Vi said, “No, it’s later. She’s closer to the end.”
They watched the video again, Boone working the remote, fast-forwarding through the tight shots, looking for the woman in the pans.
“We could look her up on ThreatNet,” said Boone, “but we’d need a name or KA. If we can get her picture, I can probably trace it to a name.”
He walked between the cubicles to the file room, talking over his shoulder. “She came early and she waited till the end. That’s what I don’t like. Gretchen said no gloves, she wasn’t wearing gloves. I don’t like, she waited in the cold night with no gloves.”
The file room had steel walls, deep shelves, and stacked boxes. Boone ran a hand along the boxes. “These here are the closed threat investigation binders going back several budgets. I’d say there’s fifty feet of threats and follow-up back here. More recent stuff, the working files, is parceled out to my guys. We’d have to go cubicle by cubicle. I’ve got a master printout in my desk, but it’ll just have the basic information.”
He disappeared down an aisle, returning with a box. The box was filled with books like photo albums. He was looking at the spines. “This is Arabs. This is neo-Nazis. This is white supremacists and a few tax protesters. This is the militias and the violent splinter right-to-lifers. This is schizophrenics. This is miscellaneous. It’s not the perfect system, because, for example, most neo-Nazis are also white supremacists—it’s a question of emphasis—but I guess it’s better than no system.”
He picked a book from the stack. The book thumped on the tabletop.
“This goes back to July,” he said. “Spring is down the hall. I can get it for you, if you want.”
Vi sat at the table in the corner and started going through the book, turning the heavy album pages, picture after picture, summer crowds in shirtsleeves, crowds and smaller groups, twos and threes. She saw two men in a pickup. The driver had sideburns and a hairy forearm. The passenger was in the shadow of the cab.
“Those two,” said Christopher, looking over Vi’s shoulder. “They kept hanging around the courthouse up in Concord. One of them we traced back to the tax protesters, or maybe the car. I think we traced the car. We have a file on that car somewhere. They saw us taking pictures and never showed again.”
Tashmo asked for the little agents’ room. Christopher handed him a key tied to a ruler.
Vi saw a man in a bathrobe taking out the trash, a man and a woman crossing a street, two men at a pay phone, one man pumping gas as another walked away. The weather got colder as Vi turned the pages. The people wore shorts and shirtsleeves, then jackets and pullovers, then coats and hats and boots. Vi saw a man scraping ice from a windshield, two men outside a Dairy Queen, two men and three women standing by a park bench on the fringe of some protest. Vi looked through seven books in all.
“I don’t know,” she said, closing the last book. “Maybe she’s in there. I didn’t really see her face.”
“No,” said Boone, “you never do. Drives me nuts, personally. You never know until later that this face—in a wall of faces, this face—will turn out to be significant. Not that your screamer will turn out to be significant, because, I mean, chances are, statistically, she won’t. But you can’t know this until later and now you’re kicking yourself for not knowing at the time that she might turn out to be important.”
Christopher came back with a large manila interoffice envelope. “These are loose,” he said. “We’ll file them when everything dies down.”
Vi started through the color photos in the envelope. Outdoor protests, placards and human chains, riot cops in helmets, people kneeling. Vi pointed at an old man with white hair, his face half obscured by someone else’s blurry hand. The picture was stamped SP-Harrisburg.
Vi said, “I’ve seen that guy somewhere before.”
Boone said, “Are you sure?”
“Definitely yes.”
Boone looked at the picture. “Oh, him. He’s in the other books.”
Another picture: a woman, a brunette, and a young man with a boot-camp haircut getting into or out of a green car, something with a hatchback, a Pinto or a Mazda.
“No,” said Vi.
Another picture: another protest, wintertime. Vi saw the same brunette, now in sunglasses, a scarf over her head, with another woman, also in a scarf. The women were walking up a street. The picture was taken from a car; Vi could see the doorframe in the corner of the shot. The first woman, the older of the two, carried a cardboard mailing tube. The picture was stamped Erie PD.
Vi said, “Maybe.”
Christopher said, “Which?”
“Her,” said Vi, pointing to the younger woman, the one without the mailing tube.
“We could do a flyer,” Boone was musing. “We could do a sketch, pass it out to the cops, in case she tries to crash your perimeter again. That’s worked in the past. We’ve got a super artist on retainer. He does wild seascapes and all of the official gubernatorial portraits—you should see him work. Holds the pencil like this, eraser like this, and his hands are like a blur, incredible. I think he’s on vacation, but I have his beeper. We could do it over the phone. He could fax the sketch back to us for corrections. His name is Ed Talty, and I like to kid him. I say, ‘Ed, where in the hell—’”
Vi pointed to her maybe, the woman in the picture. “What’s her name, Boone?”
Boone looked the women in the picture, the face just out of focus, frozen in the frame. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I know someone who might.”
“The informant’s name is Little Flower,” Boone was saying. “Or that’s her movement name. She has a real legal name, of course, but we don’t use it, do we, Christopher? She’s been working for us since the fall—we got her from the FBI in a multiplayer trade—and if you call her anything but Little Flower she gets all bent out of shape and it takes an hour to get her back on topic. So that’s the first thing to remember when we get there, Vi: call her Little Flower. It’ll save a major hassle.”
Vi said, “What’s her deal?”
Boone said, “She bombs things.”
They were following the motorcade away from Severance, east on a state highway through the low, eroded hills.
“She started as a biker chick,” Boone said. “She was with a gang up north, some lame Hell’s Angels spin-off. They roared around the timber towns, sold guns and fake ID, smuggled speed from Montreal. Little Flower’s specialty was rental cars. You steal a credit card, run up some ID to match the name, rent a car from Avis, chop it up for parts, not a bad racket all in all. The Bureau popped her at Logan with a stack of Vermont driver’s licenses, her picture with ten different names. They sent her to Memphis for that. She met some Christians in the bing. They recruited her, converted her, whatever. She came out loving Jesus and reporting to Probation. Last winter—I don’t know, you maybe saw the press—her group blew up the Whole Woman Wellness Center down in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a two-ton fertilizer bomb. The cops found Little Flower sleeping in a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The van was stolen, she was wanted by Probation, and the van seats tested positive for nitrates. The Bureau tried to flip her on the clinic. She said no, I’ll never talk, this is my religion now, blah blah blah blah blah, so the Bureau went to work on her. They showed her pictures of the watchman in the rubble. She said it was a big mistake, there wasn’t supposed to be a watchman, that’s why they blew it up at night. The Bureau said, ‘There’s always a night watchman, Little Flower.’ They showed her pictures of the man, his family, his wife of forty years, his eleven grandkids, his ribbons from Korea, and his bowling trophies. They said, ‘This was a life. You took a human life.’ They kept it nice and simple. I’m told she fell apart and started giving names and that’s how she became a confidential source. She’s still pretty touchy about the night watchman. Don’t ask about Whole Woman, don’t mention bowling trophies. She gets all worked up and then you have to calm her down again.”
They stopped for gas at a two-pump c
ountry store in a town called Willingboro. Christopher did the pumping. Vi and Boone stayed in the car. Vi watched the motorcade get smaller down the road.
“She isn’t always stable mentally,” said Boone, two hands on the file in his lap. “She needs to be focused. She’s funny with her lies. She’ll admit to murder if you phrase it right, but not to the little things. She’s like a child, only worse. Kids can’t tell the difference between truth and lies, between what happened and what should have happened, fact and wish get all confused. That’s why you can’t polygraph a child.”
Christopher came back from the store carrying a white plastic bag. He got in, threw the bag on the seat. They took a side road out of Willingboro. There were signs along the road for deer, the leaping silhouette, shot up with little holes, rusting from the holes.
Boone said, “She was a minor Bureau source, not the mother lode. She did names and faces—adequate for background. The Bureau talked to the judge, got her home confinement, electronic monitoring, the ankle radio. The Bureau says her head was fairly clear at first, but you know how it is with these historical informants—they sit around, all cooped up, getting grilled by teams of strangers about what happened on a certain date a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, until finally they lose track of what day it is today. The Bureau sucked her dry and we did a deal. We gave them two spent dope informants and they gave us Little Flower. One of the dopers died of OD after that and the Bureau tried to renegotiate. They said, ‘You never told us he was an OD candidate.’”
Christopher said, “We were like, ‘Duuh.’”
Boone said, “I told ’em, ‘Hell, the girl you gave me doesn’t even know what year it is.’ Last deal I do with them whiny bastards. I let my guy, Brian Ryan, run her for a while. These kids need experience and I feel a duty as a mentor. Bri did a nice job and then I figured I’d give Christopher some hands-on, which was a bit of a bum deal, I’m afraid, because she’s really going soft on us.”
“I don’t mind,” said Christophe, driving. “I learn from everything.”
“Tell Vi about the time you caught her lying on the rock.”
“It started with Bri.”
“But you’re the one who caught her. Tell the story.”
Christopher said, “She was obsessed with the EM unit on her ankle. When the Bureau got her home confinement, Probation came out and installed the hardware at her house. They explained it to her, and she kept explaining it to Brian like it was the seventh wonder of the world, this whole moronic explanation. ‘The ring on my ankle is a radio, Brian.’ He’s sitting there, listening to this. ‘My ankle radio sends a weak signal to the receiver in my phone jack.’ Bri is nodding, yeah, whatever, Little Flower. She’s says, ‘The weakness of the signal is the key. It will carry one hundred feet, no more. If I get more than one hundred feet from the unit in my jack, the absence of the signal will cause my jack to dial Colorado, where a mainframe will page my PO in Portsmouth. He will get the page, call my house to see if there’s a malfunction, and if I don’t answer, he’ll show up here or maybe ask the cops to send a car. If the cops don’t find me here, my PO will notify the judge’s clerk to get an absconder warrant. The warrant is the point of no return. Once they find me, boom, I go to Memphis.’ Poor Brian must’ve heard this rap twenty times. It was like hearing a child explain thunder.”
“It’s not that she lies exactly,” Boone said. “Half her stuff is on the money, half is in her head. Our job is to figure out which half. She gave Christopher a murder plot last month.”
“Said she knew a man named Gib,” said Christopher, “an ex-biker, who knew another man. She said this other man worked in a factory where they mill casino chips, Bally’s, Harrah’s, and, I think, Trump’s. Said the man had skimmed and stolen a million bucks in chips a little at a time from the assembly line. The chips were buried in a field outside Troy, New York. The thief himself had disappeared. Two brothers had killed each other looking for the chips. Hoodlums dug the fields at night, playing hunches. This whole vignette. She was great on detail, that’s what half-convinced me.”
Boone said, “My kids are good young agents, Vi. They spent twenty man-hours running down the lead, and it checked out, to a point. Yes, there are casinos and they issue chips, and yes, some chips go missing. We found the factory. It’s not in Troy, nowhere near, but there is a Troy and Gib exists, we know this for a fact. Then Christopher was watching cable one night at his place.”
“I saw a rerun movie,” said Christopher. “Ice Heist. Ben Gazzara, Nipsey Russell, Barbara Eden. I’ve always been a Ben Gazzara fan.”
Vi said, “Let me guess. Casino chips, buried in a field.”
“But not in Troy,” said Boone. “That part was invented. Now, whenever she gives us information we check the TV listings before acting on it.”
They came to a small lake dammed between two hills. At the far end of the lake was a motel cabin court, seven wood-frame cottages on a dirt pullout in the pines. The cabins were dark brown, shingles green with age. Each cabin had a little saggy porch facing the highway and the lake. The road to the cabins was half washed out and deeply rutted, rocks and roots exposed. They parked in front of the last cabin.
“Little Flower’s parents bought this place in ’51,” Boone said. “She says it was really nice when she was a kid. They had perch in the lake, sunnies too, and families came to fish from as far away as Worcester, same families every year. They had their favorite cabins and reserved them in advance. They showed outdoor movies on Saturday at dusk. Don’t get her started on how nice it used to be.”
Vi saw the curtain move in the cabin window. “She knows we’re out here.”
“Yup,” said Boone, relaxing.
“It’s good to let her stew,” said Christopher.
“That’s right,” said Boone.
“The key to Little Flower is to make her think that you already know the answer to your question. If she thinks you don’t know, she’ll go off on a tangent. That’s why we always bring a file when we see her. She thinks we keep the answers in our files. Sometimes Bri forgot to bring a file and he had to stop at Staples, buy an empty folder and some typing paper. He wrote ‘Little Flower: Facts’ on the file, just for the intimidation value.”
Boone said, “That’s exactly right.”
“Another thing we do is sit in the car and talk before going in. She sees us and assumes we’re talking about her. She thinks we must know plenty, if we have this much to say.”
Vi saw the curtain move again.
“Lake is pretty,” murmured Christopher.
“Yes it is,” said Boone.
“I understand they dredged it.”
“Really?”
Vi said, “I think she’s pretty focused now.”
Boone banged on the cabin door. “Little Flower, Little Flower, it’s Boone Saxon from the Secret Service. Open up.”
They heard a woman’s singsong voice. “I’m in the shower—”
They waited on the porch. Vi saw fallen tree limbs in the straggle grass, pinecones everywhere, and rusted lawn furniture, separate little groups of chairs and tables in odd parts of the yards, two chairs facing each other over by the road, three chairs in conversation by a flaking silver propane tank. Vi didn’t hear a shower in the cabin.
Boone said, “Let us do the talking, Vi, and remember: don’t mention Erie, bowling trophies, or how beautiful these cabins used to be.”
“And the date,” whispered Christopher.
“That’s a good point—avoid the topic altogether, Vi.”
“What’s up with the date?”
Boone said, “Her home confinement time ran out last month. Legally she’s free. Probation came out and took her bracelet off. We came in as they were leaving and put a new one on. It connects to nothing, of course. We never said it did. On the other hand, we never said it didn’t.”
“We don’t lie to her,” said Christopher. “Everything we say is strictly true.”
The door opene
d and there was Little Flower, dressed in stretch slacks and a red-checked flannel shirt. Her hair was dirty, brown, and straight, wet-looking though not wet.
Boone said, “I thought you were in the shower.”
“I didn’t say it was—turned on.” Little Flower said this as she inspected her visitors, first Christopher, then Vi, a quick look up and down. As she said “turned on,” her eyes came around to rest, coquettishly, on Boone.
Boone said, “We don’t have time for your silly games. This is Agent Asplund out of Washington. Let’s have a little chat.”
“What have I been doing? What have I been doing? This is a question, Boone?”
They sat in the front room of the cabin, Vi in a rocker at one end of the coffee table, Little Flower on the couch between Christopher and Boone. The little room was packed with bric-a-brac, glass poodles and glass dishes, an older woman’s taste, Vi thought. She wondered if Little Flower’s mother was alive and living here, or whether the bric-a-brac was posthumous. Christopher got up and roamed around the cabin, looking in the closet, pushing coats around to see behind them.
“Lately, I’ve been listening,” Little Flower said. “My ankle unit makes a noise, a high-pitched eeeek—it does, Christopher, I don’t care what you say, or Bri either, you’re both a pack of liars in my book. I can’t sleep, listening for it. When I can’t hear it, I get scared and think my bracelet is malfunctioning, and the cops are coming for me, and I panic in my bed. I can only sleep when I hear it nice and steady. Wait—there it is.”
“It doesn’t make a noise,” said Christopher. He was looking through the closet. “I told you that before.”
Big If Page 23