Michael McGarrity - Under the color of law

Except for the bathroom device he left everything else in place.

Using a handheld scanner Kerney made a grid-by-grid pass of the walls, floors, and ceiling in the bathroom, bedroom, and closet, and didn't find any more bugs. With what he'd bought, he could work in the bedroom without raising the suspicions of his listeners.

He carried everything he needed into the bedroom and closed the door.

Just before he plugged in the earphones and started listening to the audiotapes, the living room TV blared the notes of a bugler sounding a cavalry charge.

Unlike real cities with real morgues and coroners, the Santa Fe local-yokels stashed their stiffs at the regional hospital. That made scooping up the body, as Applewhite had so inelegantly put it, a relatively easy chore for Charlie Perry. He followed the rent-an ambulance to an HMO facility in Albuquerque near the air force base, within shouting distance of the VA hospital. Two white-coats and an armed uniformed security guard waited at the back door.

The white-coats transferred the corpse to the gurney and the guard led the way into the building. Perry tagged behind. The inside didn't look anything like an HMO clinic. There were laboratories, research suites, and communications rooms, offices identified by numbers only, contamination vaults and refrigerated storage lockers posted with radioactive warning signs, a video surveillance room, and finally a real morgue.

The white-coats dumped the body on a stainless-steel autopsy table and left. The guard remained in the room. Perry smiled at the guard. He got a tight nod back.

CIA, thought Charlie. Maybe something to do with the vast nuclear weapons stockpile stored in the mountains on the air force base. He thought human radiation exposure, epidemiology testing for rare forms of cancer, forensic pathology studies to determine unusual causes of death, psych testing to assess mental functioning.

Charlie decided it was smart to put the facility right next door to the base and close to the VA hospital so all the civilian and military worker bees could be easily examined, probed, and tested, to study the effects of exposure to plutonium, uranium, anthrax bacilli, Ebola, or whatever else the government was playing around with.

A man in a lab coat walked in. He flipped off the sheet covering the cadaver and did a visual head-to-toe inspection. Maybe on the early side of forty, he wore a Naval Academy class ring.

"Cause of death appears to be blunt trauma to the head, with some very interesting lacerations," the man said.

"Someone drew blood, did a mouth swab, and took a skin sample. What's that all about?"

Perry froze. That son of a bitch Kerney had all he needed to wash the Terrell homicide cover-up down the tubes. He didn't know whether to lie or tell the truth. He knew Applewhite wasn't FBI. But was she CIA?

Military intelligence?

State Department counterintelligence? He had every reason to believe she'd killed four, possibly five people. It was time to start covering his ass.

"Who took the samples?" the doctor asked.

"I had those done," Perry lied.

The doctor nodded.

"Want me to open him up?"

"If you think it's necessary."

"What do you need?"

"The local police are calling it a homicide," Perry replied.

"I doubt they're wrong. What do you want done?"

"It needs to become an accidental death," Perry said.

"Who gets the autopsy report?"

"The Red River town marshal."

Sal Molina's undercover vehicle was a minivan equipped with a radio, a pinpoint shielded privacy light, cell phone, 35mm camera, night-vision binoculars, video camera, and an array of weapons held in a rack above his head. While it looked like an anonymous soccer mom car, a souped-up eight-cylinder engine powered the vehicle and a new suspension gave it a surefooted feel on the road. The van could top out at 140 mph and manage a high-speed emergency U turn without nipping over.

It had been used by a local real estate agent to transport crack cocaine to wealthy clients who divided their time between Santa Fe in the summer and trendy, upscale Colorado skiing destinations in the winter.

Sal had tailed Charlie Perry and the ambulance to Albuquerque. Watching Perry play body snatcher demolished the last of his doubts about Chief Kerney's plan.

He took snapshots, scribbled surveillance field notes, and followed Perry back to Santa Fe, expecting to spend the remainder of the night parked outside of Charlie's hotel. Instead, he waited and watched as Perry parked at the back of the federal courthouse two blocks from the plaza and went inside.

The FBI offices were next door in the post office building. What was Perry doing at the courthouse? Unless he had a late-night meeting with a judge or a federal prosecutor from the U. S. attorney's office in from Albuquerque, it made no sense. Other than Charlie's unit there were no cars in the spaces reserved for judges and staff. But behind the post office there were five nice, shiny new Ford sedans that screamed FBI.

Only one full-time resident agent, Frank Powers, worked out of Santa Fe.

Why the late-night caucus?

Sal reached for the Santa Fe telephone book, found a number, and dialed up a retired sheriff's captain who worked as a federal court security officer. Six years ago Molina had busted the man's youngest son for drug dealing, turned him into a snitch, and let him walk. After the kid cleaned up his act, Molina had cut him loose.

A sleepy voice answered on the second ring.

"Jake."

"Yeah."

"It's Sal Molina. Who's holding a late-night convention at the courthouse?"

"Man, I don't know what you're talking about. The courthouse is locked up at night."

"Wrong answer, Jake. I just watched an FBI agent go in the back door."

Sal heard Jake catch his breath.

"I don't know nothing about that," Jake said.

"I hear Joey's doing okay. Married. Kid on the way. Got a good job as an auto mechanic with the highway department."

"Jesus, don't do this to me, Sal." The words came out pinched.

"That's not a trade someone learns in the slammer," Sal said evenly.

"Okay, okay, I owe you. There's an off-limits suite of rooms in the basement.

People come and go. I don't know what they do down there."

"I need more than that, Jake."

"This has to stay off the record," Jake said.

"I'm not supposed to talk about it."

"You've got my word."

"You gotta pass through a retina- and palm-print-scan foyer that's behind a keypad access door on the first floor, just off the back entrance. That's all I know."

"You said you see those people come and go, Jake. Who do you think they are?"

"Some are FBI suits and Beltway types, but most of the current crew look like computer gee ks to me."

"Is the basement in constant use?" Sal asked.

"Staffed regularly?"

"The last group to use it was the Secret Service. They were here when the vice president came to Santa Fe."

"When did the computer gee ks set up shop?"

"About two months before the FBI task force came to town on the Terrell homicide."

Sal decided not to push it any further.

"Thanks, Jake. Give my best to Joey."

After sampling the Mitchell audiotapes to get the meat of each interview, Kerney worked up a set of questions he would use in the morning. He planned to call some of the people Mitchell had interviewed.

He figured it would be safe to use each of the new cell phones three or four times before the feds got on to it.

He stared at Mitchell's list of names and numbers. How did the priest make contact with these people? There was no phone in his room at the brothers' residence hall, and the two phones in the common areas where the brothers congregated weren't suitable for private conversations.