by Robert Pobi
Whitaker stepped forward. “Because we would.”
Lucas could see that she had switched gears into combat mode. So could the sheriff. “Don’t be so sure,” he said, and it was hard to miss that it sounded like a thinly veiled threat.
Whitaker walked over to the rifle rack until she was almost nose to nose with the man. “I appreciate your position, and as much as I’d like to tell you that you’re allowed to have opinions, you’re not. Our brothers-in-arms are out there being murdered by someone, and I need to know who. You either become part of the solution right fucking now, or you’re part of the problem.” She smiled at him, and it wasn’t a friendly expression. “And you do not want to get me angry.”
Doyle was silent for a moment, and it was obvious he was thinking through his options. “We need a plow to get up there this time of year. We stopped clearing the road on the county dime to cut down on pilgrims going up.”
“Pilgrims?” Lucas asked. “What kind of pilgrims?”
The sheriff tried to pick an eye to focus on, finally settling on Lucas’s good one. “The kind who don’t like tyranny.”
Whitaker kept the voltage in her voice dialed up. “So get us a plow. I’ll pay for it.”
Doyle was trying to put the pieces together. “What does Jameson’s killing have to do with Bible Hill?”
Whitaker answered as if there were nothing to think about. “They are independent incidents.” Which was the safest way to handle things.
Doyle nodded at that. “I know that. I just want to be sure that you know that. Jameson was still in high school when Bible Hill happened.”
“And you?”
He paused, and the mass of his larynx pumped once with a swallow. “I had no choice. You people stormed in here with two dozen agents and a ton of bad ideas. I told you not to go up there. I told you it wouldn’t end well. I tried to help.”
Whitaker flexed rank again when she said, “I need to see your files.”
Doyle smiled at that. “Lady, I don’t have any files. You people took everything.”
Whitaker didn’t look convinced. “Can you remember who was in charge?”
“Sure.” Doyle nodded. “Some asshole name of Doug Hartke.”
66
Bible Hill, Wyoming
It wasn’t hard to see why they had named this place with such reverence. The ground below his feet dropped off, and the old-growth coniferous forest was dappled with patches of green poking through the snow. It was the kind of view that could make you believe in God if you didn’t understand the general mechanics of the universe. Or weren’t interested.
Lucas and Whitaker had gone through the appropriate motions, digging through the FBI archives to replicate Nadeel’s findings. Whitaker found a basic case summary, totaling less than six thousand words, and the picture it painted was ridiculously incomplete. They needed something solid to take to Kehoe. The link was here. Somewhere. They had passed the threshold for coincidence.
Lucas turned away from the HD image of the world stretching into forever. Back to the mountainside. Back to the burned-out cabin and litter-strewn clearing. Back to where a family had been killed.
Whitaker and Doyle were standing up at the foundation near the stone chimney reaching into the sky like a charred bone. They were speaking softly, Doyle pointing here and there as he went through the chain of events that led to a disaster so terrible that it had been struck from FBI memory. On the way up here, Doyle had laid out his version of events. It was not pretty, not particularly erudite, and very disturbing.
Doyle had been very matter of fact about it all, but Lucas didn’t have a great deal of faith in the man’s loyalty to their cause, and he took everything at less than face value. After all, the FBI was the very government that his bumper sticker confirmed he didn’t respect. But his delivery jelled with what they knew, and the predictability of the story didn’t make it any less heartbreaking.
Carl and Elisabeth Quaid had had enough of life in the city. Their growing mistrust of the way civilization was heading was fueled by the ministry they attended, the Covenant of the New Order, a fundamentalist End Times congregation with Christian Identity roots. Certain that the apocalypse was imminent, Quaid and his wife bought three hundred acres in the mountains using a distant relative’s inheritance. They built a cabin. A smokehouse. A larder. All overlooking God’s country.
For a lot of years, everything had been good. Their children spent their time doing what kids did. Tommy, Forney, Ursula, Ruby, and Esther never really knew any other life, and they were devoted to their parents and their teachings. Quaid made a living operating heavy machinery for a local roadwork crew and buying and selling guns in his spare time. Elisabeth homeschooled the children. They had a vegetable garden, and Carl hunted to fill the storeroom. Carl split logs in the fall to heat the house through the winter. They had two dogs, German shepherds—Boomer and Keylor. They cut their own Christmas tree, and Elisabeth canned vegetables. They enjoyed the sunrises. Life was hard work, but they were good at it.
Then one Monday, Carl Quaid sold a trunkful of semiautomatic AR-15s to someone he barely knew in the parking lot of a Waffle House in Jackson. Quaid had a dealer’s license, and the transaction was completely legal, but things got complicated when the customer became upset that the weapons weren’t fully automatic. Quaid told him to file down the hammer hook—or remove the disconnector—but after the back-and-forth became heated, Quaid took one of the assault rifles apart right there on the hood of the car, modifying it with his Gerber pocket tool. When he put the rifle back together, a dozen ATF agents jumped out, read him his Miranda rights, and led him away in handcuffs while his three-year-old twin daughters watched from the backseat. Turned out the customer was an ATF informant.
It was a bullshit charge that any decent lawyer could have sold as entrapment. But Quaid stood by his actions; he had done nothing wrong. After he posted bail, he refused to show up for the trial date. And when Sheriff Doyle was asked to deliver the arrest warrant for failure to appear, he had driven up there and tried to talk it out with Quaid. He told him that the powers that be were pissed and that he should take it to court. Worst-case scenario, he explained, Quaid could plea it down. Quaid said he believed in his constitutional rights under the Second Amendment, and he thanked Doyle for his efforts before telling him that the only way he was coming down off the mountain was feetfirst.
Doyle said he was stupid enough to relay Quaid’s comments to the Wyoming branch of the ATF. It was a decision that would haunt him until the day he closed his eyes. Lucas didn’t say anything to that, but he understood those kinds of regrets.
Three months and five days after Carl Quaid failed to appear in court, the ATF and FBI showed up on the mountain.
The Quaid cabin overlooked the single road that climbed to their gate, and they saw the convoy coming. They were prepared. But it is impossible to stand up to the government of the United States in any meaningful way, and things were bad from the beginning.
By the time the ATF, FBI, local SD, and U.S. Marshals arrived at the cabin, the gate was locked and the drive was blocked by a series of chained logs.
But the dogs were out, and the government made their point by killing both. They left Boomer and Keylor on the road, and in the subzero weather, the convoy of government vehicles spread them out in a long red smear on the ice and snow. Doyle cited this as merely one instance out of many that amounted to unnecessary mental cruelty, paramount unprofessionalism, and supreme negligence. Lucas couldn’t disagree with the man. Doyle pleaded with the feds to leave and let him bring Quaid in when things calmed down. He was ordered off the mountain.
Things went from bad to worse when an FBI sniper positioned on an outcropping of rock five hundred yards from the cabin took a guess shot at a figure he later testified he believed to be Carl Quaid.
Doyle claimed that there was footage locked away in some unknown FBI vault that showed the nine-year-old boy’s head disintegrating. The thought brought bac
k images of Atchison’s skull taking the full wallop of the sniper’s round.
Doyle said the boy would lie out in the yard for the next four days, like the dogs.
Things continued the spectacular downward spiral as mistakes compounded, sending the entire operation into the shitter of the irrevocably fucked. Two FBI agents and one ATF officer died from what ballistics would later determine to be “friendly fire.” One of the senior agents from the FBI would fall off a cliff, rendering him brain-dead; Doyle wondered out loud if he was still on life support all these years later.
But the big cinematic finale occurred on the fifth day.
It was an errant shot that should not have been let go. But one of the government men who had been out in the cold for too long didn’t realize that frostbite was setting in and one of his fingers twitched.
The bullet ricocheted off the doorknob.
Right into a propane cylinder.
Technically, there was a clink.
Followed by a partial scream by Elisabeth Quaid.
And a bang.
But no one really heard anything but the mushroom cloud motherfucking whump that rose into the sky like an angry fist reaching for God.
The cabin burned through the night, the first half hour punctuated by endless rounds of stored ammunition going off, the heavy punch of twelve-gauge shells offset by the high-pitched crack of .223 rounds complemented by what the forensics investigators would later discover was over a hundred thousand rounds of .45 and 9 mil in the basement. Bing. Bang. Pop. Crack. Zing. And the occasional boom. All recorded on government footage that would remain sealed for ninety-nine years, a time capsule that future generations could look back on and weep.
They found most of Elisabeth; her charred corpse was wound around her baby, their bones intertwined in burned human macramé. They weren’t as lucky with Carl Quaid; all they managed to cull from the embers were his feet bones, a few ribs, and his skull. The big Kodak moment were the children. They were discovered in crispy little pieces of bone that would take a month to identify, their itty-bitty pieces spread out over half the hillside.
All the government agencies involved would be drawn into an investigation that wasn’t as monitored as it might have been due to the lack of plaintiffs. There was a closed trial. And a secret settlement. Doyle was flown to Washington, D.C., where he sat in a hallway for three days, sipping vending machine coffee and listening to court clerks come out and tell him that they’d soon call him as a witness. But they never did, and he was sent home without ever answering a single question.
Not that any of it would have made a difference. The Quaids were dead, and the money went to Elisabeth’s sister, another hard-line fundamentalist who would disappear from public life. Promises of reform and future transparency were made. But after the legal dust settled and the documents were sealed, the event was lost to communal memory.
Which brought Lucas back to Doyle fingering Hartke. Either Doyle was lying, or Hartke had put the past into a box and buried it in the earth. Hartke could be shoehorned into a lot of stereotypical topography, and the strong, silent type would top the marquee, so it would be easy to explain why he had never mentioned Bible Hill. Besides, no one talked about their old cases, it was an unwritten rule in the bureau. But there was too much coincidence here, and Lucas felt that he was being set up in one of Kehoe’s games.
The question was: How?
Lucas walked up the hillside, through the deep footsteps he made on the way down. It was colder up here than down in town, which was some kind of black magic. Not only did his nostrils close up, but the cold was so aggressive that when he blinked his lashes froze together, only to come apart like crazy-glued zippers. He couldn’t understand how anyone could take this weather. Not with any sort of regularity.
Back at the cabin, Doyle and Whitaker looked as if they were finally starting to feel the temperature, and Lucas momentarily gave in to schadenfreude. He lifted his aluminum hand and jabbed a thumb at Doyle’s SUV parked at the mouth of the drive behind the city plow they had rented for the morning.
“You good?” Doyle asked.
Lucas turned to the snow-covered charred remains of what had once been a family home. “No, but I’m ready to go.” And he headed back to Doyle’s 4 × 4.
67
Milliner, Wyoming
The sign at the town limit of Milliner denoted a population of 4,032 souls. It was a handsome hamlet that sported all the usual amenities, most of them buried under snow that looked like it had been here since megafauna still roamed the area. Lucas was once again amazed that human beings could brave these elements for a good chunk of the year without getting scurvy, starving, or committing suicide.
They drove through town, past the single car dealership with a mobile home for an office, two bars, a combination hair salon / post office, and a Chinese restaurant that looked like it had closed some time before the first moon landing. There was a white spired Presbyterian church, a gas station / convenience store combo, gun store, and a pawnshop. Along with a grocery store, one gas station, and a bank.
The immediate knee-jerk reaction was to compare Milliner to ten thousand other towns spread through the country, represented everywhere from stock photos to movies. But the truth was Lucas found every one he had ever visited to be different on so many levels. They had been built by different people, grown by different people, and occupied by different people. There was a homogeny because they were American, but there was nothing generic about them. Not when you really took off the blinders. And the farther apart they were, the more their differences showed. It was simple math. And there was something true, something attractive, about each and every one of them—even the run-down ones.
They decided that a cold call would garner the best results. There was a lot bothering Lucas, and he didn’t want to add local law enforcement with misaligned sympathies to the list. Sheriff Doyle’s CSPOA stickers were still bugging Whitaker. That Doyle had helped them was some kind of testament to luck; Lucas just couldn’t figure out if it was out of brotherly fidelity to the law enforcement officers back in New York who had been killed, the death of his own deputy on that icy road three years ago, or a real desire to help Lucas and Whitaker because they faced the pointy end of a spear on the same side of the fence—a little of the old the enemy of my enemy is my friend thinking. It certainly wasn’t out of a love for the FBI. If nothing else, Doyle had been clear about his feelings on the bureau in general and Hartke in specific. It was hard to miss that he felt betrayed, which was something they had in common.
And after reading the skimpy files they could find, Lucas understood why; it was a classic example of governmental overreaction combined with not enough thinking. And the closed hearings and archival amnesia highlighted that everyone concerned wanted this to be gone. And it was. To everyone.
Everyone except the man with the rifle.
The patronizing voice of the GPS politely—but firmly—directed them ten miles past town before telling them to turn left. Whitaker paused on the shoulder in front of a drive heading into the forest that looked like the mouth to Mordor. She checked her sidearm.
“Nervous?” Lucas asked, realizing that he was externalizing.
“It’s not like these people like the FBI.”
“Yeah, I was thinking about that.”
“Check your sidearm.”
“I don’t carry one.”
“Funny,” she said flatly.
“I’m not kidding.”
Whitaker eyed him for a few quiet seconds. When she saw that he was serious, she reached around to the small of her back and pulled out a tiny chrome semiautomatic. “The sights are filed off and it’s difficult to hit anything beyond thirty yards, but it’s loaded with hollow points that will put down a rhinoceros.” She held it out. “It holds six shots.”
Lucas stared at the little pistol in her palm. Her skin offset the bright polish of the weapon. He shook his head and said, “I’ve never met a rhinoceros I could
n’t reason with.”
“You’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.” Her eyes narrowed. “Trust me.”
“Statistically, guns don’t save people.”
“There are lots of stories to the contrary.”
“I’m not shooting anyone. Guns are for weak people. Or frightened people. Take your pick.”
“Personally, I feel guns are for protecting me from other people with guns.”
“That’s the beauty of this country—you’re allowed to believe whatever you want, even if the numbers say otherwise.”
“And they stick you with me.” She slipped the pistol back home. “I must have pissed Kehoe off.” She pulled into the forest.
The snout of the rented SUV wound through a thick canopy of old-growth coniferous forest, and the road was a dark ribbon punctured by little bolts of sunlight piercing the thick roof of branches.
After a hundred yards of heavy shade intermittently pierced by dancing winter sky, the trees opened up and the road furrowed between a pair of old stone pillars that grew into an arch of intertwined deer antlers. They crept beneath the decaying architectural sculpture, and its shadow crawled over the hood like animated snakes. The tires crunched on the snow. When they were through, it was as if they had gone back in history, and for the second time that day, Lucas understood why some people felt the need to think that a god had created the earth for humans.
The road wound into the distance over a gently rolling field that dead-ended in a tree-lined ridge looking down on a house, barn, and three outbuildings. The sun cut down through a cleft in the stone wall behind the ranch, illuminating the field in a blanket of colors like a Monet oil painting. Anywhere else in the world, this chunk of real estate would have cost a bucketload of money. Here, where there were no factories, burgeoning IT start-ups, palm trees, or infrastructure, the place cost less than a decent German automobile.