I continued with the part about Davies and me interviewing the hired man, our helicopter flight over the area, and ended with the snowmobile chase.
"So, to keep the ball bouncing," I said, "let me ask you a question."
"Go ahead."
"Just what is Gabriel's 'business' in Nation County?"
"Money," he said. "My sources tell me he needs financial support for his activities."
"He's here on a fund-raiser?" I asked.
"Of a sort. Not the fifty dollars for a plate of chicken type, though. He apparently intends to rob several banks in the area. Simultaneously."
Suddenly, it was one of those conversations where two threads spring up at once. While I said, "Several?" George said, "Simultaneously." And Lamar said, "Take him out now."
Lamar won for two reasons. He was proposing a course of action, and it just took him longer to get it out, so we all heard his last two words.
"You mean on the murder charges?" I said.
"You're goddamn right."
"Are they good enough?" asked George.
"You're goddamn right they are," said Lamar. "You know where he is, we go now!"
"Oh, I agree," said Volont. "We only have one problem."
We three just looked at him.
He looked at me. "Could I have some coffee, now?" Before I could answer, he continued. "The problem is, I'm not, well, precisely sure where he is. Are you?"
It all boiled down to the fact that, after the murders, Gabriel had split. Fast and clean, to parts unknown. Which was beginning to look like why the surveillance team stayed on location. To pick him up when he came back.
"This sounds a lot like 'The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime,'" I said. "Surely you have more than that to go on."
Volont smiled, shrugged, and simply said, "Of course." In that "If I tell you, I have to kill you" tone we all knew and loved.
We had to take him at his word. We sure as hell didn't know where Gabriel was.
"Another question…?" I asked.
"Go ahead," said Volont.
"Just when were you intending to tell us about the bank robberies?"
"I would have given you twenty-four hours notice, naturally." He looked at Lamar. "You'd be right there."
For publicity. Not for any participation in the bust. That's not what he said, but it was what he meant.
"And now?" I asked.
"Now," he said, "you're in the loop. Right along with everybody else."
Sure.
As I headed back to the booking room, Lamar gave me the rest of the bad news. He'd decided to let DCI know we'd made an arrest in the Colson case. Well, that was all right, and I should have thought of it first. The unfortunate part was that Art was on his way back to Maitland. Just who I needed.
Booking Cletus had been a drawn-out process. His attorney had practically followed us in the office door. Well, actually, he'd followed us from Cletus's farm. He'd been one of the two people who had come out of the house with Cletus. He was a largish man, Ray Gunston out of Cedar Rapids. I'd heard of him. Well known, successful, and on TV a lot. Attorney to the rich and infamous, as we said.
Anyway, after forty-five minutes, Cletus was tucked away on a $250,000.00 bond. A tidy sum, but I wasn't at all certain he couldn't raise it in a hurry.
We'd also made the acquaintance of his other attorney. This guy named Horace Blitek had just walked in the office, and announced he was "at law, assisting in the representation" of Cletus Borglan.
"I wasn't aware that Mr. Borglan had any other…"
"I'm part of the defense team, Deputy. Mr. Borglan is a very important man. I received a call from his friends, and since I represent some of his corporate interests, he'll need me if he's compelled to raise a bond."
Sure. I notified Cletus, and he said that Blitek was, indeed, a member of the defense team. Gunston didn't seem too happy with the arrangement, though. I, for one, had never heard of Blitek. He hadn't given a card. I did notice, though, that his clothes looked a little worn, especially his shoes.
We'd notified Davies immediately, and he'd driven up when his court case had adjourned for the day. The first thing we did was brief him on Gabriel.
"Holy shit."
Well, he got that right. I'd just told him that Gabriel, whose real name was Jacob Henry Nieuhauser, was an ex-Army colonel, who had all sorts of Special Ops knowledge, and who was the man who had been so heavily involved in the case where Lamar had been shot, and one of our deputies killed. Not so damned long ago, either.
He laughed a little nervously. "You got extra security laid on for the building here?"
I explained how much good that had done us before. "Besides," I said, "it's not in the budget."
"We need a warrant for his arrest. Pronto."
Lamar took that one. He left for the judge's office. We were going to get a "confidential" arrest warrant, one that would be filed with the Clerk of Court herself, and sealed until it was executed. A nice thing to have, if we had to do anything unusual to effect the arrest.
Davies knew Gunston very well. Before we'd gotten to the kitchen, he'd said that the Cedar Rapids attorney was reasonable, but fast. "Tell you what," Davies had said. "He's gonna want to move this right along to a point. Only to a point. But he's assessing the case as he goes, trying to see if it works for him. Understand? He'll hustle your socks off, you let him, and he'll be persistent to the bitter end."
"Whether or not Borglan's guilty?" asked Lamar.
"No," said Davies. "Whether or not the case will generate enough billable hours to enable him to own Borglan's farms." He laughed. "For true. That'll be his first checkpoint. Shit, guilty, schmilty, he won't care. He gets paid either way."
I was surprised that Cletus was even talking to us, and said so.
Davies laughed. "Cheap discovery. He stops talking as soon as he knows what he wants to know. Well," and he chuckled, "whenever Gunston tells him to, anyway."
We didn't know a lot about Cletus, mainly because I didn't think the man had ever been arrested in his life. Not until now, anyway. Between Lamar's and my recollections, we were able to piece something together.
First of all, Cletus Borglan wasn't an extremist, not in the violent sense of the word. Neither was he a "Militia" man, or Nazi, or anything like that. Cletus was a fairly wealthy farmer, a truly successful farmer, who honestly didn't like the tax system. Well, who did? He also was very much pro-family farm." Well, maybe it was more of an anticonglomerate farm stance, to tell the truth. Regardless, he really felt for the small farmer who was slowly going under. Cletus was a hard worker, who had inherited two farms, and bought another. Lucky there, and nobody knew it better than Cletus Borglan. He'd also been savvy enough not to get in over his head, when many others were mortgaging to the hilt to buy up more land, on the theory that the more they planted, the more they'd make. It had sounded good, but just didn't work.
His wife was a second-level administrator at an area education agency, had gone back to the University of Northern Iowa and obtained her MBA, and had set up their computerized farming operation. Between the two of them, they put in long hours, but with great success.
Having encountered him often over the years, I thought Cletus had a major flaw. Aside from predictability, that is. Cletus got emotional about farming. Really. Whoever had invented the slogan "We feed the world" hadn't done Cletus any favors. It was too evocative of images of altruism. It should have been "We sell food to the world."
Regardless, that was a trump card. Cletus was a crusader.
George, Art, Davies, and I were at the kitchen table, with Cletus and his attorney Gunston on the other side. The whole business was being conducted here because his attorney thought it less likely that we had bugged the kitchen. Right.
We were closer to the coffee. We'd just got settled at the long table when attorney Gunston stated that this was a "police-dominated environment." Too many cops at the table, and we'd intimidate his client. Right out of the late '60s, but still viable. At the same time insisted that only "the deputy" do the interview, as I was the officer with superior jurisdiction. Sure. He was trying to pick the less sophisticated officer, the one he thought would do the worst job of interviewing his client. Me. Well, maybe he'd get a surprise. Davies agreed, with the provision that he too be present.