by Ty Patterson
He went to the lobby, reserved another two rooms using one of the several identities he carried, and headed back to the twins.
They watched him silently as he hustled them out of the room, heads bowed, and took them up the stairs to a different suite from the one Kelly had booked.
He inspected their suite first before leading them in, pulled the curtains closed, and deposited their bags on the bed.
‘You don’t trust anyone, do you?’ Meghan asked him with amusement in her voice.
‘Not till we know what exactly is going on.’ As he was leaving, he turned back. ‘Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we talk and try making sense of this.’
‘What happens when we know what’s going on?’ she asked him.
‘Then, it’s hunting season.’
Chapter 6
He grilled them the next day. They were in a café on Town Square, deep inside, Zeb facing the entrance. Zeb figured the busy, crowded square was low risk, as long as he was with them.
‘Tell me everything, right from your dad’s death and Beth’s shooting.’
He had read all the available coverage of the university shooting in the back editions of newspapers and in internet channels, and they added very little more to what Ketchum had told him.
He saw Beth’s hand twitch once before Meghan’s covered it and squeezed it.
Meghan went over the details Zeb already knew, watching the bustle in the café, taking comfort in the intensity of the here and now. ‘You know, we weren’t supposed to be in university that day. We both had been through our commencement ceremonies, and that particular day we were supposed to be just hanging out at home. However, our friends were visiting the campus that day, and they asked us to go along.’
Beth took up the narration. ‘Initial information about the number of shooters was sketchy. Some said three, some said four, some six. The number of dead was also unclear. The shooters were geeks and had set up jammers, so cell phones were dead; the SWAT comms weren’t functioning; only landlines were operational. The cops set up a perimeter, and after an hour of trying to negotiate with the shooters, the SWAT team went in. Six of them, led by Dad. They went from room to room on the ground floor of the main building – they knew the shooters were on the ground floor, since there were enough choppers in the air who had eyes on the other floor. SWAT shot and killed two of the crazies, and when they breached the last room, they found me.’
She took a deep breath, and Meghan gripped her hand hard, her knuckles turning white, and took over. ‘Dad and another SWAT member went in hard. They used dynamic entry, using speed and surprise to take the shooters off guard, but without a flash-bang – since they didn’t know who they’d find in there. They found three students on the floor, apparently dead, and one of them was Beth. Two shooters were standing behind the bodies.
‘Dad froze for a moment. One fucking moment. One of the crazies emptied his magazine in Dad. Body armor caught almost all of the bullets, except two, which penetrated his goggles.
‘The other SWAT officer took out the crazy and the second shooter and got help, but it was too late. Team Leader Bud Petersen had never made a mistake as a cop. That day he made his first and his last.’
She angrily knuckled away the tears from her eyes and drew a shuddering breath. Beth gave her a tight, comforting hug.
‘The medical team found me with a bullet in my head, but I was still breathing, though unconscious, and they choppered me to the hospital immediately. That immediate response by the SWAT team and getting me to the hospital quickly, saved me. The bullet had gone through the left side of my head, entering the front, exiting the back, high enough to avoid contact with any of the left hemisphere. I was operated on, placed in an induced coma while the doctors did what they had to. Meg says the town just came to a stop while I was in the hospital, flowers spilling over into the street, making it difficult for ambulances to navigate. The country’s best neurosurgeons were constantly being consulted every minute. They say I responded to commands, but I have no recollection. My first memory is of her sitting beside me.’
She stopped and played with the cup in her hand. Zeb was motionless and patient, allowing her to tell her story, her way, at her pace.
‘I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t remember anything. Life started for me from that point onwards.’ She didn’t elaborate, but Zeb got how she must have felt – a person with no identity and no remembered life entering a world of strangers.
She went on to explain the recovery, the repeated operations, the last of which took place eight months after she was shot.
‘They call it dissociative amnesia,’ Meghan resumed. Beth’s voice had gone hoarse with talking, and she had fallen silent. ‘The patient not only loses memory but also autobiographic information. Sometimes some memory is retained, but in Beth’s case, it was as if the hard disk had been wiped clean. I had a faint hope that she would come through this without any side effects, though, of course, the doctors warned me that was highly unlikely. Beth not recognizing me, not remembering anything, was still a body blow for me. It took weeks for me to accept that this was how life would be now.’
She laughed without any humor. ‘You know, in all this, I never had the time to mourn Dad. Mom and he had no other close relatives; it was just them and us… so there wasn’t a family support system for me after the shooting and during Beth’s recovery. The cops, mainly the SWAT guys, became my support system, really. Dad’s team members’ families kept me company every evening and brought me food. One or another of the guys' wives stayed with me throughout. Life became a blur for eight months; it was only when the last operation was performed on Beth and the doctors said that now it was up to her body and her brain that I started taking charge of our lives. Of course, in those eight months, I tried to fill in the blanks for Beth, tried to reconstruct her life.’
Beth smiled at her sister. ‘Many people, heck almost every one, looked at me as if I was some creature in a zoo. Some of the stupid fucks even tried to test my memory. Meg nearly shot some of them in the ass. I don’t know how I would’ve turned out if she hadn’t been around.’
A tear rolled down her face. ‘We started off in life as twins. After all this shit, we started off as friends, who also happened to be twins.’
She wiped her face and smiled apologetically. ‘I rarely visit those days. Not because they were traumatic – they were – but because I have realized how irrelevant the past is. One doesn’t need a past to start a new present and a new future.’
Zeb leaned back and looked at her. She had lost her memory, that which gave life its fragrance, and had made a new start for herself despite that loss.
He had striven to forget his past and had made a new life for himself.
He understood her. He knew just how difficult it was to let go of the past.
Or not have one.
In that one fleeting moment, he committed himself to them, determined to see this through to the end.
Beth’s voice turned lighter. ‘Meg was flooded by media calls, requests for interviews, and several book and movie deals came out of the woodwork. One agent even managed to breach the security perimeter in the hospital and approached her with a contract. Kelly punched him on the nose and sent him packing.’
Meghan patted her arm. ‘When Beth was back home, we talked for a long time about what we were going to do with our lives and then made some decisions. We sold our home – Dad’s home – which, luckily for us, was mortgage free, and Dad’s service benefits kicked in, so financially we were good. I got a job offer in Boston to work in a graphic design agency, and we decided to move there. It would be a clean break for us, away from the past, an opportunity for Beth to start anew.
‘We moved to Boston in January of the following year and have been there ever since. I quit my job after one year and started our design business. Beth and I are equal partners. She looks after the financial side of it, and I look after the design part of it. I don’t know if the partners
hip would have worked with the old Beth. Twins working together – I’ve never heard of it.
‘But the new Beth is my friend, my sister, my business partner… she’s my everything.’
Something in Zeb’s face made her smile. ‘Oh, we both go on dates and have separate and active social lives, but neither of us has found anyone serious.
‘So that’s us, Mr. Carter.’ She corrected herself a second later. ‘Zeb.’
‘Tell me about the business,’ he said, as if he had tuned out their story.
They both giggled and then laughed when they couldn’t hold it back any longer. Seeing his expression, Beth explained. ‘We had a bet – I said you would react in exactly this manner. Totally incurious about what happened to me, fully focused on the here and now. She said there wasn’t a single person on the planet who wouldn’t want to know more about what happened, how I survived, all that shit. You owe me a drink, sis!’
Zeb’s expression didn’t change, prompting Meghan to ask him curiously, ‘Don’t you smile, Zeb? In the few days we’ve known you, we’ve never seen any expression on your face. No smile, no laughter, nothing.’
‘Oh all right. The business.’ She explained the setup, a straightforward legal entity that undertook graphic and web design for small businesses. ‘You know the stuff companies want – logos, business card designs, web sites… we do all that. It’s just the two of us full time in the business, and we work with freelancers on the design bit. I do some of the design myself. We have a steady clientele who refer business to us – it’s a nice small business in a field that we enjoy working in.’
‘Have you been in debt, taken on any funding from anyone?’
‘Nope.’ She shook her head vigorously, brown locks of hair covering her left eye momentarily. ‘If you think this could be related to money we owe to someone, nope. We have never taken any loans from anyone. As I said, we were lucky on the money side. Frankly, Zeb, I just can’t see how this is connected to our business or to our life in Boston.
‘We work our butts off on weekdays, get home by around seven or eight p.m. We meet friends during the weekend, go for a movie, or to a bar… when we have dates, we split up and go separately. No date has ended badly; no boyfriend has come around threatening us. For that matter, no client has camped at our doorstep with any kind of issue. There’s absolutely nothing in our life or at work that we think could have any bearing on this.’
He pondered for a moment. ‘How did you get to Jackson from Boston?’
‘Flew via Chicago, and at Jackson Hole Airport, we rented a car. This was five days back. We came to Jackson around two in the afternoon and checked in at the same hotel we were staying in yesterday. We went to the Town Hall and met Kelly and some other cops that we knew.
‘No one from Dad’s SWAT team lives in Jackson anymore. One of them, Joe McBride, died a couple of years back in a hunting accident. Jack Foley, Zach Suiter and Ryan Taggart are in Washington, D.C. All three of them have careers in politics. Foley and Taggart are on fast-track careers in the Department of Homeland Security. Suiter is a very well-known political lobbyist who works for defense firms. The fifth one, Dante Jordan, is in Florida, writing cop stories. The SWAT commander during Dad’s time is still around, and we’d been to meet him – more a courtesy call than anything. Commander Peregrine is a seasoned professional, and while Dad wasn’t close to him, Peregrine was responsible for making sure Dad’s service benefits came to us smoothly and quickly.
‘We were there till about five in the evening, came to Town Square, browsed in the stores a bit, had our caffeine fix, and then went to Kelly’s home in South Park in the evening for dinner, maybe around seven. We returned around ten, hit the bed, and left Jackson around eleven in the morning the next day, with a group from the hotel that was also heading to the park. That day, we didn’t venture outside the hotel. You know the rest of our movements once we reached the park.’
Meghan held her hand up to forestall him. ‘Nope, we didn’t see anything unusual, didn’t meet anyone who we shouldn’t have met, certainly no one carrying a gang membership card.’
‘These people you headed out with, how well did you know them?’
‘Not well at all. They were a family of five whom we met in the hotel over breakfast the day we were checking out. We talked and decided to drive out together. It’s not like we were lifelong friends.’
Zeb leaned back in his chair, waving away the approaching waitress. He was coffee’d out. The twins leaned forward, waiting for him to give his opinion, and when none came, Meghan frowned.
‘Zeb? ZEB?’
‘I swear the Sphinx talks more than you,’ she said when he looked at her. ‘So what do you think? What have we landed in?’
‘Who was your dad closest to?’ he asked her in return.
‘Kelly and Joe McBride,’ she replied promptly. ‘Joe was his partner in SWAT, and the two were very good friends. Joe and his wife, Maggie, didn’t have any kids, and they used to hang out at our place many a time. It was mostly Maggie who stayed with me at the hospital. When Joe died, we stayed with her at their home in Idaho Falls for a month and helped her pick up the pieces.
‘Why do you ask?’
He looked past her without replying, and when he continued looking beyond them, they turned.
Kelly was approaching them fast, disregarding the looks of the people he jostled past.
He stood over them, breathing heavily.
‘They’re gone. The five gang guys. All gone.’
Chapter 7
Zeb stared at him, hearing the twins gasp softly as Kelly pulled a chair and settled heavily. Rage and embarrassment played on his face.
‘They were in the Teton County Jail, about four blocks away from here. That’s where all inmates are housed. Sheriff’s office was notified – the jail comes under his jurisdiction – and all paperwork was done. Early this morning, very early, at six, a black Suburban swept up, three men came in, presented their papers, authorizations and all that shit, and whisked the prisoners away. They were–’
‘FBI agents,’ Zeb cut in.
Kelly glared at him through bushy eyebrows, as he struggled hard to contain his anger. ‘Good guess. How did you know?’
Zeb shrugged. ‘Not difficult to work out. Black vehicle, three men – generally the only agency a sheriff’s office or state police will hand prisoners over to is a federal agency. The FBI is the most recognized federal law enforcement agency.’
Kelly nodded slowly. ‘The guys at the jail checked their papers, made calls to confirm their credentials, and by seven a.m., they were away. I came in an hour later, and there was a message for me from the jail, notifying me of the transfer.
‘I was puzzled because I had spoken to Ketchum and Connor at YNP and neither had mentioned the Feds taking over the prisoners. I called Connor, and he was clueless, and then the alarm bells started ringing. By then it was too late, we were already deep in it. Those three agents were fake. The papers they presented were fake. That call made from the jail went to a number that was answered so professionally and with the correct protocol that the officers at the jail had no reason to suspect anything.’
He ran his hand over his bristly hair. ‘Bottom line, our prisoners are gone. We’ve no idea who set up their phony release or where they went. Of course, we alerted all our patrol cars to be on the lookout for a black Suburban. They found it or what was left of it. It was found burning on the edge of town. No doubt, those escapees are in another getaway car.’
‘Any connection all this has to the university shooting or to any of Petersen’s cases?’
Kelly growled. ‘Nope. We’ve discussed that possibility at length and rejected it. There’s just too long a time interval.’
‘Besides, after the university shooting, we took a microscope to that horrific incident. We looked into all the back cases of the entire SWAT team, spent several hundred man-hours investigating, and found zilch in correlation.’
‘All this shit happe
ning now is in no way connected to the past.’
He took a deep breath, and sound crept back in again. He let them digest it and then told the twins abruptly, ‘Get out. Get out of town now. Go back to Boston. I am saying this as your dad’s closest friend. We’ll investigate this, but this just became a ginormous clusterfuck.’
He saw their faces firm and laughed suddenly, all anger gone from him. ‘You are Bud’s daughters. He wouldn’t have run away either. All right, have it your way, but remember this’ – his face sobered – ‘we aren’t geared to protect you.’
Meghan smiled and patted his hand. ‘Gotcha, Kelly. We know what you’re saying and what you aren’t. We’re staying till we get to the bottom of this. We’ve got our knight in shining armor right here, for a few more days, so I think we’ll be okay.’
Beth looked at Zeb doubtfully. ‘Dunno about the shining bit, sis. He’s a bit dull.’
‘Not for a few days. Till we wrap this up.’
The twins looked at him, their eyes wide, as his words sank in. He ignored their look.
Kelly nodded slowly as if he’d confirmed something. ‘Why?’
Zeb said simply, ‘I’ve a stake in this now. That hood tried to kill me. Those guys that got away, they know I’m involved. I’ve no idea how clearly they saw me, but I have to assume that they have my description.’
Kelly continued looking at Zeb, but addressed the twins. ‘Connor said Director Murphy, after he had torn a second one into him, told him to stop thinking about the women and focus on getting the prisoners back. He told Connor if Zeb was around, it was the gang who had to worry.’
His bushy eyebrows came together. ‘You realize this is bigger than a state gang.’
Zeb agreed. ‘Yeah. Faking FBI creds – that takes organization, clout and reach. That’s also a federal crime and these guys are prepared to risk that. There’s someone with significant reach and an organization behind him who’s feeling threatened by the twins. I think the gang was just the most convenient tool at hand in the state.’