The Shadow Priest

by D. C. Alexander

  They donned riot helmets with face shields and began practicing scenarios in which the officer was down flat on his back with an assailant mounted on his upper chest, landing blows on the officer's head and face. The officer's goal in the exercise was to use his hands and arms to defend his face and head from the blows, and then to execute a move that would bounce and roll the assailant off to one side. The state trooper's practice blows bordered on being inappropriately hard. Arkin knew it was the right time to take a break, to let the trooper's surging bitterness dissipate. Instead, he let his thoughts return to options for Hannah's care. Meanwhile, he dislodged the state trooper, with embarrassing ease, three times in a row. As they set up to practice the scenario a fourth time, he remembered that there was an acquaintance of his from his Naval Academy days who was an oncologist at Mass General. As he tried to remember the doctor's name, the trooper landed a palm heal strike to the bottom edge of Arkin's face shield that came down so hard it bent the plastic until it hit Arkin in the chin, knocking his teeth together with a jarring pain. In the blink of an eye, he bucked the trooper forward, locked the man's left arm down against the floor, rolled him onto his back, and jammed both his thumbs, with full force, up and against the trooper's hypoglossal pressure points. The trooper grabbed hold of Arkin's arms, let out a long, agonized scream through his clenched teeth, then appeared to pass out.

  "Out of role! Out of role!" he heard Morrison shout, the words half drowned out in the loud rumble of blood rushing through the vessels around his eardrums. Arkin disengaged and stood up over his victim, noticing a large wet spot on the crotch of the trooper's sweatpants. He looked around, meeting the troubled faces of the other officers. He took off his helmet and bent down to check the trooper's pulse, finding that the man's heart was racing from an adrenaline overload brought on by the pain. He sighed and stood up.

  "I'm sorry," he said, gazing down at his unconscious victim. "I'm really sorry, everyone." He grabbed his duffel and left as another of the state troopers cradled the head of his fallen comrade and broke open a bindle of smelling salts under his nose.

  *****

  Arkin spent the rest of the day with Hannah, who seemed weaker than ever. "It's just the muscle relaxer," she said, trying to allay his obvious fear. "I was having muscle spasms in my leg."

  At 10 p.m., Hannah ordered him to go home. He arrived at his cold, empty house to discover that there were nine voicemails waiting for him on their land line. Most were from friends inquiring after Hannah's condition, wishing her a speedy recovery and so forth. One was a recorded message from a local politician, warning the electorate that some sort of unspecified doom was at hand if they didn't stop such-and-such incumbent by voting for his ouster. The ninth and final message was from Pratt.

  "Hey, Nate. I didn't want to bother you by calling your cell while you were at the hospital, and I'm sorry to bother you even now, but Bill and I wanted to let you know that we found a roster spot for you in a great anger management class up at Fort Lewis College." He laughed. "I'm just kidding. Actually, the troopers said to tell you not to sweat it, and that the dude you manhandled is a total asshole and that they've hammered him themselves on occasion. But the real reason I'm calling is to tell you that I'm heading back to the office. I was talking about this case with one of my old buddies from FLETC who's now in the Detroit field office, and he told me I should double-check a section of the INDIGO case file called 'miscellaneous case notes.' It's a sort of backwater section that was built into the half-hidden second-tier directory of the generic INDIGO case file structure, so every case file has it. But it's a redundant thing agents aren't even trained to use under normal procedures, so it never occurred to me to look there. Point is, this buddy of mine said that sometimes headquarters administrative personnel will use it as a place to add random things that come in after a case has been officially closed and archived. He said that once in a while he finds things in that section like late-arriving court filings, letters from witnesses, and documentary evidence that was misplaced or misdirected before finally being routed to the right file. That sort of thing. So I'm going to run down to the office and take a peek. Probably a long shot. But I'll let you know if I find anything. Oh, and the follow-up credit card data and security camera footage—such as it is—came in today. I didn't have time to look at it, but we can go over it in the morning. Still waiting on the State of Wyoming. Carry on sir." End of message.

  EIGHTEEN

  The next morning, Arkin woke to a vague anxiety that he was missing something critical. As he lay in bed, allowing himself the small luxury of a gradual wake up, his fear began to take shape. His intuition told him that someone—some hidden player—had indeed deleted the contents of the Priest file from INDIGO. And worse, that that someone had done so with a malicious intent that might pose an ongoing threat to their investigation. The implications were troubling. Someone at headquarters had an interest in making the Priest investigation go away. Probably a high-ranking someone at that, since only IT specialists and officers above a certain rank had the sort of access to INDIGO that would allow them to purge information from a case file.

  In the wake of his epiphany, a new fear gripped him. For a number of reasons, most having to do with security, whenever field agents used the INDIGO system, their queries were logged and indexed at headquarters, such that certain staff and officers could monitor exactly who was working in which electronic files, and when. Whoever had been trying to extinguish the Priest case might still work at headquarters, and might even be aware of the exact extent of Pratt's inquiries—aware of any discoveries Pratt may have made.

  A further realization made him sit straight up in bed. The credit card data! The date of the reversal of direction, back toward Durango, of the two suspected members of the Cortez assassination team coincided exactly with the day that Pratt, on Arkin's recommendation, first queried the Priest file in INDIGO.

  Oh, shit.

  As Arkin reached for his phone, he flinched at the unmistakable sound of a high-caliber rifle shot echoing out over Durango. It rattled the bedroom windows. He dialed Pratt's cell. It rang five times, then went to voicemail. He redialed. Same result. Fucking hell. He dialed Pratt's home phone. Same result. He kept trying, dialing each number in turn. By his eighth attempt, he heard the sirens. One ambulance, and at least three police cars. With the wild, echoing acoustics of the Animas River Valley, there was no way for Arkin to pinpoint the direction from which the sirens came. But he knew in his gut that they were converging on Pratt's home.

  *****

  Arkin had been friends with Durango's senior detective, Paul Regan, for years, and they had a deep mutual respect for each other's abilities, so Regan had no problem admitting Arkin to the scene as his team was finishing up. The FBI agents dispatched from Farmington hadn't arrived yet anyway. So Arkin was more or less free to examine the scene as he wished. The only problem was that he couldn't think. It wasn't that he was overcome with emotion. If anything, he was surprised at how numb he felt, given that his friend had just been gunned down in front of his family. Despite his personal connection, Arkin was somehow maintaining the cool, calculated distance he'd put on in innumerable, horrific crime and combat scenes of his past. It was more that his brain felt slow, as if he'd been studying civil court procedure for hours, to the point where his mind simply started to shut down. Almost as if he were mildly drunk, but without the comfort of an accompanying buzz.

  Ella and the kids were at the home of another family—friends of theirs from their LDS church. And Pratt's body had already been consigned to the coroner's care. All that remained of him in his family home was a lot of his blood and tiny fragments of his head, scattered across the floor and left wall of the entryway, across from the breakfast nook where his children had been eating pancakes when it happened. According to Regan, all they could get out of an hysterical Ella was that Pratt had opened the front door, and then, like he did every morning, turned around to blow each of them kisses before he step
ped out to leave for work.

  But there was little mystery to what happened. Someone had set up with a heavy rifle—no doubt the same .50 caliber sniper rifle used in Cortez—on the scrubby hillside across the street from Pratt's house, probably no more than 80 yards away. As soon as Pratt opened his front door to go to work, a single round entered the lower left quarter of the back of his head, blowing more than half his brain out the other side and completely obliterating his face. The bullet had then gone through a window and out the far side of the house, probably landing somewhere in the brushy field behind Pratt's lot. It would take a while to find.

  Arkin gave Regan the suspect credit card numbers, explaining their relevance. But he very much doubted the assassins would be foolish enough to use the same cards again. He wished they'd had a chance to run down information on the cars the credit card holders were driving—from gas station security camera footage or anything else. There were, after all, only four roads leading out of Durango—one for each point of the compass. It would have been easy to set up roadblocks. But they could hardly do so on the basis of what they had to identify a suspect—a mere hunch that one of them was tall with long, dark, moderately curly hair.

  Arkin had been wandering the house and immediate surround in a daze. He returned to the present to find himself staring down at the dark red pool of blood on the entryway floor—blood that had drained from Pratt's head. It was quickly drying in the arid, high country air. He stared for a moment, then realized what he had to do.

  "Regan," Arkin called.

  "Yeah, Nate."

  "A quick word?" He led Regan out the front door, out of earshot of his team. "Paul, I don't have time to give you a full explanation, but I need to ask a big favor."

  "Anything."

  "When you guys find that bullet, it's probably going to be a .50 BMG."

  "Like in Cortez?"

  "Probably fired from the same gun. In a nutshell, I think Pratt's involvement in the Cortez case is what got him killed. And what's more, I think he was compromised by someone in his own agency."

  "A traitor? In DCI?"

  "I hope not. But when you find that bullet, do me a favor, will you? I need you to keep it out of federal hands until after the state lab has had a chance to run its own analysis. Pretend not to find it. Pretend there's a mix-up in the evidence locker. Anything. Bottom line, we need to see the analysis before the feds take the bullet away."

  "I understand. I'll do my best."

  Arkin remained on the front porch after Regan went back inside, wondering at his own lack of emotion. He'd never been a particularly emotional person. But his lack of feeling here, in the immediate aftermath of the murder of his good friend, was disconcerting.

  His gaze drifted across the road, over toward the hill where the assassin had no doubt taken his shot. He scanned the area for likely firing points. Then something occurred to him. When the Priest case was taken away from him before his banishment to Durango, his Canadian liaison, an affable RCMP officer named Brian Tremblay, had, at least in theory, still been trying to run down information for him. It was possible that Tremblay had eventually—perhaps after DCI had closed the Priest case—sent DCI courtesy copies of whatever he'd found for Arkin. If Tremblay had done so, the documents he sent to DCI would probably have included the name of the Vancouver company. And given what Pratt's voicemail had told him, it was entirely possible that one of the DCI administrative staff, upon receiving documents from Tremblay concerning a case which was by then closed, had scanned the documents and entered them in the miscellaneous case notes section of the archived INDIGO case file for the Priest case.

  If, as now seemed probable, someone had gone in and deliberately removed the file contents, then perhaps whoever had done so never bothered to check back to see if anything had been subsequently added. There would have been no reason to expect a significant addition of information after the case was closed, after all. Indeed, there would have been little reason for anyone to check the miscellaneous case notes section specifically unless, as he now suspected, someone had been monitoring Pratt's INDIGO queries. But this was conjecture, at best. He could only guess at the true story of what happened. Still, in his gut, Arkin had a feeling that Pratt had found something in the INDIGO file. Something critical. Perhaps the name of the Vancouver company. Whatever it was, it had probably gotten him killed.

  Certain that Pratt's office had already been cleaned out—including any useful information that might have come in because of the subpoenas—Arkin nevertheless got in his car and headed toward their office building.

  *****

  Shutting off his car, Arkin scanned the parking lot of his office building. Not seeing any unfamiliar vehicles, he made his way to the back entrance, and once inside the rear stairwell, drew his gun and chambered a round. As he emerged on the basement level and made his way down the hall toward Pratt's office, he could see that a small round hole had been cut in the window of Pratt's door, probably with a simple glass cutter. He bent down and peeked through the hole. The office was vacant. He ran his fingertip around the edge of the hole, as if doing so might tell him something useful. When it didn't, he pushed the door open, stepped inside, and closed it behind him.

  In the air he caught the faint smell of Pratt's cheap drugstore aftershave. Scanning the room, Arkin confirmed what he already expected to see. Pratt's INDIGO terminal and computer were gone. All they'd left on the desk was the monitor, mouse, some dangling wires, and the Strawberry Monkey notepad Pratt's kids had given him for Father's Day—its top page blank. Even the printer, fax machine, and antiquated phone with its built-in voicemail recorder were gone. Arkin flopped into Pratt's chair and began examining all of Pratt's files—having to pick the locks of three different file cabinets to do so—all the while knowing perfectly well that he wasn't going to find anything useful. Whoever had taken the computer would have been damn sure to take any paper files too.

  An hour later, having found nothing, he was done. He picked up Pratt's desk phone, but then, thinking better of it, hung it up, went down the hall and picked up the phone on the vacant security officer's desk. He dialed a Washington, D.C., number. "Myers," a voice said.

  "Hello there, Danny boy."

  "Who's—Nate?"

  "Good. I'm glad somebody remembers me."

  Dan Myers, a respected field agent at one time, was now director of INDIGO integration—a paper title, given that he had no employees and no authority. Like Arkin, he'd been demoted—in his case, in the wake of a political power struggle within the agency, where his name ended up being too closely associated with the losing cabal. Now he sat at a dented metal desk in a windowless, low-ceilinged office and proofread information entered into INDIGO by other agents.

  Arkin took a few minutes to catch up with his old friend before breaking the news about Pratt, and then explaining the real reason for his call.

  "The bottom line is that the critical information I need, the information Pratt was getting for our case, was probably in INDIGO yesterday, in the miscellaneous case notes section. It may very well have been deleted by now. But if you have access to a backup or a cache memory where it might—"

  "Whoa, daddy. Are you kidding me? I can't share that with you, even assuming I can find it."

  "It isn't for me. Given that one of your agents was killed for it, we need to secure the evidence."

  "Why wouldn't it be secure here?"

  Arkin almost told him why, but stopped himself, knowing it would be foolish to advertise his suspicions until he had more information. Until he knew exactly who he could trust. "You know how much better I feel when I have something in my hand, Dan. Anyway, it's a joint investigation with a consolidated grand jury file."

  "Nate, you know damn well that without an MOU to cover my ass, they'd put my severed head on a spike on the Key Bridge. Plus. . . ."

  "Plus what?"

  "Nothing."

  "What?!"

  Myers groaned. "This stays between you and me,
Nate. Cross your heart, and all that shit."

  "Sure. Anything."

  "I've been ordered not to give you any information. I mean you, specifically."

  Arkin digested this. "Ordered by whom?"

  "Trlajic."

  "Who?"

  "Dragoslav Trlajic."

  "Throw me a bone, Dan. I've been away for a few years. Who the hell is Dragoslav Trlajic?"

  "Killick's senior policy advisor."

  "Is he Serbian?"

  "He ain't Irish."

  "When did he go to work for Killick?"

  "Pretty much just after you left."

  "Does Killick know about this?"

  "About Trlajic's order? I assumed it was coming from Killick."

  "I doubt that very much."

  "Well, regardless, Trlajic didn't say, and I didn't ask. He's a serious asshole. Territorial and insecure. Doesn't like anyone questioning him on anything. If he even found out I was talking to you. . . ."

  "I understand. In the meantime, you can at least secure the information on your end."

  He hung up with Myers, and then called his own supervisor at MWA, Scott O'Neil, to apprise him of his intent to work the Pratt case with the FBI, and to request a memorandum of understanding between MWA and DCI to appease Myers.

  "I can't assign you to that. And I can't forward the request for an MOU."

  "Why not?"

  "We don't have the resources."

  "Resources? Are you shitting me?

  "Nate—"

  "I only have seven active cases. I spend half of each work day dusting the empty shelves in my office. Anyway, two weeks ago you were telling me to use up my budget on new office furniture before the end of the fiscal year so that it wouldn't look like we didn't need as much funding next year."