by Jeff Miller
“Diego, are you—”
A second explosion shook the silo with such force that the top half of the ladder detached from the silo and, with their combined weight pulling on it, folded down and smashed into the lower half of the ladder. Dagny now hung above Diego. The right rail of the ladder broke where it had folded in half, so only the pinched left rail was holding them. This caused the ladder to swing to the left, and she lost her grip. He caught her as she fell.
“I’ve got you,” he said.
“You’ve got me,” she replied. “Who’s got you?”
The pinched joint in the left rail started to give. They grabbed rungs on the attached part of the ladder as the dangling half fell to the ground. He started down first, and she followed.
“Run!” she yelled at Victor and Beamer, who were watching slack-jawed beneath them. They obeyed.
They were ten feet above the ground when the third blast shook them from the ladder. Diego landed flat on his back. She landed on his chest. He put his arms around her and rolled them to the side, just in time to avoid a falling chunk of concrete. She felt his heavy breath against her cheek.
“We need to run,” she said, pushing off him and joining Beamer and Victor in a sprint toward the barn.
“Agreed,” he said, chasing after them.
A fourth blast lit the sky and shook the ground. She turned back and watched the fireball shoot from the top of the silo. “Call every fire department in the region,” she yelled to Beamer.
“Already on it,” he said, cell phone in hand.
“And we’ll need the biggest construction crane we can get. With a spotlight.”
He seemed confused by the request, but he didn’t question it.
While he worked the phone, the rest of them sat in the grass, watching the silo erupt like a giant volcano. Someone was dying inside that silo, and there was nothing they could do about it.
CHAPTER 26
Eighteen trucks came of various sizes and shapes—engines, pumpers, ladders, and platforms, converging from three counties in the middle of the night. They bathed the scene in flashing red light, the ambience of tragedy. The largest ladder extended seventy-five feet, which was just enough to aim hoses down into the silo. Dagny watched the effort at the side of Max Conroy, Bilford’s fire chief, a gray-haired shrivel of a man who had the experience and sense to provide her with his expertise but defer to her judgment. It was their fire, but it was her crime scene.
By 3:00 a.m., the fire had been reduced to embers, and steam, not smoke, billowed from the top of the silo. She turned to Conroy. “How hot is it in the silo right now?”
“About four hundred degrees, I suspect.”
“Still?”
“That’s down from more than two thousand.”
“How long before it cools down more?”
“It will be hot all day,” he said. “Those concrete walls are more than a foot thick. Whole thing is like a stone pot at a Korean restaurant.”
She wondered when he’d been to a Korean restaurant, and then chastised herself for thinking everyone in Bilford was an unworldly simpleton. It was a bad East Coast prejudice, particularly for a woman from St. Louis.
“I’ll need to borrow a fire suit,” she said.
He studied her for a moment, sizing her up physically and mentally, it seemed. Putting his bullhorn to his mouth, he turned to the gaggle of firefighters. “Mayer!” A firefighter jogged over to them. “I need your suit,” he said.
The firefighter took off the goggles, then the helmet and the protective hood beneath it. She looked at Dagny. “For you?”
Dagny nodded and extended her hand. “Dagny Gray.”
“Nicole Mayer.”
She was in her twenties. Slender but fit. Face full of freckles. The lone woman in the bunch. Dagny knew what that was like. “How’s it going to feel in there?” she asked, nodding toward the silo.
“Like hell.” Nicole removed her glasses and set them on the ground. “How are you going in?” she asked.
“That’s what the crane is for.”
Nicole nodded, taking off her outer coat and pants, tossing each to the ground with a thud. Dagny picked up the coat—it weighed a ton—but the firefighter shook her head. “Do the hood first, so it will be tucked under the coat.”
She picked up the hood. It was made of thick white material that had a square cutout for the face. She slipped it over her head. “Okay. Next?”
Nicole held up the pants so Dagny could step into them. The firefighter looped suspenders over her shoulders and held up her coat so Dagny could slide into it. The whole thing was heavy enough to make her stumble. “You get used to it,” Nicole said. “After a year or two.” She smiled and handed over her boots.
Dagny put them on and took a few labored steps. “Your job is harder than mine.”
Nicole looked over at the silo. “If that thing is full of bodies, I don’t think so.”
Dagny walked over to Diego, Victor, and Beamer, who were sitting in the grass, staring numbly at the scene. “John, who’s in charge of the crane?”
“Steve Johnson. Local 925. Good guy.”
“Let’s go,” she said.
The crane was parked fifty feet from the silo. Its hundred-foot arm was swung away from it. Johnson sat in the cab, smoking a cigarette. He hopped down when he saw them coming. “Hey, John!”
“Steve, thanks for coming out.”
“Of course, man. This is something else, ain’t it?”
Dagny extended her gloved hand. “Dagny Gray.”
“Jesus, there’s a woman under all of that?”
“Yes.”
“FBI agent,” Beamer explained.
“What can I do for you?” Steve asked.
“You’re good with this thing?” she asked, motioning to the crane.
“Yep.”
“I need you to lower me down the center of it. Carefully. So I don’t bang against the walls.”
“You want to go in there? Right now?”
“Yeah. To dangle and get a look.”
He smiled, shaking his head in a well, this beats all kind of way. “All right.”
“Can we attach the spotlight to the arm, so it will shine down into the silo and illuminate the inside?”
“This can’t wait until dawn?”
“No.” Every minute counted when a killer was loose.
He bit down on his lip. “We can do it. Getting the line rigged will take a few men.”
Dagny looked over at the sea of firefighters milling about the scene. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
The fire truck’s ladder made it easy to lift the spotlight to the top of the crane. The firefighters attached it, threading the cables down the jib to a generator behind the cab. When the light came on, it was blinding enough that everyone shielded their eyes. It would do.
She walked over to the cable that dangled from the arm of the crane and studied the foot-wide steel hook at the bottom of the hook block. If she planted her foot into the cradle of the hook, she would have to hold the cable, which would move up and down as it flittered through the pulley system that raised and lowered her. There had to be a better way. Victor walked up as she was pondering a solution.
“It’s not safe, Dagny.”
It was a sensible observation, but not enough to deter her. “Then help me make it safer.”
He sighed. “Well, the firefighters probably have a harness.”
They did. They placed it on her like a backpack, clipped the front at her chest, and pulled the straps to make it tight. Removing the hook, they tethered her to the crane’s hook block. She signaled to Steve Johnson, who pulled on the lever that lifted her. The suddenness of the jolt caught her with such surprise that she laughed a little, and the inappropriateness of this shot her back to sullen despair.
As she flew toward the sky, the scene below receded like a young director’s Scorsese shot. Spinning wildly, she grabbed onto the hook block to steady herself. Johnson lifted her ten
feet higher than the charred, steaming top of the silo and swung the arm of the crane directly above it. The heat burrowed its way through her suit, and within seconds, she was drenched in sweat. Steam from the silo glowed white under the intense light shone from above. As the cable lowered her into the cloud, she thought of David Foster Wallace’s commencement address, “This Is Water,” and how he referred to dinner as supper. She never used the word supper—it was always dinner, even though the words were interchangeable. Perhaps a robust vocabulary would make use of both, she thought. Was it a regional quirk that lodged dinner as her default, or was it familial or cultural—a Jewish linguistic quirk or prejudice, perhaps? As she debated the issue, she wondered whether the fumes from the explosion were clouding her mind. She felt sick and wet and heavy.
She emerged from the steam cloud in the belly of the silo, lit by the spotlight above as brightly as an operating room. It was with crystal clarity that she observed the lines and colors of each piece of charred wood and blistered concrete, all of which dissolved into background once she spotted the dead and damaged and often detached pieces of human body among them.
There was no way to signal to Steve to raise the hoist, so they’d agreed she would dangle for five minutes of inspection before he would lift her. This was, she realized, a terrible overestimation of the time that was desired. It took only seconds to ascertain the gravity of the scene; every moment beyond this was torture. Between the heat, the weight of the uniform, and the extent of the atrocity before her, she was dangling in hell.
Some of the faces in the debris were burned beyond recognition; others were ashen but intact, even retaining expression, although Dagny wondered whether she was simply projecting emotion into the lifeless. There were twelve human heads visible in the wreckage: some attached to entire bodies, some torn from their owners. Countless other bodies lay under them, certainly. Whoever did this, she decided, had no soul. They were dealing not with a man but a monster.
She closed her eyes and bowed her head, and the sweat poured from her hair against the face of her mask. These were the longest five minutes of her life.
When she felt the tug upward, it was as if she were ascending from hell to heaven through the steamy white cloud into the cool embrace of the crisp night air.
Johnson slung the jib and lowered her to the ground. Firefighters swarmed her, unclipping her harness and removing it. She lifted her helmet, tossed it to the ground, and removed her mask. Victor helped her with the coat.
“It was awful in there,” he said.
“Yes. How did you—”
“The look on your face.”
She pulled off the boots, removed the fire-suit pants, and pulled out her iPhone. After wiping the sweat from her hands, she opened the phone app and hit the first entry on her favorites. The old man answered, grumpier than usual.
“Chrissake, it’s four thirty in the morning,” he barked.
“I found your goddamn bodies.”
CHAPTER 27
“Wonderful,” he said. “You’re reinstated. Which is good, because I never got around to filling out the onerous paperwork required to suspend you.”
“This is huge, Professor. This isn’t something we can do ourselves,” Dagny said. “I’ve got a silo full of bodies here. We need agents, technicians by the dozens. For fingerprints, we need the Disaster Squad.” It sounded like a team of comic-book superheroes, but it was the actual name for the FBI’s team of mass-disaster forensic specialists.
“That bad?” There was an unseemly relish in his tone.
“At least eighty-one bodies. Probably more.”
“I will take the first flight to Dayton from National, and shall instruct Brent and Victor to catch the same from New York.”
When she hung up, she sent Diego off to get some sleep and dispatched Victor to the Dayton airport, so that he could fly back to LaGuardia in order to join Brent Davis on a flight back to Dayton. It was madness, but they saw no way around it. He was supposed to be in New York per the Professor’s orders, and although she could get away with insubordination, his leash was shorter. If they had trusted Brent, they could have explained the circumstances and asked him to cover for Victor. But they didn’t.
After bidding Victor good-bye, Dagny basked for a moment in the turn of the tide. Now she had a case—a real, live case—and that meant she could open a file, subpoena documents, search databases, and amass teams of skilled experts. Glancing at Beamer, she caught his smile. He felt it, too—a pocket of joy in the shadow of tragedy.
“John.”
“Yes?”
“I need you to call your chief and introduce me.”
He glanced at his watch.
“It’s worth the waking,” she said.
He nodded and dialed his phone. “Officer Beamer here. Sorry to wake you. The FBI is in Bilford investigating the murder of more than eighty individuals. Special Agent Dagny Gray is the lead agent on the case, and she has . . . More than eighty, sir. . . . At the Hoover farm. She’s right here. Let me put her on.”
She took the phone but covered the microphone with her hand. “What your chief’s name?”
“Wiggum.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. He’s sensitive about it, so don’t joke.”
She nodded and put the phone to her ear. “Chief Wiggum, this is Special Agent Dagny Gray. As you heard, we believe that eighty-some young men have been killed here. Bureau personnel will be descending by the dozens over the next couple of days, but I’ll still need substantial assistance from your force. I would like Officer Beamer to be appointed as the full-time liaison to my investigation to help coordinate efforts and—”
“I’m concerned—”
“—keep you informed. Yes, sir?”
“Perhaps it is the haze of sleep, but I believe I must have misheard. How many bodies?”
“Eighty-one, at least.”
“Jesus. In Bilford County?”
“We have a silo full of bodies here. Some of them came from other parts of southwest Ohio.”
“A silo?”
“We just put out the fire.”
“That’s the sound I heard last night?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. I’m coming over, if that’s all right.”
“Of course. But in the meantime, I need John to start making calls for me.”
“That’s fine. Whatever you need, we will provide.”
“Thank you, Chief.”
When the Professor arrived, he would be in charge, but until then, it was Dagny’s show, and she intended to make the most of it. Over the next three hours, she instructed area police departments to set up roadside checkpoints in case the unsub was making his way out of town; obtained a pledge of assistance from the medical examiners of Bilford and its surrounding counties; arranged for the assignment of the Bureau’s best mass-disaster specialists and forensic examiners; ordered additional construction equipment to the site for the careful excavation of the silo; briefed Chief Wiggum in person and enlisted his men to guard the perimeter of the Hoover farm in order to preserve the scene; isolated a sample of residual fuel from the silo explosion for analysis; scanned and sent the fingerprint data collected from the cell phones for matching through the Bureau’s IAFIS system; drafted a case summary with all known material information for circulation to selected team members; rented factory-strength air-conditioning units, stainless-steel tables, body bags, and blankets; hired three refrigerator trucks for transport; procured a promise of assistance from Principal Geathers; and reserved two more rooms at the Bilford Motor Inn.
Dagny was on the phone, finishing the last of these talks, when Beamer tapped her shoulder and pointed to the glow of the sunrise, which was painting lines across the horizon behind the silo. The bottom line hugged the earth in a deep, bright orange. Above it were darker orange lines, then blue ones, then the black of night. The scene was so beautiful that she pulled her Canon from her backpack and snapped a photo. The image on th
e camera’s display failed to capture the spectacular definition of the lines of color. Beamer looked over her shoulder at the screen. “Some things you can only see in person, I guess.”
“What kind of camera equipment does your department have?”
“The sun will be up all the way before we could get it.”
She shook her head. “C’mon, John.”
“Oh, you mean to document the scene.”
“Yes.”
“Some HD video cameras and several DSLR cameras.”
“Can you have someone bring them?”
Twenty minutes later, a young officer handed her a box full of various cameras and equipment. Dagny picked a Canon HX camcorder from the bunch. Sifting through the box, she found three HDV cassettes and popped one of them into the camcorder.
She handed her own DSLR camera to Beamer. “Follow me and take pictures. I’ll film.” She led him back to the farmhouse, turned on the camcorder, and panned from the front of the farmhouse to the crop fields, barn, and silo. After stating the date, location, and her name, she yanked the microphone cable from the XLR input on the side of the camera.
“Why’d you do that?” he asked.
“Any additional audio would be hearsay, and besides, I want us to be able to speak freely. Step only where I step.” Dagny led him around the outside of the farmhouse, filming its exterior and the landscape around it. She recorded the track from the house to the barn, looking for signs of egress. Although she found some trampled grass, there were no usable footprints. From the barn, she filed the walk to the silo, where there were so many footprints from the previous night that none were distinguishable. Along the way, she found a few scraps of paper trash that Beamer photographed and she collected and documented. None of it seemed promising. There was a lot of silo debris scattered about the explosion, and a few pieces of rusted metal that she guessed came from barrels that fueled the explosion. Beamer photographed all of them before she bagged them. They worked their way back to the farmhouse, where she made one more pass around its perimeter.