The Big Thaw (24 page)

Cletus had made the big mistake. He was predictable. Altogether too predictable.

I looked over at George. “What’d I tell you?” He just grinned. I picked up the mike. “Comm, Three is ten-seventy-six, one ten-ninety-five.”

In other words, we were en route, and we had one prisoner in custody.

“Ten-four, Three.” She sounded relieved.

“Three, One?” That was Lamar. “Meet you back at the office.” He sounded pleased.

“Ten-four.” Nonchalant. You had to be.

We got back to the office, and I was just getting my proud little ducks in a row to begin booking Cletus into the jail, when Lamar approached me.

“Mike can start that,” he said. He looked very grim. “You come back here with us.”

I thought it was sort of strange, but I went back with him into his office. George and Volont were there. They didn’t look too happy, either.

“Sit down,” said Lamar. “Special Agent Volont has something to tell you.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

“First,” said Volont, “you have to know two things. One, I’m telling you this because events have, well, overtaken us here. Two, the two brothers were killed by a single individual, acting alone.” He looked at me, evenly.

“Your surveillance team did witness the murders,” I said. Hell, that wasn’t such bad news. Not at all.

“No.” He sighed. “No, they managed to miss that, with the same skill they demonstrated when you caught them.”

He made a little pyramid with his extended fingers.

“They were killed by a man I’ve been tracking for years. You know him as Gabriel.”

“You’re kidding me…” All I could think of to say.

“No.”

Jesus. In the first place, it had just dawned on me that Gabriel, who was a professional in every sense, and was not only capable of killing without remorse, but who was also very able as well, could very easily have been at Borglan’s residence as we were arresting Cletus.

“You might have said something a little sooner,” I said. I looked over at George. “Or did you know?”

“No.”

“That,” I said, “violates just about every ‘need to know’ guideline in the book.” It did, too. You were never supposed to expose an officer to danger in the name of confidentiality. Never.

“He isn’t there,” said Volont. Just a flat statement. “I’m just telling you this because you’ll probably find it out from Cletus.” He looked at me. “You do intend to interview him, don’t you?”

“So where the hell is he?” I thought it was an appropriate question. “Gabriel, I mean. We’ll need to find him as soon as we get a warrant for his arrest.”

Volont held up his hand. “Just a moment. The Bureau has a source fairly close to our Mr. Nieuhauser,” he said. “I receive the reports on a regular basis. Gabriel’s movements and intentions are usually known to us in near real time.” He sounded pleased. “We have to wait until Gabriel is at a location that we could discover by other means, before we can move on him. Otherwise, we reveal the informant, and place them at risk.”

“That the purpose of your surveillance team, then?”

“One of them, yes. So we can reveal them at the proper time, with their data, and show that they were the ones who tracked Gabriel. Saving the life of the informant is a high priority.” He made a tight little smile. “The irony is, now we can use you to confirm the presence of the team, now that you’ve … uhmmm … apprehended them, as it were.”

I knew Volont just well enough to think that he would tell his superiors that he’d planned for the surveillance team to get busted by us. He was adept at that sort of thing.

“Our Mr. Nieuhauser, or Gabriel, has much unfinished business in this county. He’ll undoubtedly be back, and we think fairly soon.”

Volont said that he’d known Gabriel had been in Nation County since around Christmastime. He hadn’t been precisely sure where, but he was now certain it had been the Borglan residence, at least part of the time.

No shit.

“I want that son of a bitch busted as soon as he sets foot in my county,” said Lamar. “None of this pussy-footin’ around like last time.”

“Ah.” Volont actually chuckled. “Understood. This time, we won’t let him blow up Maitland.”

“That’s right.” Lamar glared at Volont. “This time we just got two people killed … so far.”

“So,” said Volont, “please tell me more about the murders…”

I did. I even repeated some detail. Drive it home. When I got to the part about the Colson brothers very likely attempting to convince their killer that they were undercover cops, he nodded. “Really not the man to use that story on,” he said.

I explained about the 5.45 mm PSM shell casing. He nodded again. No surprise to him. Well, now that I knew who the perp was, it wasn’t a surprise to me, either. During the last incident with Gabriel, we’d found that he had been assigned to Europe a lot of the time he was in the Army.

I went through the autopsy findings, and the best guess as to the manner of the death. He spoke.

“What he likely did was to shoot the first one as soon as the undercover cop story was brought up,” he said, slowly. “The other one was probably on his knees, pleading his case by denying he was a cop. He was either shot because Gabriel had to conceal the death of the first, or because Gabriel was still convinced both were officers. From what you say, it seems he still thinks they were officers of some sort.”

I continued with the part about Davies and me interviewing the hired man, our helicopter flight over the area, and ended with the snowmobile chase.

“So, to keep the ball bouncing,” I said, “let me ask you a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Just what is Gabriel’s ‘business’ in Nation County?”

“Money,” he said. “My sources tell me he needs financial support for his activities.”

“He’s here on a fund-raiser?” I asked.

“Of a sort. Not the fifty dollars for a plate of chicken type, though. He apparently intends to rob several banks in the area. Simultaneously.”

Suddenly, it was one of those conversations where two threads spring up at once. While I said, “Several?” George said, “Simultaneously.” And Lamar said, “Take him out now.”

Lamar won for two reasons. He was proposing a course of action, and it just took him longer to get it out, so we all heard his last two words.

“You mean on the murder charges?” I said.

“You’re goddamn right.”

“Are they good enough?” asked George.

“You’re goddamn right they are,” said Lamar. “You know where he is, we go now!”

“Oh, I agree,” said Volont. “We only have one problem.”

We three just looked at him.

He looked at me. “Could I have some coffee, now?”

Before I could answer, he continued. “The problem is, I’m not, well, precisely sure where he is. Are you?”

It all boiled down to the fact that, after the murders, Gabriel had split. Fast and clean, to parts unknown. Which was beginning to look like why the surveillance team stayed on location. To pick him up when he came back.

“This sounds a lot like ‘The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime,’” I said. “Surely you have more than that to go on.”

Volont smiled, shrugged, and simply said, “Of course.” In that “If I tell you, I have to kill you” tone we all knew and loved.

We had to take him at his word. We sure as hell didn’t know where Gabriel was.

“Another question …?” I asked.

“Go ahead,” said Volont.

“Just when were you intending to tell us about the bank robberies?”

“I would have given you twenty-four hours notice, naturally.” He looked at Lamar. “You’d be right there.”

For publicity. Not for any participation in the bust. That’s not what he said, but it was what he meant.

“And now?” I asked.

“Now,” he said, “you’re in the loop. Right along with everybody else.”

Sure.

As I headed back to the booking room, Lamar gave me the rest of the bad news. He’d decided to let DCI know we’d made an arrest in the Colson case. Well, that was all right, and I should have thought of it first. The unfortunate part was that Art was on his way back to Maitland. Just who I needed.

Booking Cletus had been a drawn-out process. His attorney had practically followed us in the office door. Well, actually, he’d followed us from Cletus’s farm. He’d been one of the two people who had come out of the house with Cletus. He was a largish man, Ray Gunston out of Cedar Rapids. I’d heard of him. Well known, successful, and on TV a lot. Attorney to the rich and infamous, as we said.

Anyway, after forty-five minutes, Cletus was tucked away on a $250,000.00 bond. A tidy sum, but I wasn’t at all certain he couldn’t raise it in a hurry.

We’d also made the acquaintance of his other attorney. This guy named Horace Blitek had just walked in the office, and announced he was “at law, assisting in the representation” of Cletus Borglan.

“I wasn’t aware that Mr. Borglan had any other…”

“I’m part of the defense team, Deputy. Mr. Borglan is a very important man. I received a call from his friends, and since I represent some of his corporate interests, he’ll need me if he’s compelled to raise a bond.”

Sure. I notified Cletus, and he said that Blitek was, indeed, a member of the defense team. Gunston didn’t seem too happy with the arrangement, though. I, for one, had never heard of Blitek. He hadn’t given a card. I did notice, though, that his clothes looked a little worn, especially his shoes.

We’d notified Davies immediately, and he’d driven up when his court case had adjourned for the day. The first thing we did was brief him on Gabriel.

“Holy shit.”

Well, he got that right. I’d just told him that Gabriel, whose real name was Jacob Henry Nieuhauser, was an ex-Army colonel, who had all sorts of Special Ops knowledge, and who was the man who had been so heavily involved in the case where Lamar had been shot, and one of our deputies killed. Not so damned long ago, either.

He laughed a little nervously. “You got extra security laid on for the building here?”

I explained how much good that had done us before. “Besides,” I said, “it’s not in the budget.”

“We need a warrant for his arrest. Pronto.”

Lamar took that one. He left for the judge’s office. We were going to get a “confidential” arrest warrant, one that would be filed with the Clerk of Court herself, and sealed until it was executed. A nice thing to have, if we had to do anything unusual to effect the arrest.

Davies knew Gunston very well. Before we’d gotten to the kitchen, he’d said that the Cedar Rapids attorney was reasonable, but fast. “Tell you what,” Davies had said. “He’s gonna want to move this right along to a point. Only to a point. But he’s assessing the case as he goes, trying to see if it works for him. Understand? He’ll hustle your socks off, you let him, and he’ll be persistent to the bitter end.”

“Whether or not Borglan’s guilty?” asked Lamar.

“No,” said Davies. “Whether or not the case will generate enough billable hours to enable him to own Borglan’s farms.” He laughed. “For true. That’ll be his first checkpoint. Shit, guilty, schmilty, he won’t care. He gets paid either way.”

I was surprised that Cletus was even talking to us, and said so.

Davies laughed. “Cheap discovery. He stops talking as soon as he knows what he wants to know. Well,” and he chuckled, “whenever Gunston tells him to, anyway.”

We didn’t know a lot about Cletus, mainly because I didn’t think the man had ever been arrested in his life. Not until now, anyway. Between Lamar’s and my recollections, we were able to piece something together.

First of all, Cletus Borglan wasn’t an extremist, not in the violent sense of the word. Neither was he a “Militia” man, or Nazi, or anything like that. Cletus was a fairly wealthy farmer, a truly successful farmer, who honestly didn’t like the tax system. Well, who did? He also was very much pro-“family farm.” Well, maybe it was more of an anticonglomerate farm stance, to tell the truth. Regardless, he really felt for the small farmer who was slowly going under. Cletus was a hard worker, who had inherited two farms, and bought another. Lucky there, and nobody knew it better than Cletus Borglan. He’d also been savvy enough not to get in over his head, when many others were mortgaging to the hilt to buy up more land, on the theory that the more they planted, the more they’d make. It had sounded good, but just didn’t work.

His wife was a second-level administrator at an area education agency, had gone back to the University of Northern Iowa and obtained her MBA, and had set up their computerized farming operation. Between the two of them, they put in long hours, but with great success.

Having encountered him often over the years, I thought Cletus had a major flaw. Aside from predictability, that is. Cletus got emotional about farming. Really. Whoever had invented the slogan “We feed the world” hadn’t done Cletus any favors. It was too evocative of images of altruism. It should have been “We sell food to the world.”

Regardless, that was a trump card. Cletus was a crusader.

George, Art, Davies, and I were at the kitchen table, with Cletus and his attorney Gunston on the other side. The whole business was being conducted here because his attorney thought it less likely that we had bugged the kitchen. Right.

We were closer to the coffee. We’d just got settled at the long table when attorney Gunston stated that this was a “police-dominated environment.” Too many cops at the table, and we’d intimidate his client. Right out of the late ‘60s, but still viable. At the same time insisted that only “the deputy” do the interview, as I was the officer with superior jurisdiction. Sure. He was trying to pick the less sophisticated officer, the one he thought would do the worst job of interviewing his client. Me. Well, maybe he’d get a surprise. Davies agreed, with the provision that he too be present.

Art wasn’t happy. George seemed a bit relieved. Volont wasn’t present, anyway, so it sure didn’t bother him.

After a little flurry, we began again. I used the approach that had always worked best for me, especially with an opposing attorney present. I presented facts, and asked no questions. Kept either attorney from interrupting, and if Cletus wanted to say anything, the ball was in his court.