Cold Quarry (23 page)

“I think he may have been murdered over some pending lab results. I’ll call a reporter I’ve met out here who does volunteer work for his clinic. She was actually there last night too. She may know the name of the lab where they send their tests.”

“If you get a name and address I can run it down when they open up first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Good. After that, I’m going to drive back over to Felipe’s cabin. The Feds claim that’s where they found the gun that killed Chester. Haven’t heard anything about it from the old man and I don’t think Jake had either, and that concerns me. And after that, I’m going to head on over to Leonardston—it’s only a couple of hours from here. You can meet me there.”

“Leonardston? How come?”

“I’m sure the Feds either have already or are about to search Jake’s place. If somebody’s trying to frame him, I want to have a look around the place myself. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll even beat them there. I also want to make sure whoever is taking care of his birds for him doesn’t freak out about everything.”

“Couldn’t that get you into trouble, Dad? I mean, didn’t you say in your message that you told that FBI agent you would stay out of things now?”

“You let me worry about that, honey.”

“I know! You could just send me in. / didn’t make any promises to the FBI.”

I found myself shaking my head. “We’ll discuss it in Leonardston,” I said.

“What about Mom? She’s right down the road and it’s been a couple of months, you know. I got a letter from her a few days ago she dictated to her nurse.”

“Sure, we can stop by to see her too for a few minutes, if you’d like.”

“I’ll meet you at Jake’s place in Leonardston then. What time?”

I checked my watch. “How about three o’clock? I should be able to get over to Leonardston by then.”

“All right.”

“After we go over the situation at Jake’s and visit your mom, we can head back out here together. We’ll have to be careful knowing the Feds are all over the place now, but I want to start visiting a few of these Rangers, one in particular Jake and I didn’t get to last night. I’ve got a strong suspicion he’s the one who stuck that Mossberg up my nose the other day.”

“Sounds good.”

“And remember what I said. These people are playing for keeps. You have your weapon with you?” I’d spent a lot of time with Nicole on the range over the previous year, getting her certified and bringing her up to speed on a slick little Glock 27. Not that I relished the idea of my daughter playing with guns, but she seemed determined to be in this business when she finished school, and if that were going to be the case, I was going to make sure she was prepared. Let alone the fact she’d also begun studying tae kwan do on her own.

“All set,” she said.

“Good. I’ll see you at Jake’s place at three then. If you get there before I do, do not attempt to enter on your own. If the Feds haven’t served their warrant there yet—and even if they have—we’re going to have to be cautious.”

“Okay.”

“And leave Jake’s bike at home. Bring your car instead. You may need it. Plus, you’ve got that painting you want to bring for your Mom too, right?”

“Right … and Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, sweetheart. Call me if anything comes up in the meantime.”

We said our good-byes and broke the connection.

I rolled over in bed and peeked out the bedroom window through the curtains to what was becoming another wintry steel dawn. I’d just given Nicole a somewhat precise account of how I saw things progressing over the next twenty-four hours if we were to attempt to help Toronto. A plan, neat and orderly—I thought it might give her some confidence that things could work out as intended in this business, at least on occasion, that you could always try to anticipate your obstacles and out-think the objects of your investigation.

I should’ve known better than to try to give her an idea like that.

25

His mother stroked the boy’s long dark hair. “Jason has something he wants to talk to you about, Frank.”

“He does?” I said. “Okay.”

The boy said nothing.

We were standing by the windows in the dining room, Jason holding his mother’s hand. A mantel clock ticked in the other room.

“Go ahead, honey,” Betty Carew said. “Remember you said you could only tell Mr. Toronto or Mr. Pavlicek and nobody else?”

The boy let go of her hand but still said nothing.

“He won’t even talk to me about whatever it is, Frank.”

I squatted down in front of the boy and searched his eyes. “Something about your daddy’s birds, pal?”

He shook his head.

“Is it about what happened to your father?”

He pushed his lips into a pout and nodded.

“Betty, maybe I, uh … ought to take him in the other room, see if he’ll talk to me in there alone.”

She smoothed out the apron she had tied around her waist. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll just be in the kitchen.” She turned and left the room.

“Okay now?” I asked when she was gone.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I don’t wanna tell nothing in front of my momma. They might hurt her.”

“Who might hurt her, Jason?”

The boy finally looked up at me with a pleading expression. “I know who killed my daddy,” he said.

Half an hour later our breaths pushed rolling clouds of smoke up the hill below the stream where Jason’s father had died. The sun angled a bit higher in a sky changing from pale to cerulean blue.

“All right,” I said. “We’re almost there. Can you tell me now?”

Jason stopped and listened. The woods were quiet, except for the faint sound some crows were making over the nearby field.

“The men in the masks. That’s who killed my daddy,” he said.

Hairs rose to attention on the back of my neck. “Men in masks?”

“The men who come up here.”

“How many men?”

“Two men.”

“What kind of masks?”

“The kind you wear when you ride a sled. You know, it covers up your head.”

“How do you know they killed your daddy?”

“I know ‘cause I saw them. I saw them and they said if I ever told anybody, they’d kill me and my daddy and my momma too.”

“But you didn’t tell anybody, did you?”

He shook his head.

“Then why do you think they killed your daddy?”

“ ‘Cause he must’ve found their hideout.”

“Their hideout?”

“Yeah,” he said. “C’mon. I’ll show you.”

He turned sharply and led me on a path perpendicular to the one we’d been on. We forded the stream and passed through a washout area of loose earth and large rocks. The night’s snow had turned the surface of the stones slick and I had to watch my footing, but the boy moved like a gazelle over the ice and the moss. After a few hundred yards, he turned off the faint path and we climbed uphill again, grabbing on to branches and rocks where we could gain a handhold to pull ourselves up, scrambling for several minutes until we reached the very top of the ridge.

“How far’re we going, Jason?” I finally asked.

“Just down there,” he said, pointing down the opposite side of the slope.

We now began to descend, which was even slower going than the climb, given the steepness of the hill and the lack of footing. About halfway down the boy stopped and looked up and across the slope to a spot about fifty yards distant where the ridge turned into an almost vertical cliff.

“Are we going to have to climb that?” I asked, thinking we would’ve been better off to approach from above.

“Ain’t that far.”

He scampered across the incline and I followed until we reached the bottom of the cliff. At the base of the rock wall where it turned straight upward was a stand of long tree trunks that had fallen together into a gigantic tangle perhaps a few years before. Jason waded into them.

“You got to bend down to get in here,” he said.

I wedged myself under a huge fallen pine trunk. On the other side, hidden from everything else around it, was a narrow opening in the rock wall. The boy went over and stood beside it.

“What is it?” I asked. “A cave?”

“Yes, sir. My daddy said they was going to cut a quarry or maybe mine something in this hill a long time ago, but they stopped. It don’t go in very far. I found it last year.”

“This is where you saw the masked men?”

He nodded.

“When did you see them?”

“Before daddy died.”

“How long before your daddy died?”

He thought about it for a moment. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“Was it a long time, like before your last birthday?”

He seemed confused for a moment. Then he said, “No, it wasn’t that long. You want to see inside?” He started to move into the opening.

“Wait,” I said. I stepped along the wall in front of the opening. “Better let me go first. I wish you’d told me earlier. I could’ve brought a flashlight.”

The boy said nothing.

The opening was quite narrow, barely large enough for a full-grown man to squeeze through. Just enough light filtered down from a crack in the ceiling overhead to see all the way to the back wall, maybe ten yards deep inside the fissure. I’d only taken a half step through the opening when it hit me: the pungent odor of ammonia, a telltale indication of a high concentration of ammonium nitrate. I stopped and held out my hand.

“What?” he asked.

I didn’t answer but squinted as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. Was there a bomb here? Not anymore. None that I could see, at least. No large containers of chemicals or wire or fuses or large man-made devices of any kind. Then I spotted something on the floor of the cave. A dead bird lay only a few feet to my right, its half-mangled carcass entwined in a patch of wet leaves. A mourning dove from the looks of it, or maybe a pigeon.

But there was more. A little farther along the floor of the cave I saw another dead bird. And another. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, among the leaves there was also the whip end of another tail transmitter. Was Elo, or what might be left of him, somewhere in here too? I took a half step forward then remembered what Toronto had told me about the plan to set up the Stonewallers by luring them into a deal to purchase bogus chemical agents. His contact had told him the Feds had a handle on all that. But the way things were going, what if it turned out some of those agents weren’t exactly counterfeit either?

“Jason, let’s go. We’re out of here.” I turned, grabbing him by the shoulder, and pushed him away from the cave, following closely behind.

“Why?”

“There’s something inside that might be dangerous.”

“What do you mean dangerous?”

“Well, it might not be all that dangerous to us.” Not unless someone knew how to rig a bomb together with it, I thought. “But it could be,” I said.

“I saw a dead bird,” he said.

“Come on. We need to call for some help.” I took him by the arm and led him back through the tangle of trees and down the slope a few yards. Then I took out the handheld GPS unit I’d acquired courtesy of the yet-to-be-met Mr. Connors, pushed the buttons and waited for the unit to triangulate its position with the nearest satellites to plot the coordinates on the screen. Once the device had displayed its results, I used my cell phone to dial Agent Grooms’s cell.

“Good morning,” I said when he answered.

“Who’s this?” he barked.

“Frank Pavlicek. You arrested my friend last night.”

“Damn right we did. And you’re lucky I didn’t have them take you into custody too. I hope you’re headed back to Charlottesville.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

I explained in very vague terms where I was and what I’d found. The string of profanity that spewed forth from him arose, I guessed, as much from his frustration over my failure to go away as the possibility that I just might’ve discovered something significant of which they hadn’t been aware.

“If this is all on the level, how’d you know about this place, Pavlicek?” he demanded. “What kind of game are you and your buddy Toronto playing now?”

“No game, Grooms.”

“We’ve got your pal for Chester Carew’s murder. We’ve got him cold. We know he and Carew had been to Ranger meetings. Our guess is your pals joined Higgins’s army as a Grade A recruit and that Carew got cold feet and maybe knew too much about their plans, so Toronto simply eliminated him. Don’t try to tell me he couldn’t have done it.”

“You’ve got the wrong man.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you.”

I debated how much to tell him of what I knew.

“I’m putting out an APB on you, Pavlicek. This has gone far enough.”

“Not if you want me to keep feeding you this information, you won’t.”

“Is that a threat or something?”

“Do you know everything that’s happening with your situation, Agent? Do you believe that everything is for certain, that all the people you’ve staked this sting operation on are legit?”

“How the hell’d you know it was a sting?”

“You need a wild card in your hole,” I said. “Maybe I’m it.”

He said nothing at first, then muttered “Shit” under his breath.

I told him I’d call back again in a few minutes and give him the exact GPS coordinates of our location so he could send a team up to thoroughly check the place out. Which of course would give Jason and me a chance to clear out of the area first. Given enough time and the right resources, Grooms might have even been able to trace the approximate location of the source of my call, but he must have known I’d be long gone by then. I hung up and turned the cell off.

Jason stared at me as I stuffed the phone back in my jacket pocket.

“This is all my fault, ain’t it, Mr. Frank?” he said.

I put my hands on top of his small shoulders and made sure I had his complete attention. “No, buddy. It’s not your fault. Don’t ever think that. You understand?”

He nodded.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” I said.

As we turned to head back down the hill, I pushed another button on the GPS unit, scrolling through the list of the stored way points.

“Hang on a second.” I held out my hand for him to stop. I scrolled through the list again.