Adamant

by E. H. Reinhard

  The guys closest to me stood from their stools. One of them tossed some cash on the bar. The other chugged what remained of his beer.

  “Have a good night, Jerry,” the guy who tossed the cash on the bar said.

  The dark-haired bartender turned and waved. Her name was apparently Jerry, which I assumed was short for Gerrianne, the bar owner and sister of Leland Walters.

  I pulled out my phone and sent a text to Beth, asking her to get a DL photo of Gerrianne Walters and send it to me. Less than a minute passed before an icon of an email popped up on my phone screen—a text from Beth followed, saying that she’d emailed me Gerrianne Walters’s sheet. I looked around to make sure no one who could get a look at what was on my phone was heading my way, then I opened the email. A copy of Gerrianne Walters’s driver’s license appeared, followed by a list of her priors. It was her, without a doubt. I scrolled past her DL information and had a look at her priors. A DUI and a couple of small drug pops. There looked to be a few domestic disputes mixed in—not too many to note. I closed it on my phone and went back to people watching—mostly Ms. Walters. She talked with the guys playing pool, occasionally getting a drink and leaving her spot behind the bar to take a shot on the pool table. I noticed that none of the guys were paying for anything, but that was about all I saw that was out of the ordinary.

  “I’m out of here,” I heard the guy closest to my left say.

  The bartender who had served me spoke up. “Have a good night, Ken. You need a ride?”

  “Nah, I’ll hoof it,” he said.

  “Are you sure. I can get one of the boys to drop you off,” she said.

  He waved away her offer. “Appreciate it, doll.”

  “We’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Have a good one.” The guy, looking the better part of seventy, gave me a nod as he passed me for the door.

  The other two people closest to me had left, and with the old guy calling it a night and heading out, I was sitting off to myself, which made me feel exposed—not that I had any reason to worry from what I’d seen. As far as anyone inside knew, I was just a guy there drinking alone, and I was sure every bar on every corner had another guy doing the same thing.

  I glanced over at the bikers at the end of the bar a couple of times. More than once, I caught people looking back. I’d seen what I needed to see. There were no signs of Burr, and the people in the place seemed to be a tight-knit group, and I was clearly not a part of it. I finished my drink, left a few bucks on the bar as a tip, and said thanks to the bartender, who looked over at me as I stood. As I turned toward the front door and started walking, I caught a couple of the guys from the far end of the bar getting up. When I pushed the door open and walked outside, they were following.

  “Shit,” I mumbled under my breath. I instinctively grabbed under my arm for my weapon, which wasn’t there. The sound of the front door clacking shut registered in my ears. The guys came out after me. I glanced over my shoulder to see the pair of guys walking in my direction. I made the corner of the building, turned it, and walked to my rental car. The guys weren’t more than twenty feet behind me. I thought they were going to try to rob me or something—they couldn’t have known that I was law enforcement.

  I hit the button to unlock the rental car, rounded the nose, and got to the driver’s door. One of the guys stopped at the front bumper of my car, and the other came at me between my car and the pickup truck that I was parked beside. My eyes shot from his right hand to his left. He wasn’t holding a weapon, just car keys. The guy stopped a few feet away. I took my hand from the door handle of the car.

  “You hopping in?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I just need to grab my smokes from my glove box in my truck,” he said. “So, I kind of need you to get in so I can get in.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” I pulled open the door, got in the car, and started it up after swinging the door closed. The guy pulled open the passenger door of the pickup truck and stood in the doorway while he fished around inside of it.

  “Smooth, Rawlings,” I said to myself. I backed from the spot and pulled from the lot, dialing Beth as I left the bar in my rearview mirror.

  “Hey, how did it go? What was up with those guys?”

  “You saw that?”

  “We were watching, yeah. Saw a pair of guys follow you out and round the corner after you. We were just about to get our asses over there. Figured you did something dumb inside.”

  “Nah, just a coincidence that they came out when they did, I guess,” I said.

  “Did you talk to them? It kind of looked like you did.”

  “The guy just asked if I was leaving. Said he was trying to get in his truck to grab his smokes or something. It was nothing.”

  “Okay. Where are we meeting?” she asked.

  “Gas station.” I started in that direction.

  “Okay. We’ll meet you over there.”

  I heard Beth say “gas station” to Disick.

  “What about inside? Anything?” Beth asked. “What did you need Gerrianne Walters’s sheet for?”

  “To see if she was who I was looking at inside. She was. It was her. But aside from that, I didn’t see anything that would make me think Burr was or had been there. Though, thinking about it, aside from seeing him inside, or overhearing his name, I’m not sure what I expected to find.”

  “Well, it was worth a look.”

  “It was,” I said.

  “Disick wants to know if we still need eyes on this place overnight,” Beth said.

  “Yeah. Let’s do it. Even though I didn’t see anything inside, you just never know.”

  Chapter 21

  I was halfway through a cup of hotel room coffee and my morning talk with Karen when my other line beeped in. I took my phone from my face and glanced at the screen—an unknown caller.

  “Hey, I’m getting another call, babe. I should take it. Could be about the investigation.”

  “Okay. Give me a call later.”

  “I will.”

  “Love you. Be safe,” she said.

  “Love you too. Bye.” I clicked over to the other call.

  “Hank Rawlings,” I answered.

  “Um, this is Patrick Catalane,” a man said. “It looks like I got a couple messages from you.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Catalane. I’ve been trying to reach you. We even popped by your office last night.”

  “You wouldn’t have had much luck with that. None of us are in the office this week.”

  “Are you aware of what happened at your business?” I asked. “The gas station.”

  “I found out this morning when we got to port.”

  “Port?”

  “We’ve been at sea. Family vacation, and my family pretty much makes up my entire staff. We got to port this morning, where we finally have some signal, and I find out that one of our businesses has burned to the ground. So here I am sitting on a cruise ship in Mexico, with that going on up there.”

  “Mr. Catalane, we found a camera in the remains of the store,” I said.

  “We had more than one. And we watched them just before I called you.”

  “You watched footage of what happened inside of the store?”

  “My son did the security system. He does them for all our businesses. He’d just pulled it up on his laptop. I sat here with my wife, son, daughter, and granddaughters, watching customers get shot. Murdered. Watching a guy we hired three weeks ago get lit on fire. Watching the whole place burn.”

  I didn’t have anything for the guy other than an apology. “I’m sorry this happened. Sorry your family had to watch that. We’re doing our damnedest to catch up to this guy and get him locked up where he belongs.”

  “Who is he?” Catalane asked.

  I didn’t think keeping Burr’s identity a secret was going to have many benefits, and while we didn’t tell the press Burr was responsible for the gas station murders and fire, I imagined that we would get the word out as soon as
we had a hundred percent confirmation—the more eyeballs looking for him, the better. I figured shooting straight with Catalane was going to be my best chance at getting a look at the video as soon as I could. “The guy’s name is Charles Burr. Goes by Chuck. Escaped inmate out of Louisiana.”

  Catalane grunted a response.

  “Mr. Catalane, we need access to the videos you have. How can we go about getting that?”

  “Hold on,” Catalane said. “I’m going to put you on with my son.”

  Catalane passed the phone off, and I heard him say, “He’s a fed. Give him whatever he needs.”

  “Hello,” a man said.

  “Hello. This is agent Hank Rawlings.”

  “Steven Catalane.”

  “Mr. Catalane, I’m looking to get access to the video that you watched this morning. The security video from the gas station.”

  “You can access it online. Or through an app on a phone. Um…” He paused. “I guess I could give you the website and log-in info if that’s what we have to do.”

  “It would be appreciated,” I said. “We need to see what happened inside the gas station and analyze the video. There could be something that gets us closer to catching him. Where do I go to log in?”

  I pulled my notepad from the small desk in the hotel room and jotted down the website and log-in credentials as he gave them to me—albeit somewhat hesitantly. “Can you give me one second while I try to bring this up?”

  “Um, yeah,” he said.

  I kept the phone pinned to my ear and punched the web address into the search bar on my laptop. When the site loaded, I typed in the username and password. A dashboard on the website popped up. I could see in the top right corner of the screen that I was logged in as Red Moon Corp. What looked like folders appeared on screen—six in total, with addresses beneath them. My eyes landed on the folder with the address of our burned-down gas station. I clicked on it, and four black screens showed up, all reading “No feed.”

  “Okay. It looks like I’m in. I’ve got four black screens that all say no feed on them.”

  “Those are the four camera feeds for the store. Or were. I was waiting on another four cameras to add to the store, but they were on back order. You’ll have to go to the individual feeds, and once you click on them, there will be individual dates that you can watch. You’re looking for Friday at about a quarter after five. The guy comes in and kind of stands at the glass for a bit before anything happens. It looks like he’s wearing a vest over a flannel shirt. Do you need me to try to walk you through everything over the phone?”

  I would figure it out when I got off the phone, and if I couldn’t, the twins back at the home office surely could. “No need. We’ll be able to figure it out.”

  “Um, okay,” he said. “And for how long?”

  It seemed like an odd question, but he’d been reserved during the entire conversation. I was under the impression that he wasn’t happy about giving us access. “Probably not any longer than it takes for us to have a look at the footage and do what we have to in order to make copies of it.”

  “So, if I changed all the log-ins tonight, that would be enough time?”

  “It should be,” I said.

  “Sorry, I just don’t like the idea of Big Brother having access to our cameras. Not that they’re not watching everything transmitted over the internet and across the airwaves already. I’m sure they’re listening to this phone call.”

  When I heard his comments, his reservations made more sense. He was one of the “Big Brother is watching everything and spying on the American people” conspiracy theorists. And while the bureau and a couple of other government agencies had caught flack in the past for spying on people of interest, I was about a thousand percent certain that nobody was going to pay someone to spy on this guy’s gas station feeds. I reassured him that no one would have access to his account that didn’t need it. I let him know that he could change whatever he needed to that evening for further peace of mind. He mentioned the boat leaving at six o’clock and said he would have to change the passwords before that. I agreed without question.

  “You need my father back on the phone?” he asked.

  “Just really quick,” I said.

  He gave the phone to the elder Catalane. I thanked him for the help, gave him my direct number, and explained that I would be following the investigation to wherever that took me, possibly away from the Waco area. I gave him Disick’s contact information to use if I was gone and he needed to contact someone local with the bureau. The second I wrapped up the call, I sent Beth a text to come to my room.

  While I waited for her to show, I clicked on one of the video streams, which came up full screen on my computer. Control tabs for the player lined the bottom of the screen. To the right on the screen were individual twenty-four-hour feeds—the dates went back two weeks. I clicked on our day in question, and the video began playing starting just after midnight. The camera was aimed at the front counter area of the store.

  A bang came on my hotel room door.

  “Coming!” I went to get the door for Beth

  “What’s up?” She stood in the doorway and sipped coffee from a chain coffee shop—she must have already been out.

  “We have video from the gas station,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “It’s up on my laptop now.”

  Beth followed me into the hotel room and sat on the edge of the bed. I retook my seat in the room’s single rolling desk chair and started advancing the footage. Using the bar at the bottom of the screen to scroll through the day’s recording, I brought it to the time Catalane mentioned and saw someone appear on screen wearing a vest over what looked like a flannel shirt—just as he’d said. I clicked Play.

  “I think this is him,” I said.

  “Burr?”

  “Or whoever the hell did all this if it wasn’t him.” I squinted, trying to identify the man on the screen as Burr, but with his back toward the camera and not getting a good look at him when he walked into frame, I found it hard to say with any certainty. “Let me rewind this. Hang on. I want to see him come in.”

  I rewound the footage until he stepped into the building, then I jotted down the time in my notepad. With the exact time, I would be able to quickly check the other camera feeds for what they caught without spending needless time searching around. I let the footage play. We watched the man we figured to be Burr come into view. I quickly paused the feed. “Does that look like him to you?”

  “Yeah,” Beth said. “Just let it play.”

  I did.

  Beth rose from her spot at the edge of the bed and watched the video over my shoulder as it played. The guy walked straight to the counter. It took a moment for the employee to get off the stool he was sitting on and come to the window. The pair stood there and talked for a bit, and no transaction was made.

  “Is there any audio?” Beth asked.

  I checked the volume on my laptop and the recording, but there simply wasn’t any sound. “Doesn’t look like it, but we have a couple other feeds to check after this one. Maybe one of those does.”

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” Beth asked.

  “Asking for directions, maybe.” I shrugged.

  “Could be.” Beth finished her coffee, shook the cup, and tossed it in the trash next to the television. She pointed at my laptop’s screen as she resumed watching over my shoulder. “It looks like the clerk is showing him something on his phone.”

  I watched as the employee seemed to hold his phone against the security glass so that the man we assumed was Burr could see. A second later, the clerk seemed to move away from the glass a bit quicker than what would have seemed natural. The customer stepped away from the glass and produced a firearm from his waistline. He fired a single round into the security glass, aiming at the employee.

  The quick, violent motion of producing the gun and zero hesitation of firing it made both Beth and me pull our heads back. Just as quick
as the guy fired the shot, he stuffed the pistol into his waistline and walked straight toward the camera, disappearing from the frame. As he walked to the camera, he was as clear as we were going to get—I was all but certain he was Burr. My eyes went back to the clerk’s location, but he wasn’t in view. My guess was he’d ducked down beneath the counter. A moment later, Burr reappeared in frame with a pair of white bottles.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Beth said.

  Burr went to the glass, set one of the bottles down, and grabbed something from a rack on the counter. A lighter, maybe. He unscrewed the top of one of the bottles and seemed to splash it through the pass-through opening for money at the bottom of the glass. When the bottle was empty, he tossed it to the floor and grabbed the other. The employee popped up from behind the counter and took a couple of steps back. Burr took the cap off the second bottle and again splashed it through into the secured employee area.

  “It’s rubbing alcohol,” I said.

  Burr put the lighter to the pass-through and lit it up.

  “Oh my God,” Beth said.

  We watched the flames grow inside the secured employee area. The clerk thrashed around. In flames, he finally shot out of the secured room and crashed into the coolers just outside of it. Burr had been waiting. He fired a couple of rounds into the guy, and the guy dropped, his legs still on fire as he lay on the ground, bleeding out. Burr shot toward the door to leave but stopped in his tracks. He stared out before taking a few steps back from the door.

  “Someone is outside,” Beth said.

  Burr yanked the gun from his waistline and stood near the door. The first man walked into frame and stopped just a few feet inside of the entrance. Another guy had entered and stood behind him. Burr yanked the third guy through and appeared to be instructing the men to stand together by the soda machines. He held all three at gunpoint. He waited. And waited. Some words seemed to be exchanged, but unless the other feeds had audio, we would never know exactly what was being said, short of getting a lip reader to give us their best guess. I didn’t need to hear what was being said to know what was going on. The guys were pleading their case, and Burr was instructing them to stay put and keep quiet.