The Triggerman Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  "Every word of it is true."

  "So, after half-a-year, you have no suspect?"

  "I'm not prepared to say that."

  "Then you do have a suspect?"

  "I'm not prepared to say that, either."

  Baum leaned back. "You people. You government people Honestly. And you say the media is leading this country down the suckhole. You're not prepared to say anything about any thing. Fine. Then let me tell you what I've found out, just so we have something to talk about while we eat. Okay?"

  Sharon waited, picking through the seafood in her bowl of pasta.

  Baum's expression seemed to lose some of its vigor then, and a fretful grayness replaced the rosiness of her cheeks. She looked back at the door again. For a moment she looked very old. "The first two months were terrible for us. I felt afraid, anxious, furious, helpless, idiotic. Poor Rob—that's my husband—he was even worse. The Journal provided twenty-four hour security, but only for a month. After that, I took a two-month leave of absence in New York. When I came back it was just escorts to and from my car, which I pull right up to the lobby entrance now anyway. Not the same car, of course—I could never touch the old Town Car after what happened. Now, I get a different one every week. Anyway. By then I wasn't really scared any more—I was numb. I was angry. At the people who killed Rebecca, at you people for freezing me out of the loop, at the world. Still, we went through two home security systems that made us feel like prisoners, car alarms that screamed at all hours when they weren't supposed to, even a couple of Doberman pinschers that bit Rob. We've got two apartments now, plus our home, and we shuttle between them like roaches. Not once in that time, Sharon, not once in six months have you called me and said 'look out, Baum—we think he'll try it again,' or 'don't worry, Susan, he's not going to try it twice,' or anything at all." She glanced back at the door again. "On the contrary, you barely returned my calls until last month. I'm sitting out at the edge of your investigation like a half-used target. It doesn't seem beyond reason for me to wonder what you've found out—if anything."

  Dumars felt a little ashamed but, as with any bureaucrat, procedure was God and procedure was on her side. "Well, Susan, we told you back in March to stay aware, vary your routine, not expose yourself unnecessarily. We told you to be cautious and alert."

  "That was sure a lot of help. Is varying my routine leaving at a different time every morning, or is it moving to Chicago? Is being aware the same as not sleeping for three straight days? Is it necessary to actually leave my home? Cautious? Well, is going out to dinner cautious or is it not? It took me months to arrange this simple meeting with you. A lunch. I sit here in public. I'm exposed, aren't I?"

  Sharon straightened in her chair and inhaled audibly.

  "No, really, Sharon. Please answer me. I'm just as expose* right here as I was that afternoon in the parking lot, aren't I? “I mean, I'm no less . . . obvious."

  "Yes, yes, Susan," Dumars answered quietly. "You are ex posed here. And I see your point—if someone is determined to kill you, you're exposed almost everywhere you turn."

  "It's a cliche but it's true, Sharon, that if they can shoot the President, nobody else is safe. Just ask Rebecca Harris."

  Dumars ate slowly, letting a long silence fall over the table.

  "So anyway," continued Baum. "I got mad. And when I get mad I go to work. And when I work I find things out. I'm really good at finding things out. I do the same thing you do, Special Agent, but I make stories and you make arrests. It will come a no shock at this point, I suppose, but I've got a suspect."

  "Oh, the—"

  Co-opt her. Contain her. Anticipate her. Remember, we have been ahead, not behind.

  "—Holt idea, Ms. Baum. I've heard it."

  "News travels fast."

  "You can hardly make inquiries about someone like Vann Holt to the Costa Mesa Police, the Orange County Sheriff am the FBI in Washington without word getting around law enforcement."

  "So, you're not interested in that idea either?"

  "Like Joshua told you on the phone. Like our public relation agent told you—we took your idea very seriously. And we've looked at Mr. Holt very hard and at some length. We came up empty. Although your theory has a certain logic to it, we couldn't find one piece of substantive evidence that incriminated him."

  "Not even the articles I wrote about his son? About him?"

  "With all due respect, Ms. Baum, those articles only incriminated you."

  "Oh, my. One bureaucrat standing up for another. I'm not in much shock."

  Dumars set down her iced tea and locked her gaze onto Susan Baum's green eyes. Sharon could feel the heat rising into her cheeks. Her calves felt tight.

  "Ms. Baum, if you're implying some kind of kinship between your suspect and the agency he used to work for, you are being overly suspicious and naive."

  The columnist stared back.

  "Do you honestly believe we wouldn't investigate him because of his former employment with us?"

  Baum touched her napkin to her lips, then spread it onto her lap. "I don't know what to believe."

  "Then I'll tell you. Believe in us."

  Baum leaned forward, her voice a hiss and her eyes luminous with the inward light of emotion. "Then talk to me/"

  Sharon sat back and again stared hard into Susan Baum's eyes. She tried to look pitying, respectful and admiring all at once.

  She'll do anything to get inside. She'll lap up our truth like one of John's dogs.

  "We have something," Sharon said finally. "That's one of the reasons it took some time to meet with you. We had to make some connections, gather some more facts. We're sorry for what must seem like an incredible delay. But we've been busy, I can assure you. In fact, Susan, right now you could safely say that we're hot."

  Baum said nothing, but kept her brilliant green eyes on Dumars.

  "We have a suspect. And we're ready to go public with it."

  Baum's face turned an excited pink and her eyes seemed to grow even brighter. " Who?"

  "I think we should talk about this somewhere else. Let's finish up and take a walk. Okay?"

  "Oh, I'm finished."

  CHAPTER 11

  They strolled down the boardwalk at Laguna's Main Beach, but Sharon knew Baum could not go far. It was Josh's idea to "pre-fatigue" her, loosen her up for gullibility as a picador would loosen up a bull for the sword. The poor columnist was sweating hard and limping badly before they'd gone a hundred yards She'd pulled a hat from her bag and jammed it down over her hair, and slipped on a big white windbreaker. She kept looking behind them.

  "I don't like looking the same for more than about one hour," Baum stated. "But it's hard on the wardrobe."

  "It's okay, Susan. You're okay here with me."

  They sat on two multicolored ceramic seats with a multicolored ceramic stand and chessboard between them. Sharon looked out at the autumn Pacific—waveless, breeze-brushed, silver.

  Along the boardwalk tourists wandered, taking pictures. Locals smashed volleyballs back and forth in the sand while further down the beach two basketball courts teemed with jerking, jumping bodies. Offshore stood two jagged black rocks topped with birds that didn't so much as flutter when the swell heaved up around them. Sharon could even see Catalina Island, twenty miles away, a low shape separating the metallic sea from a pale blue sky. She liked this town. She had lived here her junior year in college with her boyfriend. The city and its beaches always brought back memories of her love, his betrayal, the way they went from being happy to being over. Donny. That was almost a decade ago.

  "His name is Mark Foster," Sharon said. "He's twenty-four, a drifter, a criminal. At the time of Rebecca's death he was living in Huntington Beach, hanging out at a White Supremacist compound in Newport."

  "Alamo West," said Baum. "I wrote about it."

  "We think you might have touched an even bigger nerve than you usually do," said Sharon, flatteringly.

  "I tried to be nice to those skinhead Nazi morons
. It was my chance to be forgiving. But the man who runs the place—that reverend?—he actually made me nauseous. I do remember that Mark Foster was less of a swine than the others, or seemed to be. Funny though, I've forgotten which one he was."

  "This might help."

  Sharon removed from her briefcase the file supplied by Norton. On top was one photograph of Foster—a mug shot taken by Gainesville Police back in 1988. There were two others: one a mug taken by police in Eaton, Colorado, 1992; the other a snapshot of Foster and friends at a neo-Nazi skinhead rally in Huntington Beach, 1994. His face wasn't very clear in this nighttime shot because Mark and his friends were gathered around a bonfire, some holding torches, some holding beers, and the photographer was obviously an amateur.

  "The Journal ran this picture with my column," said Baum.

  "Right. We've got a rap sheet on him, too. Burglary, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, public drunkenness, public disturbance. To be honest, Susan, it took the Bureau some time after Rebecca's death to start poking around Alamo West. I mean, we had quite a list of people you'd attacked in the Journal."

  "I didn't attack anyone at Alamo West."

  "That's why we didn't scrutinize them at first. But you did condescend to them. To some people, that's worse than a full offensive."

  "Well, I was a little . . . maybe, pitying."

  "Maybe Jewish women shouldn't condescend to neo-Nazi men, Susan."

  Dumars wondered if she was laying it on a little thick. She had the psychological equivalent of a choke-hold right now, and years of law enforcement training had taught her to never, ever surrender an advantage. Still, she flinched inwardly at her own feigned superiority. To hide this, she took a deep breath and looked knowingly at the columnist.

  Baum nodded as Dumars continued.

  "The man you suspected, by the way—Vann Holt—was someone we looked hard at, early. He cleared. So congratulations on your instincts, Susan. Maybe you've got a career with the Bureau if you ever get tired of newspaper work. Anyway, Holt isn't and never was our man. But by the time we started focusing in on Alamo West, Mark Foster was gone."

  "And?"

  "Remains so. We've gotten unverified reports that he headed up into the Pacific Northwest. If he shows his snout, we'll hook it."

  "Wonderful language. Can I quote you?"

  "Absolutely." Dumars smiled then, but it felt strange to be smiling and lying at the same time. She wondered if the columnist could sense her duplicity. Sharon had never considered herself an even passable deceiver, but Joshua had told her it was time to learn the craft. To deceive successfully, he said, began with belief in one's self. Like a religion, it required faith. If you had that, it was as easy as falling into bed.

  "I can give you this file copy, if you'd like. I ran it on our best machine, but it's still a little blurred. The photos are really pretty decent."

  Baum accepted the file, her eyes dancing with curiosity and pleasure. "What led you to Foster?"

  "First, we matched all the people you'd written about negatively against their potential as killers. You'd hit the Boy Scouts pretty hard for opposing gay troop leaders and insisting on mentioning God in their pledge, but we didn't think the Boy Scouts of America would target you for assassination. You had a field day with the tobacco lobbyist who summers in Newport Beach, the GI Joe designer who lived in Fullerton and the Christian recording label out in Irvine, but are they killers? No. So, once we cast our net wide enough, we came up with Alamo West. A different story. We'd heard rumors that some members had planned violence against a local synagogue, and were targeting an Orange County group called One Hundred Black Men. We weren't convinced they had the, uh, the . . ."

  "Balls?"

  "... Well, resources for that, but we try to keep an eye on those kinds of people as a matter of course. Maybe, if Foster had just stuck around to answer our questions we might not have

  latched onto him so fast. You can imagine how skittish these types are, after Oklahoma City. But he didn't stick around. No doubt the reverend tipped him to our interest, and that was enough. In Mark's sudden absence we managed to turn up, at his last residence, a box of .30/06 ammunition similar to that used on Ms. Harris. There were two cartridges missing from the box. We also found copies of your column on Alamo West. The clincher was a letter addressed to you that we assume he never mailed. It was in a safe deposit box that took some time to get into. In it, he implied that he would love to kill you because you were a Jew and a traitor to America and a fool." "Oh, my."

  After you've hooked her, enlist her.

  Dumars set a hand on Baum's. "I ask you not to mention that. Say nothing about what we found in his place. It would encourage him to destroy evidence, and evidence is the only thing that will convict Rebecca's killer. Please."

  "Understood. I would have come forth with that letter, if I'd gotten it."

  "I know. There's a copy of it in the file for you."

  "Did you find the gun?"

  "No gun. Yet."

  "Have you gotten an arrest warrant?"

  "No. We want him only for questioning. It's important you say that in your article. There's no reason to put the fear of God in him if there's even a slight chance he'll come forward. It's possible he didn't do it. It's also probable that he didn't do it alone. So we want to give him the opportunity to include his friends at Alamo West, if that's how it went down. A suspect wanted for questioning—not for arrest."

  "I understand. God, this is ... I feel so conflicted right now."

  "There's no conflict in busting creeps."

  Baum removed the largest of the photographs of Foster and stared at it. "He was the most decent one of them. Or so I thought."

  "He's a fringe character, Susan. They all are at Alamo West."

  "And you've got nothing on any of the others?"

  "Not so far."

  Baum continued to regard the picture. "Now that the killer has a face, I feel. . . it's like . . . this boy was capable of that? He looks so innocent."

  "So did Ted Bundy."

  "Oh, my." Baum flipped through the rap sheets. "A violent man. Of all the people I regularly insult in print, this boy wanted to kill me. You know, I wondered when I wrote that piece on the skinheads if one of them—just one—might read it and well, learn something from me. Be illuminated. Change. That was naive."

  "Optimistic, but naive."

  Baum's bright green eyes held Sharon's. "And I'm not a naive person. Not after covering the news for thirty years. Am here, I was so sure Vann Holt was behind it."

  "Wishful thinking, Susan?"

  "I hit him hard a few times in print. All his right-wing this and right-wing that. All those secret men he trains. I exposed his son as a probable sex offender during the Ruiz trial. I was sure he had decided to get me. He seemed like a perfect assassin. A pig with a gun. Though on some level, I felt sorry for him."

  "It's a long journey from Republican to assassin."

  "I know."

  Sharon watched a flock of seagulls scatter as a puppy ran toward it. The birds cried, cawed, circled and gathered further down the beach, landing on feet as orange and bright as plastic.

  "The Bureau thought, given the circumstances, that you should get this information first. We'll have a news conference tomorrow up at county, to fill in the other media. They'll get most of what you got."

  "Thank you. Sharon, do you think there's a chance that Foster will try again?"

  "No. But keep a weather eye."

  Baum nodded thoughtfully.

  Sharon left the interview with an uneasy conscience. She was a woman most comfortable with black and white, wrong and right and she had willingly promoted a falsehood here. Yes, it was a lie designed to put Wayfarer's mind at rest, to further draw him away from any suspicion of John. A white lie. It was important that the Bureau be seen as working hard on the wrong suspect

  Of course, the longer Foster remained at large the better, and the Bureau would help him stay that way.

&
nbsp; Unsettled as she was by her subterfuge, Sharon was thrilled by the power of it, too. What a feeling, to sway and influence the media. Deceit ruled. She consulted the rearview mirror to see if dishonesty had changed her face. No, Sharon decided: it was the same 34-year old biological-clock-ticking-away face she'd left home with that morning. She wondered about Retin-A.

  She drove by the old apartment she had shared with Donny, at the base of Third Street hill. It was still there, though freshly painted. A new Honda sat in the place her old Chevy Malibu once occupied. The apartment had new curtains. She parked in the driveway for a moment. She remembered the life she had then, all the books and part-time jobs and sharing every expense with Donny, all the lovemaking and fighting and tears and long Sunday morning hours in bed with the newspaper strewn across the covers and cups of coffee growing cool on the nightstands. Those were the best times, she thought, those Sunday mornings.