by Steven James
He introduced me around. Though the men didn’t seem antagonistic, they greeted me with a visible air of suspicion.
Sean explained that I was a member of the investigative team looking into Donnie’s disappearance and the shootings at his house.
“Ardis and Lizzie,” one of them said.
“Yes,” I replied.
“You a cop?” he asked me.
It struck me that, just as I hadn’t told Margaret about my brother, Sean hadn’t told his buddies about me. “I’m with the FBI,” I said.
The two men who were pecking through their lunches stopped. Stared at me.
I went through the standard questions: Do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt Donnie or his family? Did he have any enemies? Had he indicated to any of you that he was upset with his wife or daughter?
The answers came quick and blunt: no, of course nobody wanted to hurt him; he didn’t have any enemies; he loved his family. In fact, he and Ardis had tried for years to have kids and finally adopted Lizzie.
“How long has he worked here?”
“I don’t know. Seven, eight years.”
The door opened, and a looming, broad-shouldered Native American introduced himself to me as the foreman. He told me his nearly indecipherable Ojibwa name, then added that I could just call him Windwalker. “What do you need? We’ve already talked to Deputy Ellory.”
I gestured toward the sawmill building. “I’d like a quick tour, then a look at Donnie’s personnel files.”
Windwalker didn’t seem thrilled by the idea, but he agreed and led me into the sawmill while Sean stayed behind to catch up with his friends.
As we entered, Windwalker handed me a pair of industrial-grade headphone-style hearing protectors. “You’ll need these.”
Both of us slipped on a pair, and I took in the room.
Sawdust lay everywhere, and the smell of freshly cut pine was sweet and damp and almost overwhelming.
The white pine log I’d seen earlier on the conveyor belt was halfway in the building. The belt carried it forward until its end nudged up against a wickedly edged saw blade nearly two meters in diameter.
One of the workers pressed a button on a control panel to my left, and a 200-horsepower diesel engine growled to life. The shrill whine of the now-spinning blade filled the air. Then the saw blade slid to the side, the conveyor belt carried the log forward, and then the blade swung back into place, biting into the wood.
For a moment it reminded me of one of the Edgar Allan Poe stories Tessa had convinced me to read- The Pit and the Pendulum.
A blade swinging.
Slicing toward a victim tied to a table.
He escaped just in time.
I watched the saw blade chew through the log, then I surveyed the rest of the mill, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. Unfortunately, my unfamiliarity with the site made that challenging, so, rather than try to pick up specific clues, I tried to get a sense of the place, a spatial understanding of the sawmill where Donnie Pickron, the main suspect in a double homicide, had worked until two hours before his family was slaughtered and he disappeared.
Different workstations were positioned throughout the mill. Five men and two women sorted boards into piles, graded lumber, or removed warped and knotted timber, then sent the unusable pieces to the far end of the mill on a second conveyor belt to be ground into pulp for easier transport to the paper mills.
The wood shredder for grinding the logs into pulp was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The reticulated gears spun at an astonishing speed, powering through the boards and logs in seconds.
Hardly anything was left after the logs were shredded.
Hardly anything was left.
Donnie disappeared.
Unlikely, but not impossible, not out of A hand on my arm caught my attention, and Windwalker motioned toward the door. I took one more look around the sawmill and then we dropped off our hearing protectors by the door and he led me toward the admin building.
A rush of snowflakes slanted around us.
“Can you tell me about Donnie’s job?” I asked.
“Transported the logs. Piled ’em here in the yard, sometimes drove ’em to Hayward.”
“Was he hourly or on salary?”
“Hourly.”
“And yesterday?”
“He was on a run. Left at noon. That’s all I know.”
“I need to see his time cards and a record of his arrival times.”
“Time cards are just inside.” His voice was curt. It was clear he was not enthusiastic about helping me here today.
We entered the building and found a receptionist’s office. He mentioned briefly that he had “let the girl go” recently, and I could see that he’d taken over the office himself.
The room was arranged haphazardly with used, mismatched furniture, two old filing cabinets, a desk strewn with invoices and a decade-old computer. A small bookcase filled with three-ring maintenance and construction binders sat in the corner. A photo of Windwalker standing beside a waterfall with a man I had not yet met was propped on the corner of the desk. The window on the south wall overlooked the yard.
My phone vibrated and I took a call from Jake. He informed me that the Lab’s handwriting analysts had confirmed “with a high degree of certainty” that Donnie Pickron had written the name on the helmet. Also, an unidentifiable set of prints were found on Ardis Pickron’s cell. “They’re not hers. Nothing came up in AFIS.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
“Press conference went well,” he said, reiterating what I’d gathered from our earlier conversation.
“I’m sure it did.”
“I’m still hoping to make it by 2:30.”
“All right.”
End call.
As it turned out, the time punch cards weren’t in the office but down the hall in a makeshift employee break room.
When Windwalker and I entered, I was surprised to see a set of old gym lockers rather than the open-faced shelves I’d expected. It explained why most of the guys had left their helmets on their snowmobiles outside even though it was snowing-there wouldn’t have been room for them in the narrow lockers. Just beyond the last one, a stairway led down to a basement.
Each locker was labeled with a strip of white tape containing the handwritten name of an employee.
Donnie Pickron’s locker sat on the far right and had a padlock hanging from it.
“I have no idea what the combo is,” Windwalker told me.
Even though I had my lock pick set with me, it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good with a combination lock. “Could you dig up a hacksaw or some bolt cutters for me?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said grudgingly.
“I’ll wait here.”
The tracking signal in the bag that Alexei had left with the Eco-Tech activists disappeared.
He was driving on Highway K when it happened, and he slowed to a stop by the side of the road to check his equipment for a malfunction.
Moments later he’d assured himself that there was nothing wrong with his GPS tracking device.
Someone must have found the transmitter and disabled it, but with the thread-sized wires and a nearly untraceable signal it seemed remarkable that any of the amateurs he had met would have located it.
But maybe they were not all amateurs.
Alexei pulled out his phone.
Now that he’d delivered the money and the access codes, a status call to Valkyrie would be in order. A few strategic questions could give him the answers he needed, but as Alexei was tapping in this assignment’s alphanumeric pass code for Valkyrie-Queen 27:21:9-he noticed movement in his rearview mirror.
A state trooper’s cruiser had turned onto the road and flipped on its blue lights.
Alexei stopped his call.
There were any number of reasons for the lights, but he had a feeling he knew what the real reason was.
Someone who was not an amateur.
You left th
e knife there, left your prints with them.
But had enough time passed for that to make a difference?
Well, whether it was the prints or not, something was up.
They turned you in.
Maybe.
Probably.
The car rolled up behind him, kept its overheads on. Parked.
Alexei set down his cell. He would call Valkyrie after he’d taken care of this situation.
In his rearview mirror he watched the officer talking into his radio. Alexei gauged what he would need to do but then had another thought. He pulled up a GPS lock on his car and searched for any nearby businesses or parking lots where he could acquire a different vehicle.
Using the bolt cutters Windwalker had retrieved, I managed to cut through the combination lock and clicked open Donnie Pickron’s locker.
Inside, I found a change of clothes, photos of Donnie’s wife and daughter, an extra pair of brown leather gloves, a pair of the same type of headphone-style hearing protectors I’d used to protect my hearing from the grind of the motors and saw blades. All to be expected.
I was feeling the pockets of his Carhartt work pants when I found what I did not expect: a federally issued biometric ID card.
Windwalker was lurking behind me. I held up the card. “Any idea what this might open?”
He shook his head.
“Could you bring me Donnie’s personnel file?”
A slight pause. “Yeah, sure.”
I searched the locker more thoroughly but didn’t come up with anything else.
I studied the ID card.
It’d been issued by the Navy. Above top secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) access. I saw that he was a commissioned officer, a lieutenant commander. And he was most certainly not retired.
I had no idea what the card might have given him access to. As far as I knew there were no military bases nearby.
Windwalker returned with Donnie’s personnel files. I collected the time punch cards I’d come in the room to retrieve. “Is there a place I could look these over?”
He gestured down the hall. “You can use the office. Long as you don’t disturb anything.”
The trooper still had not left the vehicle.
Alexei figured that if he’d stopped simply to help a stranded motorist he would have certainly gotten out by now to see if the person was okay.
In lieu of that, Alexei ran down what he knew about American law enforcement felony stops. The trooper would give instructions through his cruiser’s PA system but wait until he had backup, a cover officer, before exiting his vehicle.
The language might vary, but the standard operating procedures were similar for law enforcement agencies throughout the United States: single commands to ensure that the driver’s hands were visible and that he was not going for a weapon: “Driver, put both hands on the ceiling… With your right hand remove the keys to your car… Place your right hand on the ceiling… Open the window of your door with your left hand… Place your left hand on the ceiling
… Throw the keys out the window… With your left hand open the door… Exit the vehicle… Face away from me…”
Then he would tell him to interlock his hands behind his head and walk backward toward his voice until he told him to stop.
Then kneel and cross his ankles.
Now, as Alexei expected, the trooper’s voice came through his vehicle’s PA, but what he said was surprising. “Step out of the vehicle with your hands away from your body.”
Not protocol.
Either this state trooper was a rookie or he knew that backup wasn’t going to be arriving anytime soon. And either of those scenarios played in Alexei’s favor.
The order came again: “Driver, step out of the vehicle.”
Even before Alexei opened the door he had decided what he was going to do.
26
Alexei stood with his hands up, facing the officer, the bone gun slipped down into his right sleeve.
Weapon drawn, the state trooper approached him.
Alexei ran through what a typical civilian might say, how he or she might respond. “Is there a problem, officer?”
“No problem,” he replied tersely. “As long as you keep your arms outstretched.”
Windblown snow sliced through the air between the two men.
How would Neil Kreger, a used furniture salesman from Des Moines, Iowa, respond?
“I don’t think I was speeding or anything. It’s fifty-five along here, right? I was even taking it slow because of the-”
“Turn around and place your hands on the vehicle.”
Okay.
So.
“Officer, I-”
“Turn around.” The officer leveled his gun. “Now!”
Alexei silently complied.
The trooper approached him from behind.
Typically, you don’t want your gun in your hand when you’re patting down a suspect because it’s too easy for him to knock it away or disarm you and acquire the weapon himself, so Alexei waited for the soft swish of the gun being holstered so that the officer could frisk him.
And he heard it.
Even though Alexei did not want to do it, he had to respond appropriately to the situation.
Three moves-rotating while bringing his arm down to knock the officer’s hand away, a round kick to the knee, and, as he collapsed, a straight, direct punch to the temple, sending him reeling to the ground. It only took Alexei a second to disarm the officer and use the bone gun on each of his wrists.
The man went instinctively for his radio, but as he did he cringed and cried out in pain.
“I’m sorry about that.” Alexei tossed the officer’s Glock into the woods. “A little surgery, a couple months of physical therapy, and you’ll be able to feed yourself again.”
“What?” Desperation quavered in his voice.
The shattered scaphoids wouldn’t heal on their own, and until reconstructive surgery the officer wouldn’t be able to grasp anything without debilitating pain. As long as he didn’t try to move his fingers he would be okay.
But even now he was trying to move them and was crying out in a helpless, childish way.
“Just don’t flex your fingers. Wait for the paramedics to arrive.”
Alexei didn’t bother to cuff him, really, there was no need, but he did place the man in the back of the cruiser. Not wanting him to go hypothermic in this weather while he waited for help to arrive, Alexei started the engine and dialed up the heat.
Since this man had called in his location, Alexei knew that additional state troopers would undoubtably be arriving any time. He needed to change vehicles as soon as possible.
At first he thought of using his rental car to get to a place where he could switch vehicles but immediately realized that since law enforcement was aware of the make and model, that wouldn’t be wise.
His attention returned to the cruiser. A police cruiser always draws attention, even from people obeying the law. So that had its drawbacks as well.
However, in this case, taking into account the condition of the roads, the cruiser had better traction, more power, and he could monitor the radio while he drove.
So, the cruiser.
To take care of his electronic equipment in his car, he initiated the countdown of the small explosive device he’d brought with him, positioned it beneath the dashboard, and set the timer for two minutes. A nominal loss, considering everything.
He climbed into the front of the cruiser. The sawmill was less than five minutes down the road. He figured he could find another car there, or even better, a snowmobile, and disappear into the national forest.
Ignoring the groans of the man in the backseat, he ran down his priorities.
First, elude the authorities.
Second, contact Valkyrie.
Third, deal accordingly with the environmentalists.
There was nothing in Donnie’s personnel files that indicated why he would have a government-issued b
iometric ID card with above top secret clearance.
Using my phone I clicked onto the Federal Digital Database and came up dry there as well.
But there was one person I knew who could give me some answers.
I tapped in Margaret’s number.
“Director Wellington,” she answered, even though I knew my name would’ve come up on her screen.
“Margaret, Pat. Listen, I need you to look up Donnie Pickron’s military service records.”
She responded promptly, “He didn’t kill them, did he?”
Her words surprised me. “Why do you say that?”
“Jake filled me in on what we know. I’ve been doing some checking. Donnie was a Navy information warfare officer.”
“Was or is?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s still active duty.” I told her about the ID.
“I have no record of that information.” Her tone held a nuanced threat, and I knew I wouldn’t want to be the person who’d kept that information from her.
Although I was familiar with some jobs in the Navy, I’d never served in the military myself. “What is an information warfare officer, exactly?”
“Mainly they’re involved with cryptology and intel evaluation or dissemination. Some of them work in deployment.”
“Can you find out conclusively if Donnie Pickron is still active duty, still involved in either cryptology or deployment?”
I waited while she typed. It didn’t take long.
“Not officially.”
“In other words, yes.”
“Yes.”
“So what was a covertly commissioned Navy information warfare officer with a biometric ID card that gives him Sensitive Compartmented Information access doing here in the middle of northern Wisconsin working at a sawmill?”
The blank silence I got was not encouraging.
“Help me out here, Margaret. Is there anything more you know? Is there a regional information processing facility or cryptology center? A missile deployment base that hasn’t been disclosed to the public?”
“None of those.”
“Then what?”
“I need to check on something.”
“We have at least two people dead and a third-”
“I know that, Agent Bowers. But I’m not going to make unfounded inferences here.”