Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  Bishop flipped through the pages. The writer was entertaining at least. He had written his opus in a pro-active note and did not dwell in monotonous moral outrage. And Bishop noticed with growing interest, he was also an objective author. He glanced at the cover of the book again. A true crime piece of non-fiction the exterior had been designed to garner the attention of the avid reader. A depiction of a scarlet tanager took flight across the ragged jacket. Upon closer inspection the simile of a death’s head skull was constructed within the body and wings of the bird. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that the book’s cover meant to catch the attention of the passerby. Death involved! Scandal inside! Murder and Intrigue! Read me!

  And there were those annoyingly persistent questions that passed through Bishop’s analytical mind with nettlesome doggedness: Why was Robert Wren so captivated with the book? Why kill an author for a book that tens of thousands of people had already read?

  Bishop could only sigh. For the first, the answer was probably as simple as F-Bob being a crank. Albeit an intellectual, well-educated crank with some influence on his eldest son, and having had some previous spark of interest that had been electrified on by the sudden appearance of Theodora Howe herself. An infamous legend appears in the man’s own household. She was accompanied by one of his very favorite students asserting that she was not only innocent, but that she was being wrongfully pursued by agents of the federal government. It was the sort of thing that Robert Wren lived for. The government is inherently evil. The common folk are not. Forget that not one of the key players in this twisted farce could be considered common folk. Not Fitch and certainly not Theodora.

  Bishop flipped the book open to the middle section. Photographs had been included. As a matter of fact, the front cover baldly stated, ‘Photos included!’ in case anyone couldn’t stand purchasing a book that contained only words. So Bishop looked at the photos. Copies of copies of photographs that reproduced marginally well in a mass-produced, non-fiction work. The plane wreck was featured. A photo of the Howe mansion in Louisiana was included. Portraits of the players were there. The father, Thomas Zachary Howe, with handsome features, and a chiseled face, the look of a self-confident man. The mother, Greer Theron Howe, her hair color light in the photograph. She had been beautiful. Strikingly so, and Lee wondered if his son had been affected by the daughter’s resemblance to the mother. Then the next page was Theodora herself and he found doubt once more.

  Theodora was a skinny little girl, with light hair and light eyes. She bore some resemblance to her mother, taking after that side of the family, but she was clearly an adolescent, her cheeks drawn and her eyes full of pain. Bishop studied the photograph carefully and then read the notation below. ‘Theodora Andrea Howe, aged fourteen.’ She appeared as though a strong wind could have blown her away, hardly weighing more than the infamous scarlet tanager.

  What exactly does Fitch see in this young thing? He considered. A grain of truth? Young romantic Fitch. A boy with unrealistic expectations? No, I don’t think so. I did at first. But how does an FBI agent’s fingerprint get onto bullets within a gun that he claims that he’s never seen before Theodora Howe supposedly produced it to shoot a security guard in the back? How does a single print of the same man get on the broken neck of another dead man? He tapped the photograph of the young woman with his index finger. He studied it, using every bit of his evaluative and discriminating logic, silently demanding that the picture tell him all of its unspoken secrets. And then it came to him. A simple answer that fit all of the complexities of the situation. A situation that wasn’t nearly as complex as he might have once believed.

  This girl is telling the truth. Bishop was amazed. It was a lightning rod of revelation. And she read this book at some point in time. It would have been a natural interest. If someone wrote a book about you, you would read it. And because she’s contacted this man, this pseudo journalist, and offered him information about what? About her parents’ deaths?

  Bishop glanced up and realized that Gower had been out of his sight for some time while he had been lost in thought over Theodora. He looked down at the ill-starred young heiress and finished his analysis. Whatever it was, it was enough to get him killed. But how did they know that Morris possessed this information or was meeting with Theodora? There was another simple answer. He told them. The cursed idiot. He called them up and he told them. And they came, but it wasn’t what Edward Morris was expecting. Perhaps he was trying to get the other side of the story before he started writing his piece. Perhaps he was simply being the good journalist. Or perhaps he had tried to sell Theodora out to...

  Bishop leapt to his feet and the table shook. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “How could I be so damned stupid?” He rapidly exited the room and grasped the first state trooper he found by the upper biceps. “Where is Agent Gower?” he demanded in a voice that brooked no refusal.

  The trooper blinked, a half-foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than the other man, and uselessly tried to shake the NSA Director off. He knew who Bishop was, but that didn’t mean he had the right to treat each member of the Oregon Department of Public Safety like his personal staff. Bishop had an iron grasp on his arm and he repeated the demand again, except it was louder and filled with icy requirement. “Where is Agent Gower?”

  “The big tall blonde one?” asked the trooper, abruptly deciding that cooperation would end the confrontation. Bishop nodded quickly and the trooper added, “I think I saw him go into the ready room, where they have all the phones set up.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  Bishop strode down the hall, burning up the tile as he went. He stood in the doorway of a large conference room and surveyed the men and women there. This was all part of the fugitive pursuit that Gower had instigated. There were phones and white boards and maps on the walls. Men and women sat at tables performing telephone searches, checking airports across the western side of the United States and Canada. Other men and women were taking phone tips.

  But Gower was not in the room.

  Bishop’s voice boomed across the room. “Where is Agent Gower?”

  People stopped what they were doing. Law enforcement agents paused on telephones and their eyes went wide at the sight of the general, dressed in class A uniform, resplendent with all of his medals and awards, appearing as official as any man could look, almost angrily postulating the whereabouts of a federal agent.

  “You,” Bishop pointed at an older man in a dark suit. “You’re another one of the FBI agents, aren’t you?”

  The agent reluctantly turned to Bishop and said, “Sir, we’re all sure that you’re concerned about your son, but disrupting the investigation will not be beneficial to...”

  Bishop interrupted coldly, “I want you to tell me where Gower is. Barring that, I want you to tell me about the phone call he just received.”

  The agent took a step back. His name was Mark Thorne and he had flown in from Ohio that very morning, chartering a jet to get him in on the action that Gower had developed. It had all happened so quickly that he wasn’t quite up on all the details, but his own boss had informed him that if the general wanted to participate, however fleeting, then he was to be allowed to do just that. If the agent had had his way any family member of a fugitive pursuit certainly wouldn’t have been allowed into the county building where such activities were taking place, even if he was the Director of the National Security Agency. “You have no reason to...”

  “Listen to me, Agent whatever in hell your name is, Gower is pursuing the young woman, Theodora Howe, for an altogether different reason that he would have you believe. As a matter of fact, I have just been informed that a warrant is being issued in his name in relation to the deaths at the Lincoln County Memorial Hospital.” Bishop gritted his teeth together. “And he just got a call from someone. Now who was it, and where is he?”

  “A warrant?” repeated Thorne doubtfully.

  One of the troopers manning a phone called, “It was his director, sir
. Deputy Director Theron. That’s who called him. Then he hightailed it out of here like his ass was on fire.”

  The FBI agent took a moment to glare at the trooper. The trooper shrugged and folded his arms across his chest defensively.

  “Jackson Theron,” repeated Bishop. “It’s her damned uncle. Jesus Christ. Her mother’s name was Greer Theron Howe.” If he hadn’t just read it in the book, he wouldn’t have made the connection. The investigation had eliminated Theron almost from the beginning, but Bishop didn’t discount anything. It was the only thing that made sense. The explosive had failed to work as planned and somehow she had survived. Theron had attempted to shift blame to her, attempting to kill two birds with one stone. He hadn’t dared to kill her right away but had prudently waited. But she hadn’t waited. She’d ran and he’d had his lackeys hunting her ever since. And he’d been covering it up all along, being in the right place as a deputy director.

  The CNN footage popped into his mind. Judd had played it for him on the laptop, showing the adult Theodora, known as Teddy Smith, a girl who had risked her own life to save an unknown child from drowning in the ocean. A close-up of her face had betrayed her and she’d been forced to run again when they found her in the hospital. The security guard and the reporter had interfered somehow and been murdered, most likely by Gower.

  Theodora had escaped somehow, and connected with his son, in front of the hospital, so that it appeared pre-arranged, but it was not. Fitch would have acceded to a young girl with a weapon. A young girl who was purportedly bleeding from the head wound that she had received previous to that day. He would have tried to help her. She might have demanded that he take her to his house for what reason?

  She had been in a hospital gown, armed with a stolen, illegal weapon. The closets upstairs had been disrupted. Judd couldn’t tell the officers if anything was missing. But perhaps there was some clothing gone. Something that belonged to Edana. Then Redmond had shown up. He had bypassed the security systems and entered the house illegally. Something had certainly happened there. She had killed the agent. Bishop doubted his son had done it. Fitch would have been capable, but she had been the one with the weapon. Her fingerprints had been found on the exterior of the weapon, on the clip itself. But the killing itself wasn’t the event that most interested Bishop. Something had happened that had moved Fitch completely to the girl’s side of the fence.

  Fitch possessed a strong sense of right and wrong. Sometimes that sense of right and wrong didn’t correspond to what the law stated. He believed in ideals. More often than not, Bishop admired his eldest son’s magnanimity and altruistic nature, even while knowing that Fitch would garner his share of trouble for those same qualities. Those traits had shown him something. Something so compelling that he felt obligated to assist the girl. He helped her evade the police by climbing the cliffs, by stealing the Halford’s Ford Explorer, by racing off to Robert Wren’s home, and then by way of a motorcycle chase, which ended up in a nearby lake and culminated with the stealing of a boat, a police car, and possibly a plane.

  Thorne had paused in thought for a moment while he considered what the general was insinuating. He was saying that not only was Gower involved in some kind of criminal conspiracy, but then, so too, was his own boss, Jackson Theron. He knew about Theron’s infamous niece and participated in the Howe investigation, when new leads arose. Up to this point he had assumed that Theron had kept himself distanced from an active role.

  Thorne digested the indigestible, having the unwanted information sticking in his craw and then directed the remainder of the people in the room, “You, call the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department. Get the sheriff on the line. I need to know about this warrant. You,” he pointed at an agent. “Call the security in the building. Detain Agent Gower. The rest of you, forget the calls for now and start searching the building.” He turned back to the NSA Director, even while he dialed a secure line to his own director, something that in twenty years of federal service he had never had to do before, and he said, “General Lee, this had better not be some kind of twisted way of allowing your son to escape.”

  Bishop frowned. “Hardly.” He looked down at the book he held in his hand and flipped through the photographs. He hadn’t forgotten the part where he’d betrayed his own son, mistakenly presuming that Fitch had been misled into believing a liar and a possible murderess. It was part of the problem. If Fitch and the young lady couldn’t trust any member of law enforcement then they could hardly turn themselves into any one of them. If Gower and Theron could have concealed their illegal activities for the last six years then how could Fitch and Theodora know for sure that doubt had ensued on the part of those who would uphold the law? They couldn’t. They wouldn’t.

  So there was only the final question. Why do they need a plane?

  Not ten minutes before, Fitch had called him; it had been a phone call that had caused tremors in the backs of his knees. His son hadn’t asked for an explanation. He hadn’t even sounded angry. He said that he was all right and he wanted Bishop to call his mother and brother and assure them of this. Furthermore, while things appeared to be out of control, they had a plan. They had a way to prove Teddy’s innocence. That’s what Fitch had called the girl, Teddy. Just like she had been credited with the young boy’s rescue on the Oregon coastline. It would be the way that Bishop would refer to her in the future.

  He looked at her photograph again while men in state trooper’s uniforms scrambled through the building. Bishop would call the Director of the FBI, Stephen Urban, once more. He would let that man know of Theron’s indiscretions and that of Gower’s, as well as the growing evidence against them. There would be no more protection for those two men. Perhaps their guilt hadn’t been completely proven, but there was more than enough doubt. Gower thought that the Glock 18 was untraceable, so he had gotten careless with the bullets he’d loaded. And he had always fallen back on his manipulative manner, ensured that his status as a member of one of the most exclusive and well-known law enforcement organizations would allow him to conceal any crimes he committed on the way to his pay-off from Theron.

  Foolish man, thought Bishop. Sooner or later, even the most competent criminal makes a mistake, no matter what kind of badge is carried in his wallet. Bishop had a very good idea that the actual crime of blowing up the Learjet that contained the Howe family would never be proven to be the work of Theron. However, there was more than enough evidence that the two agents, Gower and Redmond, had been working illicitly for Theron, and had murdered the security guard and the reporter. That would be the focus of a massive investigation that would have Theron tied in knots for the next fifteen years. Without the principal of his deceased brother-in-law’s estate or the support of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Theron wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

  No one should feel pity for the man who attempts to have my son killed, all in the name of stealing money, Bishop contemplated. He continued to study the photograph of Teddy and imagined that her frightened, little-girl appearance contained a bit of defiance there. Now there’s a blood-and-guts, astute girl. She eluded his men for three years and lived through six years of hell. He smiled to himself. They make a hell of a team, Fitch and Teddy.

  Bishop went to close the book and stopped abruptly. The book flipped itself open to the photograph of the Howe mansion. Lost in the process of understanding what had happened to Fitch, Bishop had failed to notice notations in the volume. The well-used book had been the subject of notes written in a cramped hand on the margins. Many had been single questions, obviously asked of the reader, such as, ‘Does this sound believable?’ or ‘What about other relatives who would have the same motive?’ to ‘How does she inherit if she’s dead, also?’ But the photograph of the stately Howe mansion, located outside of Natchitoches, Louisiana, was circled in red ink, a different color than the rest, and on the bottom was noted, ‘Trust him. Help him, but trust him!’

  “Why there?” he muttered the question and the older FBI
agent looked up from his phone call. Bishop realized that he must appear some kind of crazed fool thumbing through a ragged paperback, looking for answers to questions that he barely could perceive. Bob had come to warn him. Him and him alone. Not Gower, not the FBI. But Fitch’s father. Because he knew that Fitch must need help. He must be putting himself in some kind of precarious position.

  “Is there something you need to tell us?” demanded Thorne, out of the corner of his mouth. He was on hold for Director Urban.

  Bishop looked at him for a moment. Then he continued to thumb through the book. He found what he was looking for after several minutes. Teddy had spent two years in the Howe mansion, supposedly recovering from her injuries. The author speculated that she was under forced isolation, eschewed by remaining family members, her guardian had been her own uncle, Jackson Theron, her closest kin, the man who would have inherited the Howe estate if Teddy hadn’t survived. Had she been forced into some kind of prison of his own making, waiting for the day that he could kill her without being suspect?

  God. Why would she want to return there? Unless she left something important behind.

  The words burned into Bishop’s corneas as if they were a red-hot poker thrust into his face. Trust him. Help him, but trust him!

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  August 18th

  From Big Daddy’s Book on Birding, written by Dan ‘Big Daddy’ Sully, Roget Press, 2005, pg. 234: When Big Daddy was down in the swampland of home, sweet, bayou country, he done heard the dulcet tones of one of his favorite birds, the Aquatic Wood-Wagtail, sometimes known as the Louisiana Water Thrush. The Latin is Seiurus motacilla for all my die-hard birders, men and women who could give Bruce Willis a run for his money. I know. I know. You done heard Big Daddy say he had favorites before. Big Daddy is a bird fanatic and he’s got to have many favorites. Oft times his favorite is the bird he happens to be writing about at the time. But the Aquatic Wood-Wagtail, which kinda sounds like a black and tan hound taking a swim in the swamp, if you reckon what I mean, is the bandsman of the bayou, the lead singer in the lowlands, the melodist of the marsh. He sings, boy-howdy, does he. A feller could sit in a pirogue and listen to them warblers sing high to heaven all day long. They have grayish olive-brown upper parts with a conspicuous white line over the eye that reaches almost to the nape of their necks. Buff underneath, with some white, they have other parts streaked with dark brown, faintly on the breast. If you’re lucky enough to catch sight of these song-singing, swamp babies, then keep an ear open, because Audubon once compared their liquid-trilled warbles the equal of the European nightingales. Big Daddy disagrees. Ain’t nothing like a good old boy from the bayou to thrill your day...