She explained what Kreiss had said about night-vision equipment. He nodded, then asked her precisely when Kreiss had pulled her out of the tunnel.
“It was night. I guess I don’t remember,” she said.
“Elevenish, I’d guess.”
He said, “Uh-huh,” and then looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.
“You got plans for your Sunday, Special Agent?” he asked.
“Uh—” “Now you do. Let me suggest you take that coffee upstairs, make yourself functional, if not too beautiful, and then I need to take you somewhere to show you something’.”
She just looked at him.
“It shows better than it tells, Special Agent,” he said.
“And time, believe it or not, time is a-wastin’. Help if I say please?”
“Is this something I should call my boss about first?” she asked.
“No-o,” he said. “
“Cause he’s gonna ask you a million questions, and you won’t have any answers whatsoever until I do my show-and-tell. Please?”
Half an hour later, they were leaving Roanoke and headed south on 1-81 in his car. He was explaining how they had tagged Edwin Kreiss’s truck.
“Four bugs? Whatever happened to the notion of the private citizen?”
“Private citizen?” Ransom said, slapping the wheel, as if she’d told a wonderful joke.
“No such thing in America anymore. First of all, nobody’s a citizen anymore.”
Uh-oh, she thought. Brother Ransom has a hobbyhorse. She decided to go with it anyway.
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“Simple,” he said.
“We are what bureaucracies call us. Like law enforcement? We’re ‘subjects,” Pollsters? We’re ‘respondents.” Marketin’ people? We’re ‘focus groups.” Politicians? We’re ‘voters.” Your Internet provider? You’re a ‘subscriber.” IRS? We’re ‘clients.” Clients—do you love it? Ain’t no more ‘citizens.” Last time there were citizens, in the way you mean it, Special Agent, was during the Roman Empire. And maybe the French Revolution, when they got into their guillotine phase.”
She decided to shut up. She was in no shape for a philosophy discussion.
The coffee was wearing off and she was still very tired. She settled back in the seat and let him drive. Forty minutes later, they were
stopping next to Jared’s lonely driveway. Ransom turned in and parked the car out of sight of the county road. They walked down the dirt lane to the trailer, which Janet could see was sitting at an odd angle.
“This here is the residence of one Jared McGarand,” Ransom announced.
“What’s that smell?” Janet asked, although she already had an idea.
“That is most likely related to brother Jared’s final movement, if you get my meanin’. Under that end of the trailer, right there, where you see the jack handle stickin’ out. And if you check that vehicle over there, you’ll find one very expensive tag tracker on the back bumper.”
“The one you put on Kreiss’s truck?”
“That very one, Special Agent.”
“Okay, I give up. I assume there’s a dead guy under there. What the hell’s going on?”
“I was kinda hopin’ you could shed some light on that, seem’ as you had a meet with subject Edwin Kreiss, apparently right before he came out here and wasted this McGarand individual. Least I think he did. I haven’t gone and lifted that trailer up to make sure, but my nose is makin’ an educated guess here, okay?”
“About a dead body, or Kreiss doing it?”
He grinned and shrugged.
“I got nowhere at that meeting,” she said.
“I’ve already told Farnsworth this. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, I didn’t want to admit that Kreiss just totally blew me off, but that’s what he did. He also saw through the proposition that we might work together, you know, to catch the mysterious bomb makers while I helped him find his daughter.”
“Saw through it?”
“He said it was bullshit. That Washington being here was about him.”
“Oh boy,” Ransom said, blowing out a long sigh.
“Here we go again.”
“It was bullshit? Bellhouser and Foster’s bit about the bomb makers?”
“Truth?” Ransom said.
“I don’t have any idea. My assignment was to cooperate with those two. And to keep my bosses at the Agency informed as to what was goin’ down.”
“So if those two were conspiring to trap Kreiss in something, you wouldn’t necessarily know about it?”
Ransom hesitated before answering.
“Lemme just say that if somebody managed to take Ed Kreiss off the boards, my bosses wouldn’t exactly complain, okay?”
“Son of a bitch,” Janet said softly.
“Kreiss was right.”
“What’s his state of mind?”
She snorted.
“I offered to help him find his daughter, you know, as cover for the other little project. He said he didn’t need any help. He also said that if he found out someone had done something to his daughter, he’d catch them and put their severed heads out on pikes on the interstate.”
“That’s our Edwin,” Ransom said admiringly.
“Might be interestin’ to see if this dude under there is headless. On the other hand,” he said, squatting down on his haunches, “might not be much left to mount.” He stood back up.
“Now, you had this meetin’ with Kreiss, he told you to buzz off, then you go home and he comes out here and does a number on this vie here, which we assume is subject Jared McGarand. You go to your weekend class the next mornin’, then you go to the arsenal for your little field trip, and you encounter—Edwin Kreiss. Tell you anythin’?”
“That Kreiss might have found out something from this Jared whatever about his daughter. And that something points back to the arsenal. But—” Ransom cocked his head.
“Yeah, but what?”
“But Kreiss already suspected the kids had gone to the arsenal.”
“At night? Why’s he there at night? And didn’t he tell you he was goin’ back there last night? After he rescued you?”
“Yes.” The smell was making her queasy. She backed away from the mess under the trailer.
“Can we go now? And shouldn’t we call in local law?”
“Yes, we can go now and, no, we will not call in local law. We don’t have anythin’ to do with local law and local homicides, seem’ as we never operate domestically.”
“Oh, right,” she said sarcastically.
“But we do.”
“And you would tell the cops what, exactly?”
“That there’s a dead body under this trailer.”
“Which you found out about in the company of an Agency person, while investigatin’ a missin’ persons case that you’ve already shipped off to Washington. How you feel about explainin’ why you did all that to the local shareef? Or to Farnsworth?”
She took a deep breath. Ransom was right.
“See, here’s the thing, Special Agent. I buy Kreiss goin’ out to that
arsenal durin’ the day, snoopin’ around, lookin’ for Injun signs. But if he’s goin’ at night, he’s goin’ covert.
