A melange of anger and disgust soured my stomach. I reached for the Diet Coke.
“At the time Cindi Gamble and Cale Lovette vanished, the posse was under surveillance,” Williams went on.
“You had someone inside?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Was it Lovette? Gamble?”
Williams ignored my questions. “Our intel also suggested that members of the group may have had ties to Eric Rudolph.”
“Did they?”
“We were unable to establish that fact with certainty.”
“The posse disbanded in 2002, but the bureau has continued to track some of its members.”
“J. D. Danner?”
“Danner now heads a much bigger organization called the Loyalist Movement. The group has several thousand followers throughout the Southeast.”
“Who are they?”
“Extremists who believe that the federal government deliberately murdered people at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and that door-to-door gun confiscation could begin any day. Their ideology is less white-supremacist than in the nineties, though many have now turned their venom toward followers of Islam. What holds the group together is anger at the government.”
I pictured the Tommy Bahamas, the sapphire ring, the RX-8. “Danner looked pretty flush.”
“The Loyalist Movement is well funded, and Danner skims a big chunk off the top. But make no mistake. Though he lives well, Danner is committed. The guy’s cunning as a fox and dangerous as typhoid.”
“Why are you sharing all of this now?”
“To keep you in the loop.”
“You want nothing in return.”
“Normal professional consideration.”
“Uh. Huh.”
With that, we disconnected.
After chugging the dregs of my Diet Coke, I got MCME 239-11 from the cooler.
The I-485 creek-bed skull was covered with moss and missing its entire face and most of the base. Copper staining, remnants of adipocere, tissue turned crumbly and waxy due to the hydrolysis of fats, and the presence of a shriveled mass of petrified brain told me I was probably looking at an old coffin burial. Without more contextual information, there was little I could say.
I was jotting a request to Hawkins for information about cemeteries in the vicinity of the creek bed, when my iPhone rang.
Katy.
I clicked on.
“Hey, babe. What are you up to?”
“Working late.” Her tone suggested a need to vent. “As usual.”
“Same here. Anything interesting?”
“Mind-blowing. I can hardly stay in my chair.”
“Oh?” I ignored the heavy sarcasm.
“Some guy’s in the running for most flagrant tax-fraud artist of the year. I get to plow through boxes and boxes of his papers.”
“Getting any good ideas?”
“With my salary? What would be the point of tax evasion?”
“Will you finish tonight?”
“I won’t finish until I’m ready for Medicare—one of the few systems this creep didn’t scam. Here’s a good one. He’d buy first-class airline tickets, then turn them in for a full refund and buy coach. But he’d submit the first-class receipts for tax purposes.”
“Not all that original.”
“OK. How about this one? He set up some sort of tax-free bank accounts for his kids’ education. But before they went to college, he drew out all the money. And never told Uncle Sam.”
“Isn’t the IRS able to track that sort of thing?”
“I’m probably missing something. It was complicated. And just one of the many cons el creepo got away with for years.”
