The odor of cheese slams into us the moment the door opens. Looking inside, I can see about fifteen barrels, the type that would ordinarily contain cheese, but this time they had better not. The smell is not a good sign, and Laurie makes eye contact with me that indicates she doesn’t like where this is going.
It takes an hour and twenty minutes for the officers to search through the truck’s cargo, though it feels like about a week. They find nothing but cheese, which I suppose on some level makes sense, since they’re searching a cheese truck.
When they finish, Laurie just gives me a shake of the head to indicate what a waste of time this was. An officer takes Drummond out of the car and uncuffs him.
“What is R amp;W Dairies?” she asks him.
“It’s a… it used to be a dairy company in this county,” says Drummond. “They went out of business a few years ago, and we bought their stuff. We never bothered to change the name on the truck.”
“What was the cargo on the plane that just landed at the Center City airstrip?”
“Nothing… it was empty.”
Laurie asks him some more questions, but he’s feeling increasingly confident, and he deflects them. She doesn’t want to probe too much, so as not to reveal the little that we do know.
“You’re free to go, Mr. Drummond,” she says.
His face is a mask of surprise and relief. “I can go?” he says, to make sure he heard correctly.
“That’s correct,” Laurie says, and Drummond wastes no time in getting back in the truck and hauling his ass, and his cheese, out of here.
Laurie walks over to me. “Well, we did it, Andy. We smashed a Parmesan cartel.”
She and her officers get in their cars and leave, my humiliation complete. I have no idea what went wrong, but I’ll have plenty of time to think about it. Unfortunately, thinking has not been my strong point of late.
I was wrong about what was in the truck, but no matter how many ways I look at it, I don’t believe I was wrong about the big picture. Even if there had been no murders, and no one had expressed a fear of Alan Drummond, what took place today would still be absurd.
It is simply preposterous to assume that a cargo plane flew into that airstrip, set in the middle of a community whose only product is cheese, and delivered a load of cheese. Yet that is exactly what seems to have happened. What I need to figure out is why.
By the time Laurie comes over for dinner, I have it narrowed down to two possibilities. One is that our adversaries are watching Larson, and once they found out that he was still staking out the airport, they set us up to look foolish.
The other possibility, perhaps more likely, is that Laurie and I weren’t careful enough and left some evidence that we searched the airstrip hangar the last time the plane came in. It signaled that we were on to them and would continue to be watching. So they set us up.
Laurie, to her credit, is not angry about what happened. She accepts the responsibility, since she went along with it willingly. But even though we both agreed on what should be done, she will suffer the most for it. Stephen Drummond will certainly file a complaint over the way his son was treated, and Laurie will at the least receive a severe reprimand.
We talk about it through dinner and afterward. It’s only when we’re finished and heading for bed that I think of something that I noticed on the road but hadn’t thought about since. “Did you think Alan Drummond looked scared when he came down off that truck?”
She nods. “Petrified. That’s one of the reasons I was so surprised when we didn’t find anything.”
“I felt the same thing. And I think he really was afraid. He couldn’t be that good an actor, and he would have had no reason to even try.”
“Which means he thought he was in trouble.” Then, “Do you think it’s possible he didn’t know what he was carrying? That he was as surprised as we were when it turned out to be barrels of cheese?”
“Yes, I absolutely think it’s possible. But if he didn’t know what was in that truck, who did?”
• • • • •
I’M GOING TO have to adjust my goals downward. This will not be easy; downward goal adjustment has never been a specialty of mine. But it’s got to be done.
I’ve stayed in Findlay in order to identify the one or more people who killed Liz, Sheryl, Eddie, and Calvin. I now believe that those murders were committed to cover up a criminal conspiracy, the geographical center of which is the Center City airstrip.
My recent efforts, however futile and embarrassing, have been directed toward uncovering the details behind that conspiracy. I will continue in that vein, and I may or may not succeed. But even if I do, it’s a stretch to think that evidence will also be uncovered to make a charge of murder stick. So my new goal will have to be to get the bad guys put in jail for the criminal conspiracy, which will no doubt be a lesser charge than they deserve. What they deserve, as Jeremy Davidson said, is to be strapped down and have a needle inserted in their arms.
By the time Laurie leaves for work, we’ve come up with Plan B. I call it B even though it’s very similar to Plan A. It’s just that A was such a disaster it seemed logical to move on to a new letter.
We’re going to continue a stakeout of the airport, though this time Larson will not be involved. I’m going to have Marcus with me, taking him off his assignment of watching over Madeline Barlow. No one has made any kind of an effort to go after her, and Laurie will have Cliff Parsons make sure she is watched by one of their officers.
We’re going to be in Marcus’s car, so if anyone is watching me, my car will be parked in front of my house. Marcus will ensure that we are not followed, so there will be no reason for anyone to think the airport is being watched.
I’ve told Laurie I will call her, as before, if anything happens. What I’ve neglected to mention is that Marcus and I are going to take a more active approach. Before we call Laurie, we’re going to move into the airport and try to catch the bad guys in the act, whatever that act might be.
I’m not thrilled about deceiving her in this manner, but I don’t feel like there is any alternative. As civilians, Marcus and I do not have the right to do what we might wind up doing, and if Laurie had the knowledge of it, her job would compel her to prevent us from doing it.
Going into this operation, I knew there were a couple of possible downsides. For one, we could wind up getting killed. Actually, I can’t picture Marcus getting killed, so I’m more worried about me. Second, we could accomplish nothing except wasting a lot of time and effort.
Sitting in the car now, about fifteen minutes into the first day, I realize I hadn’t factored in another downside. I’m stuck alone in a car with Marcus.
I feel like I should make conversation, but I don’t have the slightest idea how to have one with Marcus. “Sandwich?” I ask, thinking he might like one of the sandwiches I made and brought with us.
“Unhh,” he says.
“I’ve got roast beef, turkey, and turkey pastrami.”
“Unhh,” he says.
“I’ve never actually seen a turkey pastrami, have you? I mean, do they look like regular turkeys? Or regular pastramis?”
“Unhh,” he says.
“To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know what a pastrami looked like if it were sitting in the backseat.”
“Unhh,” he says.
“Anyway, they’re in the cooler in the trunk if you want one,” I say. “Just help yourself.”
This time he just nods; maybe he feels like he’s been chatting too much.
Suddenly, I realize that the radio is not on. I don’t know if playing the radio violates stakeout etiquette, but I’ve got to do something to cut through the silence. “Okay if I turn on the radio?” I ask.
He shrugs his assent, and I turn it on. Classical music blares through the speakers, and in about four seconds I find myself longing for silence. “I’ll tell you what,” I say. “You listen to what you want for an hour, then I get the choice for an hour, then you, and
so on. That work for you?”
He nods.
“Great. This your choice for now?”
Another nod.
“Okay,” I say, looking at my watch. “We change over at about… oh… nine-sixteen and thirty-one seconds. Somewhere around there.”
Still another nod; it looks like we have a deal. I think I’ll grab myself a sandwich.
Seven hours into our stakeout, I may even be getting to like classical music. “Like” may be too strong; “tolerate” would probably be more accurate. We’ve just concluded the latest hour with some Beethoven, and my critical assessment would be that it’s got a good beat, but you can’t dance to it.
I’ve been using my precious hours for a combination of news and sports, and I start this one with news. The newscaster introduces a feature piece about “the obesity epidemic in America,” and I see Marcus perk up, seeming to listen intently. It surprises me, since his percentage of body fat is slightly less than absolute zero.
I lean over and turn the volume up a little, to allow him to hear better, but in a quick motion he reaches and shuts the radio off entirely. This seems to be a violation of our arrangement, but I don’t complain because it’s now obvious that Marcus wasn’t listening to the newscast at all. He was listening to a sound that seems to be overhead.
We are about a mile and a half east of the airstrip, and the previous planes have come in from the northeast. We chose this location to give us a vantage point from where we could see the plane without the people in the plane seeing us.
Right now the plane is coming from the same direction as the previous times, but something seems different. I soon realize that it’s lower this time, perhaps in an effort to avoid radar detection.
Marcus starts the car, and we drive toward the airport. I climb in the backseat so I can watch the plane through the rear side window. Not only is it lower, but it’s losing altitude in preparation for landing.
But this plane is not heading for a landing at all. It’s too low, too far from the airport, and as I watch with a combination of fascination and horror, its nose tilts downward and goes crashing into the otherwise peaceful countryside, about three hundred yards from us.
The resulting explosion lights up the Wisconsin sky, and even Marcus seems mesmerized by it.
Nobody could have survived this crash, and if Alan Drummond was on that plane, he’s just answered for his crimes.
And whatever secrets he had went down with him.
• • • • •
WITHIN TEN MINUTES it seems like every fire truck and police car in Wisconsin is on the scene. The area where the plane crashed is an open field, surrounded on three sides by trees. The field might have been long enough for a successful emergency landing, but the way the plane smashed down, nose-first, it never had a chance.
Laurie arrives with three of her officers, though the state police have taken temporary control of the scene. Nevertheless, I tell her that Marcus and I witnessed the crash, and she conveys that message to the authorities. Marcus and I are then told to remain on the scene to answer questions.
The fire is put out relatively quickly, and all that remains of the plane is a charred shell. It’s in pieces, but those pieces are not spread over a large amount of land, possibly because the plane was moving down vertically at the time of the crash.
A number of cars from Center City arrive as well, and I see both Keeper Wallace and Stephen Drummond. They are surrounded by at least four uniformed servants of the Keeper, though I don’t recognize any of them as being the ones that kidnapped Madeline.
Both Wallace and Drummond look properly somber as they are led in to talk to the authorities. Drummond sees me, and his face reflects his surprise that I am there, but I doubt he dwells on it very long. He’s got other, bigger problems with which to deal.
I see Drummond again about twenty minutes later; he and Wallace are leaving the trailer that’s been set up as command central as Marcus and I are being escorted to it. Drummond is attempting to appear composed and in control, but his face is tearstained, and the anguish is evident. Alan Drummond must have been on that plane.
Officials from both the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board have made their way out here, and they seem to be sharing a dual command. With terrorism being the first thing that everyone thinks of when a plane crashes, the FBI will treat the location as a crime scene until they find out otherwise.
Marcus and I answer questions from FBI Special Agent Ricardo Davila. Marcus is as unresponsive as ever, which proves not to be a significant factor when he says that he didn’t see the crash. He’s telling the truth; I was the one in the back watching while he was driving.
I report the salient facts: that I saw the plane coming in far too low to reach the airport and that it was rapidly losing what altitude it had. The nose was pointed down, at least forty-five degrees, and if it made any effort to straighten out, I certainly didn’t see it.
“What were you doing out here?” Agent Davila asks.
“We just went for a drive,” I say.
He looks at me, then at Marcus. Then he looks at me again and then at Marcus again. “The two of you went for a drive?”
“That’s right,” I say.
He nods, though it clearly doesn’t compute. “Did the plane break apart at all in the air?”
“Not that I saw. And I had a clear view.”
“Nothing fell off of it? It stayed completely intact?”
“Completely intact,” I say. “And there was no smoke either. Not until it hit the ground.”
Davila asks a bunch of additional questions, then calls over a guy from NTSB to ask a bunch more. Satisfied that they’ve extracted all the information they’re going to get from us, they take our names, addresses, and phone numbers and send us on our way.
Marcus and I head toward our car but stop when we see Laurie and Cliff Parsons. “Was it Alan Drummond?” I ask.
Parsons nods. “They think so, though it’s difficult to identify the body in this condition. He was wearing a ring that his father says was his. They’ll do DNA testing.”
“Did you see anything fall off the plane?” Laurie asks.
I shake my head. “No. But the FBI asked me the same thing. Any idea why?”
“A mail carrier out on his route about four miles from here says he saw something fall out of the plane. His view was partially blocked, but he seemed certain of it.”
Considering that we believe the plane was carrying illegal goods, this is a potentially significant fact. “Have they been able to determine what cargo the plane was carrying?” I ask.
“None,” Parsons says. He shakes his head, as puzzled as the rest of us. “The plane was empty. Not even any goddamn cheese.”
There would seem to be the possibility that the illegal cargo was thrown from the plane, which was what the witness saw falling to the ground. To believe that, one would have to accept that Alan Drummond knew the plane was going down, but rather than focus on saving himself, he saved the cargo instead. This despite the fact that his coconspirators would have no idea where he threw it, and therefore it would most likely wind up in the hands of the police.
I doubt that Alan Drummond was that brave, or that stupid.
Marcus drops me off back at the house, and I take Tara out for a long walk. I feel guilty about having left her for so long, but the truth is, she had proven to be a mediocre stakeout dog the time she went with me. By the time we get back to the house, Laurie is there, already cooking dinner. I’m glad, because there’s nothing I like better after a long stakeout than a home-cooked meal.
Laurie has little more to report on the crash, except that an intensive search has not yet turned up anything that might have fallen off the plane. “If Alan Drummond knew he was going to die, why would he throw something off the plane?” she asks. “And how would someone know to look where he threw it, unless…”
“Unless what?” I ask.
“Could this have been planned in adv
ance? Could he have known beforehand that the plane would go down, and he prearranged with someone where he would drop the cargo?”
“You’re asking if Alan Drummond could have committed suicide? Because how else could he know the plane would go down, unless he was going to take it down?”
“Is it possible?” she asks. “Why would he commit suicide?”
“Just thinking out loud,” I say, “but maybe he thought we were about to bring him down, and he was protecting his father and maybe Wallace by taking the literal fall.”
“Or maybe the wheel told him to do it,” she says.
It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Be they suicide bombers or Kool-Aid drinkers, people down through the ages have sacrificed their lives in a misguided pursuit of their religion.
Why not Alan Drummond?
• • • • •
MY UNDERSTANDING of the Centurion religion and the role of the wheel is limited. Try as I might, and I’ve tried pretty hard, I haven’t been able to get a good feel for it. Catherine Gerard described it in some detail, and her husband’s articles did as well, but the real essence of it remains somehow just beyond my comprehension.
I think this lack of understanding is more on an emotional than intellectual level. I know the mechanics of how the wheel operates; I know about the symbols that only the Keeper can decipher. I know about the ceremonies, about the decisions that are turned over to Wallace and his wheel, and how the townspeople have achieved a serenity and bizarre freedom of choice by their choosing to give up that freedom.
What I can’t quite grasp, can’t really believe, is the level of devotion that these people seem to have. To my knowledge, in well over a century only two people, Henry Gerard and Madeline Barlow, have in any sense turned against the town. Yet even they have not turned against the religion and have maintained their faith in its precepts.
But how far will these people go? Are there limits to what they will do in the expression of their devotion? Will they commit murder? Would they, or more specifically, would Alan Drummond, commit suicide if directed to?
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