"Ms. Baum, if you're implying some kind of kinship between your suspect and the agency he used to work for, you are being overly suspicious and naive."
The columnist stared back.
"Do you honestly believe we wouldn't investigate him because of his former employment with us?"
Baum touched her napkin to her lips, then spread it onto her lap. "I don't know what to believe."
"Then I'll tell you. Believe in us."
Baum leaned forward, her voice a hiss and her eyes luminous with the inward light of emotion. " Then talk to me/"
Sharon sat back and again stared hard into Susan Baum's eyes. She tried to look pitying, respectful and admiring all at once.
She'll do anything to get inside. She'll lap up our truth like one of John's dogs.
"We have something," Sharon said finally. "That's one of the reasons it took some time to meet with you. We had to make some connections, gather some more facts. We're sorry for what must seem like an incredible delay. But we've been busy, I can assure you. In fact, Susan, right now you could safely say that we're hot."
Baum said nothing, but kept her brilliant green eyes on Dumars.
"We have a suspect. And we're ready to go public with it."
Baum's face turned an excited pink and her eyes seemed to grow even brighter. " Who?"
"I think we should talk about this somewhere else. Let's finish up and take a walk. Okay?"
"Oh, I'm finished."
CHAPTER 11
They strolled down the boardwalk at Laguna's Main Beach, but Sharon knew Baum could not go far. It was Josh's idea to "pre-fatigue" her, loosen her up for gullibility as a picador would loosen up a bull for the sword. The poor columnist was sweating hard and limping badly before they'd gone a hundred yards She'd pulled a hat from her bag and jammed it down over her hair, and slipped on a big white windbreaker. She kept looking behind them.
"I don't like looking the same for more than about one hour," Baum stated. "But it's hard on the wardrobe."
"It's okay, Susan. You're okay here with me."
They sat on two multicolored ceramic seats with a multicolored ceramic stand and chessboard between them. Sharon looked out at the autumn Pacific-waveless, breeze-brushed, silver.
Along the boardwalk tourists wandered, taking pictures. Locals smashed volleyballs back and forth in the sand while further down the beach two basketball courts teemed with jerking, jumping bodies. Offshore stood two jagged black rocks topped with birds that didn't so much as flutter when the swell heaved up around them. Sharon could even see Catalina Island, twenty miles away, a low shape separating the metallic sea from a pale blue sky. She liked this town. She had lived here her junior year in college with her boyfriend. The city and its beaches always brought back memories of her love, his betrayal, the way they went from being happy to being over. Donny. That was almost a decade ago.
"His name is Mark Foster," Sharon said. "He's twenty-four, a drifter, a criminal. At the time of Rebecca's death he was living in Huntington Beach, hanging out at a White Supremacist compound in Newport."
"Alamo West," said Baum. "I wrote about it."
"We think you might have touched an even bigger nerve than you usually do," said Sharon, flatteringly.
"I tried to be nice to those skinhead Nazi morons. It was my chance to be forgiving. But the man who runs the place-that reverend?-he actually made me nauseous. I do remember that Mark Foster was less of a swine than the others, or seemed to be. Funny though, I've forgotten which one he was."
"This might help."
Sharon removed from her briefcase the file supplied by Norton. On top was one photograph of Foster-a mug shot taken by Gainesville Police back in 1988. There were two others: one a mug taken by police in Eaton, Colorado, 1992; the other a snapshot of Foster and friends at a neo-Nazi skinhead rally in Huntington Beach, 1994. His face wasn't very clear in this nighttime shot because Mark and his friends were gathered around a bonfire, some holding torches, some holding beers, and the photographer was obviously an amateur.
"The Journal ran this picture with my column," said Baum.
"Right. We've got a rap sheet on him, too. Burglary, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, public drunkenness, public disturbance. To be honest, Susan, it took the Bureau some time after Rebecca's death to start poking around Alamo West. I mean, we had quite a list of people you'd attacked in the Journal."
"I didn't attack anyone at Alamo West."
"That's why we didn't scrutinize them at first. But you did condescend to them. To some people, that's worse than a full offensive."
"Well, I was a little… maybe, pitying."
"Maybe Jewish women shouldn't condescend to neo-Nazi men, Susan."
Dumars wondered if she was laying it on a little thick. She had the psychological equivalent of a choke-hold right now, and years of law enforcement training had taught her to never, ever surrender an advantage. Still, she flinched inwardly at her own feigned superiority. To hide this, she took a deep breath and looked knowingly at the columnist.
Baum nodded as Dumars continued.
"The man you suspected, by the way-Vann Holt-was someone we looked hard at, early. He cleared. So congratulations on your instincts, Susan. Maybe you've got a career with the Bureau if you ever get tired of newspaper work. Anyway, Holt isn't and never was our man. But by the time we started focusing in on Alamo West, Mark Foster was gone."
"And?"
"Remains so. We've gotten unverified reports that he headed up into the Pacific Northwest. If he shows his snout, we'll hook it."
"Wonderful language. Can I quote you?"
"Absolutely." Dumars smiled then, but it felt strange to be smiling and lying at the same time. She wondered if the columnist could sense her duplicity. Sharon had never considered herself an even passable deceiver, but Joshua had told her it was time to learn the craft. To deceive successfully, he said, began with belief in one's self. Like a religion, it required faith. If you had that, it was as easy as falling into bed.
"I can give you this file copy, if you'd like. I ran it on our best machine, but it's still a little blurred. The photos are really pretty decent."
Baum accepted the file, her eyes dancing with curiosity and pleasure. "What led you to Foster?"
"First, we matched all the people you'd written about negatively against their potential as killers. You'd hit the Boy Scouts pretty hard for opposing gay troop leaders and insisting on mentioning God in their pledge, but we didn't think the Boy Scouts of America would target you for assassination. You had a field day with the tobacco lobbyist who summers in Newport Beach, the GI Joe designer who lived in Fullerton and the Christian recording label out in Irvine, but are they killers? No. So, once we cast our net wide enough, we came up with Alamo West. A different story. We'd heard rumors that some members had planned violence against a local synagogue, and were targeting an Orange County group called One Hundred Black Men. We weren't convinced they had the, uh, the…"
"Balls?"
"… Well, resources for that, but we try to keep an eye on those kinds of people as a matter of course. Maybe, if Foster had just stuck around to answer our questions we might not have Dance latched onto him so fast. You can imagine how skittish these types are, after Oklahoma City. But he didn't stick around. No doubt the reverend tipped him to our interest, and that was enough. In Mark's sudden absence we managed to turn up, at his last residence, a box of . 30/06 ammunition similar to that used on Ms. Harris. There were two cartridges missing from the box. We also found copies of your column on Alamo West. The clincher was a letter addressed to you that we assume he never mailed. It was in a safe deposit box that took some time to get into. In it, he implied that he would love to kill you because you were a Jew and a traitor to America and a fool."