“A consortium owns it,” she said. “I lease it. I never own the place where I live. That way, I can walk away at a moment’s notice if it suits me. But I am the only one who works and lives here.”
She took him into the expansive living room and offered coffee. He found the light a bit strong and was thinking about putting his sunglasses back on, when she picked up a remote and changed the tint of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“How many folks work for you?” he asked, savoring the strong coffee.
“The number varies. I don’t have regular employees except for Sharon, the woman downstairs. I form teams when I need to, because each job requires specific expertise. Most of my employees are computers.”
“And where are the tigers?” he asked.
“Downstairs in the lab. I have a terminal up here, of course. The sheriff was a bit vague as to what he wanted me to do.”
“Are you still working with the Bureau?” he asked.
“I have no active contracts going right now,” she said. “If they call, of course I go.”
“And did the ATF take over the bombing investigation?”
“All these questions, Just Cam. What is it we’re doing here, please?”
He got up from the low leather couch, which had begun to make his back ache. “I’m not entirely sure, Jay-Kay,” he said, going over to one of the windows. The traffic down in the city streets was not audible. “I’m officially on a leave of absence, which means no badge, no police powers whatsoever. The sheriff wants me to find out if there’s a vigilante squad in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office.” He turned to face her. “I told him I’d need computer support of the covert variety-a way into old case files and the county law enforcement’s E-mail system.”
“Looking for?”
“Again not sure,” he admitted. “Evidence, preferably. Indications of past cases that might resemble what happened to the two minimart robbers. E-mail chatter about the bombing. What the cops are saying about the ATF’s investigation. The sheriff has come around to the notion that he might have a problem. He wants to look into it before anyone else does.”
“What will he do if we uncover evidence of such a thing?”
“Bobby Lee? He’ll pull the State Bureau of Investigation in and then hold a press conference.”
“He wouldn’t cover it up?”
Cam didn’t even have to think about his answer. “Negative. Bobby Lee Baggett’s so straight that he can’t cross his eyes.”
She put down her coffee cup and joined him at the window. “It just seems a bit strange to me, having observed the federal agencies, that he would employ a single undercover agent to suss all this out, and not, say, his Internal Affairs, or even the feds themselves.”
He was conscious that they were just about the same height. He thought he could detect a hint of perfume in her jet black hair. “I think it’s more a case of his wanting to know stuff before anyone else does. He has a way of doing that in his outfit. When he asks an embarrassing question, he usually already knows the answer. Plus, cops investigating cops is a delicate business.”
“How so?”
“Well, in a Sheriff’s Office, all the veterans came up together. We’ve protected one another’s backs on many an occasion. Sometimes we owe our lives to another cop, and we all have to act that way when we hit a tactical situation. There’s an assumption of perfect trust. Hard to investigate someone whom you trust absolutely. And afterward, that trust is forever impaired.”
“And why will you be able to do any better job of that?”
He smiled. “Because I have an overriding personal interest in finding out who killed Annie Bellamy.”
“But not who killed the two robbers in that horrible chair?”
He turned to face her. “Actually, I know who did that. Ready to keep some secrets?”
When she said yes, he told her she’d been right about Marlor’s cell phone. He described the discussion in the mountain cabin and what had happened afterward. He also told her about the warning from the mysterious deputy who had paid him a visit. She went back to the couch and sat down when he was finished. “Does anyone else know this? That James Marlor is dead?”
“I don’t think so, unless I was being followed. And I have to admit to making an assumption that he killed himself and didn’t, say, fire a shot into the woods to make me think he had. He could still be alive.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No, I don’t. He had nothing left to live for, and he seemed determined.”
She was nodding as he said that. “He must have had some help,” she said.
“Obviously. Somebody steered him to those two guys. He admitted that. And he sent a reply, telling whoever had contacted him where that chair was.”
“Which by now they’ve done away with?”
“Not necessarily,” he said, remembering all those approving comments of the cops who had watched the videos.
“And this is not a double standard here?” she asked. “It’s okay for Marlor, with police help, to have killed the two robbers, but not okay for someone else, possibly police, to have killed the judge?”
“All these questions,” Cam said, throwing her own words back at her. “Yes, it’s a double standard. Annie Bellamy was a valuable human being. The two mutts were not. Plus, that account is squared: Marlor did what he had to do, and now he’s dead, too.” He paused for a second. “I seem to remember you talking about heads on stakes in the public square?”
She colored slightly and then nodded. “Yes, I did say that. And I have no problem with what Marlor did. I just wanted to be sure you are firm in your convictions, Just Cam. Because if you uncover the police who are doing this, it will be a war. No time for second thoughts then. Especially if they find out what you’re doing before you are finished doing it.”
Cam stared down at the floor for a moment. He knew he’d crossed a significant bridge when he’d let Marlor do himself in. “Yeah, I understand that. How about you? You still want to get involved in this? It could be as dangerous for you as for me.”
“It sounds like an interesting challenge,” she said with a shrug. “Besides, I’m an excitement junkie.”
He laughed. “Remember those words,” he said. “Now, I’d like to see if you can find my new truck.”
She gave him a blank look and he explained how he had purchased a new truck. “Every cop on the force knows my old Merc. Not as many knew my old pickup truck, which I suspect is now speaking Spanish. I want to know if my little deception worked.”
She picked up the window remote and darkened the windows. Then she picked up a second remote and pointed it at what looked like a blank wallpapered section of the living room’s interior wall. Two panels drew back and exposed a square forty-eight-inch flat-screen display. The faces of two Bengal tigers were drifting around the screen in a screensaver motion. She spoke a single command in a language Cam didn’t recognize. The tigers growled in unison, disappeared, and were replaced with an organizational chart of the North Carolina government. A bright cursor was blinking on the governor’s box. She gave more voice commands, which moved the cursor down to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and then the screen was replaced with a single box. She spoke a series of words, which caused numbers to appear in the box, and then the screen blinked and a database page that allowed one to search listings for registered drivers appeared. She spoke individual letters that spelled out Cam’s full name, and two vehicles came up, along with his North Carolina driver’s license.
“How do you happen to have that password?” Cam asked.
“The Bureau gave me one for the last project. It allows access to all state databases.”
“They just hand that out to contractors?”
“No, they hand it out for specific case projects. The password is retired when the contract expires. But: the numbers are generated from a sequential list of numbers allocated to the Charlotte field office. I have that list. My machines simply pick a number that hasn’t been issued yet, like the last one I used, plus a few hundred digits down the list. Are those your old vehicles?”