He nodded. “Yes, by zip code.”
I nodded. “Good. So we’ll each take different lists, and go over it by hand. We’ll get it done,” I said, though I had no idea if we could, since I had no idea how many lists there would be, what form they would take, or how many names would be on them.
I asked Robbins, “You have people that can help?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Only those you can trust completely, that you don’t think will be careless and miss anything.”
“I understand.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll tell Bryan we’re a go.”
Edward Holland was frustrated and angry.
The District Court had declined to provide a court order removing the protesters, choosing to give them more time to respond to Holland’s motion. That effectively removed the possibility, for the time being, of state or Federal intervention.
The murder of Richard Carlton was announced after the court issued its ruling, and there was no way they would reconsider before Monday.
Monday wasn’t good enough.
It was an uncomfortable position for Holland to be in. He had been the champion of the people he represented, and now he was at least temporarily on the other side. But he was positive that more violence was on the way, and he had to do whatever he could to prevent additional loss of life.
To that end, he again called Brayton’s police chief, Tony Brus. “What have you got on the Carlton murder?” he asked.
“He took three bullets in the back from ten feet. No witnesses. Also had a broken arm that happened premortem. Coroner won’t know for sure until the autopsy, but his guess is the arm happened within minutes of the shooting. Different gun killed Rhodes.”
“Anything that might lead you to the killer?” he asked.
“Hard to say. We took prints, but no results yet. But this was not an amateur job.”
“We’ve got to act,” Holland said.
“I’m acting,” Brus said, annoyed at the implication. “I’ve got every officer working fourteen-hour days. You want more action, get me more people.”
“I want the protesters removed from the mining site.”
Brus was tired of dealing with this asshole, especially since he was more and more inclined to run against him in the next election. “Mayor, I was just there. Everybody is calm; they’re barbequing and throwing Frisbees, for Christ sake.”
“People are getting blown up and shot in the parking lot.”
“I’ve told you, the violence is being committed by outsiders. I don’t know who, but there’s no way the people camping out on that land are killing people.”
“I don’t want anyone killed. By anyone. I want them gone before dark tonight,” Holland said.
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Your point of view is noted. Now I’m the Mayor, and I want them out. Bring tear gas, hoses, whatever the hell you need, but get them out.”
Brus was furious, but maintained control. “It will take me a while to put the operation together.”
“Do it,” Holland said, and hung up.
Brus hung up the phone with one thought on his mind. He would do his job, but there was no way he was teargassing his friends. And whatever he did, he would make Mayor Holland look bad in the process.
The day was already a month long, with no sign of ending any time soon.
At least that’s what it felt like, waiting for Howie and Sarah to set up the machines that would start monitoring TV viewership throughout northwest New Jersey.
Of course, at the same time, the clock seemed to be moving at a mile a minute, as it literally wound down the time left in Bryan’s life.
All we could do was watch and wait. Every time Howie frowned, I was afraid that he had just discovered something to make the entire project technologically unfeasible. And he never seemed to smile, so there was nothing to provide an upbeat counterbalance to that worry.
Robbins brought three people in, two women and a man. None of them were over twenty-five; retirement age in this company had to be thirty. But they seemed sharp when Robbins downloaded them on what was going to happen, and I further impressed the life-and-death seriousness on them.
I’ve been present when Julie gave closing arguments to a jury in capital cases, but I’ve never seen anything approaching the tenseness in her face and body as I did at that moment. Bryan was her family, and Bryan was her friend, and imagining him suffocating to death was completely and totally unacceptable.
I was able to spend the time beating myself up over not having thought of this earlier. I had known Bryan had television from almost the beginning; all this could have been accomplished with time to study the data, with more than four percent power on his computer, and a lot more than a few hours of air for him to breathe.
“OK,” Howie finally said, looking up at us. “We’re as ready as we’re going to be. It’s ten forty eight; we’re set to go at eleven. We’ll have the printout about six minutes after the time period is up, so we’ll get the first one at eleven twenty-one. That won’t do us any good, because we’ll have nothing to cross-check it against. We’ll have the second report at eleven thirty-six. There’s no way to tell how many reports we’ll need to eliminate all but one.”
He seemed to be a smart and confident guy, which made me feel better that he knew what he was doing. I liked him, and if he screwed it up, I was going to kill him.
But the bottom line was that we would not have anything to cross-check for forty-eight minutes. Since each minute seemed to take about four hours, we were looking at a long wait.
I didn’t want to e-mail Bryan, because I didn’t want him to use up computer power in responding. There was also no need; he knew what he was supposed to do, and would do it as long as he could.
I called Barone and told him what was going on, and asked him to send backup officers and position them in various areas in the three counties we were looking at. I wanted us to be able to get to Bryan as fast as possible once we knew where he was.
And then my mind wandered back to Brayton, again probably because I didn’t want to think about Bryan, counting on us, waiting in that room.
Ordinarily, in a situation like that, I would write down everything I knew. It helps me to think clearly, to make sense out of things that sometimes seem nonsensical. I didn’t have time for that now, so I couldn’t get my mind around certain questions.
Why would Carlton have been killed? He was no longer a factor in the mining operation; Hanson had already bought the land from him. Was it revenge by the townspeople? That hardly seemed likely. Was it to keep him quiet? Quiet about what?
What could Carlton have told Gallagher, and why did it send him to the drilling site? And what was he doing feeling around in the dirt, and looking at the drilling equipment?
