“Are you done with your coffee? I can’t bear to watch any more of this horror show,” Naya said.
Sasha drained her mug and gave herself a moment to reconsider what she was about to do.
Then she stood and squared her shoulders. She strode toward the couple. When she reached their table, she stopped beside the man’s chair.
He twisted in his seat to look up at her with a mixture of annoyance, confusion, and interest, “Can we help you?”
Sasha smiled at him and then turned to the city attorney, who was discreetly checking her watch. She waited until the woman glanced up and met her eyes, “I realize I don’t know you, but my friend and I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. I’m a lawyer, too, and I know the hours can be brutal on a social life. And, I’m not lucky enough to have children, but I have to tell you this: there are worse things than being alone.”
She tilted her head toward the guy, just in case her message wasn’t clear.
The woman gave her a half-smile and a nod. Naya choked back a laugh.
Sasha walked away with Naya trailing her.
“Lesbians,” the architect muttered behind her.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Leo was surprised to hear peals of laughter floating down the hall from Sasha’s office. In light of the stress and time constraints they were under, he expected Sasha and Naya to be intent and subdued.
“Hey,” Sasha managed, wiping tears from her eyes with her finger.
“Hey, yourself. What’s so funny?” he asked.
Naya shook her head. “Long story.”
She pulled a sheet of paper from the printer and handed it to him. “Here, sign this verification.”
Leo skimmed the document, which required him to verify the factual truth of the motion for a temporary restraining order.
“Shouldn’t I read the motion first?” he asked.
Naya shrugged. “Good point.”
Sasha printed the document, and they watched in silence as Leo read it carefully.
When he got to the end, he looked up. “Okay. Looks good to me. Can I have a pen?”
Sasha tossed him a blue ballpoint from the Prescott & Talbott mug that sat on her desk. He scrawled his signature and passed the paper to Naya.
Naya gathered a stack of printed pages and disappeared into her office.
“Now what?” Leo said.
“Now we file. This part’s done,” Sasha said, standing and stretching.
She bent at the waist then turned, with her head resting on her ankle, and peered up at him. “Did you get a meeting with the task force?”
“Tomorrow morning. Are you stiff?” he asked.
“A little bit. I haven’t been to class in nearly a week,” she said. She stretched her other side and then stood up straight and rolled her neck.
Leo felt himself frowning. “That’s not good. You need to stay sharp.”
Sasha was a danger magnet. He already worried about her nearly constantly. The only saving grace was that she was a skilled Krav Maga student and could take care of herself capably. But, it wouldn’t do for her to get rusty or soft. Not with the country teetering as it was on the edge of crisis. If there were a societal breakdown, a small woman like her would be viewed as easy prey for any number of evil acts.
She wrinkled her brow at him. “I know. I’ve just been busy, and I guess I’m going to miss class tomorrow morning, too, if we’re heading to D.C. You want to spar?”
She dropped into a defensive posture, legs shoulder-distance apart, arms raised in a block.
Leo laughed. “No. I’m not crazy. Just … don’t get complacent.”
She smiled up at him, and his heart squeezed.
“Get your stuff together. We need to make a stop before we get on the road,” he said.
CHAPTER 14
Gavin rapped on the bowed aluminum screen door, hitched his thumbs through his belt loops, and waited. He stood on the small porch, more of a covered step, really, of a small rancher. Its aluminum siding had once been white but was now a dingy gray, scratched and dented. An old broom rested against the exterior wall, right next to the door. The concrete space where he stood had been swept clean. Was probably swept clean each day as part of a morning routine.
He was about to knock again when the interior door swung open, causing the wilted, red-bowed wreath that hung on the door to bounce against the glass. A woman in her late sixties stood in the doorway, blinking up at him from behind streaked glasses. She clutched a housecoat around herself, defensive, but once she realized who he was, her face relaxed into a smile.
“Gavin,” she cried, joy and surprise coming through in equal measures in her tone. Her hand continued to grip the robe closed, but he sensed it was now out of modesty, although he could see she was wearing pajamas beneath it.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Gerig,” he said. He gave her a reassuring smile.
“Where are my manners?” she asked, moving aside. “Come in, come in.”
Gavin shuffled his feet on the rubberized welcome mat and ducked his head.
“I can’t stay, Mrs. Gerig. I just wanted to stop by real quick and ask if everything’s okay with Celia. I tried to call her, but her number’s been disconnected.”
Mrs. Gerig’s rheumy eyes flickered with hope. “You’re trying to get in touch with Celia? After all these years?”
Gavin cleared his throat. “I just wanted to see if she’s okay.”
He didn’t see any upside in explaining to his high school girlfriend’s aging mother that, after several sessions of sweaty fumbling beneath the stadium bleachers after football games, they’d both realized she was more interested in what was under her fellow cheerleaders’ skirts than what he had to offer.
Celia had stayed the course until graduation, attending prom on his arm and then drifting away gracefully, instead of exposing herself to the special brand of cruelty practiced by small-town high school kids. He’d always been surprised that she stuck around town after graduation, given her preferences. But she was an only child, whose father had died when she was twelve. She was close to her mom. Although apparently the two weren’t close enough for Celia to share the truth about her sexual orientation—the romantic reunion dancing in Mrs. Gerig’s imagination would require a serious lifestyle change on her daughter’s part.
Mrs. Gerig’s smile faded. “I’m not sure if she’s okay, Gavin. She was supposed to come up and take me to church this morning, but she didn’t. I haven’t heard from her, and that’s not like my Celia. She would never miss church during Advent. And to not call…” her voice trailed off, wobbly and soft.
“Come up from where? She’s not living in town anymore?”
Gavin hadn’t made any effort to stay in touch with Celia, but he’d seen her around town from time to time—at the post office or the diner, pumping gas at the Shell station, or when he was shopping for groceries at the supermarket where she’d worked. They’d always been cordial. Now, he tried to recall the last time he’d seen her, and he couldn’t. Her vehicle registration still listed her mother’s address, so he’d started here.
“Oh, heavens, no. She moved down toward Pittsburgh just last month. She was staying with a friend and looking for a job. You know, she felt this town didn’t have much to offer her. Wanted a change, she said.”
That didn’t sound like the Celia he remembered.
“What kind of change?” he pressed.
Mrs. Gerig sighed heavily. Gavin watched her struggle with herself. Her desire to keep up a brave front and pretend that all was well with her only child was colliding with her niggling concern that Celia was in trouble. The internal debate played out across the old woman’s face. Gavin waited.
Finally, she exhaled and shook her head, “I told her not to get mixed up with those Doomsdayers, but she didn’t listen.”
“Doomsdayers?” Gavin repeated.
“They call themselves preppers, but it’s just another cult if you ask me.” Mrs. Gerig crossed herself hastily.
/> “Preppers,” Gavin said. “You mean, like those folks who have the compound up past Firetown?”
“Those very same folks, as a matter of fact,” she answered with a short nod. “She fell in with them a while back. At first, it seemed harmless. She did ordinary things—kept her gas tank full, batteries in the flashlight, an extra gallon of water. But, then she started worrying about the collapse of the government and the monetary system. Next, it was poisons in the water supply. Or a meteor strike. She was obsessed with the fall of civilization, I guess. She bought a gun—Celia!—and learned to shoot it.”
Gavin stared at her.
“It’s true. She was spending all her free time up at that compound, doing exercises and drills. So, when she said she was moving to New Kensington, I was thrilled. Relieved that she’d be getting away from those nutjobs, to tell you the truth. And, now she’s disappeared.” The old woman’s face crumbled, and her chest heaved, but she held back her tears.
“When did you last see her or speak to her, Mrs. Gerig?” Gavin was careful to keep his tone neutral; he didn’t want to get her any more worked up than she already was.
She thought back.
“Two Sundays ago, she came up, and we went to church. Then, last week, she called and said she was very busy and couldn’t make it, but she’d see me this week.”
“Did she say what she was busy with?”
“A new job. She said she’d found a job, something seasonal. She didn’t go into details because Betty Caponata was here, waiting to take me to get my hair done. But she said she’d tell me all about it when she saw me on Sunday.” Mrs. Gerig huffed out a ragged breath as she finished.
“Do you have a telephone number for her? Or an address?”
She shook her head, a little bit sad and a little bit embarrassed. “I had the long-distance service shut off years ago. I never used it, why pay for it? And she was bouncing around, staying with this friend, that friend … and she always called me.”
“These friends, were they preppers?”
Her eyes met his, and he saw fear and realization as it dawned on her how little she knew about her daughter’s life.
“I have no idea,” she admitted.
And then, the tears she’d been fighting back poured from her eyes and her frail frame shook. Gavin crossed the threshold and stepped inside to comfort the woman, and she burrowed her face into his chest and cried.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
After Gavin had calmed Mrs. Gerig with a promise to help her find Celia, he hurried to his car and pulled up Sasha’s cell phone number while his engine came to life.
His call rolled straight into voicemail and Sasha’s businesslike, but pleasant, voice urged him to leave a message. He ended the call and drummed on the steering wheel, thinking. He could try her office number. Then he glanced down at the clock on his dashboard. It was not quite two o’clock. He didn’t have anything scheduled for the rest of the afternoon. He might as well drive out to the compound and see if any of those blasted preppers were around, on the off chance one of them knew how to get in touch with Celia. Once he talked to Sasha, she’d probably ask him to check that box. Might as well do it now, before it got any darker and the promised snow started to fall.
His mind made up, Gavin turned on the car’s heater and cued up The Nutcracker in the CD player. Next to the perfect cup of coffee, there was nothing Gavin liked better than big, sweeping orchestral scores, especially this one, especially during the holidays. Well, that and Sunday Ticket. He checked his rearview mirror and pulled out, leaving Mrs. Gerig and her worry behind.
The compound was way up in the far northeast corner of the county. Bordered on two sides by state game lands and more than thirty minutes from its nearest neighbor, the site was a perfect place for the preppers to hole up, practice their idiotic war games, and avoid complaints. They were in their own little world up there, which Gavin presumed was the point. In fact, he only knew they existed because he’d stumbled across their compound a few years back during a hunting trip.
Tracking a deer through the woods, he’d come out into a clearing and bumped into an armed sentry, for lack of a better word. The man wore some sort of makeshift uniform—army green cargo pants and a tan flak jacket with a desert camouflage pattern. He sported a graying buzz cut and a Ruger. It was evident that he was as startled as Gavin was, but he recovered quickly, pointed his rifle at Gavin’s chest, and announced that Gavin was on private property.
Over the guard’s shoulder, Gavin glimpsed a large garden, several sheds, and an enormous stack of firewood. Beyond that, in the distance, he could make out several log structures. In light of the gun pointed at his center mass, he chose not to move in for a closer look.
At the time, he had still been with the Sheriff’s Office, but his jurisdiction was limited. He’d apologized and backed away, back into the wooded game lands, his heart thudding and the buck long gone. He’d tromped back through the woods, almost running, until he found his hunting buddy—a state trooper—crouched in a thicket. When Gavin described the man and the compound, Phil had nodded.
“Sounds like those dang preppers,” Phil said.
“Who?”
Phil shook his head. “Some numbnuts who think the world’s gonna end. So, they started a survivalist group—’cuse me, preparedness group.”
“Are they violent?” Gavin asked.
Phil spat on the frozen ground and considered the question.
“No,” he finally said. “They seem to keep to themselves. But, if the crap ever does hit the fan, I expect they’ll be plenty trigger-happy.”
Just to satisfy his curiosity, one afternoon, he’d stopped by the Recorder of Deeds Office and sweet-talked a clerk into pulling the property records on the parcel. She’d leaned against the counter to give him a good look down her fuzzy, low-cut sweater and explained that the land, and the cabins on it, had been transferred from the Commonwealth Department of Natural Resources to a husband and wife, Jeffrey and Anna Bricker in 2000. She told him the state had used the property as a campground in the 1940s and 50s, but it was one of dozens of campsites that had fallen into disuse and were being auctioned off for whatever sums the state could get for them.
Gavin had tucked their existence away in the back of his mind.
And now, according to her mother, Celia had fallen in with the preppers. The thought sent an unpleasant chill up Gavin’s spine. He pressed his foot down on the gas pedal. It’d be better to get up to the compound and back to town before nightfall.
The sun hung low in the gray sky when Gavin pulled up in front of the gated drive leading from the state road to the gravel approach to the compound. He sat and peered through the metal arms into the distance but couldn’t make out whether any smoke rose toward the horizon.
He chewed his lip, then pulled out and drove past the private drive. He continued down the road another fifty yards and parked along the shoulder on a patch of frozen ground that was at least partially hidden from view by some naked brush. He killed the engine and opened the glove compartment.
Gavin took out his gun, weighed it in his hand, and thought. Anyone he ran into on the preppers’ land was guaranteed to be armed. He was licensed to carry a concealed weapon, of course. But, as a civilian, he sometimes felt carrying the gun was more of a drawback than an advantage. When he’d been a deputy, he’d had a clear mandate and defined guidelines for when to draw and use his weapon. As a citizen, the lines were grayer, the risks greater, and the chance for mistakes seemed higher. He’d taken to leaving the thing in the glove compartment more and more.
He moved to return it to the space now and stopped, his hand hovering near the box, undecided. Finally, he closed the glove compartment. He confirmed the gun was loaded, and the safety was engaged, then slipped the weapon into his shoulder holster and smoothed his jacket flat over it.
Better safe than sorry.
He put his cell phone in his pocket and emerged from the car’s warm interior into the frosty late afte
rnoon air. The car gave an electronic beep as he locked the doors and jogged toward the compound, his head down against the wind.
As he rounded the bend in the road and neared the compound, he slowed to a quick walk to lessen the noise from the crunch of frozen snow beneath his boots. The only other noise was the sound of his breathing. Traffic would be light up here. Deer season was over for the year, so the only hunters would be the hardcore types who hunted rabbits and squirrel in the off-season. Aside from hunting, there wasn’t much to draw anyone up to these parts. Gavin reasoned that was part of the location’s appeal to the preppers.
He stopped twenty feet away from the gate and stared hard at the cabins off in the distance. He saw no signs of activity, and no recent tire tracks on the driveway. The place felt empty. He approached the gate and vaulted over it. He felt exposed as he walked up the driveway toward the cluster of cabins. He quickened his pace.
The first grouping of cabins sat off to the right of the driveway, off behind the woodpile. A tarp covered the firewood. The crusted snow showed no recent footprints. No noise hummed from the nearby cabins. The land was quiet under its blanket of snow; it felt deserted. Nobody home. He turned to leave.
Gavin exhaled, and the tension drained from his shoulders. He realized he’d been prepared for a confrontation if he’d run into anyone. His time away from the sheriff’s office had brought into stark relief just how much stress had been involved in serving bench warrants and bringing in defendants on contempt charges. Always wondering, as he raised his fist to knock on a door, whether the residents had weapons, kept vicious dogs, or were under the influence of booze, meth, or both. His private work was considerably less dangerous. And, to his surprise, he’d become somewhat risk adverse.
The notion that he was scared forced him to turn back to the cabins and check them out more thoroughly.
Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4) Page 10