by Aaron Pogue
Katie followed instructions and moved to the back. The music was even louder there, right underneath one of the bar's two speakers, and Katie understood exactly why the back corner was so empty. It gave her a good view over the bar, though, so she could scan the crowd and watch for hostile faces. She suspected that was why Faye had suggested it.
Katie didn't see anything suspicious, and she wasn't in any hurry to draw attention to herself so she just sat and waited. While she did, she scanned the displays on the monitors mounted in the bar's four corners, but all any of them were showing was sports commentary. She pretended to watch one and waited, glancing at her red-ringed watch every couple minutes until Faye finally found a moment.
When she did, she stepped up right beside Katie and bumped her with a hip. "Scootch over, honey. We're all friendly 'round here." As she said it, she pulled the headset from her ear and tucked it in a pocket. Katie made room, and Faye sat down right beside her so she could watch the room, too. She handed her a printed menu and said, "Here, pretend you're reading this. And you're having trouble deciding."
Then Katie really understood why Faye had chosen this booth. With the noise of the speaker overhead, Katie could barely hear a word Faye said. Hathor would have just as much trouble.
"What's got you so scared?" Katie asked, leaning close.
"Same thing that's got you wearing my jacket," she snapped back. "They got you on the run, but they'd know just where to find me."
Katie remembered her attempt to interrogate Randall, even at gunpoint, and he hadn't said a word for fear of these guys. "I'm not running, Mrs. Burke," she said, trying to get some confidence. "I'm hunting them. You need to know I'm going to do everything in my power to nail these guys."
Faye snorted. "Honey, you'll be lucky to get out of here alive." She stopped for a moment and ran a slow gaze back and forth across the crowd in the bar. "Real damn lucky."
"Regardless," Katie said. "I've got a job to do. And as I said before, I need your help."
Faye shook her head slowly. "Can't. Sorry, doll, but I can't risk it. I can't just run off back to DC if the case goes south. Can't skip off to California when things start to get scary." Her lip curled at that. "I've got to live here."
"You're talking about Paul," Katie said. "The preacher. He had some reason to be scared?"
Faye stared at the table for a moment, clearly hesitant, but then her shoulders slumped and her breath escaped her. "No," she said with a vicious shake of her head. "He got spooked all right, but...for all it was his fault, the answer's no. Nobody would've killed him."
"But Mr. Burke?"
"Timmy," Faye said. "Call him Timmy. But yeah. They weren't afraid to kill Timmy. Who was going to stand up for him? The dumb bastard did his job too well."
Katie nodded. She was silent for a moment, then, "How was it Paul's fault?"
Faye shook her head. "He wanted Timmy to figure it all out. Big mystery, like he reads about in his books, going down right here in Bickmore. He pushed Timmy to sniff it out—"
"And when Timmy was killed..." Katie said.
"Paul got scared. Timmy's only real friend in town—my only real friend, now—and he ran away."
Katie thought about it. "Mrs. Burke," she said, "what happened to Timmy's casefiles?"
Faye shook her head, uncomprehending.
"Notepads," Katie said. "Where he recorded evidence. I know he kept a lot—"
"Those are gone!" Faye said quickly. "I threw them all out." Her eyes shifted uncertainly, and Katie leaned closer.
"Paul took them, didn't he? He wouldn't let all that information go." Faye hesitated a moment longer, but then she gave a jerky little nod. Katie smiled. "Good. I might be able to leave you out of this if I can get at those notes. Where does Paul live?"
Faye glanced at her clothes on Katie again, and twitched a shoulder. "Right across the street from our house. You can find it?"
"I can," Katie said with a grin. "Think you could call him up and ask him to leave the doors open for me?"
Faye didn't answer. Her eyes were fixed on the bright sunshine glow of the open door across the room. Two new arrivals came in, eyes scanning, and Faye watched them with a bubbling terror in her eyes. Katie recognized Avery Dean from his profile, and the big one next to him could have easily been Wade Hartman.
"Faye?" Katie said, squinting against the glare of the light. "Are those the men you're afraid of?"
Faye didn't answer. Instead she took the menu from Katie's hands and pushed to her feet. "That's an excellent choice!" she said, loud and clear and with the sharp tremor of nerves. She scribbled on her notepad as though writing an order, but Katie saw the words clearly. "Get out now!"
Katie slid closer, voice still low. "Please, Mrs. Burke, just tell me who—"
The door opened again, flash of light in the darkness, and Faye whirled in a fit of panic. Katie saw a third figure join the shadowy pair who'd scared her so much, tall enough to be Ken Thomas, and Katie saw Avery raise an arm to point toward her table. Faye gave a strangled little squeak—strangely pathetic from such a big, strong woman—and Katie took pity on her.
She slid out of the booth, got to her feet, and spoke loud enough to be heard over the music. "Thanks anyway, but you've been no help at all." She started to step away, and found the three men from the doorway already halfway across the room. The crowd was parting to let them through. She saw angry eyes fixed on her and took a deep breath, readying herself for a fight.
She was surprised to feel Faye's hand fall heavily on her shoulder. Faye tugged, spinning Katie back to face her, then she swung her other fist hard, hitting Katie square on the jaw and sending her sprawling.
"That's right!" She stepped forward to spit at Katie, and pulled her lips back in a snarl. "We can take care of our own. Get your federal ass out of here before we do far worse."
Katie recognized the three closest faces in the crowd—Avery and Wade and Ken, all right—and Ken nodded his approval of Faye's threat. Avery stomped a boot down inches from her head, and she let herself recoil in fear. She scrambled to her feet, wide-eyed, and then shoved a way through the crowd. They grudgingly let her go.
She heard jeers start to rise up among them, and behind her—clearest over all the noise—Faye's cruel shouts. "Go on! Get! Don't let us catch you in our town again! You know we'll be lookin'!"
Katie fled through the door, slammed it shut behind her. She could hear a cheer go up among the locals, and that probably bought her some time. She didn't waste it. She made a run for it—around the corner of the bar and straight into the woods. She scrambled hard through the brush for the first twenty yards or so, then broke through into something resembling a path and followed it at an easy lope down to the right.
She caught her breath, got her heart rate under control, and then reached up gingerly to touch her jaw where Faye had hit her. It was sore—she'd really sold the punch—but Katie had gotten out surprisingly clean.
She'd gotten out with good information, too. Avery, Wade, and Ken. That didn't tell her who the actual gunman was, but it told her who the townsfolk were afraid of. Someone in that group had killed Timmy, and almost certainly Eddie, too. Someone in that group had offered Randall a lot of money to hand her over to them, and scared the well-loved preacher enough that he'd skipped town and abandoned Faye to the wolves.
She stopped, resting against the trunk of a tree and listening for any signs of pursuit. She could hear a little hollering from the direction of the bar, but it didn't sound like any kind of organized search party. It could just as easily have been a satisfied customer heading home to sleep it off.
The preacher was the key for now. Katie needed to get to his place and find Timmy's notes. If he'd discovered something worth shooting the sheriff over, Katie wanted to have it. She checked her watch and ran her calculations again. Reed could have some backup here to assist her in an hour, or tomorrow morning. She had no idea which one it would be. She wanted to have something solid for them to go
on by the time they got here, though.
So she pushed away from the tree, tried to picture the map in her head and work out where she was, then picked a path through the trees and headed south.
More cautious now, Katie took thirty minutes to get back to the intersection with Folla where the Burkes' house sat across from Parson Paul's. On the east side of the street now, Katie had direct access to the back of the house. She darted up and tried it, but it was locked. Then she stood for a moment, taking measured breaths against her racing heart, and tried to decide how to proceed. She had some hope that Faye had contacted Paul, even with the back door locked. The other woman wouldn't have thought that far ahead. Katie knew she would be incredibly exposed when she moved around to the front door. She tried the back door again, tried kicking it even, but it wouldn't budge.
Finally, frustrated, she slipped around the side. She looked both ways then moved along the front of the house as fast as she could. She heard the sound of a car approaching just as she reached the door and fought down an urge to look. The knob turned easily in her hand. She slipped through the door, then closed it fast behind her and stretched on her toes to peek through its little window out on the street. The car she'd heard was nowhere in sight.
That either meant they'd paid no attention and moved on...or they'd recognized her and were sneaking up on her position. Or maybe lying low, waiting for reinforcements. She laughed at the thought and checked her gun.
When nothing happened for more than a minute, Katie felt her attention start to wander. She'd come here looking for something, after all, so she turned her back against the door and scanned the house. It was a wide open floor plan—the work of heavy remodeling, but back home it would've been considered a beautiful loft space. The sleeping area in one corner was open to the entertaining area along the back wall, focused more on the fireplace than on the tiny monitor propped above it.
There were two bookshelves standing on either side of the fireplace, each of them packed with thousands of dollars worth of antique books. The one on the left was full of religious texts—Bibles in several languages, commentaries, and even a handful of religious fiction. The bookshelf on the right was filled with novels. Faye had made reference to the mysteries, but Katie also saw science fiction, thrillers, and even a half-shelf collection of romance novels. She didn't see any sign of the notepads, though.
She walked up and down the loft. She kicked through the pile of dirty laundry near the bed and peeked in every cabinet in the kitchen. She checked under the sink in the bathroom. The notepads were nowhere...and they were the only thing she really wanted here.
Finally, frustrated, she went back to stand by the door and looked over the whole space one more time. Her eyes kept drifting back to the fireplace, to the circle of easy chairs, to the perfect little reading nook he'd set up. The whole house flowed into that one spot. She followed it, moving to the chair that had to be his favorite seat, and sank down into its generous cushions.
From there, she spotted it easily. He had a footstool—a cheap little thing on wheels, made of fiberboard stapled together and covered with a thin green flannel for upholstery. It was maybe two feet square, and Katie could see the seam around the edge, just below the pillowed top. She leaned forward, lifted the top off, and found the cavity within.
It was filled with Timmy's notepads, crammed in tight until many of them were bent, their bottom edges curled into empty spaces. She grabbed the first, sitting flat on top of all the others as though it had been added last—or removed from the stack and returned in a hurry—then sat back and started reading.
It was clearly labeled. "Investigation into the Bickmore Gun Club. Personal observations. April 13." It opened with two paragraphs of straightforward explanation, notes to himself or maybe to Paul about why he was writing all this on paper instead of recording voicenotes on his headset. Or maybe they were notes to her—prescient explanation for whomever would have to take over the case when he was unable.
The more she read, the more believable that became. He was clearly just as afraid of these men as everyone else in this town. Katie had to admire him for sticking with the case. And he had. Over the course of five months and nine notepads, he'd tracked their every move.
He called them collectively "The Gun Club" and individually by initials. Katie had learned just enough at the Wolf Trap to interpret those: "W" was Wade Hartman, "K" Ken Thomas, and "A" Avery Dean. Halfway through July she found a "J" added to the list with no clear indication who that was, but the other three were fixtures. As soon as she got access to Hathor again, that would be plenty to go on. She could put a face on the fourth accomplice easily.
There was a note in the margin of one page, reflecting the same question Katie had. "Who is The Leader?" Who was in charge? And who was the gunman? She couldn't find an answer on any of the packed pages.
She tried another notepad at random, and that one was dedicated to Randall. His name was spelled out, with no attempts at subterfuge at all. Katie skimmed through Timmy's notes on Randall, scribbled transcripts of Hathor footage of Randall talking about the shotgun exploit, Timmy's observations concerning Randall and his buyers, and a detailed chart of Randall's activities that roughly resembled the one she'd found in Randall's own handwriting back at his place. Timmy had been onto him for weeks before the bust.
And then Katie found out why. The Gun Club had ratted him out. She found a printout of a text message Avery had sent to Timmy, taped to one of the last pages in the notebook. It said simply, "Randall's poaching in the woods. He's got a shotgun that can shut down the recorders. You should do something about that."
Avery Dean, assisting the sheriff he helped kill five months later. Katie shook her head, baffled, and looked for more.
Instead, she found hints into her own problem. The third notepad she looked at held pages and pages of detailed records Timmy had apparently transcribed directly out of Hathor reports—identity failures for each of his tracked suspects. There was almost no overlap at all—it was one at a time, which confirmed Katie's earlier suspicions. They'd been using a SpectreShield for several months now. The relatively few times they'd all disappeared at once, they'd probably been gathered together in one place, where the SpectreShield could handle it.
That explained why they hadn't crashed the recorders more often. Katie remembered the big yellow dot on Eddie's map overlay—remembered that he'd only found five instances of it ever. That was some impressive restraint, compared with the rest of the townsfolk when they'd learned about the shotgun trick. They were using that almost daily.
The Gun Club didn't need it, though. They had the SpectreShield. That made them virtually invisible. And that made the shotgun exploit a vulnerability. She nodded with sudden understanding. Eddie had pointed it out: if the recorders failed too often, someone would come replace them. Someone would come snooping around, and the Gun Club didn't want that. They'd ratted out Randall in the hopes of putting a stop to it and keeping that power to themselves.
She found a jackpot in the back of that notepad, tucked between the very last page and the cardboard backing. It was an old yellowed topographical map of the area, and Timmy had annotated it in black Sharpie, big asterisks marking all the recorders the Gun Club could disable at once, a huge sweeping circle showing the radius of Eddie's yellow dot, and a big ugly X near the center of it, neatly labeled "The Bunker."
There were trails on the map, too, traced in red and blue and green, that marked different routes into the wilderness and back out again. Katie found a red line that nearly matched the path she and Eddie had taken in, intersecting late with a green path that followed the old creekbed upstream. She traced that one with her finger and found the point where Eddie had been shot.
So close, on the map, but not close enough to see anything. She stared at the X, angry. The bunker. What was there, that they were working so hard to hide? The answer was in these notepads. She knew that. Timmy had uncovered it, and someone had killed him to keep him
quiet. What was the Gun Club up to?
Katie was still staring at the map when she heard a crack out back of the house. She recognized the distant sound of a shotgun blast, almost dismissed it out of instinct, then caught herself. She turned her head toward the sound, listening for more. A sudden, heavy thump on the house's back door made her jump.
She flew to her feet. Her gun was in her hand, and her eyes shot to the front door. The house was still empty. Another shuddering thump on the back door, and she backed away. Then she heard the pop of a rifle, far away, and a bullet smashed through the door.
Katie threw herself to the floor as two more shots stabbed through the wood. Another pierced the wall to the left of the door. It buried in the floor halfway across the living room. Katie scrambled back. Three more shots, and two of them made it into the house, right to left, one of them blowing a hole through the built-in bookcases and flinging a German Bible halfway across the room.
Gunshots from the woods. A shotgun blast first. To disable the recorders. And a rifle to pick her off. They were strafing the house, hoping to get lucky. It didn't matter if they hit her, though. She was right in town. People would be coming to check out the noise. They'd find her there....
She turned and dove for the door. A quick glance showed the street outside empty. That wouldn't last. She couldn't hear any more gunshots, and that gave her a breath of hope. She stepped outside, looked frantically left and right, and then sprinted straight out. Across the lawn, across the road, and through the Burkes' vegetable garden across the street. She dodged left, jumped right, but mostly she just ran. And prayed.
She made it to the woods without hearing another gunshot. Back to the hiding place where she'd staked out Timmy's house earlier. This time, while she watched, people rushed to the scene. She saw Faye in the mix. And Avery. Had he come from the bar or just stepped out of the woods? She couldn't tell. Wade was there, too, but she saw no sign of Ken. She couldn't make any sense of it.
She couldn't afford to wait, either. Her position was too close. She pushed away, started to move to the left, and then froze. There was something on the ground behind Paul's house. None of the crowd had noticed it yet, but Katie could just see it peeking out around the left corner.