P Deutermann - Spider mountain

I took them through it from the beginning, or at least from the point where Carrie had gotten involved. They did not take notes-they just listened. Gelber watched me the way a hawk watches a little bunny hopping across a big field, waiting for it to get equidistant from any possible cover. His stare was sufficiently hostile that I called in the shepherds and made them lie down next to my chair. If he got the message, he didn’t let on. Finally, when I was finished, he told me to go through it again. That pissed me off-he was in fact treating me like some kind of suspect.

“No,” I said. “I’ve told you what I know. I’ll answer questions if you have some.”

Gelber’s face froze and he balled his hands into fists. Big fists. Frack sat up, staring at him. “Not your call, cowboy,” Gelber said, leaning forward in his chair as if he were getting ready to come at me. Frick sat up now, and both shepherds were locked on, without a word or signal from me. Gelber finally noticed what was happening.

“You sic those dogs on me and I’ll shoot both of them before they get off the first bark,” he spat.

I sighed. “You make any sort of move just now and you’ll lose both your hands and your face,” I said quietly. “You need to settle down, Special Agent.”

Gelber got very red in the face, and for a moment I thought he was going to try it. It would have been interesting. Bloody and noisy, but definitely interesting. Then the older agent intervened.

“Carl,” he said in a voice of calm authority. “Get ahold of yourself. You’re being unprofessional.”

Gelber blinked, turned around to look at the older man, and then deflated. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Sorry, sir.” He relaxed fractionally in his chair, opened his hands, and put them on his knees. Both shepherds relaxed along with him.

“Lieutenant Richter,” the older man said to me. “I’m Sam King, and I’m the western district manager for the SBI. As you might imagine, everyone’s pretty upset right now. Why don’t you and I have that drink. We’ll just let these gents go outside for a cigarette.”

It was my turn to blink, but I agreed immediately and told the dogs to lie down and watch. Gelber didn’t much care for that word “watch,” but he and his buddy stepped outside. Both shepherds followed them to the door and then sat down on the porch. Gelber’s anger seemed to have been genuine, so I didn’t think they were playing the bad cop, good cop game, but I decided to be on my guard. If this guy was the western district manager, he’d be looking to make sure that this situation didn’t get any serious mud on the SBI’s shoes.

“We went into Robbins County,” King said once we sat back down. “I had one team looking for Carrie Santangelo, or her remains, in the area where you said the shooting went down. No sign of her, unfortunately.”

“Maybe fortunately,” I interjected. “No body might mean she’s still alive.”

“Or drowned and not coming up for the usual two more days,” he said gently. “We did find the remains of the raft, hung up on a snag. Complete with bullet holes. And someone’s nasty toy.”

The mamba stick. One point for me, I thought.

“I took another team into Mingo’s office in Rocky Falls,” he continued. “We were rather, um, belligerent. But Mingo was prepared for us. According to him, two of his deputies were cruising the river road, looking for an escaped prisoner.”

“That would be me,” I said.

“Yeah. Anyway, the gospel according to Mingo: They heard shooting, stopped to investigate, saw a man they say they didn’t know shooting at two unidentified people in a raft. They thought they saw one of said people get hit and fall out of said raft. When the shooter saw the cops, he took off. They called it in and went down to the riverbank to investigate because they thought there might be someone injured in the river. While they were down there, somebody grabbed their cruiser and also took off. Here endeth the lesson.”

“The two vehicles were parked together when the shooting started,” I said. “Side by side. The rifle shooter was firing from between the vehicles. Those cops are complicit in this. They knew the shooter’s name.”

“And we’ve asked Mingo to get them in for a lie detector test.”

“He agree to that?”

“Hell, no, he wouldn’t even ID them. I’m guessing they’ll get their union rep in and then stonewall. Assuming they’ve advanced to that point in Robbins County. We looked at the site, and, yes, there are vehicle tracks all over it. Too many, unfortunately. We did find a couple of fresh-looking cigarette butts, which might indicate someone had been staked out, waiting. But we also found used condoms, beer cans, fast-food wrappers, so it’s probably also a make-out spot. We’ve sent the ciggy-butts to our lab for a DNA take.”

“Did they say anything about Rue Creigh getting her head blown off?”

“Not a word,” King said.

“That’s very interesting,” I said. “I can show you where that happened. I’ll bet there’s some blood evidence on that dirt road. No mention of my taking Nathan Creigh down and ‘borrowing’ his shotgun?”

He shook his head and consulted his notebook. “They did say that the raft had been stolen earlier in the morning, so they suspected the guy in the raft might be their fugitive. They said you burned the jail and possibly killed two jailers during your escape. Anything on that?”

I told him of the events at the jail and that the Big brothers were here in Carrigan County under Hayes’s protection and could back up my story. He nodded and made a note, which is when I realized he had been putting stuff into his notebook the whole time we’d been talking. Smooth western district manager.

“Mingo say anything to indicate that he knew it was Carrie who got shot?”

“News to him,” King said. “He did make an oblique reference to the fact that technically, anyway, she didn’t work for us anymore.”

“Sending you a little message, maybe?”

“Maybe,” King said. “We’ve been looking at Robbins County for a long time, but it’s always been in connection with Mingo and his crew of ‘unofficial’ deputies protecting the meth trade.”

“That’s not what Carrie was after,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. And you’re probably wondering why we didn’t go with it.”

“I assume it was the same problem everyone has in Robbins County: no hard evidence.”

“That’s right,” he said. “And there was a personal, somewhat obsessive angle, which tended to taint any theories she might have advanced. When she quit, I had some second thoughts, so I went to the Bureau in Charlotte and asked them what they had on any child trafficking going on in western Carolina.”

“And?”

“And that got me an invitation to drive down to Charlotte for a face-to-face conference with their intel people. I was supposed to be there today, but then Sheriff Hayes called.”

“What’s Gelber’s problem?” I asked.

“He was Carrie’s immediate supervisor,” King said. “He thinks she resigned because you talked her into it, and then you got her killed.”

“He’s got it exactly backwards,” I said. “I was all done up here. She’s the one who wanted me to go back in, to chase this kid thing.”

“Well,” King said, closing his notebook, “you’re welcome to try to convince him. He might just be feeling a little guilty for not taking her theory seriously, too.”

I sighed. I was still tired. “Look,” I said. “I can’t produce any evidence of children being abducted and transported for sale. I overheard a conversation that confirmed that theory for me, and we had one old lady say that there seemed to be a lot of kids who ran away up there, but there are lots of other possible reasons for that.”