Cold Quarry (17 page)

“Is that right? Listen, Warnock, I’ve seen the police sheet on Jake Toronto. It doesn’t look much different from my own or that of any other ex-cop who happens to be in our line of work.”

“Well, maybe I’m just not used to dealing with that many people in your line of work.”

“Or maybe you’re a liar. Maybe someone else dropped some icy piece of propaganda on you and you’ve been spreading it around to the cops, the Feds, and anybody else who’ll listen.”

“Frank, look. I understand how you might be upset if you were present at this bombing like you say. But I can assure you—”

“You’re not assuring me of anything, Warnock. You’re making me more nervous.” I stood up to leave.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Oh, I’ll be back,” I said. “Count on it.”

Back in the truck, I used the cell phone to call Nicole on hers. She answered on the third ring.

“Hey, Dad. I’ve been dying to hear from you. What’s going on?”

“Any more progress on those background checks I asked you to do, honey?”

“Some. Nothing unusual to report though.”

“Well, keep at it. Don’t stop with the surface stuff. I want to know everything I can about anybody who is involved with this thing out here.”

“Okay. I heard something about a bombing on the news,” she said.

“Yeah, there was a bombing.”

“Were you anywhere near where it happened?”

I snickered. “You might say that.”

“Dad, what’s going on? Was Chester murdered?”

“Yes. At this point, I really think he was.”

“What do the police say about it?”

“They say a lot of things, but it doesn’t seem to be their primary concern right now.”

“So you and Jake are going to find out who did it, right?”

“I sure hope so.”

“Where’s Jake? Is he with you?”

“I’ll have to get back to you later, Nicky. Call me later if you come up with anything, all right? Anything at all.”

“I love you, Dad.”

“Love you too,” I said.

I had just stuck the nifty little phone back in my pocket when it chirped at me. Great. I plucked it back out and pushed the
TALK
button.

“Listen, Nicky,” I said. “I can understand you’re curious and all—”

But the voice was low and agitated on the other end. “Hold on, Frank. It’s not Nicky,” Toronto said. “It’s me.”

18

Finding Felipe Baldovino’s cabin wasn’t as easy as, say, just calling the old man up and asking for directions. Toronto’s father didn’t have a phone at his ramshackle hunting lodge, which was a forty-minute drive from Charleston, a two-mile climb up a peak out toward the headwaters of the Kanawha, Fayette County, and the New River Gorge. For Felipe, cell phones, e-mail, or other modern forms of communication might as well have been alien devices from another planet.

Locating the right road was my primary problem, since it wasn’t on any of the maps I had in the truck, and it had been three or four years since I’d been to the cabin for the one and only time. Toronto had taken Chester and me up there on that particular November morning with Chester’s first bird, a gargantuan female redtail who was a fierce hunter. Her name was Maltese and Chester would forever after talk about her as his standard for a falconry bird. She’d been killed eighteen months later by a stupid encounter with a high-power-line transformer—stupid because the local power cooperative in the county where it happened had refused to spend the relatively small amount of additional money needed to build the simple protective perches on their high-voltage lines.

Fortunately, the day we took Maltese up to Felipe’s empty cabin was etched pretty firmly into my memory. I only drove up one wrong back road before being forced to turn around and backtrack. I located the correct turnoff about a mile farther on down the highway. As soon as I began the climb, I remembered certain landmarks: the rusted-out hulk of an old Volkswagen Beetle inexplicably stuffed into a narrow ravine alongside a small pile of equally rusted-out hulks of ancient refrigerators; a massive eastern hemlock, part of its root structure exposed by the washout of the road, sprouting from a steep moist slope where water normally cascaded across the road—except that now with the drought the rivulet was reduced to a thin muddy bog.

The end of the road leveled out some at the summit and the cabin, a one-story frame structure with weathered wood and rotting shingles, came into view. The house itself hadn’t changed much since my prior visit. But instead of Felipe’s old Pontiac station wagon he used to drive all the way down from Queens there was a mud-splattered Chevy Tahoe parked alongside the Carews’ Suburban in the driveway next to the front porch.

Toronto was waiting for me on the brown grass beside the two SUVs. There was a little more snow here at this elevation, but still not much. The pale earth broke through in mud-packed sections everywhere. The lack of moisture had bleached the tree trunks and stones, even the old wood siding of the cabin.

“Thanks for meeting me way up here,” he said as I climbed out.

“What’d you expect? You got my curiosity up, wigging out of there yesterday like that.”

“Mmm. … Dad’s inside, but I’d just as soon he not hear most of what we have to talk about.”

“Sure,” I said.

He blew on his hands to warm them. Toronto hardly ever wore gloves, except when stealth or the bitterest of cold required it. My hands were bare too,” but still warm from the truck.

“So you said you think you’ve got a lot of this whole mess figured out.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Like I told you on the phone, I talked to someone who gave me most of it.”

“And that someone would be?”

“Sorry, Frank. No names. I know this guy from some ops a few years back. He’s a heavy hitter. Ex-CIA. Not someone to screw around with.”

“I wasn’t exactly planning to screw around with him.”

“I know, but that’s how it’s got to be.”

“All right. How did you know this guy had info on Chester?”

He shrugged. “You might say I happened to bump into him. He surprised me. I didn’t realize he was involved with this whole affair.”

I hadn’t told him much about my conversation with Grooms, figuring it was best to find out what he had to say first. “So this guy’s take is?”

“Here’s the deal: he’s taking down the Stonewallers for the Feds.”

“Okay. And how is he doing that?”

“It’s a sting operation. They’ve been setting up for months. You know that GPS you picked up, those pigeons we saw, and all those tail transmitters we found?”

“Yeah?”

“Apparently the Stonewallers have got great plans for them. They think they’re about to acquire some actual weapons-grade chemical materials. Something real nasty. My guess would be Sarin, maybe even VX gas.”

“Lovely. And just what are they planning to do with this crap?”

“For starters, use the little coop flyers to spread some of it all around Roseberry Circle.”

“The population of which they no doubt feel is polluting their Aryan blood.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. And let me guess. They’re going to track all these little buggers using the transmitters and GPS technology.”

“You got it. Courtesy of our own defense department, who so kindly descrambled the signal a couple of years back so that now any Tom, Dick, or Harry can find his way to anywhere within a couple feet of where he wants to go.”

“Wouldn’t want the high-end Beemer with the two-thousand-dollar computer to get lost trying to evade traffic somewhere.”

“You betcha.”

“How’re they planning to physically deliver the chemicals from the birds?”

“That’s where it gets a little dicey. But my source claims they think they’ve got it worked out. Ever see pictures of those old-time homing pigeons you were talking about, like the ones Hitler used?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Turns out they’ve got a long tradition of being used in warfare. You can strap little capsules right onto their backs. They used the capsules to hold messages, but now you just launch the birds from up there where Chester’s land is, they boogie straight toward the coop back at Higgins’s place, and with a little radio-controlled signal when they’re over the target …”

“Bombs away.”

“You got it.”

“No one will even be able to figure out where the stuff is coming from.”

“Not quite as birdbrained as it first sounds.”

I looked down the mountain, where a small cloud was passing just in front of an adjacent peak. “But back up—you said the Stonewall Rangers
think
they’re getting these chemical weapons.”

“That’s the whole point,” he said.

“The Feds have helped your pal set the whole thing up?”

“Right. They take out the Rangers, track down their source of funding, maybe even lobby Congress to reform the GPS protocols while they’re at it. The whole shooting match.”

“How much money’s involved?”

“I didn’t ask, but my guess would be in the millions.”

“You think Warnock’s the player making all that happen?”

“Looks like it.”

I thought about everything Grooms had told me. “This contact of yours is working with the ATF then?”

“ATF, FBI, locals, you name it.”

“So they think Chester just stumbled onto something—maybe with the birds or whatever—and the Rangers killed him to keep him quiet.”

“Something like that.”

“What about the bombs?”

“That’s why I took off yesterday. I’d seen this guy earlier, but that’s when I knew I needed to talk with him. They’re thinking the Rangers are getting real nervous and wanted to try to take out you and me and anybody else snooping around up there on Chester’s land.”

“Well, I’ve already gotten the message loud and clear the Feds want us out of their hair.”

He folded his arms across his chest and drew in a deep breath. “I’m wondering if for once maybe we ought to listen to them.”

The wind kicked up and blew a swirl of white powder snow at our feet. My hands were beginning to feel the cold now.

“Something just doesn’t add up,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“What about the ANFO bomb?”

“ANFO bomb? Ammonium nitrate and shit? Who said anything about that?”

“I found evidence in Chester’s desk at home. It looks like
that
could be what he found that got him killed. Not something to do with tracking birds to drop chemical weapons.”

“Maybe the Rangers have some kind of an alternative plan using a bomb.”

“Maybe. Or maybe the story’s not quite so simple as your friend indicated.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong. This guy’s no friend. I know who my friends are. I’d call him more of a professional contact.”

“Not sure you trust him then?”

Be careful who you trust.
Grooms’s words still echoed through my mind.

Toronto thought about it. “I think he was giving me some straight dope. It jives with all the evidence we’ve seen. It explains what happened to Chester. But if you’re asking me would I trust this guy with my life, the answer is no.”

“How come?”

“I’ve seen too much of the way guys like him operate. Working both sides of the fence. In it for themselves mostly in the end.”

“Everybody seems to be going on the big assumptions here. But what if the Rangers
didn’t
kill Chester.”

“How do you come up with that idea?”

“The guy who hit me across the mouth with the Mossberg. If you’re the Rangers and you’re planning this big attack, and you’ve just killed a potential witness, why would you send somebody right back up there a couple of days later to the scene of the crime?”

“Maybe they’re just making preparations for their operation.”

“No. I sensed this guy was looking for something. He freaked out when I showed up.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m wondering if the guy wasn’t sent there to look over the scene because the Rangers are trying to find out who killed Chester too.”

“Which would mean there are other players here we don’t know about.’’

“And the scary thing is, maybe the Feds don’t know about them either.”

“Only one way to find out for sure and that’s talking to the guy who socked you.”

“Uh-huh. You come up with anything on that phone number he called?”

“As a matter of fact I did. But I wasn’t going to go anywhere with it.”

“How come?”

“It’s not good news. Turns out he’s one of Higgins’s lieutenants and he’s a state trooper,” he said.

“You talk with him in person?”

He beamed. “Yeah. We … uh … played some chin music together yesterday. That’s right.”

“Chin music.” Where did he come up with this stuff?

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“He wouldn’t give me the name of the caller, he said. He gave up our buddy Tony Warnock instead.”

“Back to Warnock again.”

“Call it corroboration,” he said. “Rats from a ship.”

“You think your trooper’s state police superiors know he’s been involved with the Rangers?”

“Nope. And now he swears he’s got religion. Won’t ever talk to Higgins again and won’t go to another meeting either.”

“All from talking with you.”

“Yup.”

“You can be very persuasive.”

He nodded, beaming again.

I stamped my feet, thinking the whole thing over. It wasn’t getting any warmer up there on the top of that mountain.

“So what do you want to do, boss? Punt and just let the Feds handle it? We’re talking about some pretty big kahunas involved here.”

“I want to find out who killed Chester Carew,” I said.

He smiled. “Like a mad dog on a bone. I was afraid you were going to say that, Frank. But you know what? Me too.”

19

The Bitter Angler sounded more like a watering hole for frustrated bass fishermen than a redneck haven. I bit anyway. The establishment occupied the end cap of an otherwise crumbling strip mall on the river between Dunbar and the north side of Charleston. Out the back, the Kanawha flowed wide and strong, and in the evening light even the visible fire stacks from the first of the chemical plants upriver glowed with an almost pastoral aura.