We stuck with it, though. We had nothing else to go on, or so I thought.
The intercom buzzed, and I answered. Judy, with a phone call for Volont. He took it out in the reception area. He was back in less than a minute.
"If you gentlemen will excuse me for a short while, I have some other business to attend to."
We did.
Just like so many other times, that little interruption broke the train of the meeting, and everybody just about simultaneously decided to take a break.
I took George aside out in the kitchen, when I went out to make a pot of coffee and he tagged along for the exercise. "What did you interview Nancy and Shamrock for?"
"Mostly to find out what they knew, and to tell them they couldn't use anything they had learned about a particular individual."
"George, damn it, it's our murder. We can deal with the press if we want to." The coffeepot had stopped gurgling, and was in the hiss-and-steam phase, which meant the water reservoir had emptied. The flavor was best then, before all the water had dripped through. I turned the pot off, and pulled the basket.
He shrugged. "We mostly wanted to shut down anything about Gabriel. They seemed to understand. Including the film."
"'The film'?" I stood there with the pot in one hand, and a cup in the other, and nearly poured the contents on the floor.
"Shamrock's film. I asked her to let us keep the strip of negatives that contained the photos of Gabriel. Two frames."
I chuckled. "You mentioned Gabriel?"
"Volont specifically told me to. As Nieuhauser, of course. Not Gabriel. But this Nancy is pretty sharp. She picked up on it right away."
"Yeah." I poured my coffee, and put the pot down. "So, you don't think you pissed them off totally, then?"
"Oh, no. They were very nice." He poured his own, adding fat-free milk and sugar substitute.
"How is that shit?" I asked.
"Awful. Milk and sugar are good, though."
"Thanks." I took a sip. "Doesn't Volont realize that he just drew Nancy's attention to Gabe?"
"I'm sure he does," said George. "I'm just not clear as to why."
He sipped his coffee, looking a bit worried. "Can I trust you with something?"
"You betcha."
He closed the door. "This is supersecret, and you never heard it. I'm deadly serious about this."
He sure appeared to be. "Fine. I'm good for it," I said.
"Okay… here you go. Don't ask how I know this, either, by the way. I can't tell you." George took a deep breath. "Okay. First, Gabriel is supposed to be leading Volont to some 'big man' in the antigovernment movements. Really big man. Gabe was Volont's snitch. At some point in the past. For sure. Volont squeezed him a few years ago, over some arms sales or something. But Volont's lost control of him. As if you hadn't figured that part out."
I just nodded. I figured this was not the time to demonstrate ignorance.
"Volont's pissed. 'Cause now old Gabe is simply getting ready to make a hit to fill his own pockets, and run away to somewhere. Not for the 'movement.' That's all phony as hell, now." George looked around, just checking, I guess. "None of this 'five banks' thing is for anything other than Gabe. All his associates don't know this, but he's just using them for his own purposes."
"And Volont knows all this?" I asked.
"And a hell of a lot more," said George. "He's got people on the inside, I'm certain."
"I'll be damned." I thought for a few seconds, wondering who that could be. "And he's probably known this for a while now, hasn't he?"
"You could say that," said George.
"I know what that Spook stuffs like, George. Are you sure Volont is right about him not doing this for the 'movement,' or anything like that? Could he have misled Volont?"
George grinned. "Wheels within wheels. Just know what I've been told," he said.
"Sounds true," I said. "You know what they say about 'doing it for the movement.' Just means you don't have to pay the help."
Fascinating. Unfortunately, it didn't change a thing as far as murder and bank burglary were concerned. Ideology aside, we still had the same problems going on.
"Thanks, George," I said. "A lot." He'd taken a large risk to tell me that. I just wished it had been something I could have used to stop the "five banks" stuff, or to have prevented the deaths of the Colson brothers. But I did file it away, and very carefully, too.
Between the office and home, a distance of six blocks, I decided to go take a peek at the Grossman place.
It was about eight miles out. Dispatch thought I was going home. If anything happened, I didn't want any sort of mix-up.
"Comm, Three, on INFO?"
"Three," the dispatcher crackled back on the INFO channel, where she could hear me, but other cars couldn't.
"Comm, I'll be in the car in the central part of the county for a while."
"Ten-four, Three, ten-six at 2044."
Just in case.
Every limestone rock quarry has two "roads" that lead to it. The main one, and the one that everybody sees is the ground level entrance the trucks use. But the second one runs to the top of the quarry, and is used by workers who want to drill and blast. They aren't used all that often, and are sometimes very difficult to find. This particular one had come to my attention during a raid on a beer party more than ten years back. It entered the quarry area from nearly a quarter of a mile back down the road, and twisted through a stand of trees on it's way to the top of the quarry hill. No snow plow would ever go here, but since nobody else had, either, it wasn't particularly slippery. Road ice usually comes from traffic on snow, compressing it, and making the ice. Snow, if you're careful, isn't all that slippery. Especially in below zero temperatures. I crept up the back slope at about five miles per hour, lights off. It took me a good five minutes, but at the top I was rewarded with a passable view of Grossman's house, and the broad valley leading to the Borglan farm.
I picked up my binoculars, and cranked down my side window. Cold, but much clearer than looking through the glass. The vibrations of the engine prevented me from resting my arm on the window edge, but I needed that heater on. I looked over the area. Lights, and two pickup trucks in the yard. Unremarkable.
I put the binoculars down, and waited about five minutes. I looked around my perch, able to see more since I was beginning to dark adapt. Trees. Rocks jutting up out of the snow along the edge of the man-made bluff, to keep trucks from slipping over the edge. I looked to be about 50 or 60 feet above the quarry floor. The more I looked about, the more it appeared that I might not have enough room to turn my car around on top of the quarry. Shit. Was I going to have to back down?
I decided to give it a while longer. If I crunched the car up backing down that access road, I wanted to have something to show for it.
My radio crackled to life. "Comm, Nation County Cars, radio check…"
Every hour, on the hour, after 9 P.M., they checked. The patrol units gave their current location as a response. On the OPS channel, where all ears could hear them. When she called my number, I responded with a simple "Three, ten-four…" on Info. The other cars couldn't hear me, but they would know I was still out.
I looked at the house again. Nothing. Now, that was weird. I mean, it wasn't that big a house, and with two pickups in the yard, that meant that they had company. It was likely that they would all be on the ground floor, with the possible exception of little Carrie. But there was no movement, and most of the lights were on in the kitchen, which I could see pretty clearly.
I put the binoculars down again, and sat. What were they doing? Watching TV as a group? I rolled up my window. If I didn't, I was going to start to shiver, and shivering makes it impossible to use binoculars.
I unrolled the window after a few minutes, and thought I heard a popping sound. I switched off the ignition, and in the silence, could hear a roaring that seemed to be coming from near the farm.