Richard Greener - The Knowland Retribution

“The b-bloody canyon!” she squeaked.

“Canyon?” His face made it clear that he knew she had something. She had the thrilling sensation of something approaching a boil.

“I think we should look at the guns. It’s something we know, something we actually have. Jennings was a shooter. So is Leonard. They have to use a firing range. Laticia said you can’t shoot off guns wherever you please.”

Walter picked it up. “Some of Leonard’s rifles have a range of fifteen hundred yards or more. He killed Hopman from four hundred fifty yards. Who knows how far out on Lake Mead he was?”

“Locate the ranges. We narrow the whole thing down. Ranges or wherever else he could practice undetected.”

“You can buy those weapons on the net. They’re expensive. The Holland amp; Holland double rifle goes for about twenty-seven thousand dollars,” said Walter.

“The other stuff, the equipment he left for me, it’s all top of the line, six, eight, ten thousand dollars apiece. How do you get things like that? If people see things like that they remember. We work it from the guns, where they came from, where they went. Can we find that?”

Walter said, “They’re not as hard to get as you might think, but he’s not walking in and buying this sort of equipment over the counter.

He must have a shipping point, a drop, maybe even a dummy name. Wherever that is, that’s where you’ll find the firing range. Unless-”

“Unless what?”

“Unless he’s been using his own range. Unless he’s got open space. He bought that hut in Jamaica. Maybe that isn’t the only place he bought.”

“You mean someplace where he’s been living?”

Walter was nodding, trying as hard as he knew how to rid himself of a nagging doubt. “Everyone has to live somewhere,” he said quickly, adding, “you have to avoid making judgments, Isobel, coming to conclusions based on speculation. Speculation is good, but only if it leads you in one direction or another. Eventually there has to be evidence. Physical evidence. Something you can see and touch. Something real. Work with what you know, not what you think you know. You never get everything right all the time. Errors happen, but if you have a starting point that’s beyond question-you go back and take another turn. And what do we have that’s beyond question? The guns. We have the guns. Begin with the guns. Nice going.” Walter leaned back in his chair, a visible sense of relaxation having come over him. Isobel saw it. She imagined this to be the work product of a man who’s been through this very process many times. The effect on her was exactly the opposite. She was exhilarated.

“Now tell me about the other thing,” she said, her excitement spilling out with her words. “Kermit.”

“I already did. I only said maybe.”

“Are you going to make me guess? I’m the one who got abused.” She tried to work up some indignation but couldn’t quite bring it off. She tried a smile, but Walter was serious now.

“It’s just the way I work,” Walter said. “Some things I keep to myself.”

“I tell you everything I know.” Her eyes grew wide, implying hurt. She hadn’t forgotten about her secret, but she had convinced herself it didn’t count.

“I tell you too,” he said. He meant that he shared everything he knew, and that was true, but not everything he thought.

Like Sherlock Holmes, whom he read soon after getting into this business, often behind warehouse crates, Walter made a practice of drawing no conclusions, and certainly sharing no half-baked ones, until he had sufficient facts in hand. The revelation that Sherlock Holmes observed this rule lent grandeur to what had been a chafing, sometimes desperate need. Walter had left Vietnam, but had Vietnam left him? His mother saw the root of it as soon as he got back. Or maybe she heard the screaming in his head. She demonstrated her love by keeping her distance; allowing him to do the same. His work-finding people-eased his troubles.

His clients craved privacy, but Walter craved it even more. His work not only gave him a living, it allowed him to hold on to his secrets. And when he finally found whoever it was he was looking for, everything was all right again. No one held the secrets against him because he’d helped; he’d done the work.

His wounded nature reshaped itself around a peculiar structure of isolation. That peculiarity killed his marriage. It kept her out. And who wants to live with that? Gloria waited for him to let her in, but he never did. After four years she told him she had to go. She loved him, but that was all she could do. He knew she was right and he hated being without her.

He tried to try, but whenever she threatened to touch him at a certain depth of feeling, an iron door shut hard in his head. And when that happened he froze her with the look in his eye and the deathly sound of his voice. And all that lasted until his mind relaxed and his shame unclenched and he could think and act like a normal man. It happened, and happened, and happened because the threat was unrelenting. Both of them came to understand it. When she left, Gloria told him, “You’ll be fine Walter. You really will.” He never doubted it. And she had been more right than wrong. That iron door had grown rusty over the years. No one had wandered back there for decades.

And now, he thought, this girl. And this idiotic thing about who drove the car-Kermit. For reasons he could not imagine, he felt the rusty hinges move. Yes, he had a fine working method, and it should certainly be maintained. No point at all to pointless speculation. Never bend the rules that matter most. But he’d never had a partner before. He’d made that rule number three (after not promoting himself and never accepting supervision). And it’s different with a partner, like it or not. You have to exchange ideas in a different way. Besides, they had conjectured together. They traded hypotheses, worked them to theories, set out conditions for proving facts.

“Are you okay?” She looked concerned.

Walter knew he’d broken a sweat. He knew that she saw his agitation, had to have glimpsed the fear. At the moment it thrashed and towered. It felt like a wave breaking over and inside his eyes. The door squeaked louder; he could hear it. Once it thundered shut he would shiver and freeze again after all those years.

But if he let this other thing out…

He confronted the prospect of thirty years of heavy protective machinery wrecked around him. He wondered what the arrangement would be after that.

He said, “I think he’s Carter Lawrence.”

And then, to his amazement, he slumped quite comfortably into his sturdy bamboo chair, remembering the time he and Gloria flew to Denver. He’d loaded her up with valium to cut her fear. He’d held her hand as the plane taxied into position. He’d smiled at her as she turned to look out the window. And when the engines fired up and swept them into the smooth silk sky she put her head on his shoulder and giggled. He’d done that. But it was long ago.

“Kermit,” Isobel said, “… is Carter Lawrence?”

“I don’t know. I’m not even sure why I think so.” Walter felt more than comfortable now-he felt euphoric.

He enjoyed a deep breath of moist Caribbean air. His thoughts jumped like unruly pets.

“So where does this leave us?” said Isobel.

He went to autopilot. “If Carter’s the guy, he may help a lot. There’s always a way when people are…” He waited for the word. They waited together. “Vulnerable,” he said. “He may be vulnerable.”

Isobel offered ideas for going at Carter, reworking their background, designing a quick, simple plan of action aimed to open him up.

By then Walter’s mind had shifted back to the point he needed to care about most: the widened gap between what Tom Maloney had told him and the version Dr. Ganga Roy gave to Leonard Martin. To the extent that Roy had it right, and Walter had no reason to doubt it, Maloney and Stein were far from the relative innocents Tom described, mistakenly targeted by a madman. They were the ones who set the death train in motion. How did Leonard put it? He labeled them “premeditative mass murderers.” Accused them of making a cost-benefit analysis. And he said they “decided to kill my family for money.” That altered the picture. It suggested questions. What else didn’t Walter know about his clients? And what did they really expect for their million dollars?