Deadly Waters (30 page)

LXXXI

12/07/10 20:21 PST

In spite of the warning Mondragon had given him, Ed Harris had apparently spoken to someone in the media. Five different talk shows and two supermarket tabloids had received e-mails from Oshkosh. These messages told of how Mondragon and Taylor had purchased particular stocks in order to take advantage of the disaster. During his morning outing on the Seventh, a reporter from a despicable rag of a newspaper had followed Mondragon into the coffee bar and had asked him: “Is it true?”

“Go away, young man. I am a private citizen,” Mondragon had told him and at the same time had signaled his antsy bodyguards to stand back. “I’m not some movie actor grateful for publicity. I’m no one. Just a simple businessman. These stories are all pernicious nonsense.”

A few strong words and a slanted eyebrow sufficed to frighten his employees; the same action left the reporter unfazed. The young pup had followed Mondragon into the men’s restroom and later, right to the front door of the Mondragon Building, pestering Erin with provocative questions that revealed an insider’s knowledge of the assaults on the dams. Mondragon needed every ounce of self-restraint he could muster not to have the little snipe beaten senseless.

After much reflection upon the revelations in the gutter press and upon the death of Kenneth Greeley, an event that should have intimidated everyone concerned into total silence, Mondragon concluded as he sat in the chilly foyer of his penthouse that he had been wrong about the colonel. Either Ed Harris was the phantom creating these embarrassing leaks, or he was feeding information to this nameless phantom. Col. Method was far too loyal and too obsessed to betray the conspiracy. Taylor had been watched day and night and had not talked. That left only Harris, but no, he too was the wrong man. Harris and Greeley had been friends. Why would Edward endanger a friend? Had not Harris gotten rich these past two years? What grievances did he have? No, Erin decided he had been correct the first time; these later developments had to be the product of Method’s agitated mind. He would be impossible for the authorities to find. He had no family or friends to protect.

“The mad man is trying to silence us all, one by one,” decided Mondragon. “He created the reports, and he’s pretending to fix the problem he created. That is the only explanation that makes any sense. This has been his doing since the Washington state incidents.”

Immediately he phoned one Vincent De Smit, the one member of his security staff with a real law enforcement background, as Vincent had been a cop in Boston before his brother policemen learned his true nature. Something had happened while Vincent was on duty one night, and someone had ended up in Boston Harbor. Vincent had the build of a shotgun shell and was every bit as emotive as a large piece of ammunition. No one in California knew exactly what he had done in his past life. When asked a question, Vincent never gave a straight answer. Some who knew him thought his taciturn ways showed an unexpected thoughtfulness in the man. Mondragon knew the man’s way of behaving actually showed how little was working above the twin mounds that were Vincent’s shoulders. The man in question sidled into Mondragon’s office fresh from the break room, baker’s sugar still on his mouth and fingers.

“What do you think about going to Wisconsin?” Mondragon asked him.

“Cold,” said De Smit after he had time to think upon that portion of the upper Midwest.

“Take a friend of your choosing, someone from the security detail, and a road map,” Mondragon told him. “I have some guard duty for you to do in Oshkosh.”

LXXXII

12/09/10 02:12 CST

Bob Mathers sat in his pick-up in the December Wisconsin cold, alternately turning his motor off and on to coax a little warmth from the heater. To ease the cold he had tried lighting some large hurricane candles he had gotten at Wal-Mart. The man in the hardware department had assured him that in case of an emergency, a single candle in its long glass cylinder would keep him alive through the worst blizzard. Bob had lit all four candles that came in the pack and still was shivering as he sat on Nineteenth Street in the suburban South Park area of Oshkosh and downed his sixth cup of coffee. He had been anxious throughout the night. Every thirty seconds or so he swore he could see the tall man he had spied in Alabama walking down the sidewalk toward Ed Harris’ home down the block from his truck.

“Could be him,” Bob had time to think when another figure walked past. As soon as he had framed that thought he saw another man follow a tall figure into the front yard of the Harris house. This second man ran across the shadowy lawn in front of Harris’ two story house from the opposite direction. The tall man passing Bob on the sidewalk managed to open the front door’s lock and enter the house as quickly as the other man floated across the snow covered grass, and Bob Mathers could not have said which of the two was more daring. The second figure entered the house only footsteps behind the first. After hours of watching the silent street in the winter cold, the unexpected speed of the anticipated event when it finally arrived created a strangely fascinating scene that made Bob keep watching to see what happened, rather than take any action.

Bob had seen Ed Harris twice during his surveillance of the house. The thirty-one year old engineer had decided not to run elsewhere despite what he had said to Mondragon concerning leaving Wisconsin. He was familiar with his home and electronics, and he had used the past week to place motion detectors around the parameter of his two acre estate.

*

Vincent De Smit was stationed in the front rooms while the other man from Mondragon’s security detail kept watch in the back. Beneath the peaked second floor roof that stood over the rest of the sprawling house like a watchtower over castle battlements was a third man, one Harris had hired himself, and this one was armed with an automatic rifle. Because of the electronic equipment Harris, and
his
three men had spotted Bob Mathers’ truck twice during the previous day and had suspected that he was Col. Method on a reconnaissance mission. The heavily armed household had been put on full alert. The four men were going to learn in the next seventeen seconds that caution is not prevention. They had seen Method coming long before Bob had. De Smit had actually succeeded in getting a few dozen steps behind the veteran of countless dirty little battles. Stopping Method was going to be much harder.

*

From his truck Bob saw rapid flashes of red light behind the darkened windows of the house. His rational mind knew these were gunshots, but they did not sound like gunshots Bob had heard on the firing range. From inside Harris’ home they sounded like dud firecrackers, fizzing and half-heartedly popping in the still, frigid air. Bob saw the black figure of Ed Harris race from the right-hand side of the house and down the white lawn toward Nineteenth Street.

The tall man threw a living room coffee table through the front bay window; the ferocious old man followed the heavy rectangle of black through the broken glass and onto the snowy lawn. The sixty-seven year old warrior leapt forward like a broad jumper a third his age and swiftly assumed a shooter’s stance, his knee down and both hands on his pistol. Ed Harris was seventy feet away as the tall man drew his bead on the back of the engineer’s head. The colonel did not hurry; he let Harris reach the street, let him put his hand on the end of a parked car, then fired a single, precise bullet. The engineer pitched forward a step, stumbled a few more steps to his right, and fell. His body lay in an awkward heap, his knees tucked underneath his abdomen.

“Holy shit,” whispered Bob, and slowly lowered himself behind his steering wheel so that only one eye was looking over the dashboard. He knew, then, that this had to be Col. Method. The killer walked toward the body, swaggering in triumph and popping another clip into his weapon; he intended to blast two more bullets into Harris’ skull, as he did to all his victims.

Bob Mathers had the eerie feeling he was watching how Wayland Zah had died. Method was raising his pistol to fire, probably smiling in the darkness at a job well done, when a man with an automatic rifle hiding beneath the high peaked roof on the house’s second floor let fly a streak of fire that showed bright red against the night sky. Method turned and blazed away at his attacker.

For what seemed to be five minutes but was really only a couple seconds pandemonium overcame the quiet residential street. Lights came on for blocks around. Dogs barked across southern Oshkosh in response to the gun shots. Snarling pieces of lead ricocheted off the pavement and zipped through the windows of parked cars. Everywhere on Nineteenth Street groggy men in t-shirts and women in curlers and bathrobes appeared on front porches asking what the devil was going on.

As soon as they saw what the devil was doing, they darted back inside their houses to dial 911. The shooting ended as suddenly as if a film director had yelled “cut.” The rifleman on the second floor pitched forward through the brittle glass panes, and his firearm went rattling over the eaves.

Method attempted to get himself upright and away from the people watching him from their doorways. On the white lawn where he had turned to fire he had made a wide patch black with lost blood; another man might have laid down in the cold and given up his life right there. Motivated by a will so strong it propelled his injured body onward, Method got to the sidewalk and staggered on wounded legs in the direction of his car. Bob Mathers held his breath while the tall man passed his truck and once more ducked his head below his dashboard. He heard Method mutter to himself when he drew even to his passenger door: “Be more careful,” he heard him say, a self-warning that came a little too late in this instance. Bob counted to twenty before raising his head again. By then he could see Method’s back swaying over the bare sidewalk as he progressed slowly toward his parked car.

Bob’s mind at once became clear amid the swelling noise and the scores of lights switching on along both sides of the street; he knew he had to drive out of there that very instant. The police were going to arrive at any moment. If they blocked the street they would stop everyone attempting to leave the scene; a search of his car would produce his service revolver and the reams of information he had collected on Harris, and Bob could not talk himself out of that fix.

He turned the key in his ignition and engaged the clutch, but kept his head down lest Method turn and fire a last shot in Bob’s rear window. In the mounting confusion on Nineteenth Street the tall man did not pay any heed to a single vehicle that was headed in the opposite direction. Bob was turning the corner of the block when he saw the blinking lights atop the first police car arriving in his rear-view mirror. He was not on scene to see Method fall on his way to this automobile, or to see the colonel rise and reach the inside of the car. Bob Mathers was two blocks away the moment two more police cars arrived in the neighborhood and sealed up the other end of the street, blocking the badly wounded Method’s last route of escape.

Not until eight-thirty in the morning did Bob learn how the carnage in front of Harris’ home had ended. He was sitting inside a Fond du Lac diner approximately twenty miles south of the gunfight and sipping another cup of coffee (this would be the ninth one he had downed during the long night) when he saw a special broadcast on the television at the end of the long linoleum-topped counter. “Bloodbath in the Heartland,” read the caption over the wrinkled forehead of a serious looking female reporter standing in front of the yards of the late Ed Harris’ home, which was now decorated with yellow crime scene tape. She told her audience in her best journalist voice that three men had been found shot dead in the house behind her, a fourth was discovered lying murdered on the front yard, and a fifth man, a man police said had possibly killed the other four, had shot himself inside a car parked yards from the Harris household.

“Police spokespersons speculate,” explained the newswoman, “that the killer saw he was trapped. Badly wounded and with little hopes of shooting his way out of the vicinity, the unknown killer put his own gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

Bob Mathers paid for his coffee with a five dollar bill and told the waitress to keep the change. Back inside his pick-up he scratched off two more names from a list of names he had been carrying for the past twenty-three days.

LXXXIII

12/13/10 10:00 CST

“You were in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department?” asked FBI agent Mark Lingworth of Bob Mathers as the two men sat in the agency’s Milwaukee office.

“Police,” said Bob. “I was in the L.A. Police Department. We worked together on the Allison kidnapping case in 1996 when you were stationed on the west coast.”

“I remember your face, Mr. Mathers,” conceded Lingworth. “I’m bad with names, good with faces. You say you’re in the security business now?”

“Yes.”

“You understand we can’t get involved in a private firm’s business,” said Agent Lingworth. “The Bureau has strict guidelines.”

“This isn’t a private matter,” said Bob and placed a folder on the agent’s desk. “Four days ago there was a multiple murder in Oshkosh.”

“Most murders are not a federal concern, either,” said Agent Lingworth. “Those, as you know, are local concerns.”

“How about if the murders were committed by a former federal agent?”

“What sort of fed?” asked Lingworth, remaining unruffled despite the peculiar turn the conversation was taking. “Surely not one of ours?”

“One of the five men they found on the scene, the one who killed the other four, then shot himself, was Michael Method,” said Bob. “He was once a full colonel in the Army, Special Forces no less, and he was an operative at various times for the CIA, and maybe for other agencies in the intelligence community.”

“Mr. Mathers,” said Lingworth, folding his hands on his desk top, “as a former law enforcement officer you can appreciate how many cranks contact this office in any given month, claiming they know JFK’s real assassin and that maybe a Chinese spy is living next door to them. Put yourself in my position: would you believe somebody off the street saying that this dead man in Oshkosh was once some kind of high level intelligence operative?”

“The locals in Oshkosh can’t identify the body, can they?” said Bob. “Don’t be surprised. I don’t have an inside source anywhere in Wisconsin. I know everything concerning Method is secure. He might as well have never been born.”

“If he’s a man never born,” said Lingworth, “how are we going to know this is him?”

Bob took several stapled papers from the folder he had placed on the desk. “This is a summary of the lab evidence in the unsolved murder of Wayland Zah, which took place in Utah in May of 2009,” explained Bob. “Notice the MO: three 7.6 millimeter bullets to the head.”

Lingworth put on his half-lens reading spectacles and had a look. “So?”

“Stay with me,” said Bob, producing a second stapled packet. “This is a similar report of a triple murder in Washington state last summer. The same MO: Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe and Abraham Wilson were all shot three times in the head with a 7.6 millimeter gun. Compare the signatures of bullets with those in the Utah murders. They’re all fired from the same weapon, an antique Lugar, probably from the Second World War.”

“Really?” said Lingworth and held the papers side by side.

“Last, here is the report on the murders of Kenneth Greeley and Lilly McCoy in Alexander City, Alabama, earlier this month,” said Bob and handed the agent a third packet. “Again, the same gun, the same type of bullet in their heads. These were supposed to look like a double suicide, however, the bullets don’t match the gun they found in Mr. Greeley’s hand. I don’t have any reports from Oshkosh, but I can bet you’ll find Method used the same gun there, too. He was hurried up there. Maybe he didn’t have time to put more than one bullet in each of his victims, otherwise, I’m sure everything else will match up. You’ve got nothing to lose by looking. If I’m one of your cranks, you’ve lost five minutes. If I’m right, you’re the hero.”

Lingworth looked at the packets, then rechecked them in his distinctive, deliberate way. “Not a bad piece of detective work, Mr. Mathers,” he concluded. “I won’t ask what a security guard is doing with three police files, still... very good. A couple questions come to mind, however, Mr. Mathers. First, why on earth did you come to me? I could have you held in custody, at least for a time, anyway.”

“As I remember, sir, your wife was sick thirteen years ago,” said Bob.

“Yes, Betty is a breast cancer survivor,” nodded Lingworth.

“During the Allison investigation, you had to tend to your wife,” recalled Bob Mathers. “Another field agent, I think his name was Butler, took charge of the case.”

For the first time in the interview the serene visage of Agent Lingworth betrayed an unguarded emotion. At the mention of the hated name “Butler,” a tic developed in his right eye, and he whispered “yes.”

“As I recall,” Bob continued, “Mr. Butler became a local director, and you…?”

“I am still a field agent, in Milwaukee,” said Lingworth. “Your point is?”

“I thought you were a man who wouldn’t mind becoming a hero,” said Bob.

As when he deliberated upon the packets, Lingworth tapped his fingers upon the papers while he thought.

“What was your second question?” asked Bob.

“How,” asked Lingworth, “did you know about this Method person? A good cop might have put together the murders. I admit you’ve got me believing you’re onto something there. I don’t get any of this cloak and dagger nonsense. Why would you know anything of his intelligence activities?”

“A man in a bar in San Francisco told me,” said Bob. “He said Method had connections to every one of the victims. They had been in South America together, mixed up in some secret operation.”

Bob did not say that the man in the bar was John Taylor, or that the secret operation was the attack on the dams. Taylor and Mondragon were names that had already been in the tabloid press, and a tough-minded agent of Lingworth’s mold would shy away from sensational stories.

“What man in a San Francisco bar?” asked Lingworth.

“He didn’t tell me his name,” lied Bob. “I only know he was somehow tied to the same business in South America.”

While not the most brilliant investigator the FBI had ever employed, Agent Lingworth was more than competent at his job. After conducting thousands of interrogations over the course of thirty-one years he certainly could tell a blatant lie when an amateur liar like Bob laid one before him. He tapped his fingers again while he decided he would, at this stage in his career, indeed rather become a hero than find out the entire truth.

“This had better be good,” he said as he reached for the telephone to call the Oshkosh Police Department.