One Through the Heart

by Kirk Russell

  They ate sardines, cleaned, salted, and roasted. They ate a plate of crostini with quail eggs and prosciutto that Celeste brought over. She sat with them, drank a half glass of wine, winked at Raveneau, and left as Sheriff Crawford drank cold white wine and talked about her life and job and living on a bluff over the Mississippi. She was locked in a tight race running for re-election.

  ‘The election is less than a month away and the fellow I’m running against has made catching who did this his main issue. He claims I haven’t put enough work into it. Think there’s any chance this will get solved before then?’

  Raveneau did, and he briefed her on where things were at. They talked more and then as he drove her back to the Sheraton there was a report of yet another new fire. They listened to that report and as she got out of the car she leaned back in.

  ‘They didn’t fly me out here just to ID a body. They know something else.’

  ‘That’s what I figure too.’

  ‘But they haven’t said that to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘At home I know an FBI agent who refers to the police in Missouri as the locals, even St Louis metro. They’re all tribes to him in a foreign country he’s been stationed in, and he was born in Missouri. I’d show you how he walks and looks at us, but I’ve had too much wine.’

  ‘Get some sleep.’

  ‘You’re a good man, Benjamin Raveneau. I’ll call you when they get through with me tomorrow.’

  It would turn out she was right. The FBI did know something and had for at least twenty-four hours. Raveneau didn’t like that and liked it even less when he found out what it was.

  FORTY-TWO

  When Jennifer Crawford looked at the melted right side of the dead man’s face, the stump of ear coated in melted plastic from a helmet, they said, and then the other side, she asked, ‘How did Inspector Raveneau identify him?’

  ‘You tell us.’

  ‘I tell you? What’s that mean?’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I see myself throwing up in a toilet in about twenty seconds.’

  ‘Have you ever seen him before?’

  ‘Maybe, just maybe, and what is it you’re going to tell me about that?’

  ‘Let’s do this first, Sheriff.’

  ‘Am I getting radiation right now?’

  ‘No, and a lot of it was on his body and clothes. He was washed.’

  ‘This is cleaned up?’

  She didn’t listen to what either behind her said next and studied the face more closely. She recognized him and was trying to put a place to it. One of the agents was Newton, the Missouri FBI agent she was telling Raveneau about last night. That said to her she should know this man and she knew now she hadn’t ever spoken with him, never cited him or pulled him over, or questioned him. But there was something in her memory in the background. A car accident? No. Something else and maybe it was the elderly man locked outside his house and lying dead in the cold morning. Was he the one who called it in that the detective later questioned? Thought on that a moment and turned.

  ‘I think he was interviewed after a neighbor got locked out of his house and froze to death. He called it in and later our detective went back and interviewed him as a possible suspect.’

  Newton tried to get the elderly victim’s name from her and the name of the detective, Abe Burtle, now retired. She didn’t give either. She said, ‘Good to see you, Todd.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought we’d catch up over dinner last night but I couldn’t find you. I left two messages for you.’

  ‘I got both. I was out with one of the locals.’

  ‘Raveneau?’

  She nodded and then followed Special-Agent Coe to his office. She liked Coe. She saw a little dance of light in his eyes. He needed a few meals and some sleep, but he wasn’t a suit with a gun. Now they sat a table in a much nicer room than anything in the squat, square, poorly air conditioned brick building she worked from. She took in a flat screen TV and then as abruptly as if switching off a light switch she quit being a tourist. ‘What do you need from me, Agent Coe?’

  ‘All the help you can give us. We think there’s a house in your county where he was living and that house may have radioactive materials stored in it.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘John Royer.’

  They watched her for a reaction and Jennifer thought Royer was right. That might be it.

  ‘They tell me you may have recognized him. How would you go about finding out where he lived and who he associated with?’

  ‘Get him out on Facebook. Run an article and put a photo front of the weekly. It won’t take long.’

  ‘At this point we’d like to avoid going public with this. That’s part of why we flew you out. We wanted to talk with you face-to-face.’

  ‘Why isn’t Inspector Raveneau here?’

  ‘We’re devoting significant Bureau resources to a potentially catastrophic terrorist plot. That’s what this is about. The fires may just be one aspect of what’s coming. Inspector Raveneau and I work well together and certainly we’ll bring him up to speed on this, but at this point we need to move as quietly as possible. You recognize our victim as John Royer and we’re prepared to act on that today as you remember more about this elderly man locked out of his house. We need to find that house today if it can be done. For the next few days we’d like to do that by alerting as few people as possible.’

  She turned to Agent Newton and visualized Newton’s car driving fast as hell down a county road. Everywhere he went, everything he did was important, even now in his mid fifties. She took in the other agent again, young, trying to mind his manners and sit at the grown-ups’ table.

  ‘To do this right, I need to go home now.’

  ‘We’ll get you there. We’ll fly you.’

  ‘Are you really that worried?’

  Coe leaned back. He folded his arms and then unfolded them and she figured he was going to lie to her, but then changed his mind.

  ‘Jennie, the dead man you looked at was placing incendiary devices that created the biggest fire ever on that mountain. It burned houses. It killed people. It could have killed many more. It was a ruthless act and we have very good reason to believe he planned it in association with the pair we’re still trying to apprehend. He may have committed suicide drinking a radioactive agent or they may have killed him. We don’t know which yet but it’s the second instance of radioactive ingestion and more evidence that they have access to radioactive isotopes. We know that they’ve talked about producing dirty bombs. We know they were waiting for a cyclical weather event and now we know why, but my point is if there’s more to come there’s a good chance it’s coming soon. We feel we’re racing the clock. They probably feel the same. They know the manhunt under way is going to get results eventually. One is dead. Two are at large. We don’t have any choice but to take a radioactive threat seriously.’

  ‘I’m just trying to get my head around it. Inspector Raveneau called me. That’s where this started for me. He read about our caskets washing up and the skulls and the bones taken. Didn’t he lead you to these men and identify the same body I looked at?’

  ‘We still want to keep this within the Bureau for a few days.’

  ‘It was several days. Now it’s a few?’

  Coe showed a much different stare. He set his mouth then consciously relaxed it. Terrorists were here to stay and radiation was a big deal and scary, but she had seen and heard enough now to be skeptical of those holding the levers. The 9/11 Commission made recommendations everyone agreed with and no one implemented. So she figured you’ve got to take everything with a grain of salt. They talk one way, but always do something else.

  She did think the FBI had done well thwarting several attempts. She admired them for that and Raveneau was right, they’re all we have. But a kid with a melted face and part of his skull looking like a burnt cracker with radioactive material intended for terror in San Francisco stored in a house in her county, rea
lly? And the one who picked up on it first and seemed to be figuring it out kept in the dark now, that didn’t work for her. That felt like something she was familiar with and she didn’t like it that Newton was here to help bring her along. He ought to be home looking for the house.

  ‘I do recognize him and I might be able to get on the phone and come up with a name right here, right now. But I’ll need some space. I need to explain things in a way people can hear them. You might not want to listen in. And then there’s Raveneau.’ She pushed her hair back. She stared back at Coe. ‘You’ve got issues with him that are more important than finding these people.’

  ‘I resent that.’

  ‘Of course you do. That’s why I said it.’ She paused before adding, ‘He’s not ever going to do things your way. That’s not him and you know that. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

  ‘How did he compromise you so fast?’

  ‘It’s called respect, not compromise. I know the difference.’

  ‘OK, Jennie, you win. We’ll bring him to Missouri.’

  ‘That’s the right thing to do.’

  They thought she was full of shit. But Jennie didn’t care. ‘I need a place where I can get on a phone and talk,’ she said. She stood.

  ‘No, you stay here,’ Coe said. ‘This is your room.’ He pointed. ‘That’s your phone. Come on, everybody, out of the room, give her some space.’

  FORTY-THREE

  Raveneau missed a call from Sheriff Crawford as he walked into a South San Francisco bar that Hugh Neilley was a part owner of. Hugh owned six percent and that turned out to be enough for him to consider it his space and probably was why he chose here to meet. The bar was Irish-pub themed and you could tell because two walls were painted green and a leprechaun leered above the dingy corridor leading to the rest rooms. He didn’t see Hugh and walked back and used a urinal that held a crumpled cigarette package, chewed gum, and half a dozen cigarette butts.

  Then he went back out and looked over Hugh’s investment as he waited. His take was that Hugh was lucky he didn’t own more. The air smelled of rancid fryer oil, stale beer, and the dirty water used to mop the floor. And somewhere in here and not all that long ago was somebody’s vomit. It was humid and the ventilation system was people coming in and out of the front door and right now no one was.

  He checked his phone, saw Jennie Crawford had called and tried her back, but didn’t reach her. He left a message and started getting agitated waiting here to have some heart to heart with Hugh that felt contrived. It was a bad day for a four o’clock beer.

  When Hugh walked in he waved at Raveneau but headed to the bar and clapped the backs of two daylight drinkers. The afternoon was hot and the fires dominated the flat screen TV over the bar. Hugh wore a black short-sleeved shirt and what got marketed to the middle class as designer jeans. Raveneau couldn’t help but wonder as Hugh walked over if pulling the gun out of the kitchen drawer was staged.

  ‘I’ll get us two beers. How about Trumer? You like Trumer and we’ve got it on tap.’

  ‘Trumer is fine.’

  Raveneau pulled his phone as Hugh returned to the bar. He read a text from Sheriff Crawford: ‘Call me as you can.’

  He texted her back: ‘Call you in forty minutes.’

  ‘I’ll be in the air.’

  He called her as Hugh was paying and starting back with two pint glasses, one in each hand, and the one in his left dripping foam that ran down the glass and through his fingers. He looked at Hugh but listened to her.

  ‘I helped them put a name on the body this afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘John Royer. He lives in my county.’

  ‘Spell it.’

  She did. Raveneau wrote it down. ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘I didn’t say I know him. I know of him. We had an incident he was questioned about. The FBI is planning to search his house tomorrow. Do you want to be there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought so. Agent Coe will call you. We had an old man die of exposure when he got locked out of his house late at night during a storm. He was close to ninety, frail and getting a little confused, so everyone thought he’d wandered out and the door closed behind him. His tracks in the snow went out his driveway, then returned and circled around to the back of the house. We thought at first he went out the driveway to go get a neighbor to help and got confused because of driving snow and came back and looked for another unlocked door. The man who found the body was his neighbor across the street, John Royer. That’s how it looked at first and then our detective started to look a little closer and there were some things that didn’t add up.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the old fella never locked his doors. The neighbors who had known him for forty years said everyone knew that. And Royer’s answers were inconsistent and the detective found him odd.’

  ‘So did I.’

  She chuckled at that. ‘The Feds are flying me back now.’

  ‘I’ll call Coe. I’ll be there tomorrow.’

  As Raveneau put his phone away, Hugh asked, ‘New girlfriend?’

  ‘No, the Missouri Sheriff we returned the skulls to. The Feds flew her out and she’s leaving now.’

  ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘It’s about the dead man up on Mount Tam. He may be from her county.’

  ‘Too bad he didn’t die sooner.’

  Hugh took a drink of beer and wiped foam off his upper lip with the back of his hand and as they left the sheriff a tension settled over the table. Raveneau asked how the bar business here was going.

  ‘Not well,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s another business deal I shouldn’t have gotten into. Did you tell that prick of a contractor that I have issues?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him much of anything.’ Raveneau took a sip of beer. He thanked Hugh for the beer and then asked, ‘Do you have issues? Should I have told him that?’

  ‘Fuck you, Ben.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck me.’

  ‘The bomb shelter is filled in. It’ll have a garden over it and flowers. That’ll be the end of it, huh, no one else going down there ever. That’ll also be the end of your investigation and getting yourself puffed up about solving what the fuck-up detectives before you couldn’t. I know you haven’t found anything new because Ray Alcott and I didn’t find it and we were a lot closer to it when things happened and probably better than the pair of you.’

  ‘Is this the heart to heart you wanted to have? You’re going to tell me how fucking good you were?’

  Hugh leaned forward on the table and it rocked a little as his big frame weighted it. More beer spilled and his breath crossed the table. ‘I’m seeing a doctor and he says stress may have triggered the gun thing. Money worries have had me upside down. He wants me to cut stress and that means eliminating what I can and one of those is what happened to Ann Coryell. I’ve told you everything I know. I can’t help you any more on that one.’

  ‘You haven’t helped me, so keep on keeping on.’

  ‘Are you going to be a jackass this afternoon? Why say something like that? Is my life one big joke to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why is it every time I turn around you are asking questions about me or undercutting me? Ferranti said he asked you about fake haul tags and you wouldn’t vouch for me.’

  ‘He told me about the tags and after he did that I wanted to know how he came up with proof that you hired someone to make you some fraudulent tags. He says he’s going to show me.’

  ‘None of that is any of your business. I’ll deal with him and you keep your nose out of my business.’

  ‘OK, well, Ferranti says he’s going to show me proof. When he does, what do you want me to do with it? Tear it up, give it to you, threaten Ferranti, what works best?’

  ‘You’re making a big mistake here with me. You really are. I’m trying to talk to you.’

  ‘Go ahead and talk.’

  Instead he started into a labo
rious retelling of his need to make the demolition business work coupled with the old saw of his certainty the police pension was going down. He was probably right about that, but others had issued the same warning for years, and it was a little like listening to a Wall Street banker on a Sunday talk show predicting where the economy was going. You knew as a TV viewer that the banker didn’t have a clue. Everyone watching knew and it was like that with Hugh now, except that Hugh had some other goal that required grinding him down first.

  ‘I want you to call Ferranti and say you talked to me and tags were nothing I did and that I fired my nephew.’

  ‘You want me to make that call?’

  ‘I’m asking you as a friend to talk to him. Tell him I’m rebuilding my company without Matt and I apologize for anything Matt did. You, because he knows you know me well and you have no interest in construction.’

  ‘You’re on your own.’

  ‘You won’t do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I need someone at my back as I get around this problem. I’m not asking you to lie. Matt was my problem.’

  ‘Your nephew dumped trash off the side of a road, and if he forged tags, deal with that. Ferranti, I gave him the OK to fill the bomb shelter and he’s filled it in and the rest is yours. Go sit down with him.’

  ‘He fired me. He says he’ll see me in court. He’s not paying what he owes and I need someone to vouch for me. You’re saying you won’t do that?’

  ‘Vouching for you won’t change anything. Sit down with him and talk it out.’

  ‘You’re a cold fuck, you know that?’

  ‘But if you did hire someone to make you fraudulent tags, then I think you should announce your retirement tomorrow.’

  ‘Get out of my bar, Raveneau. We’re done.’

  ‘No, we’re not done yet.’ Raveneau picked his phone up off the table. ‘Thanks for the beer. I’ll be in touch.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  Raveneau changed planes at three thirty in the morning and landed in St Louis at dawn. He picked up the rental and drove for an hour and a half before he called Sheriff Crawford. ‘I’m close.’