What she failed to see, however, was that as Malick bent to pick it up for her, he glanced at the screen and a look of shock ran over his face. He looked to Sarah and then back to the phone. He never expected anything like this.
Chapter 46
BEFORE SARAH HAD RALLIED up his driveway to tear him a new asshole, Tyler Ford had been at home looking into ‘The Agrarian’ Case. He’d been thinking about Carson a lot and he needed something to take his mind off it.
He recalled looking into who it had been who tipped off the mob about the impending raids on the farmers' lands that it turned out never happened. As usual when it came to the mob there was a lot of closed ranks and fear of being labelled a snitch but Tyler had found out something on an informant called Donny and was now using it against him—this was how these things worked unfortunately.
Donny didn’t know who the cop was, but it had been Donny he’d warned so he would pass on the message. Tyler’s conversation with Donny was through fractured text messages on a phone Tyler had given Donny sometime back to contact him.
Donny told him how the gang bosses had been annoyed at him at first when the raids didn’t happen but that they were glad now after all the murders that had taken place. Their cars would have been impounded and found to be stolen if they were still there now.
Donny’s description of the cop was nondescript; the only thing being that he was a plainclothesman. Tyler thought about this for a time and then an idea came to mind, something he had thought about before but hadn’t put much stock in. He looked up a few sites on his phone and then selected a photograph of a man that matched Donny's description and pressed send with the message.: Is this him?
Sarah showed up not long after that and things took an unexpected turn and it was many hours later, after Sarah had left his house when Tyler saw that Donny had replied.
“YES!” the message screeched out.
Tyler looked out the window to where Sarah had gone; she was long gone now, over ten minutes. He dialled her number but it went to voicemail. This happened over and over as he got dressed and then finally, as he jumped into his car to try to follow her, he sent a text message to her phone.
He didn’t pick up her trail and assumed she must be driving like a crazy woman to get where she was going. He was regretting now that he hadn’t asked where the house was and he started calling around to his contacts looking for information. It was twenty five minutes before he got the info he needed.
All the way there he tried calling her and even thought of calling the local cops out by the house to tell them what he knew, but that was for Sarah to decide. He tried her again and again but still only voicemail.
“Calm yourself,” he said out loud in the car; “You know the crime scene is real, you know there are plenty of people there. She will be fine until you arrive.” he looked at his watch. Only an hour to go.
As he drove he cursed himself for having these thoughts before and not acting on them or following them. Spalding had played this one very well and even Sarah with her suspicious FBI nose hadn’t got wind of this one.
It made sense now how Spalding had been able to tap Sarah’s original phone and how he knew of the FBI investigations of him at key moments of the ‘John the Baptist’ case and now ‘The Agrarian' one. The phrase keep your enemies closer came to mind. This was a lapse in Tyler’s judgment that he didn’t like one bit. He should have seen this long before now. But then, to be fair hadn’t he? He’d simply let himself be led away from this idea by what Sarah was telling him.
The rural farmhouse scene was much busier than Tyler had imagined it would be. It had the feeling of another ‘Agrarian’ scene but he knew this was going to be something completely different. It seemed as though he wasn’t the only reporter who had informants working late into the night. There must have been well over a dozen news vans and cars there. Flashing lights and news camera lights could be seen from miles around. He’d never seen so many people beat him to a middle of the night gig like this, but then, what did it matter, none of them had the real story, like he did. They were all miles and miles behind no matter how much earlier they arrived here.
Tyler parked as close by as he could and then ran to jostle for a position at the front of the reporting throng. He got there just in time to see two people coming out of the house and taking off what looked like forensic coverings. It took him a moment to realise it was Sarah and Malick and he saw them exchange an envelope which clearly annoyed Sarah. She threw whatever it was on the ground and then stormed away with her back to her partner. Tyler was too far away to hear anything and he wondered what was going on between them right then. He saw Malick bend to retrieve the paper and then he bent again a few seconds later and picked something else up from the ground. What was it? A light emitted from it and there was something off about the way he looked at the thing that made Tyler feel uneasy.
