”
“Unless he wouldn’t talk. Not the first guy who wouldn’t talk to Edwin Kreiss had him an accident of some kind.”
“You think this was an accident?” she asked.
“Yeah. The kind that happens when folks resist a peace officer in the performance of his sworn duties, you know?”
“But how do you know it’s Kreiss who did this?”
“Because our tracker tag is on that piece-a-shit pickup truck over there, maybe?”
“Who the hell knows? He could have discovered that while he was shopping at the local Piggly Wiggly and put it on the nearest vehicle. I mean, based on evidence, that’s as reasonable an explanation as all this supposition you’re coming up with. Those security people weren’t alarmed about anything, and I sure as hell didn’t see any signs of anything going on out there.”
“From your tunnel perspective,” he said. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with both hands.
“Look,” she said.
“You think there’s been a murder here. Okay, homicide is serious shit. I want to go back and update my boss, if only because I’m going to have to explain the loss of that car anyway. You come with me. I’ll tell my sad tale: you tell yours. Let’s see what Farnsworth thinks.
Let him fold in your supervisors. If he wants to tell local law, I’m sure he’ll give you guys a chance to cobble up a story to keep your precious Agency out of the picture. That’s the right way to go here. You know that.”
“Tell him today, Sunday.”
“He’s spoiled a couple of mine.”
“And in the meantime, where the hell is Kreiss?”
“Who cares, as long as he’s out looking for his daughter. Hell, he might find her. But I think all you guys are wrong about this arsenal bomb thing.
That place is just a ghost town with a street-maintenance problem.”
Kreiss awoke at dawn on Sunday to the sounds of a single mockingbird rousing the forest from atop a telephone pole. He had to think for a