“Someone like me?” Kenny asked.
Cam didn’t reply.
“Or someone like you?” Kenny said with a grin.
Cam stared at him, wondering if this was perhaps an oblique invitation.
“I mean, hell,” Kenny said, “don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”
“In the heat of the moment, maybe,” Cam said, remembering one street fight he’d been in as a young cop, where the situation would have justified his just blasting one meth-eyed suspect to hell and gone. Instead, he’d shouted the kid into submission. “But if someone had proposed organizing a squad, no. For one thing, it would be very hard to do.”
“Would it?” Kenny asked.
“Hell yes,” Cam said. “They’d have to have some kind of initiation process. A new recruit would have to do something way out there that would give the rest of the cell a lock on him.”
Kenny nodded thoughtfully.
“And they would need a secure comms system,” Cam continued, watching Kenny carefully, looking for some sign of acknowledgment. “A system within a system, maybe,” he said. “Some sort of code that could be overlaid on the existing secure comms. And a way to get around without calling attention to themselves.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Kenny said, his face revealing nothing. “Although what we would see as simple justice, the law would call murder, straight up, every time.”
“Damned right, but being cops, they might think they were invulnerable, that being inside the system was such an advantage, they’d never be caught.”
“I don’t know, Cam,” Kenny said. “You know everybody in the Sheriff’s Office. We all talk trash about doing bad guys, but no one I know would jeopardize his job and his pension, not to mention his personal freedom, for a moment of satisfaction.”
“Business before pleasure, huh?” Cam said.
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, who wouldn’t like to pop some lowlife right in front of his mother? But, hell, Cam, get real. Ain’t a cop in the world who wants to go inside for that.”
“The only thing that could really threaten a cell like that would be another cop who got curious,” Cam said carefully. “He or she would have to be dealt with.”
“Yeah, and?” Kenny said, listening intently now.
“And maybe that’s the initiation fee,” Cam said. “A warning maybe, and then some direct action.”
“A warning like that would go a long way to proving that the cell exists,” Kenny said. “They wouldn’t be that dumb.”
“Unless they’d already made the decision to solve their problem.”
“But we haven’t lost any cops that way,” Kenny pointed out. “Every line-of-duty casualty we’ve ever had was thoroughly investigated. No mysteries. Not one.”
Cam nodded, no longer looking at Kenny. He was almost afraid to because of what he might read from Kenny’s eyes. They went way back. Plus, he’d been expecting Kenny to dismiss the whole notion, to call it all total bullshit. But that was not what was happening here. He decided to change tack.
“I can see one guy being able to take out the two minimart robbers,” he said. “But the incidents at Annie’s house-that would have to have been organized. Not one guy carrying a grudge, acting on sudden impulse.”
“Not one cop carrying a grudge,” Kenny said carefully. “She was universally despised in the Sheriff’s Office. You were probably the only cop in town who felt something besides contempt for her.”
Cam stared at his scotch. He knew that Kenny was a lot more complicated than his skirt-chasing, cop-as-cowboy public persona indicated. “It wasn’t love,” he said. “I think it was more like comfortable companionship.”
Kenny sniffed and made a face. “Well,” he said, “you know my history with her. She went after other cops, too. Don’t know who appointed her God, but that’s how she acted.”
Cam felt a surge of anger, but he hadn’t come here to fight, he reminded himself. He wanted to leave Kenny at least neutralized, so he didn’t point out that it was Kenny’s own actions that had brought the court’s sanctions. “Our relationship was a lot of things,” he continued. “Some old, some new, some just spur of the moment. You should also know that she wasn’t exactly happy the way the minimart case came out. But that was business, and, if you remember, more our fuckup than hers.”
Kenny grunted. “SWAT’s fuckup, you mean, and there was a lot more history between her and us than just that case. But either way, this has to be James Marlor. I’m sure of it. Occam’s razor: The simplest solution is usually the solution. Cop vigilantes don’t make sense, especially when there’s a perfectly good suspect right there. All we have to do is find his ass. Then it’s over.”
“I suppose,” Cam said. He wanted to leave it on an agreeable note. A disarming note, just in case. “I guess I do need to just get on with the rest of my life.”
“And your coming inheritance,” Kenny pointed out. “Assuming the feds let go of that.”
Cam wondered if that remark was a subtle threat, a little hint that the tables could still be turned. He smiled as he stood up. “Don’t have it yet,” he said.
“The taxman won’t take it all.”
“They’ll try,” Cam said. “Remember what you get when you put the words the and IRS together.”
“Enjoy your time off, then,” Kenny said. He remained seated at the table. His face was an interesting mixture of friendliness and quiet satisfaction. He chuckled. “Although the guys’re making book on how long you’ll stay away.”
“I may surprise you there,” Cam said, rubbing his stubbly beard. “Might grow to like it.”
Kenny tipped his empty glass up at him. “Happy trails, then,” he said. “Just remember-if you’re going to make the break, make the break. Don’t look back. And if we’ve got a vigilante problem, trust me, we’ll take care of it.”
“I’m sure you will,” Cam said, and then walked out of the house. And that was that, he thought.
From his car, he could see Kenny’s face in a front window as he backed out and then drove down the long drive toward the blacktop. He had come out here expecting vehement denial and some good arguments as to why he was all wet about a vigilante problem. Instead, he’d gotten-what, exactly? Kenny had brought up a disturbing possibility-that the investigation might well indeed turn around and focus on the man with all that newfound money. And the sheriff had been awfully quick to accommodate his leave of absence. If they couldn’t find Marlor, they very well might come after someone besides Marlor for all three murders.
“If you’re going to do something, you better do it quick,” he said aloud.
His personal cell phone rang. It was Jay-Kay. “I have good news, “she said. “A Lexington-area cell phone was used four miles from that place in the mountains you are interested in. Do I need to amplify that?”
“You do not, and thank you very, very much.”
“Be careful, Just Cam. I may not be the only one who knows that.”
31
As he drove back toward Triboro, he received a message from dispatch to meet the sheriff at the Triboro Arboretum. He got there twenty minutes early. The front gates were closed, but the service road on the back side didn’t have any gates. The place was a combination arboretum and botanical garden out in the middle of a high-end residential district. Right now, it was more garden than arboretum, courtesy of an ice storm that had taken down about 60 percent of the trees a year ago. He parked toward the back in the staff parking lot, turned off his lights, and waited. There was a single amber streetlight illuminating the entire parking lot. Security wasn’t a big issue at an arboretum.
He saw a cruiser with just its parking lights on coming up fast through the service entrance, and a moment later Bobby Lee was getting into the passenger side of the Merc.
“Sorry for all the cloak-and-dagger,” he said as he closed the door.
“Me, too,” Cam said. He wondered if the sheriff knew how the entire operations department tracked him from street sighting to street sighting. What they called him on the net. He probably did.