The sheriff gave Cam’s face a once-over. “You need a shave, Lieutenant.”
“Might be growing a beard,” Cam said.
They sheriff rolled his eyes. “You’re taking this leave of absence far too seriously, I do believe. Look, I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
Cam didn’t have to ask what they were talking about.
“I do want you to take a look. See if you can develop something besides bull-pen rumors on these incidents, or even past incidents. Something substantial.”
“Like evidence.”
“Yeah, evidence would be nice.”
“I’d need computer access,” Cam said immediately.
“For?”
“To look into back cases. See if there have been any other suspects who’ve been evened out.”
“Okay, but how would we get you in without people like the system administrator knowing?”
Cam shrugged. “I don’t know, Sheriff,” he said. “But I know someone who probably does.”
The sheriff looked at him blankly for a moment, and then he remembered. “But she works for the feds,” he said.
“That was my second consideration,” Cam said. “The feds would have to know that I was doing this officially. Otherwise, we cross paths-”
“And they’d freak. Right. Can you trust that woman?”
“With my personal safety? No. But she would be a reliable channel back to the feds.”
“How does that help us?”
“Shows them we’re looking into our possible problem. Here’s what I suggest: You go directly to Jay-Kay. Tell her I’m working undercover. Then you hire her on some pretext. She invents a fictitious consultant or associate, who would be me, and I’ll do my thing as I need to, using her for the computer side. That accomplishes two things: It covers my ass, because I’m official, and covers yours, because you’re taking proactive steps to see if there’s anything going on.”
He didn’t add the third consideration: If he was working undercover, it would neutralize any federal efforts, and Kenny’s, too, for that matter, to pin something on him.
The sheriff nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, that computes. The problem is that I’d need to leave you on LOA to maintain the cover. Administratively, I mean. That means no paycheck.”
Cam smiled. “I’ll take it as back pay when we bag the bastard.”
The sheriff grunted.
“How will we communicate?” Cam asked.
“I’ll get us some pagers,” Bobby Lee said. “We talk only when we can meet. No phones, and no damned E-mail.”
“And nobody in the Office but you in the loop?”
The sheriff nodded. “Not my preference, but for something like this…”
“How about Steven Klein?”
“I’ll think about it. Steven likes to showboat sometimes, impress people with what he knows. Especially at dinner parties.”
Cam thought about the Sheriff’s Office own Internal Affairs people, but then he discarded the idea. “What changed your mind?” he asked.
The sheriff looked over at him. His face was drawn in the amber light and he looked older than Cam had remembered.
“The feds have stopped talking to us,” he said.
“Well, I’ve been talked to,” Cam said, and he told the sheriff about his night visitor. The sheriff swore when Cam was finished.
“Could you tag him from a picture?” the sheriff asked.
“Probably not,” Cam admitted. “That forty-five had most of my attention. I was just surprised all to hell when he did that. Definitely an older cop. Of course the uniform and the car could all have been a fake, too. Somebody buying an old cruiser from a Sheriff’s Office auction.”
“Looked and sounded real, did he?”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“And he admitted doing the two shooters and the judge?”
“No-o, he didn’t,” Cam said. “He was just there to tell me to get out of town.”
“Son of a bitch. Then it’s true.”
“He wasn’t one of ours, Sheriff,” Cam said.
“That’s small consolation. I’ve got to report this to the feds.”
“If they’re not talking to you, why talk to them?” Cam asked. “Start your own internal investigation, within the county sheriff’s network. At some point, they’ll want to trade information, and you’ll have something to tell them.”
“And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile, I have to make it look like I got the message,” Cam said.
32
Two days later, Cam was walking steadily up a ragged trail on the north side of Blackberry Mountain. The Sinclair Reservoir glinted across its two thousand acres to the northwest, casting the trees behind him into black silhouettes in the morning’s hazy glare. His two shepherds ranged ahead of him, crossing and recrossing the winding trail, noses down and tails wagging enthusiastically. There was a mist lingering across the tops of the ridges, and the heavy air made his footsteps seem unusually loud. A light breeze flowing down from the heights couldn’t make up its mind as to whether it wanted to be warm or cold. Since it was officially bow-hunting season, he wore a bright orange nylon vest over his lumber man’s jacket. He carried a six-foot-long yew walking stick, and he had the big Colt in one jacket pocket and a thin can of pepper spray in the other. He was toting a small backpack on his upper back. He didn’t plan to stay out overnight, but he never went into the woods without a pack continuing a minimal amount of survival gear, especially in the fall. The western Carolina mountain weather could change seasons on a hiker dramatically in just a few hours, and there were dark clouds gathering over the Blue Ridge to the west.
Cam was no stranger to mountain trails. He went up into the hills and mountains just about every weekend, usually taking his dogs, and had been doing so for many years. Today, the shepherds were wearing their bark collars. He wasn’t exactly trying to sneak up on Marlor’s cabin, but he didn’t want the dogs to give Marlor a half hour’s warning that someone was coming, either. Sound carried on these wooded slopes. He climbed steadily, although not in any great hurry. This was probably also a trail used to gather ginseng root, based on some occasional digs he’d seen. More than a few impoverished mountain people supplemented their welfare checks by gathering roots up in these hills.
He’d followed the same route as the Surry County deputy had taken to the abandoned farm on the north side of the mountain. After a half hour’s search, he’d discovered what he believed to be Marlor’s pickup truck hidden in a ramshackle tractor barn. The doors had been locked, so he hadn’t been able to get in to make sure, but he’d cast the dogs out to find a trail, and they’d promptly discovered a small footpath leading up and across the northern slope. He consulted a handheld GPS unit from time to time to make sure he was headed in the right direction. He was watchful as he climbed, aware that sometimes there might be other beings watching him. There were some folks up here who enjoyed startling the flatlanders by standing motionless next to a big tree right off the trail and not moving or saying anything until the hikers were within five feet of them. That was one reason he’d brought the dogs-they would spot any human and most game animals long before he ever would. Otherwise, he’d feel obliged to do his hiking Indian-style: move, stop, look, and listen. It was interesting to do it that way, but not if you were trying to get somewhere and back before full dark descended.
He’d gone to a phone booth and talked to Jay-Kay via a landline to find out how she’d sniffed out the cell phone. With the phone company’s help, she’d located the single tower that would serve any cell phone that was activated within five miles of the cabin’s GPS coordinates on the south side of Blackberry Mountain. Then she’d located two other towers within line of sight of the cabin, but much farther away, one to the east and one to the west. Atmospherics aside, there was a higher probability that a signal from a cell phone activated up at or near the cabin would hit the first tower, while being rejected by the other two. But if all three towers recorded a hit, even a rejected hit, the topography of the south slope made it likely that the signal was originating on the mountain. Then she had her tigers initiate a continuous scan of the towers’ servers for a Lexington-area phone meeting these criteria. There had been only one hit like that, and she’d called him immediately. There was always the chance that it had been an itinerant hiker from Lexington, but it was better than the nothing they’d had for days.