by Jim Magwood
He tried to pinpoint when the fears had started, but couldn’t get a handle on anything in particular. He tried to remember something specific taking place before Diane died and the kids left, but there was nothing he could tie down. No major event at work. He wasn’t watching spooky movies or anything. Nothing in his personal life except losing Diane and the kids. But would that alone cause fears of the dark? And it wasn’t darkness itself, he knew. It was a nebulous the dark. An entity of it’s own. A feeling. Something behind the scenes. Something that covered everything else with a blanket of the unknown. Something he couldn’t touch or see. Certainly nothing he could understand.
And he knew that if he talked to anyone at work about what he was going through, they’d lock him up until it was all resolved. Until he was pronounced cured. Healed. Well enough to be trusted with a weapon on the street again. Well enough so they would trust his judgement again. Until then he would be lying on a couch telling his life story, and filling out forms and putting puzzles together. He would be desk bound, typing reports for other officers—if they even trusted him to do that.
But he also knew he had to find out what was going on in his mind—his psyche. He couldn’t keep going on like this.
A week before, he and Sylvia had been in a situation on a missing person call that had stunned him for a moment and could have turned into something serious. The parents had reported their little girl missing and they had been called in by the first officers. As they were interviewing the couple, they described the girl and his thoughts turned to his own missing daughter. His mind drifted and suddenly the husband had jumped up, run to a cabinet in the room and had thrown open a drawer and reached in. Paul just sat there, unable to move yet with his mind screaming “gun.” The man had come out with a photo album, though, and was demanding everyone look at his child and do something immediately. Sylvia had reacted well, though, and settled the situation down quickly before Paul could get his bearings. She hadn’t questioned him about the incident, apparently thinking that nothing exceptional had taken place. But Paul was shaken, and his lack of reaction shook him more as he thought about it.
Paul remembered a darkness engulfing him at the home and that it seemed to paralyze him for the moment. His vision had clouded slightly and he had seemed to watch the man move as if through a cloud. His hands had felt as though they were bound to the arms of the chair. And it all took place in just seconds—maybe five in total, and then he was fine. His heartbeat hadn’t increased. He wasn’t sweating. Just remembered that he hadn’t moved. Sylvia hadn’t panicked or taken any defensive posture, but she had certainly moved and was on top of the situation.
And the memory he had was of the darkness—the engulfing cloud—the dimmed vision. As he thought about it now, his hands shook slightly.
Thomas Mildowney leaned back against the wall and sighed. The party was going well, but it wasn’t like the old days. He remembered waltzing with the ladies, and polite conversation over simple drinks. Truly excellent food—crab legs already cracked; shrimp that you didn’t need a magnifying glass to find; steak or roast pieces that were really so tender you didn’t need a knife with you; creams and sauces that didn’t cover the taste of the food but actually enhanced it. Now you couldn’t dance to the music; you jumped and shook. The food was never done well and there was no such thing as taste. Ah, the old days. Then he chuckled as he realized he was definitely dating himself.
Julie had been with him then and they had danced until dawn many times. Now she was gone and he had never looked for another partner. Many had looked at him, but he was content. Often he did feel alone, but then accepted it and moved on. He had his work as Speaker of the House and that was more than enough.
He carefully moved his tired body away from the wall and started to walk through the milling guests. This party had been set up for him to rub elbows with people who he needed to keep close, but he was tired of what went along with the socializing. Always someone trying to put the arm on you. Conversation, if you could call it that, with people out to impress and influence. People making points and calling in chits. And hardly ever a real smile in the house. He knew he was as hard and calculating as any of them but he also knew there were times when he simply wanted a friend to talk with. A time to just be honest with emotions and to really share thoughts and ideas.
Now those days were gone. Nothing anymore but plastic people with plastic smiles, and all of them with agendas. He wished he could walk across the room to Julie and suggest they go home and watch the pleasure sweep over her face. Many times they had left these affairs early, arm in arm, both of them feeling the relief of being away from the mob and being with each other. But, no more.
He was half way across the ballroom, just reaching out a hand to embrace another plastic smile, when a loud crash sounded through the room and a couple of screams followed. A tray of dropped glasses, he thought. Many more glasses of party nerve medicine to follow, though. As the host, he moved over to where the disturbance had taken place to settle nerves and help people regain their party joy.
As he reached the spot, though, he heard the voices exclaiming about the crash and saw people pointing to the side of the room. He didn’t see waiters cleaning up any mess on the floor. “It was a huge crash from right over by the windows.” “There’s nothing broken.” “Where’d the glass come from on the floor?”
Then suddenly there was another scream from right behind him and he whirled around to see one of the women with her hands to her mouth and her eyes fixed on a man sitting on a chair, holding his abdomen and in obvious pain. As the Speaker started to take a step toward the man, he saw the blood slip out from between the man’s fingers and begin to flow off his hand onto his lap.
Without thinking, something made him whirl around and look directly at the floor-to-ceiling ballroom window behind the crowd and his eyes immediately focused on the hole through the glass about five feet off the floor. He then whirled back around to the man and said to the room in general, “He’s been shot.”
With that, the screams came from many people close to the action and spread through the room, and people started running for the doors. The Speaker moved toward the man and found two other men with him, appearing to both be familiar with these things. The three men picked up the injured man, chair and all, and moved him out of sight of the windows. One of them then grabbed his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1 and the Speaker heard him describing the situation and directing help to the scene. The injured man didn’t appear to be in deadly straits. He was moaning, and bleeding slowly from a wound that appeared to be in his side just above the hip, but he was still conscious and upright.
When the paramedics arrived, they took emergency measures with the man, then gathered him up and took him to a hospital. The police arrived with them and began questioning everyone left in the room as to what they had seen as well as investigating the physical scene. Pictures were taken; distances measured; trajectories figured; glass was swept up as evidence. FBI agents arrived shortly and began taking charge of the scene, basically doing everything the police had already done.
Certainly wouldn’t do to share evidence and ideas, thought the Speaker sarcastically. Move aside. We’ll take care of this.
When the early investigation finished later in the morning, the agencies involved determined that it really was a bullet, apparently from some type of large caliber weapon, and apparently having been fired from a hilltop perhaps two hundred yards from the home. No other signs were immediately found.
Later forensic examination proved that the bullet matched identically with the ones fired at the newsman at the first school fire and the councilman at the R Street school fire.
CHAPTER 31
Paul, Sylvia and Jake were in Commander Carver’s office getting all the information on the shooting at the Speaker’s party.
“Since the initial exam shows the bullet is the same as the ones in the other shootings you’re working, I pulled the case from Wench and King an
d you now have it. Add it to your little pile—that I notice isn’t going down real fast.” He paused a moment for any hopeful remarks from the trio, then added, “Any ideas at all yet?”
“No, Cap’n. There’s just nothing at all matching up yet. We’re probably pulling more computer time than the rest of the building together, but nothing linking.”
Paul added, “We’ve got every item we can think of in the computer search, but nothing’s popped up a hint yet.”
“Okay. Get back out at it, but make darn sure you keep me up to date. I’ve got people on higher floors than mine asking questions and they don’t like hearing the non-answers I’m giving them. Go get some real answers, you here?”
All three said, “Yes, sir” as they headed out the door and back to their desks.
As they sat down, Sylvia said, “Look, I’m the new guy, so humor me, okay.”
The men nodded at her and she continued.
“I know you’ve done this a dozen times so far, but let’s do it again. Let’s get the list of all the events and simply go down it in chrono order and see if we have any ideas—maybe see if any questions pop out.”
Jake started reading from the casebook and the others wrote their lists as he spoke.
“Okay, we start with that first school fire… uh, the one over on Calvert Street in the northwest. You want the names? Okay, it was the Oyster Elementary School. And that same place was when the newsman got shot. Then there was the little Jewish school in the storefront, right? Hendly School on Chesapeake? That one stayed with the cops over there ‘cause it didn’t seem to fit anything we were working. I’ve just got a few notes in here on that one. Am I right?”
Paul agreed with him and Jake kept reading.
“Okay. Right about then was when Senator Marks got shot. Then the fire at the WBAK building and right after that the fire at the school on R Street. The Ellington School. Got it so far?”
Sylvia said, “Yes, and I think it’s all coming out in good chrono order. Paul?”
“Yeah. Looks right to me. Go ahead, Jake.”
“Okay. Then that same afternoon at the same school site the councilman got shot. Bullet matched the newsman shooting.” He flipped a few more pages and said, “Then there’s the shooting at the party for Speaker Mildowney. And I think that’s it.”
Paul looked reflective for a minute, and then said, “There’s something I forgot to tell you two. Just remembered. Last week I remembered that prisoner we talked to, Jake, remember. Hernandez?”
“Yeah, I remember Froggy. Sweet guy.”
“Yeah. Well, I went back down to see him. He mentioned something cryptic about the schools and such when we talked to him, and I wanted to talk some more.
“When I was with him, he said something that keeps coming back to me once in a while. He didn’t say any name, but I got the feeling he knew who the guy was. Maybe the shooter. Maybe the firebug. But he didn’t say he knew him. What he did say, though, was something about ‘nobody.’ Almost like it was a name. ‘Nobody,’ he said ‘Maybe nobody did it,’ like that. And it sounded like it was a reference to someone. Again, like a name or an identifier. Then he blew up and had to be taken away, but I wondered if that might have been an act or something. Covering himself?” He paused. “Ring any bells with you?”
“Nobody,” Jake replied. “Now were chasing nobodies, huh?”
“Yeah. Felt weird to me, too, but it just sort of grabbed my attention.”
“Did you follow up on it at all?” Sylvia asked.
“No. Haven’t had time to go back to see him. And nothing really to pinpoint.”
“Do you think we should put it in the computer search? Pretty wide open, but maybe something?”
“If Sammie thought we could put it in with enough restrictions that the word wouldn’t pop up a million times, wouldn’t hurt, Jake.”
“Okay, I’ll call him right now and get it added if we can. Why don’t you two scratch your heads over that list for a while. When I’m finished, I want to go out to that shooting scene from the Speaker. We just got it and haven’t been to the scene ourselves. In fact, I think I’ll walk this info down to Sammie and chat with him for a bit. You two be ready in fifteen or so?”
CHAPTER 32
The three detectives had wandered the house and grounds of the shooting and found nothing that Forensics and Investigative Services hadn’t picked up. There had been nothing in the house but the broken window and the stained chair and floor. The supposed shooting hill had been scoured. They were standing on the hill, looking down at the house and window.
Paul said, ‘Man, I didn’t know anyone really called a place like this home. I know they’re around, but I’ve never been to one before.”
“Yeah,” Jake replied. “You could put a whole ghetto in this place. My whole neighborhood coulda fit right on this hill.”
Sylvia said, “My house could fit on their front porch, with room for swings off the pillars.”
“We’re in a different world, folks.”
“Got that right.”
“And this house isn’t the Speaker’s, right?”
“Right. Just a friend that swung the party that night. He’s been checked out and looks clean.”
“Who was it got shot?”
“Just some junior diplomat that happened to be sitting in the wrong place. Far as I can read, nobody was really in the line of fire. The bullet maybe was heading for someone, but maybe got moved when it hit the glass. There weren’t any higher powers in the immediate area when it happened. First investigators checked that carefully. Just a few groups of people standing around talking; nobody really important that might have been a target. Right now it just looks like maybe a random shot at the house of a rich dude who was giving a party.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “And the guy just happened to use the same slug as another shooter in some of our other cases, too.”
“Yep, jus’ happen to.”
“You read the file on the way over, Sylvia. Any ideas? Did everyone get checked out okay? Any little hints left for us?”
“No, everyone was clean, Paul. From what I can see, like Jake said, it appears to just be random right now. Except it also looks like our original shooter.”
“Yeah, there is that. What do you think of the shot, Jake? Seem a little long for you?”
“Well, it’s a good couple hundred yards, which is long for any regular backwoods hunter. Even with a good scope, he’d have to be holding it real steady and all. Unless it was just a wild chance of a shot. You know, with no one of any real importance being right in the line of the shot, it may have just been that.”
“Yeah, maybe just a scare tactic?”
“But, why, guys? Why come way out here, get past security patrols and the house guards, just to shoot off a wild round to scare people. Seems like a pretty much waste of time and effort, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, you’re right. But, with nothing else to go on, what else do we have? I’d like to say there’s some kind of conspiracy going on, some kind of plan, but what is it? We could plug the Speaker’s name into our search, but he wasn’t even in the room at the time, as far as we can tell.”
“Well, let’s get these extra names into the search Sammie’s doing, just to be sure none of them are linked together.”
“Yeah, and I think we should also put in some requests for anyone with sniper training, or at least people known as being really good on the shooting range. Could be some angry military guy, or a cop, a SWAT guy, or maybe even some hunter with a lot of range time and a big grudge.”
“We can do that as soon as we get back.”
“Well, I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired of this game of nothing. And when I get tired of games, I get hungry. So, how’s about going and getting a little something to make the brain work better? Some fine smoky ribs sounds real good right now.”
“Jake, we have a lady with us…”
“This lady eats ribs just fine.”
“Ribs it is, Jake. Lead the way, boss.”
After lunch, they went back to the office and had Sammie put the Speaker’s name into the database and start the requests through channels for any military or police suspects. There were still no good matches.
CHAPTER 33
There were twelve of them across the country—the Federal Reserve Banks. Plus the Board of Governors in D.C. Collectively known as “The Fed.” According to the Federal Reserve Web site, "It is not 'owned' by anyone and is 'not a private, profit-making institution'. Instead, it is an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects. In particular, the US Government does not own shares in the Federal Reserve System or its component banks. It does, though, take all the profits after salaries are paid to employees, a dividend is paid to member banks that is 6% of their capital investment, and a surplus amount is put in a capital account. The government also exercises some control by appointing its highest-level employees and setting their salaries.”
Jeff Sheldon hated the Federal Reserve more than he hated anything else in government.
He knew they basically tried to control the money of the country in order to keep everything in the economic world calm and ordered. They manipulated the lives of the people and kept them subservient to the government by manipulating the cost and flow of the money supply. Jeff had had many discussions with people about them and, while he knew they didn’t listen to his opinions and didn’t believe what he said, he knew the Fed was a major part of the country’s troubles. While it was constantly stated that the government did not control the bank, he knew that with appointing it’s highest officials and taking it’s profits the government did effectively control the bank. And while it was also stated that the Governors of the Fed were only trying to keep the economic world in good shape, he knew the politicians had the system wrapped around their fingers and were controlling the entire country, and much of the world, by controlling the Fed.
And that was why he had targeted the Federal Reserve banking system for his first major attack against the government of the United States. It was going to go through so much chaos that nobody would even consider trusting it again. And that economic catastrophe would have the whole world in chaos, with anarchy following close behind.