Hunting Season (5 page)

His arms hung down uselessly inside the sweatshirt. She did remember him. He had been truculent, almost hostile, during the initial round of interviews on the Kreiss case, which was how she thought of it now, after the meeting with Edwin Kreiss earlier that day. She looked at her watch;

yesterday, actually. She was pretty sure that either she or Talbot had reinterviewed this one. She definitely remembered the orange-red hair and the pug-nosed, freckled-face smirk that begged every passing life-form for a slap. She remained standing and got out her notebook.

“So,” she began.

“I’ve read the campus police’s incident report. What’d you leave out?”

“Leave out?” he asked blankly.

“Nothing. I told them what happened.

This huge bastard—” “Look, Mr. dark,” she interrupted.

“Let’s cut to the chase. Why was he here? What did he want? You grope somebody’s wife at Kroger’s, or what?”

He stared at her, trying for a hard look, but then his eyes drifted out of focus. Hell, she thought, closing the book. He’s zoning out. She wasn’t going to get anything useful here. She looked around. There was a pile of cut-up clothes next to the far wall. There was a dark brown smear on the wall, and some paper towels stuffed under the rug beneath it. The room was such a mess of clothes, papers, athletic gear, bicycles, and tattered books that Sherlock Holmes would not have been able to tell if anything was missing. She could see a desktop PC through the bedroom door, but the bedroom looked even scarier than this room. Her toes curled at the thought of even going into the kitchen, which she could smell from where she stood. She looked back at dark, who was staring dully at the floor.

“He scared the piss out of me, man,” the kid said softly, shaking his head from side to side. Literally, she thought, wrinkling her nose again, trying not to breathe too hard.

“He had no head,” dark said, wincing at the memory.

“And he had this huge fuckin’ knife. He lifted me off the floor with one fuckin’ hand. Like, I can move my fingers, but I can’t lift my arms. One, two, wham, barn. I was fuckin’ down on the floor like a rubber chicken. The EMT guys had to put this sweatshirt on for me. Now I can’t go to class, can’t take a shower, can’t do shit. I may lose the whole fuckin’ semester.”

Fuckin’ awesome, Janet thought.

“So why’d this happen, Mr. Clark?

What did this guy want?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” Clark said, shaking his head again, but now he was avoiding making eye contact. She gave up. The kid was hurting, but he was also lying. She put away her notebook and headed for the door. She stuffed her card between the door molding and the wall, dislodging a fat roach.

“Call me when you’re ready to talk to me, Mr. dark. Hopefully, before he comes back.”

The kid’s head came up as he registered that little comment. She smiled sweetly at him and went out to her car. She sat there for a minute before starting it up. This has to be Kreiss, she thought. That kid knows something about where those kids went, and Kreiss detected it back during the initial activity right after their disappearance. Tonight he came calling. Why now? Because today the Bureau announced it was backing out, of course.

The physical description didn’t fit, of course, but it was a rainy night.

He could have simply pulled his raincoat right up over his head, surprised the kid in a dark room, and disabled him with a couple of expert karate strikes. And with his head inside the coat, he would have appeared absolutely huge in the darkness. The question was. What did he get? She was tempted to call Kreiss right now, maybe go roust him at his mountain aerie. But of course, if it had been Kreiss, he’d have himself covered.

Despite that, she felt a tingle of satisfaction. Talbot had been wrong.

She started up the car. Tomorrow, she would go talk to Kreiss. No-first she would find out some more facts about Edwin Kreiss, as opposed to rumors and legends. For some reason, the name Kreiss had been tickling a cord of her memory. But maybe it was just her. She felt him standing in front of her again, all that energy radiating out of him. It had been like standing next to a generator humming at full power. Then her professional side reasserted itself. Get real, Carter. The guy was out of line, hassling some college kid like that. Not that it had never occurred to her to smack the living shit out of Barry dark. She smiled as she started the car. No more than once a minute, she thought.

Edwin Kreiss relaxed with a short whiskey in front of his fireplace. He felt better than he had in years, especially since now he had something to go on. He hadn’t enjoyed beating up on a snot-nosed kid like that, but he had learned long ago that sometimes a direct, physical approach gets the quickest results. He wondered if the kid would go to the cops. Probably.

No matter: He still knew how to go somewhere and leave no trace. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. A cold wind from the ridge above his property was stirring the pine trees outside the cabin, causing the fire to flutter for a moment. It was almost springtime, but not up here yet, not at night, anyway.

He thought about what the kid had said. Site R. The only Site R he had ever heard about was the Alternate National Military Command Center up in the Catoctin Mountains, just north of Washington. That Site R was a self-contained mini-Pentagon. It had been built in a five-story steel box balanced on gigantic springs inside a manmade quartzite cavern. It was the hidey-hole for the president and whichever of his generals could make it out of Washington if nuclear missiles ever heaved over the ballistic horizon. No, this had to be something closer. And the kid had said they were going to break into Site R. He closed his eyes and mentally reviewed the map of southwestern Virginia.

Assuming they hadn’t gone out of the area, as the cops were postulating, then what was around here that might be called Site R? It sounded military. He wondered if it could have anything to do with the Ramsey Army Arsenal, which was fifteen miles south of Blacksburg. He’d never heard that called Site R, although he had lived in this area only since Lynn had come to Tech. He didn’t even know if the arsenal was still operational.

But… break into? That implied a restricted area, so that could be it. R for Ramsey?

Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, he thought. What the hell did you get yourself into? The pit in his stomach asserted itself. He had only gotten to be her father, really be her father, for the past six years. Before that, there had been that eleven-year gap, when his ex-wife, Helen, had kept him firmly at arm’s length, out other life and Lynn’s.

The whole sorry episode had been hurtful. Helen had cut him out of their lives with an iron curtain after the divorce—no visitation rights, no contact, no nothing. The judge had gone along with that when Helen refused child support and alimony. His wife and child could not have been more closed off to him if they had gone to another

galaxy, even though they’d been right there in Washington the whole time. He had kept track of them, of course, keeping a distant watch on them between postings, until Helen remarried two years later to a coworker at the FBI laboratory.

After that, he had pretty much given up and immersed himself in his work, which by that time was taking every bit of his time and energy, right up to the Millwood incident and the end of everything.

And then suddenly, just after Lynn turned sixteen, she had called him, right out of the blue. Left a message with the FCI Division central operator that she was Edwin Kreiss’s daughter and wanted to talk to him. Just like that. Their first meeting, at a Metro cafe in Rosslyn, had been awkward;

the second one better. For a year thereafter, they had met secretly, conducting a small conspiracy that was, for Lynn, a fulfillment of the normal teenage rebellion against her mother, as well as a filling of the hole in her heart that yearned for her father. For Kreiss, it had been the best of times, momentary islands of warmth and eager anticipation between sieges of increasingly acrimonious political developments in the Department of Energy Nuclear Laboratory case. Then came the plane crash, later that same year, which took Helen, her second husband, and eighty eight other souls into the Chesapeake Bay at five hundred miles an hour.

After that, it wasn’t a secret conspiracy anymore, but Lynn on his doorstep, a pretty, tomboyish, bright-faced young lady with two suitcases, a tennis racket, and trembling lips that were trying hard to be brave and to hide the shock of it all. When she had been accepted at Virginia Tech, Kreiss, recently forced out of the Bureau, had moved down to the area to be near her.

Site R. Tomorrow, he would go investigate the Ramsey Army Arsenal.

He recalled the redheaded FBI agent’s warning about going solo. He snorted. I’m still Edwin Kreiss, he thought. I’ll find her, and if someone’s hurt her, I’ll find him and his wife and his children and all his other living relatives and send a load of body parts FedEx into the lobby of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Let Missing Persons sort that out.

On Friday morning, Janet Carter called Eve Holloway at FBI headquarters.

Eve worked in the Fingerprint Division and had been Janet’s racquetball partner before Janet’s transfer to the Roanoke office. Janet explained that she wanted to find out about a retired senior agent named Edwin Kreiss.

“Is this official?” Eve asked.

“Yes, actually, although we’re moving the case to MP. It’s a disappearance case—three college kids, but, unfortunately, no evidence of a criminal act. Kreiss retired from the Bureau four, maybe five years ago. He’s the father of one of the missing kids, and I have a feeling he knows something he’s not telling us.”

“Or working it off-line, maybe?” Eve asked. Eve’s husband was a senior supervisory agent in the Professional Standards and Inspection Division.

She knew a thing or two.

“Entirely possible. Supposedly, he worked in FCI, but he crashed and burned, and then he was sent home.”

Eve was silent for a moment.

“Kreiss,” she said slowly.

“I know that name. Hey, there was a Helen Kreiss who worked in the lab. That’s right—she was an electron mis—misc—shit, I can’t pronounce it. She ran the electron-microscope facility. Microscopist? Anyway, she and her second husband were killed in that plane crash in the Bay, remember?”

Janet remembered Talbot mentioning a crash to Kreiss.

“She worked for us? In the Bureau?”

“Yeah. I worked a child murder case with her, when she was Helen Kreiss. I remember she was getting a divorce at the time. This was ‘88, ‘89 time frame. I think she later married an agent who worked Organized Crime. Nice lady. I remember the plane crash because we lost two people.

It was late ‘94, thereabouts. But she wasn’t called Kreiss anymore, of course. I’m thinking it was Morgan?”

“Right! Yes, I knew her. Helen Morgan. She worked some taskings for me when I was working in Materials and Devices. I’d been there-what?—just under two years, I think. So she was Kreiss’s ex?”

“Yep. I think she had a medical degree.”

“I would have liked to talk to her,” Janet said.

“You said she was getting the divorce when you worked that case together. She ever talk about it?”

“Not really. She seemed more sad than mad. There was one child involved. That must be your misser. But listen, I think she said she had talked to one of our in-house shrinks. Maybe there’s a file?”

Janet thanked her and then called the Administrative Services Division at headquarters. An office supervisor listened to her question and promised that someone from Employee Counseling would get back to her.

Then Janet went to the morning staff meeting.

At 2:30 that afternoon, the RA of the Roanoke office, Ted Farnsworth, called Janet into his office. The nearest full-scale FBI field office was in Richmond. The Roanoke office was subordinate to the larger Richmond office, and, as such, its boss was not called special agent in charge, but, rather, Resident Agent. Farnsworth was a senior supervisory agent who was nearing retirement age. He was generally a kind and not very excitable boss, but, at the moment, his New England accent was audible, which meant that he was perturbed.

“Got a call this afternoon from a Dr. Karsten Goldberg, number-two shrink in the headquarters Counseling Division. Says they received a call from this office concerning a Bureau employee, since deceased, named Helen Kreiss Morgan? I thought this missing kid case had been sent up to MP?”

“It has,” Janet said.

“Or it will be, as of Monday. I think Larry Talbot is still finishing up the paperwork.” She then related the incident involving Barry dark, and her suspicions that Edwin Kreiss might be going solo in the search for his daughter.

Farnsworth cupped his chin with his left hand and frowned.

“And you’re looking for some background on this former special agent, Edwin Kreiss.”

“Yes, sir. His ex-wife worked in the lab in Washington. She was killed in that plane crash in the Bay in late 1994. A contact at headquarters told me she’d been to the counselors during her divorce proceedings. I was hoping—” “Close that door,” Farnsworth said, indicating his office door. Janet was surprised, but she did as he’d asked. In today’s supercharged sexual harassment atmosphere, it was a rare male supervisor indeed who would conduct a conversation with a female employee behind a closed door. He had her attention. She sat back down.

“Now look,” Farnsworth said.

“What I’m going to tell you is not for general dissemination, despite what you might have heard from Larry. I hesitate even to go into this, because you’re not supposed to be working this case anymore.”

“Yes, sir,” Janet said.

“But as I understand it, we’ll keep a string on it even when it goes to MP? And I haven’t been assigned to anything else yet.” Even as she said that, Janet realized her reply sounded a little lawyerish.

Farnsworth smiled patiently.

“Janet, you’re a smart young lady. A Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in materials forensics, right? Almost nine years in the outfit, with two Washington tours and a field office tour in Chicago? And now you’re down here with us mossbacks in the hills and hollows doing exactly what with all that specialized knowledge?”