“That’s all I have in my file pertaining to him,” Brianne said.
“That was your focus, right?”
She had hoped for more, but she did not want Kellermann to detect that.
“Yes, it was. Thank you very much. You’ve been very helpful.”
There was a momentary pause on the line.
“Have you met Edwin Kreiss?”
Her instincts told her to deflect any further interest in her call.
“Yes,” she said.
“When we interviewed the parents. He seemed—I don’t know-pretty normal? A lot of anxiety about his missing daughter, of course, and he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the case was going to MR But killerDiller secret agent? No.”
“Secret agent?”
Janet swore under her breath. Damned shrink was quick.
“Well, you know, that time he spent with the Agency.”
“I see. Not a killer-diner, but not your run-of-the-mill, quietly retired civil servant, either?”
Janet had to think about that one.
“No-o, not exactly,” she said.
“I got the impression that he was immensely self-controlled.” She remembered all the things Farnsworth had told her, but she doubted Brianne Kellermann was in the loop on any of that.
“I guess I wouldn’t want the guy really mad at me, but closet psychopath? No. And he’s not a suspect or anything. The kids just vanished. We’ve been clutching at straws the whole way. That’s what pisses me off, I guess.”
“Well, I wish I could have told you something significant,” Brianne said.
“But that’s all I have.”
Actually, you did, Doc, Janet thought.
“Well, like I said, we have to pull all the strings. And thanks again for getting back to me. I can close our files now; let MP take it.”
Janet flopped back in her chair after hanging up. Kreiss had a
reputation for being a scary guy. Kreiss’s wife had been sufficiently afraid of him to want out. Wait–correct that. Sufficiently afraid to want to go to a Bureau counselor. Having been divorced herself, she knew there was probably a lot more to the Kreiss divorce story than just that, but going to a Bureau counselor had to have been a big step for a senior FBI agent’s wife to take.
With any luck, Kellermann would now just forget the call and move on. Janet had been entirely truthful when she had said she did not figure Kreiss for a part in the kids’ disappearance. What concerned her now was the possibility that he might take up the hunt himself. Possibility, hell—probability, if the headless horseman trick was any indication. And, actually, concerned wasn’t the right word, either. Face it, she told herself.
It’s Kreiss and his exotic career that’s intriguing you. In fact, if Kreiss was on the move, she wouldn’t mind helping him. She laughed out loud at that crazy notion and momentarily woke Billy.
The FedEx truck found its way to Kreiss’s cabin late Wednesday afternoon.
Kreiss signed for the package and took it into the cabin. Parsons had done well. There were two wide-area black-and-white overheads of the Ramsey Arsenal. Each had been taken from an oblique angle, because, of course, the aircraft had no business flying directly over the complex. One of them had been taken from a much greater height than the other, and it showed nearly the entire installation, including the creek that ran through it. The other was a shot that centered on the industrial area, and it gave a perspective to the buildings in the central area that allowed Kreiss to size them. There was one additional sheet in the package, which was a copy of the large overall shot with a global positioning system grid superimposed. The title box on the lower right of each sheet identified the site as the Jonesboro Cement Factory in Canton, Ohio.
Good man, Kreiss thought to himself. Parsons had disguised the identity of the prints from prying eyes at his company. There was a note in the package saying that Parsons had the photos in a computer file and that any of them could be blown up on one of their Sun workstations and reprinted to whatever level of detail he wanted. He had been unable to
midnight-requisition the processing work, and he apologetically requested a check for fifteen hundred dollars be made out to the company.
Kreiss got his checkbook and wrote the check immediately. Then he studied the photos for almost an hour, absorbing details of the industrial area.
The individual buildings were blurry in the photograph, which told Kreiss that Parsons had already done some enlargement work.
The buildings of the industrial area took up no more than a small portion on the eastern side of the military reservation. The photo also showed the rail spur leading off the main line connecting Christiansburg to Ramsey and points north. Kreiss would have loved to get nighttime infrared photos of the entire complex, but that would have been pushing it. Besides, whatever those people were doing, they were probably doing it in the industrial area. The problem was that there appeared to be over one hundred identifiable buildings in the complex. He decided he would make one more reconnaissance intrusion, this time at night, and this time into the industrial area. It looked as if the railroad spur might be a better intrusion position, pointing directly into the industrial area and avoiding all the woods-crawling. It shouldn’t be too hard to find his way back to that rail spur. If he could pinpoint where those people were operating, he would back out, come back to the cabin for some of his retrieval equipment, and then go after them. He was looking forward to talking to them, maybe sharing his thinking with them about their itchy trigger fingers.
Just after 6:00 P.M.” Jared picked Browne up at his house in Blacksburg.
Jared was driving his own pickup instead of his telephone repair van.
There was a windowless cap on the back bed of the pickup, where Jared had packed their gear.
“Get the copper?” Browne asked.
“Yep. It’s already stashed by the main gates. Coupla hundred pounds.”
“We have to strip it?”
“No, it’s four switch-gear plates. No insulation. Heavy, though.”
On days they were going into the installation, Jared would drive the telephone company van to the concrete- filled barrels on the main entrance road of the arsenal. He would pretend to be doing something there. When there were no cars in sight, he would move two barrels slightly, just enough so that when they came later, he could pull off the main highway in the early darkness and drive straight between the barrels.
From there, they would drive, lights off, to the actual main gate, about a quarter of a mile back into the trees from the highway. In
front of the shuttered security checkpoint gates, they could turn left onto the fence maintenance and fire- access road, which was a dirt path just big enough for the truck. They would take that around the fence until they intercepted the rail line almost a mile south of the main gate.
Tonight they would stop up by the gates, well out of sight of Route 11, to retrieve the bundle of copper plates. Browne planned to run the hydrogen generator for at least four hours. He also had some sandwiches and water for the girl.
“I think you better go on walking patrol while I do tonight’s batch,” Browne said.
“We still don’t know what we had out there the other night.”
“We had us an intruder, that’s what. Question is, Did he come back, or did that forty-four do the trick?”
Browne rubbed his jaw. They had seen the occasional hunter, who tended to stay away from the industrial area because of all the talk about toxic waste. But since the kids hit the traps, Browne was taking no chances.
“No way of knowing that,” he said, “without going down there for some tracking. We just need to be careful from here on out. I won’t have some nosy sumbitch screwing this thing up, not now.”
Jared didn’t say anything for a few minutes, but then he asked Browne if he thought the intruder might be police.
“I don’t think so,” Browne said.
“Cops come in crowds. Plus, they shoot back when shot at. We’d of known by now if that was a cop. Maybe
