Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3)

by Gary Earl Ross

  “Maybe.” Pete turned to face her. “He knew the gun was a revolver. Maybe he’s in contact with the guys who ran away.”

  “Maybe he’s one of them,” Yvonne said.

  “We need to think about how he knew that,” I said, scrolling through my contact list and tapping the name I wanted. Then I put the iPhone to my ear. “The gun was in Lucy’s purse when she fired. Only somebody who knows guns like a pro could hear it was a revolver.”

  “Shit,” Pete said.

  Yvonne sank into the vacant chair at the monitor station. “I gotta call LJ. Maybe he can get us some help identifying Krieger.”

  “Don’t matter if he’s here,” Ramos said. “Lucy’s here.”

  “Along with other people from out of town who play for Krieger’s team,” I said. The ringing on the other end stopped as the phone clicked on. The hello was groggy. “Hey, I know it’s early, but this is life or death. Get a squad car over to the Bishops ASAP. Get them out of their house, without their phones, and stash them someplace nobody but you knows.”

  “What the fuck, G!” Rafael Piñero said. In the background, a woman said something I couldn’t quite hear but her tone was angry.

  “I know, but a white supremacist podcaster just put out a hit on them.”

  31

  At eight-thirty, shortly after Rafael called to say the Bishops were in a safe house, I texted Phoenix about the death threat and the family’s relocation, promising to give more details when I talked with her that night. Then I left the seventeenth floor on a brief reconnaissance mission.

  The vast lobby was already crowded, but security was high and visible. Four tactical SUVs were parked outside the hotel entrance. Uniformed officers made themselves seen as they walked past check-out and early check-in lines at the front desk, the concierge desk, and the restaurant entrances. A uni with a bomb-sniffing dog stood outside the luggage storage room. A few more uniforms were on the shopping concourse above, though no stores were open yet. Scattered among the hotel guests, breakfasters, and conference registrants were plainclothes officers with visible earpiece coils above their collars. Some acknowledged me with a slight nod or a quick smile when they noticed a gold III in the center of the dark blue plastic badge pinned to my lapel. Others gave my badge a cursory glance before looking elsewhere.

  On the conference level, the three metal detectors outside the main meeting hall were staffed by four men and two women from Donatello Protective Services. Two more detectors and four additional DPS employees were stationed at the opening of the corridor that led to the breakout meeting rooms. All ten had Tasers beneath their blazers and batons clipped to their belts. Police and DPS personnel alike knew there were only four blue plastic badges with Roman numerals. Apart from police, only the badge holders—Matt, Mark, Pete, and I—were authorized to carry a gun.

  Satisfied, I returned to the suite.

  As planned, Sam joined us outside the nine-thirty plenary session and stayed beside Drea for the entire first day. I accompanied them to the main hall, which with five hundred in attendance was about half-filled. Judge Marlo Vassi went to the stage and called for order. She introduced herself as the moderator of the opening session and praised the ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity of those assembled. Then she invited Erie County Legislature Chairwoman Amari Lockwood to give the official welcome. Wearing a yellow headwrap and carrying her five-week-old son Kwame, Lockwood welcomed visitors to Western New York and read proclamations from Alvin Zachritz and Ophelia Green. Then she reminded everyone that pages five and six of the conference program contained a list of area attractions, including the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site and Niagara Falls, as well as a schedule of tours to museums, galleries, plays, the philharmonic, and other cultural events outside the conference. After a brief logistics presentation from a hotel staffer, Rory Gramm took the stage to give a conference overview. Toward the end, the audience began to drift away to get coffee or hit the restrooms before the breakout sessions began.

  I remained with Drea and Sam for the first two while Pete was upstairs with Yvonne and Cissy to review data from Carter John’s smartphone and anything new LJ funneled to them. After lunch, Pete and I traded places for the afternoon meetings. The presentations I saw discussed techniques for making English language learner classrooms adaptable and developing immigrant communities into a force of revitalization for struggling cities. Pete lucked into cultural considerations in treating infectious diseases, economic integration as a remedy for income inequality, and the fusion of hip-hop and country music.

  In each meeting room, Drea and Sam arrived early and sat in a rear corner—with Pete or me between them and the entrance—and left at the start of the Q and A. In a ball cap and oversized untucked short-sleeved shirt that covered his newly acquired body armor, Ramos was discrete surveillance and invisible backup. Carrying the conference tote bag, he sat in the last row during each session. If he saw something we missed, he was to alert us through the earbuds by clearing his throat loudly. Under the conference program in the tote were his Taser and the baton I’d provided. At a signal from Pete or me, he would spring to his feet and engage whomever or whatever we perceived as a danger to Drea in a manner that neutralized the threat.

  But the first day passed with no incidents on site. Off-site was another matter.

  When Rafael Piñero called my cell at two, I was sitting on my pullout bed, reading the first paragraph of LJ’s preliminary report on Morgan Krieger. The last thing I saw as I answered the call was that nine years ago, when Krieger began his podcast, investigators thought he was two people, a septuagenarian named Wendell Q. McTiernan, of Kansas City, Missouri, and his then fortysomething son Nelson. Both had belonged to the Klan but neither had done more than exercise his first amendment rights.

  “Your tip was good, G, and so was the other stuff you gave us but your girl Lucy was on the ball. We got twenty-plus cops at your gig so we couldn’t spare anybody for a decoy team after we got the Bishops out. But Lucy’s got cameras all over the house networked with their cell phones. We kept the phones after we stashed the family and got a desk sergeant to monitor the house. About ten o’clock a couple of guys broke in the back door. We ran silent and got there while they were upstairs. Easiest bust ever.”

  “Great news, Raf.” I put the report aside. “They give up anything?”

  “Only their driver’s licenses—Maryland for Owen Robbins and Arkansas for Andrew Carey. I know you don’t want to tell me how you got their names—I figure a backchannel that might get somebody in trouble if we check into it.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We got them dead to rights for breaking and entering. It could be bumped up to the feds since they had firearms, explosives, and even a Wasp knife.”

  “A Wasp? No shit!”

  “No keys or cards to suggest where they’re staying but we got two revolvers with serials filed off, a cube of homemade plastique, and a remote phone detonator. Looks like their plan was to shoot the family, turn on the gas and wait for it to fill up the house, then fuck up the crime scene with a phone call from their car.”

  “Jesus! Anything on the car?”

  “Stolen, with stolen plates.”

  “They lawyer up yet?”

  “Not yet. We might be able to scare them in to talking if we drop death penalty hints. Maybe they’ll give up the radio guy who put them up to it.” He chuckled. “We’ve been doing other things while they marinate in separate boxes. They should be ready for the grill any time now. You still got a copy of that consultant letter in your wallet?”

  “Yep.” Nearly two years earlier, the mayor had hired me to conduct an independent investigation. The corporation counsel letter had been general enough to be useful on other occasions, giving cover to both me and the city as long as I did not obstruct justice or sue the department.

  “Then get one of the Donatellos and come over to headquarters…to observe and consult.”

  An hour later,
after sharing with Rafael and Travis the latest information we had, Matt and I were sipping coffee in semi-darkness on the observation side of an interrogation room mirror. The man chained to a table ring on the other side wore a dirty T-shirt and jeans. Andrew Carey was wiry and about thirty. He had a buzz cut, brown stubble on his cheeks, and a permanent scowl. The snake coiled on his corded left forearm was blue-green and hooded, with an impossibly long red tongue between exaggerated fangs.

  “The snake bothers me,” I said softly, setting down my coffee cup. “Doesn’t look like a copperhead.”

  “You know snakes?” Matt asked.

  “Not enough to pick a copperhead out of a snake pit lineup, but that looks more like a cobra to me.”

  He laughed. “Me too but these guys don’t get to be these guys because they’re geniuses.” He flipped the switch on the speaker beside the glass as Rafael and Travis entered the room. “Let’s see what they get out of him.”

  A step behind him, the detectives flanked Carey. He turned to look from one to the other and curled his upper lip in a sneer. “I see another police department’s gone to shit.”

  Travis held a pen above a notepad. Rafael removed the toothpick he was chewing. Having been interrogated by him, and having watched him question others, I was not surprised to see him lean toward Carey’s ear to speak. “You know we own you, right?” He waited a beat or two. “Don’t matter you’re free, white, and thirty-one. Your ass is ours.”

  Carey looked straight ahead, at the mirror, and blinked. He raised both his middle fingers at us. Then he blew a kiss. But I saw his Adam’s apple rise and fall. However much he tried to mask it, his fear was there.

  “That’s for the white guys back there,” he said. “The ones that own you.”

  “Said the guy in chains.” Chuckling, Rafael stepped back.

  “A felon with a stolen car, firearms, and explosives,” Travis said, far enough behind Carey that he had to crane his neck to see her. “You break into the home of a Black woman targeted for death by a white power podcaster. You were there to kill her whole family. Her children. Sounds like domestic terrorism and a hate crime to me.” She shrugged. “We hand this off to Homeland Security, in a few years you could shake hands with Tim McVeigh.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody,” Carey said. “An’ McVeigh was ‘fore my time. I mighta been in kindergarten.”

  “But you know who he was,” Travis said. “You know he washed out of Special Forces just like you washed out of the army. You know, too, he got a needle nap for the Oklahoma City federal building.”

  Carey snorted. “If you’re tryin’ to scare me, Whoopi, you’re doing a fuck lousy job. Let the greaser take over. Somethin’ tells me he’s been doin’ this longer ‘n you.”

  Travis half-circled him and hiked a hip onto one corner of the table. “Something tells me you know the case against you is strong. You want to know how strong before you put yourself in the hands of a public defender. Otherwise, you’d have asked for a lawyer.”

  “You don’t know shit,” he said.

  “I know Liberty Storm doesn’t have enough cash on hand to keep a lawyer worth a damn on retainer. I know the FBI is so close to busting Morgan Krieger for hate crimes, they can smell his wrinkly old Ku Klux Klan ass all the way over in Kansas City. I know Wally Ray Tucker is about to go down because he, Owen Robbins, and all the other dickless misfit toys in your sad little group are the same—failures looking for somebody to blame for your piece-of-shit job, piece-of-shit car, and piece-of-shit life. But the sooner you see success is not a white birthright and tell us what your leaders are planning, the better your chances of saving the life you have. For once, man up and do the right thing.”

  “Ouch!” Rafael said. “The lady’s tongue is sharper than the one on that snake you’re sporting. But if you think she was tough here, you should see what she said to your buddy.”

  Travis nodded. “You know the game. First one to talk gets the best deal.” Sliding off the corner of the table, she moved to the door and opened it. Before she stepped out, she tossed a parting shot over her shoulder: “By the way, Robbins already lawyered up.”

  Rafael caught the door before it closed. “You got some shit to think about, my man.” Then he was gone too.

  Rafael and Travis repeated their performance for Owen Robbins, a sallow man with black hair, twitchy eyes, and baby fat jowls. Then the four of us went to a conference room.

  “We’ll wait a bit before we charge them,” Rafael said. “They don’t trust the system but there’s nobody to get them a good lawyer. Sooner or later one’s gotta roll the dice on a p.d. who might care before unprepared counsel is snatched off a bench at arraignment.”

  “Thanks for the Krieger stuff,” Travis said. “I couldn’t tell if it got to them or not.”

  “I don’t know if it did,” I said. “But you did, both of you. No matter what Carey says, his eyes say he’s a little scared now. The longer he sits there, the more it’ll grow. Robbins, I’m not so sure. He looked lost when you walked in, lost when you walked out.”

  Matt nodded. “It’s finally dawning on Carey that being a savior of the race could get him crucified. Robbins seems like a follower, maybe not too bright. It’s a tossup which one caves first.”

  My front right pocket vibrated. “Hope they’ve got something to bargain with when they do,” I said, pulling out my phone and glancing at the text.

  “We’ll let you know,” Rafael said, standing. “Thanks.”

  On the way to Matt’s car, I told him about the text. “Drea wants to swim before dinner. Pete wonders if we can get the pool closed to the public for half an hour or so.”

  “I’m sure we can,” Matt said. “If your team wants to suit up and take a dip, it’d be a good time to do it. Been hot lately.” He pulled out his key fob and pushed the UNLOCK button. “Wish I could pull on some trunks myself, but I think I’ll stand guard so you guys can cool off.” Then, opening his door, he stopped and grinned across the top of the car at me. “You could do me one favor though.”

  32

  The domed grotto-style pool on the twentieth floor of the South Tower was precisely what we needed. Drea used her platinum card to order hotel store swimsuits for everyone and have them delivered to the suite. We spent late afternoon and the start of the evening splashing about or drifting on inflatable floats beneath a sky with hours of remaining sunlight.

  I swam across the widest section a couple of times but spent most of my time watching everyone else—and the door, though I didn’t need to. Sam lazed in the attached Jacuzzi for a while before sitting on the faux rocks and dangling his legs in the three-foot shallow end. Side by side, Pete and Drea swam back and across the center five or six times, she atop the water and he below it, coming up for air only at one end or the other. Afterward, she clung to the ladder on the five-foot deep side and he stood beside her as they talked. Head and dark glasses glistening with water droplets from the nearby waterfall, Yvonne drifted on a gator float and sipped something frothy from plastic stemware. Ramos tugged Cissy’s giant turtle along the irregular edges, eventually flipping her float near Sam. Laughing and sputtering, she came up and shook her wet hair at him before kissing him.

  I could almost hear Bobby saying play was necessary for a healthy human mind.

  Matt remained in his blazer, standing at the locked glass door as if to underscore the CLOSED: PRIVATE PARTY sign in the corridor. He smiled a lot, not at us but at three swimmers unconnected to Drea—his wife Sharon and their twin sons. Having seen too little of his family lately, he’d called from his car to invite them to the pool party. Built like their father, Casey and Conrad, twelve, also shared his crooked smile and blue eyes. The twin gene was not the only dominant characteristic in the Donatello DNA.

  When we got back to the suite, the dinner I had ordered through Matt was waiting for us. Wrapped in towels, most of us sitting on the carpet, we ate and talked and joked, relieved the day had passed without incident. After dinner, S
am left as everyone else took turns in the bathroom and dressed for the sleep that would come only after another hour or two of work.

  I got back to LJ’s Krieger piece at about nine. Wendell Q. and Nelson R. McTiernan. Father and son had lived together for eleven years after the sudden death of Wendell’s wife Candy, for which he blamed the Indian-American ER doctor who failed to revive her after a heart attack. After getting a modest malpractice settlement that avoided lengthy litigation, Wendell invited his divorced, spottily employed only child to move back home. Nelson had no children. Both men were in the KKK for a time and later in the militia movement. An FBI investigation into another hate group had linked Krieger to the IP address in the McTiernan home but neither man had run afoul of the law anywhere. Also, it seemed unlikely either had the skills needed to mask their IP address. To my surprise, the last page revealed both men were dead, Wendell from lung cancer three years ago and Nelson eighteen months ago from a self-inflicted shotgun blast that sent the roof of his mouth through the roof of his skull.

  “Son of a bitch,” I whispered, sitting forward on my pullout.

  Drea had thought the current Morgan Krieger was different from the original. Though the McTiernans had never officially been identified as the podcaster, it seemed likely at least one of them was. But with both in the ground, there was a new Dawn Warrior on the web, one capable of masking his IP address.

  I was thinking about all this—wondering who or where the new guy could be—when my phone buzzed and I pulled it out of my shorts. Phoenix.

  “Hi, honey,” I said. “I was gonna call you in a little while. The conference went fine and Lucy’s family is safe but—”

  “Gideon, hush,” she said. “I know about Lucy and the arrests. In a moment you’re going to get a phone call from someone who called me first because he thought you would hang up on him. Take the call and listen to him. Then call me back. Love you, baby.”