Liza came back downstairs toweling her hair, having accomplished step one. She wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and running shoes. After covering her tousled hair with a baseball cap, she pronounced herself sufficiently human-looking for a caffeine fix.
The air was on the chilly side when she stepped out, but the car was nearby. Liza backed down the drive, turned onto the road, and set off for downtown.
You really could have walked down to Ma’s
, the voice of her conscience scolded. Between planes and cars, the only exercise she’d gotten was the brief run with Rusty.
Yeah, and I’ll need the car to bring him back. Plus, I want to stop off at the
Oregon Daily
and see what Ava managed to turn up, and talk to my insurance agent.
She was halfway to downtown, bound up in her internal to-do list, before she noticed the big black SUV following her. That shifted the argument into a whole new direction.
You’re overreacting
, her internal voice chided as Liza took the next left, diverging from her usual route.
The SUV immediately turned to follow.
“Omigod, omigod.” Liza’s fingers tightened on the wheel.
It could just be a coincidence.
Liza couldn’t help noticing that her internal voice of reason was beginning to sound a little nervous. She sped up and took the next right.
The big black vehicle kept right behind her.
Snatching her cell phone, Liza squinted into her rearview mirror, trying to make out her pursuer’s license plate. It wasn’t so easy while she was jouncing down the road and the numbers and letters were backward. Then she caught a flash of familiar sandy hair.
Liza jammed on the brakes, nearly getting rear-ended by the behemoth behind her. She stalked over to the driver’s-side window of the SUV. “What the hell is the big idea, Kevin?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing.” Kevin Shepard stuck his head out. “Why are we on the road to the town dump?”
“I was trying to get you off my tail.”
“Fat chance, after what Mrs. H. told me,” Kevin looked unrepentant. “I talked to Curt—”
Sure—they were on the football team together.
“—and when he told me he couldn’t leave a deputy here all night, I said I’d take the watch. When you came out, I thought about talking to you, but you didn’t look in any mood for conversation. So I figured I’d keep a low profile and stick with you till you got wherever you were going.”
“A low profile?” Liza snorted. “I’ve seen tanks smaller than that thing you’re driving.”
Kevin shrugged. “Anyway, I’m glad you stopped so I can find out
where
you’re going—and if there’s a bathroom nearby. Rusty may get away with irrigating the bushes, but I didn’t think you or Mrs. H. would appreciate contributions from anyone else.”
“Buck—he’s an ex-cop friend of my partner’s—says that’s the worst downside of stakeouts,” Liza said. “Especially if you factor in coffee to stay awake.”
“So what do the cops do?” Kevin asked.
Liza grinned. “Apparently, a widemouthed jar is part of their standard operating equipment. There’s a turnoff ahead that will take us to the
Oregon Daily
offices—unless you want to use the bushes here.”
Kevin shook his head. “Nice offer—that’s a stand of poison sumac.”
They drove to the office. Kevin answered nature’s call while Liza riffled through the dauntingly thick file that Ava had left for her at the reception desk. “By the way,” Janey the receptionist said, “Ava told me to remind you that your cushion is starting to get thin.”
Liza looked up from the archived fire stories. Her cushion referred to the number of columns ready but not published on the
Daily
’s computer network. She’d meant to sort through them the night before last when she discovered the hacker. Obviously, Ava had chosen one for yesterday and today.
And my computer is gone, so filling up the cushion will be that much harder
, Liza thought. “Will Ava be around in a little bit? I have to talk to her—but after I’ve had some breakfast.”
With that semiappointment set, Liza headed down the stairs to wait for Kevin. She hoped the fresh air would help her wake up.
As she got down to the parking lot, Hank came running straight for her, arms outstretched. “Are you all right? I heard—”
That was as far as he got. A cyclone seemed to make its way down from the stairway, seized Hank, and flung him onto the hood of the SUV. A second later, the cyclone resolved itself into Kevin Shepard. “Stay there if you know what’s good for you,” he told Hank, his face that of a stone killer.
All of a sudden, Liza remembered stories people told about Kevin’s army service, how he’d been some sort of Green Beret or something—the guys who knew how to kill with their bare hands. Right at this moment, she was ready to believe it.
“Kevin!” she yelled. “I know him—he’s a friend. We work here at the paper.”
Traces of humanity returned to Kevin’s face—as well as the beginnings of embarrassment. “I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” Liza said. “He’s not the guy who broke in last night.”
At least I really, really hope not
, she thought.
Hank sort of flopped around on the hood. “Is it all right now if I—”
Kevin went to help him down from the front of the car.
“I heard about the break-in,” Hank wheezed. “Really, I understand.”
His eyes told a different story as they flickered between Kevin and Liza.
What kind of people do you know?
Between Calvin and Kevin in killer mode, Liza didn’t know how to answer. When she’d overreacted to Derrick’s little “Guess who?” trick, she’d only taken his breath with an elbow. Calvin at the end of his rope had nearly broken Lloyd Braeburn’s arm. Now Kevin had looked ready to break Hank’s neck.
“Sorry, Hank.” That sounded lame even to Liza’s ears.
“No, no, it’s all right.” Hank got himself free of Kevin’s supporting arm and began stumbling up the stairs. Obviously, he wanted as much space between them as possible.
“I think both of us really need some coffee,” Liza told Kevin. They climbed into his SUV and set off for Ma’s Café. Calvin was still working single-handed behind the counter, so they gave him quick orders and found a place to sit.
The corner booth, our old hangout
, Liza thought as she opened Ava’s folder and began spreading out papers. She winced at descriptions of third-degree burns and percentages of victims’ bodies damaged.
Not the best appetizer for any meal, much less Calvin’s cooking.
“So what, exactly, are you looking for in that pile?” Kevin asked.
“When Derrick spoke about the coded messages, he mentioned that things happened after they appeared. The one event he told me about involved people being burned.”
Kevin looked at the pile of paper. “Well, there’s obviously a lot of that going around.”
“And there was grumbling involved.”
“I expect I’d grumble a fair amount if my home or business burned down.”
Liza shook her head. “No, the grumbling took place before the fire. Derrick said it didn’t matter how much they’d done, they didn’t deserve to burn.”
“So maybe it was people warning or protesting about an existing condition.” Kevin reached over, took some of the pile, and began riffling, too.
He interrupted his search to go up front and get their breakfast. The bacon was one step short of cinders and the sunny-side-up eggs were runny.
“Just the way I like them,” Kevin said, digging in with a piece of toast. The toast, by the way, was just right, and the coffee wasn’t bad. As they made their way through the meal, Liza began to feel the earlier cloud around her head dissipating.
Under Kevin’s questioning, she explained what had happened in Santa Barbara and what had happened since she’d seen him the other night.
“So you’re trying to solve this?” he asked quietly.
Liza shook her head. “I’m trying to make sense of it when it doesn’t seem to make sense at all. I mean, what is it with these bad guys? They drop a decent man like Derrick off the side of a mountain with no problem, but they feed Rusty a knockout pill when it would have been just as easy to kill him. They hack into the
Oregon Daily
’s computer network so slickly that our local tech guy—he’s the one you terrorized in the parking lot—can’t even find traces of it. Then they bust into my house with about as much finesse as a crackhead and steal my computer box.”
“CPU,” Kevin corrected.
“Whatever,” Liza said. “Obviously, I don’t know all about computers. But I do know that you only need the hard drive. Why lug off the whole thing?”
“Maybe it’s because they are bad
guys
—plural,” Kevin suddenly said. “Secret messages being spread through a newspaper . . .”
“Sounds like something out of a comic book,” Liza growled.
“That, too,” Kevin agreed. “But it also sounds like a group of people, spread out geographically. There may be an evil genius lurking in the center of that network, but he or she may have a hard time finding decent help out at the edges.”
11
Calvin had a free moment behind the counter and came back to the booth. “Now it
is
just like old times.” He beamed, looking at Kevin and Liza. “At least we fixed the rip in the padding back there.”
He suddenly got solemn. “I heard there was trouble at your house. Is your dog okay?”
Liza had to laugh. “I love the way people are plugged into the grapevine around here. Calvin, you may have more up-to-date info about Rusty than I do.”
Then it was her turn to get serious. “How is Ma doing, Calvin?”
He shrugged. “Not back on her feet yet—her legs won’t take it. If she was, you know she’d be back here, while she still has customers.” That brought a laugh from some of the regulars. “The doctor is saying that, in another day or two, she should be back.”
“And not a moment too soon,” one man said, vigorously banging on the bottom of a catsup bottle to get the contents moving. “Calvin, these things are supposed to be hash
browns
—not hash blacks.”
A buzzer sounded behind the counter. “Uh-oh, back to the salt mines.”
After Calvin left, Liza took a few final bites of breakfast while Kevin continued going through Ava’s file. He passed over a pile of paper perhaps a quarter inch thick. “This story got some play up here,” he said. “I don’t know if you saw it, being farther south.”
Liza hesitated for a second. So many of these stories were so sad—people falling asleep with cigarettes, or drunks passing out with cigarettes, or landlords torching buildings. This story seemed to be a road accident. A car had tried to cut off a tanker truck full of gasoline, and the resulting collision had also engulfed another car on the highway. Then it turned out that the second car belonged to a
Seattle Prospect
reporter, and he’d been driving with a full load of passengers, all of them freelance journalists.
The reporter’s widow began calling it murder—her husband and his colleagues had been heading off to western Washington State, hoping to do an exposé on militia activity in the high desert. Somebody, she claimed, didn’t want that story to appear.
The
Prospect
’s coverage of the situation was very brief and stiff, the hallmarks of lawyer-vetted copy, something Liza knew all too well. Competing papers, however, had a field day. Liza was struck by one local columnist’s take on the whole situation:
This story has all the elements—splashy death, conspiracy theory, and a hint of scandal—that the
Prospect
would usually take to the bank. Instead, Ward Dexter is trying to sit on the story while every other outlet in town goes into media frenzy mode. I hope old Ward enjoys the hot seat. He’s the one who imported this style of “journalism” to Seattle. How nice to see it’s come round to bite him in the rear end.
“Looks like this guy is gloating more than grumbling,” Liza said. “But then, grumbling—or rather, pointing out the shortcomings of the world in general—is part of the job description for what a reporter does.”
“I was thinking that this was the kind of story that would catch your friend’s attention,” Kevin said.
“Because of the conspiracy theory connection?”
He nodded. “Also because secret messages fit right in with militia types and their conspiracy theory view of the world.” He paused. “A militia connection would also explain what we were talking about before—the variable quality of the bad guys. Did you notice that the guy who caused the accident also got killed? That would be typical for those screwups.”
Liza frowned. “Whenever I hear about militias, it’s always how they’re gung-ho types, doing all sorts of survivalist things in their compounds in the high desert.”
“Then you must find out who their publicist is,” Kevin snorted. “They like to think of themselves as belonging to a secret army. But it’s more like
Animal House
—except these frat boys weren’t smart enough to get into college.”
“And the whole survivalist thing?”
“Oh, they may have a couple of snake eaters around—” Kevin broke off at the look on her face. “That’s what the old regular army types called us guys in the Special Forces. Some people from the old outfit might fall in with the militias because of politics, but more likely they’re training them for money—and not enjoying it.”
Kevin gave her a hard smile. “Most of these militia geniuses are small-town and suburban bigots who get their outdoor skills—and military training—from PlayStation shoot-em-ups.”
He shook his head. “The only problem with the secret-message thing—I doubt whether these guys have the brains to solve a sudoku puzzle.”
“Well, all they have to do is wait for the solution the next day.” Liza suddenly rapped the Formica tabletop in annoyance. “Sometimes I wonder where
my
brains are. We’ve been looking for fires in real life and haven’t even taken a peek at the Bible. Luckily, we’ve got an expert we can ask.”