A Fine Line (18 page)

“And this SOLF, they’re hitting back at them.”

“Exactly. They’ve caused nearly a hundred million dollars in damage in the past ten years.”

“And they kill people?” I said.

“Before last week, no,” said Randall. “Mr. Duffy and Mr. Frye were the first. Before that, SOLF only hit places when nobody was there.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Walt Duffy was a famous bird lover. He photographed them for a living. Hell, he spent the last year of his life on crutches, feeding the birds in his little garden on Beacon Hill. And Ben Frye was a peace-loving old hippie pothead. Hardly what you’d call an enemy of bird habitat. Why would these people want to kill them?”

Randall nodded. “We are hoping you might help us figure that out.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“Did Walter Duffy ever mention SOLF to you? Or express anger toward any particular industries? Or comment in any way about arson fires?”

“No,” I said.

“Mr. Coyne,” she said with infinite patience, “two men, friends of yours, are dead.”

“Yes. I’m very aware of that. I never heard of SOLF—the
word or the acronym—before that video tape.”

She narrowed her eyes at me for a moment, then shrugged. “It you say so.”

The others in the room had been following Randall’s interrogation of me with impassive faces. Horowitz looked bored, as if he’d heard it all before. Mendoza had her hands folded on the table in front of her. Keeler kept shuffling through his sheaf of papers.

“Aaron,” said Randall to Agent Elliot, “give Mr. Coyne a copy of Document C, would you?”

Elliot, who seemed to be Randall’s subordinate, pushed some papers across the table to me.

I looked at them. There were four pages stapled together. In capital letters across the top were the words: DUFFY, WALTER. ITINERARY 1992–2001. It was a list of places, and beside each place was a date. In the left margin, some of the places had asterisks typed in beside them.

I skimmed through the pages. Bend and Eugene, Oregon had asterisks, as did Olympia and Seattle, Washington. San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego. Aspen and Denver. Chicago and St. Louis and New Orleans . . .

“What’s your point?” I said to Randall.

“These are places Walter Duffy visited during the ten years before his accident, and the dates he was there.”

I smiled. “I figured that much.”

“The asterisks,” she said, “are places where SOLF strikes occurred.”

“And I suppose the dates match up somehow,” I said.

She nodded. “Within two months after Mr. Duffy’s departure, in each of those cases, SOLF hit something in the area.”

“Walt had already left, so he couldn’t have set any of those fires, right?”

“That’s right.”

I thumbed through the list. “He seems to have visited a lot of places where there were no SOLF strikes.”

“That’s true.”

“Has SOLF hit any places that don’t match up with Walt’s travels?”

“Yes,” she said. “Many.”

I shrugged. “Then . . .”

“It’s a pattern, Mr. Coyne.”

“So,” I said, “you’re trying to say that Walt Duffy was involved with SOLF? That he had something to do with these fires?”

She nodded. “We have reason to believe he was, yes.”

“Based on this?” I slapped the sheaf of papers with the back of my hand.

“Based on several things,” she said. “Including that.”

“Well,” I said, “you know more about it than I do.”

“Perhaps.”

I looked at Horowitz. He grinned at me. When Roger Horowitz grinned, he looked like Jack Nicholson. His Nicholson grin had no mirth to it whatsoever.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to Randall. “How come I never heard of this SOLF?”

“What they’re after is publicity,” she said. “They want to spread their message. They destroy property to draw attention to their message. We’ve been fairly successful in, um, convincing the media to keep SOLF out of the public’s eye. We do not want a videotape such as the one we just looked at to be on the evening news.”

Agent Randall went over to her chair, sat down across from me, put her forearms on the table, and leaned forward. “Let me tell you about SOLF,” she said.

In 1990, Randall said, the northern spotted owl, a rare, reclusive bird that lived only in mature forests in the Pacific Northwest, was declared a threatened subspecies, and cutting timber in the birds’ habitat was banned. Almost immediately, the spotted owl came to symbolize the conflict between conservationists and those whose livelihoods depended on harvesting the bounty of the earth—loggers, miners, farmers, ranchers. In that part of the country, at least, the decision to protect spotted owl habitat was wildly unpopular. Locals saw it as a conspiracy between liberal east coast politicians, selfserving bureaucrats, and radical environmentalists to destroy their old and honorable way of life. Bumper stickers with messages like “Kill a spotted owl, spare a woodcutter’s child” began appearing in Washington, Oregon, Montana, and northern California.

Then in September of 1991 an out-of-work Oregon logger named Emil Pritchard announced to the Portland media that he was taking his chain saw into a restricted Oregon forest, and he was going to cut down some spotted owl houses. The TV cameras followed him into the woods that day, and so did a crowd of supporters, who cheered him on as he felled half a dozen big oak trees.

Emil Pritchard, to his disappointment, was not arrested. The local police sympathized with his plight, and the feds opted for discretion. Still, it was a big story in the local news.

Two nights later, Pritchard’s house burned to the ground. Somebody called a local television station and claimed that the fire was the work of a group calling itself the Spotted Owl Liberation Front.

The TV station ran the story, and one of the networks picked it up. And that was the beginning.

Arson fires in several states, all, directly or indirectly, aimed at enemies of bird habitat, followed. All were claimed by SOLF.

Once it became an interstate matter, the FBI got involved. Their first move was to keep SOLF out of the media.

“For a long time,” said Pauline Randall, “we believed they were just isolated little knots of local amateur environmental radicals. College kids. Hippies. Dropouts. Get-a-lifers. We caught a few of them. They wouldn’t tell us anything. They all just spouted their propaganda, thrilled at the chance to be martyrs for their righteous cause. They didn’t seem to have any organization, any plan, any leadership. No different from a lot of other fringe elements. Poor, aimless souls who thought they’d discovered a grand way to give meaning to their own pitiful lives. Ever read
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, Mr. Coyne?”

I nodded.

“These SOLF people were like them, we thought. Kooks. Every burned-down warehouse and factory was a message, a way to spread their gospel. They figured the righteousness of their mission would eventually convert a corrupt and misguided nation.”

“True believers,” I said.

Randall nodded.

“No publicity,” I said, “no way to spread the gospel. Eventually it would dry up and go away.”

“That’s what we hoped,” she said.

“So where did Walt Duffy come into it?”

“At first we thought we were dealing with isolated cells scattered across the country,” she said. “Random, ad hoc
groups of six or eight local people. Then we began to unearth some evidence that these cells were communicating with each other. Mainly by e-mail. They were very clever about it, and we couldn’t trace the e-mails to their sources. But one e-mail that we intercepted used the phrase ‘The Urban Birder’ as what seemed to be a code name. That put us onto Duffy.”

I nodded. “His column.”

“Right. So we backtracked his travels—that’s the document you have there—and cross-referenced them with fires that SOLF claimed credit for.”

“And you found a correlation.”

Randall shrugged. “Enough of a correlation to interest us, certainly. Where Duffy went, it seemed, SOLF fires soon followed. Walter Duffy was something of a hero to conservationists and environmentalists, you know.”

“You’re saying he was the ringleader?”

She nodded. “We think SOLF is a national organization. We think it’s well-funded, well-organized, and very dangerous. We believe Walter Duffy coordinated it.”

“From his little bird garden on Beacon Hill,” I said.

“After his accident, yes,” she said. “Mostly by e-mail and cell phone.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

She shrugged. “I’ve been here in Boston for two weeks,” she said. “Last Thursday—exactly one week ago—Agent Elliot and I planned to serve Mr. Duffy with a subpoena to hand over his paper records and his computers and to testify before a federal grand jury.”

“Thursday,” I said. “That was—”

“Yes. One day too late. He was murdered on Wednesday.”

“To keep him quiet? Is that what you think?”

“Mr. Coyne,” said Randall, “you told Detective Mendoza
that on the day you found Walter Duffy’s body, he had called you and said he needed to talk with you.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“But he didn’t tell you what he wanted to talk about.”

“No.”

“You had no sense that he might want to consult with you about appearing before a grand jury, or that he was concerned about what we might find in his files or the hard drives of his computers?”

“He only had one computer,” I said. “His laptop.”

She nodded. “And?”

I shook my head. “He didn’t say anything like that.”

“Did he mention those letters?”

I thought for a minute. “No. All he said was he wanted to talk to me.”

“Did he sound agitated?”

“Not that I recall. It was pretty clear that something was on his mind. He implied that it was important. I didn’t have the feeling that it was urgent, though. I told him I’d drop by when I was done in the office, and that seemed okay with him.”

“And when you got there . . .?”

I nodded. “He’d been smashed on the head. That was a couple hours after he called.”

“And his computer and cell phone and camera were missing.”

“That’s right.” I leaned forward and looked at her. “Did you tell him you were going to serve that subpoena?”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course not. We’d never do that.”

“You’re saying somebody tipped him off? He got wind of that subpoena? You think that’s why he called me?”

Randall sighed. “Duffy was a very smart man. He was in
touch with a lot of people. He had strong intuitions. Perhaps he sensed something. Or maybe he was just having second thoughts about the whole thing. Perhaps if you’d gone to see him when he called, instead of waiting a couple hours, he would have told you about his involvement with SOLF. You would have advised him to cooperate, of course, and he might still be alive.”

“I’ve been feeling guilty about it for a week,” I said. “I don’t need your help.”

She dismissed that sentiment with a quick backhanded wave. “Maybe Duffy anticipated our subpoena,” she said, “either because he’d been specifically tipped off or because he knew I was in Boston and arrived at the logical conclusion. Or maybe he just decided it was time to put an end to it, to come clean, so to speak. In either case, he would logically want to consult with his lawyer. Right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Walt would do that. He trusted me.”

“But before you got there,” she said, “somebody murdered him.”

“And,” I said, “the question is who.”

She nodded. “We theorize that he mentioned the possibility of the subpoena and his intention to consult with you to a third party.”

“Some SOLF person?”

“Yes.”

“And you think that person got to him before I did and killed him and took his computer to protect the organization.”

“Or that person told somebody else who did it,” she said.

“So all you’ve got to do is interrogate every SOLF member you can get your hands on in Boston,” I said. “One of them will surely spill the beans.”

“Catch-22, Mr. Coyne,” she said. “We don’t know who these people are.”

“How does Ben Frye fit into it? You think he was involved in SOLF, too?”

She shrugged. “We’re trying to backtrack Mr. Frye’s travels in the past year as we speak.”

“Since Walt’s accident. Since he couldn’t travel.”

“That’s right. Frye never hit our radar screen. But he did travel a great deal. We think it’s possible that he and Duffy worked together.”

“So if you can nail one of these people in the act of setting a fire . . .”

She smiled. “Exactly. They’re still doing it, apparently under new leadership. We think if we can get ahold of one of them, we should be able to untangle the whole thing. And that’s where you come in.”

“Me?”

“Pier Seven? Fore River?”

“Ah,” I said. “Those phone calls.”

“Why would someone from SOLF be alerting you about these fires, Mr. Coyne?”

I spread my hands. “I have no idea.”

She arched her eyebrows skeptically.

“Really,” I said. “I can’t think of anybody.”

“You’ll let us know the next time you get one of those calls,” she said.

I nodded.

“Try to hear it clearly. Try to get that person to say more to you. Ask for details.”

“I’ll try.”

“These two men who were murdered, they were your friends.”

“Yes, they were.”

Pauline Randall held my eyes for a minute. Then she leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and looked around the room. “Anybody want to add anything?” She arched her eyebrows at Horowitz.

He shook his head. “You about covered it.”

“What about the arson end of it?” she said to Keeler.

He shrugged. “Firefighters’ lives are at risk with every fire. The sooner we can nail these bastards, the better.” He glanced at me. “I know Mr. Coyne’s trying to help.”

“Detective Mendoza?”

Saundra Mendoza had been looking at her fingernails. When Randall spoke her name, she looked up and said, “I have nothing to add.”

Randall looked at Agent Elliot, who shook his head.

She turned back to me. “Any questions, Mr. Coyne?”

“You just want me to let you know if I have another phone call,” I said. “Is that it?”