Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  The first fragment clearly showed the beginning of a letter.

  “It’s typed,” she said. “That’s too bad.”

  “Well, we won’t be able to tie it to anybody through their handwriting, but we might be able to tie it to a particular printer.”

  The second fragment was harder for Faye to wrap her head around, but it seemed to refer to a goal or task he had set for his children.

  The third fragment was the most damaged of all.

  The fragments jumped off the screen at Faye with their direct references to the commandment that she had seen on so many of the photographs of the painted room. The third one used the word “obliterate” that she’d seen painted again and again on the wall of the underground room.

  “This is what you get when you piece them together,” Ahua said, “plus an educated guess as to what the damaged areas said. They put the guesswork in bold type.”

  “I guess it would be too much to hope for a signature?” Faye asked.

  “Apparently so. The bottom of the page was burned away. Even the FBI’s geniuses can’t reassemble a piece of paper that no longer exists. So what do you think this tells us?”

  “That’s a pretty broad question to be asking me when you only hired me to do archaeology work. I wouldn’t know where to start.” Faye put the lie to this statement by immediately leaning close to the screen, flipping back and forth to study the photos of the paper fragments and the FBI’s interpretation of what they said.

  “What if you dug up an old stone tablet?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you try to reconstruct what it had said? Or even better, a papyrus scroll that had been through a fire.”

  “I’ve never worked outside the continental US. Archaeologists in my field don’t see a lot of papyrus. Stone and pottery? Yes.” She used the mouse to magnify the image and get a closer look at one of the fragments.

  “Still, is this so different from archaeology?”

  She finally looked up at him. “No, not so much. Okay, I’ll play this guessing game. I’m going to presume that the letter was written to the bomber, since it was found on him. We have good reason to believe that he was Alonso Smith. The letter writer addresses him as ‘Father.’ Unless she was born after 1995, he lied to the school attendance officer about at least one child.”

  “That is all very well-reasoned, but why do you presume that the letter writer is a woman?”

  “Well, we can’t know for sure, but if you’re going to bet on the gender of an adult child of Alonso Smith, you’d be smart to guess female.”

  “Because the three sons we found died of hemophilia?”

  “Exactly. Their mother must have been a carrier.” As Ahua spoke, his eyes never left the screen displaying an image of the letter’s fragments. “Hemophiliacs can live to adulthood with modern medical treatment, but Alonso didn’t seem to be into taking his kids to the doctor. If he had adult sons, they were either born to a different woman, one who didn’t carry the gene for hemophilia, or they got lucky in the coin flip of which of his mother’s X-chromosomes they got.”

  “Whoever wrote it used a phrase straight off the walls of the painted room: ‘Evil must be obliterated.’ So there’s a link,” Faye said. “But the most important thing I get from this letter is that it was written by someone who seems to have been an accomplice in the bombing.”

  Ahua gave a satisfied nod. “We can stop wondering whether Alonso Smith was working alone.”

  “Exactly. There’s still somebody out there for the Bureau to chase. And not just as an accessory. The letter says, ‘Here is a device.’ The writer provided the bomb to Smith. That’s the work of an equal party to the crime, maybe even the person who masterminded it. Although this letter reads like it was written by a mastermind who wanted Alonso Smith to believe that he was the mastermind.”

  “But why arrange for a bombing? If somebody wanted that bomb to send a message, nobody knows what it was. That’s not the way terrorists usually work.”

  “I think it was a family matter. What if this letter was written by a child who wanted to follow in Alonso Smith’s antisocial footsteps? Smith never managed to cause much trouble, but if his ideas took root in the mind of someone more capable, you could be looking at big trouble.”

  “We need to find Alonso Smith’s child, the one that wrote this. Or any of his children might know what this note means.”

  Faye rose as if to run out into the world and find the mysterious letter writer, but Ahua stopped her.

  “One more thing. We know that Alonso Smith was causing trouble in Oklahoma City long before he tangled with a truant officer in Kingfisher County.”

  “We do?” Faye asked. “How?”

  Ahua pulled up another article, this time from The Oklahoman instead of the small-town paper that had reported Smith’s Kingfisher County woes. It detailed a 1986 clash between Native American activists who wanted fair funding for their schools and an anarchist group who wanted government schools abolished. Two men dominated the article’s photo. According to the caption, one of them was Alonso Smith.

  Faye was not surprised to see Smith carrying a sign reading “I’LL TEACH MY OWN CHILDREN, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!” but she was stunned by the identity of the man he was staring down. Smith’s adversary’s long braids weren’t yet threaded with gray, but they were familiar. He may even have been wearing the same hat she’d seen just that day.

  It was Ben McGilveray.

  Chapter Thirty

  Faye studied the photo of Alonso Smith and Ben McGilveray for a long moment, until it suddenly occurred to her that she knew someone else who had been an activist in 1980s Oklahoma. She poked in Carson’s number, one digit at a time.

  He answered with his usual jolly “Hey, Faye! How ya doing?” but she went straight to the point.

  “Carson, I’ve got a question for your mom but I don’t have her number in this loaner phone.”

  “Lucky you. She’s sitting next to me. Want me to hand her the phone or are you brave enough to come talk to her face-to-face? She’s as scary as ever.”

  Faye heard Alba Callahan say something that sounded like, “I had to be scary to raise you. It probably kept you out of the penitentiary.”

  Faye had a hard time imagining Carson in prison, but she could absolutely imagine Alba as the terrifyingly stern single mother of a teenaged boy. Whether wearing jeans or a tailored dress suitable for arguing a court case, she was always impeccably dressed for the situation at hand. Faye had never seen a single one of her sleek blond hairs out of place.

  Faye suspected that Alba had demanded that sort of perfection from her only child without ever quite getting it. Carson was intelligent, accomplished, and big-hearted, but asking him to be perfect would be about like asking a bison to spend a day working in the Library of Congress. It wouldn’t end well.

  Alba was a committed political activist who had lived in Oklahoma all her life. Despite the sleek blond hair, she was an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, so much—though by no means all—of her activism was centered on indigenous people’s issues. Faye knew for a fact that Carson had spent his growing-up years attending political rallies and protests with her. It beggared belief that Alba wouldn’t know Ben McGilveray, who would have been protesting on the same side as Alba, at least on tribal issues. Likely, she knew Alonso Smith, as well, as an opponent.

  “I want to talk to Alba in person. Is she here in your hotel room, or are you at her house?”

  “She’s here. She wants to see Joe’s talk tonight.”

  Faye took her leave of Ahua and hustled toward Carson’s hotel room.

  * * *

  Alba greeted Faye at the door with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Her jeans, neatly pressed and fashionably torn at the knee, said, “I’m an attorney because I have to make a living and I’m sixty-something because nobody can stop time from passing, but I’m stil
l a radical at heart.”

  “What can I do for you, Faye? Carson said that it sounded urgent.”

  “It is. What can you tell me about Ben McGilveray?”

  “Oh, nothing much, except I probably would have married him if we’d met when I was single and if I hadn’t had ten years on him. Or thereabouts.”

  Carson was looking at her like a forty-something-year-old man who would prefer not to be reminded that his mother had a history that didn’t involve him.

  “So he’s a good guy?”

  “The best. I still see him and Gloria around town. Gloria works here, you know.”

  “Here?”

  “At the Gershwin Hotel. I think she works in the financial office.”

  Faye did not know that. She needed to make sure that Ahua knew that the wife of the man facing down Alonso Smith in that 1986 photo was a Gershwin employee.

  Alba was still talking about the McGilverays. “They’re at every protest, and they’re always on the right side. I’m sure you’ve seen them over the years, Carson. They’re both Creek, but we’re not kin.”

  Carson was still speechless.

  Faye took advantage of his silence. “What about Alonso Smith?”

  “Lonnie? Good Lord. I haven’t thought of him in years. Decades, probably. He seemed to just drop off the face of the earth, and good riddance. You stay away from him. You too, Carson, but especially Faye. I never heard a good thing about the way he treated his wife. Janet was her name, I think.”

  Faye showed Alba the 1986 picture of Alonso and Ben. “Is there any chance you were there when this photo was taken?”

  “Oh, honey. There’s hardly a chance that I wasn’t. Tribal education has been a favorite cause of mine for forever.”

  “They’re all favorite causes, Mom.”

  “But education is my favorite favorite.” Alba peered at the photo. “Don’t see myself in the background, but that doesn’t mean I’m not there. Look, there’s Janet.” She pointed at a freckled young woman with shoulder-length brunette hair who stood a pace behind Alonso, holding a baby.

  Faye remembered the dark-haired woman that Lonnie had painted all over the walls of an underground room. Did he paint freckles? Would they have shown at the resolution of the photos she’d examined? And what about the police report that gave his wife’s name as Sandra?

  “They stopped coming around not long after that. He’d been threatening to take Janet and the baby out in the woods to live, far away from the government that wanted to…I don’t know what he thought the government wanted to do. Educate his children, maybe? I’ve spent my life yelling at the government to do its job, because I’ve never thought people were meant to make their way in this world all alone. If Lonnie hadn’t been such an idiot about doctors, their first daughter might not have died. It was a breech birth. Nearly killed Janet. This baby, their second one…she was a beautiful thing. Like a little doll.”

  Faye thought of the painted scenes where both Lonnie and the dark-haired woman were holding babies. Was Alba talking about one of the children left in the painted room? No. It wasn’t possible. The girl baby that Lonnie and Janet lost in the eighties couldn’t have turned into a boy baby, especially not one wearing a shirt dating from the nineties. If Faye was counting them properly, Lonnie’s aversion to doctors had cost him four children, and at least one of them was Janet’s newborn daughter. Faye ached for this woman she had never known.

  “Did they have more children after the little girl in the picture and the baby that died?”

  “I don’t know. Later on, I heard that he had married a woman named Sandra. Funny thing, though. I never heard anything else about Janet. Don’t know if she died or what. I’d like to think she got smart and divorced him, but I just don’t know what happened to her or to that little girl.”

  Now Faye was counting children. According to the attendance officer, Lonnie was rumored to have had at least four children in 1995. DNA testing on the three boys’ bodies had proven that he was their father. Alba said that the baby in the 1986 photo was his daughter and that there had been another daughter who died. Was that all of them? There was no way to know, but he could certainly have had more children by Janet or by his second wife.

  Did it matter? The note in Lonnie’s pocket indicated that he had a surviving child who could be the key to solving the bombing. One of his other children could, at the very least, be able to shed some light on why he wanted to bomb something in the first place. Most important of all, finding one of Lonnie’s children might tell the FBI whether there were surviving accomplices planning to bomb something else.

  In any case, Faye imagined that any child of Alonso Smith would be a very angry individual.

  * * *

  As soon as Faye left to talk to Alba Callahan, Ahua picked up the phone. Faye might have just met Cully Mantooth a day before, but he was still her distant relative and she didn’t need to be part of this conversation.

  This time, he didn’t mess with the older man’s mind by giving him forty-five minutes to get antsy before the interview. This time, he messed with his mind by saying, “I want to speak with you. Now.”

  Then he hung up on Cully and called the number of the man who knew more about Cully than anybody. He asked Jakob Zalisky a single question, then he ended the call and waited for Cully.

  Cully might cultivate a relaxed, affable image, but he wasn’t so relaxed that he didn’t know when it was time to do exactly as he was told. In the space of time it took him to hustle himself onto an elevator and walk to the command center, he was sitting in a chair across from Ahua.

  The man had to be nervous. His very speed in arriving showed that, but he had been projecting quiet, manly confidence for a long time. Cully looked comfortable in his T-shirt and jeans, not at all like a man who was about to talk to the FBI about a missing woman last seen in his company.

  Ahua led from strength. “So you weren’t alone when you left for California.”

  “Correct. Like I told you, Angela Bond and I ran away from school together.”

  “But, according to your buddy Jakob, you were in California within a year, alone.”

  Cully took in a breath and let it out. If it bothered him that his friend had spoken of him to the FBI, Ahua couldn’t see it. “Like I told you, she left me. Angela was my first love. How many people do you know who are still with their first love? It broke my heart to lose her, but just about everybody gets their heart broke sometime.”

  “Getting your heart broken is one thing,” Ahua said, “but abandoning a seventeen-year-old high school student who’s far from home? That’s quite another. We don’t know of anyone who has heard from Angela Bond since you two left school, so it’s altogether possible that she came to harm. Maybe you could have prevented it.”

  Ahua didn’t say, “Or maybe you’re the one who harmed her,” but those words hung in the air.

  Cully answered the words that Ahua hadn’t spoken. “I didn’t hurt Angela. God. The very idea of hurting her rips me up inside. She left me. We hadn’t gone far. We hadn’t even got out of the state when she stopped loving me. I don’t know why. She literally ran away from me, with me running after her, begging her to stop. I waited for days, but she never came back. When I ran out of food, I had to move on.”

  Ever the actor, Cully’s voice had stayed smooth, reasonable, well-modulated, but now he lost the ability to control it. It rose in pitch until it could have been mistaken for the voice of a seventeen-year-old suffering the loss of his first love. “I never saw her again.”

  “We know she didn’t go home,” Ahua said.

  “Of course, she didn’t go home.” Muscles knotted in Cully’s forearms, moving beneath weathered brown skin. “Nobody in their right mind would go back to her bastard of a stepfather. I had aunts and uncles who would have taken us in, but they wouldn’t have stopped him when he come to take he
r home. They thought he was a good man. He was a deacon in the church, right? So he had to be a good man. When we ran away, we knew we had to go far from him and never come home.”

  “But why did you keep going after she left?” Ahua asked.

  Cully’s face was puzzled. “Go home? Without Angela? When she left me, I thought no place would ever feel like home again. Going west seemed about as good as going back east toward where I lived when we were together. Better, even, because there wouldn’t be nothing to remind me of her. I felt that way for years, until I met Sue. I married Sue as quick as I could before she could run away, too. And now she’s dead and I feel just as empty as I did when I lost Angela. Have I told you everything you need to know, Agent Ahua? This conversation has left me feeling old and tired, and I’d like some rest.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Ahua watched the door close behind Cully. He believed the man had just told the truth. He just didn’t believe that he had told all of it.

  Cully was holding something back. Maybe it was something that he thought would incriminate him or somebody he cared about. Or maybe he thought it wasn’t pertinent to the case and therefore it was none of the FBI’s business. But there were times when the things he wasn’t saying were louder than the things he was.

  This was the art of Ahua’s work that someone like Faye would never understand. She was a scientist, always looking for inarguable evidence. This was what made her such a useful consultant and it was the reason that Bigbee had urged him to hire her, which was not an obvious thing to do when he had a small army of trained FBI agents at his disposal. As it turned out, Bigbee was right. Faye would have made an excellent agent.

  Ahua doubted that she’d consider dropping the archaeology and the business she’d spent years building to join the agency. Still, he doubted she would balk at the chance to do more work along the lines of what she was doing now. Maybe he would recommend that the bureau train her for that. Ahua would dearly love to be a fly on the wall, watching the people at Quantico put Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth through her paces.