The cops all looked around and then at one another.
“How many dogs we talking about, Mr. McGarand?” the sergeant asked.
“We saw the pen, but there weren’t any dogs here when we got here.”
The sergeant had a bit of a mountain accent, so Browne decided to countrify his own language a bit.
“He had him some pig dogs—three of ‘em. He never let ‘em run free less’n we were hunting.”
One of the detectives introduced himself then, flashing a leather credentials wallet with its golden shield at Browne. He, too, spoke with a southwestern Virginia country accent.
“Your grandson, Mr. McGarand?
He have him any enemies? Anyone who would have wanted to do something like this?”
All Browne could think about was that intruder at the arsenal, the big man in the weird coveralls, or whatever they were, looking right at him with those intense eyes, almost like he knew him. The cool way he had just run off when Browne opened up with the .44, not bothering to shoot back or try anything fancy. That had taken calm professionalism, and Browne was beginning to think that there was something going on here, something much bigger than the disappearance of those college kids.
Instinctively, he decided to throw them a red herring. He looked down at his shoes for a moment and shuffled his feet, creating the picture of a man making up his mind to tell the cops something embarrassing about his grandson.
“My grandson?” he said with a parental sigh.
“He liked the ladies.” The Vicks was making his eyes water, which was perfect, actually.
“And they liked him, if you know what I mean. Some of those ladies had husbands. I was supposed to see him Saturday night, but he called, said he had him a hot date. By the way he was talking, I think she was maybe one of the married ones. I warned him, right there and then, but with jared, well…”
The cops were writing in their notebooks and nodding. This was something they understood right away. It was also something to go on.
“Any idea of who she was?” one of them asked.
“No, sir,” Browne said.
“Jared, he wasn’t one for naming names; knew I disapproved. But my guess is it was someone who’d had a telephone problem, called it in, got Jared as the repairman. Something like that, I imagine.
He usually operates alone, working the back county trouble tickets.”
One cop closed his notebook and headed for his car to make some calls.
Browne kept his eyes downcast. Why were they here?
“Sir, how’s about we go inside, see if you can tell us if anything’s missing?”
They went into the trailer, past a tech who was scraping some gooey looking substance off the edge of the front steps. They walked around inside the sloping trailer, but everything seemed to be in place. Browne went through the bureau and night table drawers but didn’t say anything about the missing guns. He wasn’t entirely sure that Jared had obtained the guns through lawful channels, since Jared frequented the gun shows in Roanoke and up in Winchester. Plus, there was a lot of gun swapping that went on among those Black Hats idiots. While back in the bedroom, he asked, as casually as he could, who the other people were outside.
“Those guys? They’re Roanoke FBI agents. They’re doing some investigation at the phone company, some kind of interstate wire fraud case.
Your grandson worked for the phone company, so a couple of them came out when we made the tentative ID. Me, I think they’re just curious to see how us local yokels do a homicide investigation.”
That settled that, Browne thought with relief. Nothing to do with the arsenal explosion. They walked back through the trailer, although Browne felt weird walking over the area atop of jared’s body like that.
They asked him for some background information on himself, where he lived, and whether he would be seeing to the funeral arrangements. They informed him that, due to the suspicious circumstances, there would have to be an autopsy, after which the body would be released to him. They let him go after that, and he walked back out to his vehicle by himself. He was pretty sure that the two FBI agents watched him go.
He drove away and headed back to Blacksburg, watching his rearview mirror. Now that the propane truck was parked out at the truck stop, the clock was running. He had planned to leave late that night, but now he would have to make sure there was no one operating in his backfield, like maybe those feds, before he set out. After what had happened at the arsenal, he should be in the clear. If the Bureau would be occupied by anything in southwestern Virginia, it’d be with that explosion. He looked forward to watching it on the television news; he wanted to see what the hydrogen had done to a reinforced-concrete building like the power plant. It would give him a feel for what it was going to do to a certain mostly glass and steel office building in downtown Washington, D.C. He smiled in the darkness. He had few doubts on that score: It would absolutely, positively obliterate an office building.
At 10:30, Kreiss drove Jared’s phone repair van down Canton Street and turned at the block just before he would have reached Browne McGarand’s house. He had gone back out to Jared’s trailer at 9:30, hoping to find the cops gone, which they were. He knew he couldn’t operate in Browne’s neighborhood in a crawl suit, but he had kept Jared’s keys. He’d decided that if he could get his hands on that phone company repair van, he’d have some pretty effective cover in town. The cops had apparently towed Jared’s pickup truck away, but the repair van was still sitting there. The dogs were still not back, and the only signs of what had happened there was all that yellow tape fluttering in the semidarkness. He had watched the trailer for fifteen minutes to make sure no one was still there, and then
he’d gone in, after parking his own truck behind an abandoned house a half mile beyond Jared’s road. He had put his surveillance equipment, car phone, Jared’s .45, and Janet Carter’s pager into a bag and taken it with him in the van.
Kreiss was dressed in plain dark blue overalls, and he had Jared’s white plastic phone company helmet sitting on the seat next to him. He also had Jared’s Southern Bell ID pinned to the overalls, although the picture wasn’t even close. He might fool a civilian, but not a cop, so he would have to take some care as to where he parked the van. The vehicle smelled of cigarette smoke and the front seat was a trashy mess of fast-food wrappers, technical bulletins, repair-order manifests, and empty soft-drink cans. The back was a slightly more orderly mess of wire bins, parts shelves, opened boxes, coils of telephone wire, a pair of red traffic cones, and a variety of tools and tech manuals. He had Jared’s .45 auto in a pouch behind the seat, but still no shells. Sometimes an empty .45 was as good as a loaded one, though: People tended to make assumptions when it came to looking a .45 auto in the eye. He found the entrance to the alley that ran behind his target’s house, pulled in, came to the first telephone pole, and doused the main headlights.
Browne McGarand was almost ready to go. His pickup was in the garage, with the cap mounted on the bed to protect his tools and equipment. He had called the weekend number for a local funeral home and made arrangements for them to pick up Jared’s remains for cremation once the autopsy was completed. Then he’d called the detective who’d given him his card and left a voice-mail message that he would be out of town for a couple of days, that he was going down to Greensboro, North Carolina, to inform Jared’s younger brother face-to-face about what had happened.
He explained that the boy was mildly retarded and that the news would take some special handling. He expected to be back on Wednesday. Not asking them, just keeping them informed, everything perfectly routine and normal. That should keep them at bay if they decided they wanted to question him further.
He went out the back door to the garage and put the last bags into the passenger seat. He had everything he needed for the operation in Washington.
He hadn’t planned to leave on a weekend, but it wouldn’t matter at the target’s end, because any weekday morning would do for what he had planned. He went back into the house, turned out all the lights, and locked up. He had no dogs or other pets to worry about, and his
mailbox was big enough to let his bills pile up. He had actually considered burning the house, but in the end, he’d decided against it. If he succeeded at the target, they’d never be able to trace him to the propane truck, which might not even survive the explosion. If the bombing at Oklahoma City was any indication, they would eventually be able to trace the truck back to the town in West Virginia where Jared had heisted it a year ago, but there the trail
