“Man, everybody in our district knew Al Runciman. He was famous, one of the very first Echelon contractors, before they ever set up shop in Lordsburg. I met him the week I got taken on, we worked together a whole five years out of the Lordsburg office—”
Lordsburg? Echelon is in Lordsburg?
“—covered the whole of New Mexico down to the border, most of eastern Colorado, even got into the Four Corners a few times, if the business required—”
What the hell was Fremont talking about?
“Anyway, Al was one of the best carjackers I’d ever seen. Also good with any lock, even better with alarm systems. Great cook too, which counts if you’re wintering in a safe house up in the Absarokas. He was as good a saucier as ever popped a cork. A friend too. I hadn’t heard from him in over two weeks—”
“How’d he communicate?” asked Dalton, plucking the burning cigarette butt from Fremont’s lips just before it scorched his nose.
“MSN chat. Through a cloaked server. His persona was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. New name every week. Tell you the truth, Al was kind of a free spirit. His off-duty hobby was trolling the Web for Short Eyes. Half his in-box was chat messages from pedophiles. He’d string them on for weeks, months, then arrange a meeting in some out-of-the-way place somewhere.”
“He beat them up?”
“Al wasn’t a mean guy, ’less you pushed. No, he’d mark them.”
“Mark them? How?”
“In Lordsburg me and Al came up with this spray, only showed up in certain kinds of light — laser, some ultraviolet, certain fluorescents. We used it to tag containers, freight cars, trucks. We had laser sensors installed at rail yards and truck stops and we’d kind of keep an eye on individual shipments. It was great stuff. Permanent. Bonds on a molecular level. You get it on your skin, it’s worse than a tattoo. You have to peel the skin off right down to the fat to get rid of it. I mean, radical cosmetic surgery. Nothing else works.”
He raised his hands against the restraints, wiggled his fingers.
“I got it on my fingertips. You need a black light to see it. Anyway, Al’s sister had a daughter, eleven, she was stalked and raped by one of these Internet cockroaches. Guy got two years, gets out, six weeks later he’s at it again. Lures this thirteen-year-old boy into a meeting and just goes all medieval on his… well, it was real bad. Boy lived, in a way, but he eventually hung himself in his bedroom. So Al thinks there’s gotta be a way to tag these creeps for life. We had access to NCIC in those days, so Al would search out all the guys who were registered offenders — all this in his spare time — find his MSN chat name, set him up, take him down in a park, the woods, an alley, coldcock him, strip him naked, truss him up, and use this adhesive latex stencil he had worked up to mark the guy’s forehead with I AM A CONVICTED CHILD MOLESTER. U.S. Army — style letters. Guys came to, all they’d know is that they’d been mugged. Wouldn’t know what was on their foreheads until they went into a bar or someplace that had the right kind of lighting. Peeler bars. Laser tag places. Airport security. Dentists’ offices. Any bathroom with old fluorescent lighting. But when that tag lit up, you should have seen their faces. Al tagged nineteen repeat sex offenders before he had to stop.”
“And why did he have to stop?”
“Al was a great guy, but he could show you a mean streak if you pissed him off. He turned up one guy who he’d tagged once already. The guy was right back at it, surfing the Web. So Al gelded him.”
“Castrated him?”
“Yeah. The whole apparatus too. Steve and the Twins, all at once, Bob’s your uncle. Guy didn’t feel a thing. At least, not until he woke up, anyway. I guess it woulda smarted a bit then. Al wore surgical gloves, had everything sterilized like it was an operation. He used a real honest-to-God sheep-gelding tool on him. He said the wound bled way less than if you used a razor or a knife. Said it was more humane. Anyway, off they come, snippety-snip. Fed the guy’s dick to a dog and threw the guy’s orchids into a bark-chipper. Didn’t want to leave a mess.”
“I think body parts are biodegradable, Willard.”
“So I’m told. Anyway, Al didn’t want to kill him. He just wanted to relieve him. Of his sex drive. Which this procedure usually does. Al’s mistake was letting his sense of fun get loose. He left a business card pinned to this guy’s shirt.”
“His business card?”
“No. No, from a veterinarian’s office in Twin Falls. Dr. Franz Kaltvasser. He’s a real guy too. Al stole a pile of his cards from his front office a long while back, when he had to take his dog in for surgery. Kaltvasser was a horse doctor, specialized in gelding stallions. His slogan was ‘The Kindest Cut.’ Al thought the cards were a hoot, he used to hand them out at bars, pretend he was the guy, just to see the looks on people’s faces. He’d tell ’em to just call him Fritzie, go into detail about all these horses he’d gelded, play it real straight, string the folks along. Got himself too famous, and since what Al did to this molester — guy actually kind of died, not from the gelding but from a clot a week later, which Al figured any ER doc could have prevented with some heparin — well, it was too much for the Idaho Staties. Tagging the perps was okay, but gelding them was kind of bad PR for the law-enforcement side of things. The Agency got him off the manslaughter charge, but Al had to promise to retire his hobby. Like I said, Al was kind of a free spirit.”
“What happened to him?”
“Over two weeks go by and no MSN message. It wasn’t like Al. I was in that cabin up near Bonners Ferry — this was before I knew I was in the shit, before the shooter made his first run on me. I was worried about Al a little. He’d been drinking, kinda running to seed. I figured I owed him a drop-around, at least.”
Fremont’s voice trailed away.
“And?”
“And I found him in his double-wide on the outskirts of Mountain Home, laid out on the fold-down table. Dead maybe a week. Skinned alive. You can tell. Gutted. Al died hard, from the look on his face, which I’ll take to my grave. Walls all covered with graffiti. Damnedest thing I’d ever seen. Nothing I could do for him but to torch the place, give him a Viking funeral you know, and run like the hounds of Hell was on my heels.”
His voice trailed off and Dalton heard him moving around in the backseat with an audible clinking sound.
“Look, I don’t mean to complain, but these shackles are chafing me fierce. Okay if we slip ’em off? I’m not going anywhere.”
Dalton, caught up in the Al Runciman saga, had completely forgotten that Fremont was still bound up in irons and a waist belt. He looked up the road. They were passing through a deep granite defile blasted through the living rock and just passing a slow-moving RV in the curb lane. There was a big green road sign just ahead, which Dalton strained to read.
“Christ. Yes. I think there’s a rest stop a mile up. We’ll pull over and get them off. Sorry. I forgot all about them. What’d you do about Runciman?”
“I told you. I torched his trailer and ran like hell.”
“You didn’t wonder who killed him? Tortured him?”
“Sure I did. But what was I gonna do, on my own?”
“You coulda gone to the cops.”
Fremont was silent for a time. “Yeah. You’re right. I coulda. Maybe I shoulda.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. Look, this is no excuse. But it’s an answer.”
“I’m listening.”
“Covert. We were all covert. Our unit. Going to the cops, that’s not your first instinct when you’re off the grid. You get a man down, doctrine says you put some distance between you and your guy. Way Al died, it looked like… like vengeance. Retribution.”