Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3)
Page 25
The changing weather has lowered the temperature quite a bit, which works in our favor. In addition to our face masks, Jar is wearing a hoodie. She pulls the hood over her head, making it harder to see her face. As for me, I don my stocking cap, and pull it down until there’s only a narrow band between the bottom of it and the top of my mask for my eyes to peek out of. Pandemic anonymity at its finest.
We turn onto Dewer Street, staying on the side opposite Bergen’s house, and walk at a leisurely pace.
Though sunset is still over an hour and a half away, the menacing sky makes it feel like twilight. One benefit of the gloom: it allows us to see Bergen has turned on several lights inside his home. The windows along the front of his house aren’t very large, though, and I have a hard time making out much of anything through them. I don’t see any movement, so Bergen must be somewhere in the back.
When we reach the end of the block, we walk down the intersecting street toward the alley that runs behind Bergen’s house. I’m hopeful we can get a look over his fence at his place.
Just before we reach the alley entrance, a motorcycle rushes out, the driver skidding to a halt when he sees us.
“Sorry,” he says, his voice muffled by the face shield of his helmet.
He takes off again, but not before we see it’s Bergen.
I curse under my breath. “Send up the drone and watch where he goes,” I tell Jar. “I’ll get the truck.”
I run back to the pickup and then speed over to where I left Jar.
As she jumps in, she says, “Head to Central.”
I turn right and right again, all the while resisting the urge to shove the pedal to the floor.
“Do you still have him?” I ask.
“No. He moved out of range a few seconds before you got back. He was heading south.”
Now that we’re on the move, the drone’s range can expand.
After I get us back on Central, Jar picks Bergen up again at the far reach of the drone’s camera. He’s still southbound.
As we’re going through downtown, she says, “Lost him again.”
“Did he turn?”
“No, still straight.”
I say nothing more until we’re nearing the southern edge of Mercy. “I’m running out of city. Do I go straight, or…?”
A beat, then, “I-I don’t know.” She looks over at me. “I am sorry. He’s gone.”
I’ve been involved in dozens of mission failures over the years. A few have been substantial, but mostly they’ve been small. No matter which, though, it’s never a good feeling. And it’s doubly annoying when the failure is caused by the overconfidence of thinking all one’s bases have been covered. I was sure we’d be fine tonight. We have both Chuckie’s and Bergen’s cars bugged. What could go wrong?
What we should have done was taken an hour this afternoon and searched Bergen’s place. If so, we would have found his motorcycle and put a tracker on it. Then we would have had our bases covered.
Bottom line, I screwed up.
We drive through the neighborhoods at the south end of town, on the off chance we see his motorcycle parked somewhere. Of course we don’t.
To keep this evening from being a complete failure, we return to Bergen’s place and sneak onto his property via the alley. We’ve sent the drone aloft again and put it in sentry mode.
Bergen’s backyard is divided into two sections. The first is covered in concrete, and is meant to be a parking pad for a camper or a trailer, like the one over at the Prices’. It’s not being used for that purpose here, though. Mostly, it’s empty space. A smaller portion of the pad has been turned into a makeshift carport, consisting of an old portable cabana tent covering a section of oil-stained concrete where I’m guessing Bergen keeps his motorcycle. The other part of the backyard is covered by grass, with a few trees sprinkled around and some bushes growing next to the fence. It’s well maintained, to the point where I wonder if gardening is a hobby of Bergen’s.
Like the man’s car, the house does not have a burglar alarm, and though the back door does have a dead bolt, the only lock in use is the one in the handle. A few seconds’ work with my picks and we’re inside.
Since we don’t know how long Bergen will be away, we want to keep our visit short. We bug the place first and then do a quick search for anything that might be of interest.
The house is filled with cheap but functional furniture, and off-brand products that confirm his need to be frugal. Like the yard, it’s all very neat.
The only reading materials we find are some golf magazines. Probably from the range. Neither Jar nor I discover any golf clubs, though, so I’m betting he reads the periodicals for work, to better understand the sport and talk to the clientele.
He has a TV and computer, both also of the cheaper variety. There aren’t a lot of files on the latter, so he probably just uses it to get on the internet. Jar grabs a copy of his browser history and the few files that do exist to look through later.
We find no signs of drug use, no secret stash, not even a single bottle of alcohol. This doesn’t guarantee he hasn’t fallen off the wagon, but he’s not on parole now so why would he hide that kind of stuff in his private space?
Jar’s phone vibrates rapidly, three times—an alarm from the drone telling us it’s spotted movement nearby. After checking her screen, she says, “It’s him.”
We make sure everything is as we left it, then hurry out the back door and lock it behind us. We head over to the fence, but before we can go over, we hear voices nearby—a woman and a man talking. I chance a peek over the top of the gate. They’re standing in the open doorway of a garage, two houses down. There’s no way we can get out without them seeing us.
Go inside, I will them. But they don’t move.
A few moments later, we hear the rumble of a motorcycle turning into the alley.
So much for being gone before Bergen gets home.
I look around and spot some bushes along the fence on the other side of the yard. Most are still growing new leaves, but a couple are ahead of the curve enough that I think they’ll provide us with cover, especially with the darkening sky.
We hurry over and squeeze behind them as the motorcycle nears the RV-sized gate at the back of the property. Bergen kills the engine in the alley, then unlocks and opens the gate wide enough to roll his bike through.
After parking it under the covering, he closes the gate, stops, and looks around, his body suddenly tense, as if he senses he’s being watched. Jar and I have not made a sound that would alert him to our presence, and I’m not sure what could have triggered him.
He pulls off his helmet and takes a step toward the fence, holding his ear out like he’s listening for something in the alley. After a few seconds of this, his shoulders slump, and the unease in his expression turns into one I can only describe as regret, as if he’s disappointed with himself for thinking someone might be following him.
If you’re thinking that sounds odd, you’re not the only one.
He locks the gate and goes inside his house. Curtains are drawn across all the windows along the back so we can’t see what he’s doing. But when a light comes on in what is obviously the bathroom, I take that as our cue to leave.
On our way out, I place a tracker on the motorcycle before we hop the fence into the alley.
We’re driving north on Central, Bergen’s place a few minutes behind us.
We’re on our way to a revised midpoint between him and Chuckie, in hopes we haven’t missed the event the postcard foretold. But I’ll be honest. Given that Bergen was away from his house for nearly an hour, I have a feeling we missed our shot.
“Pull over,” Jar says.
I glance at her. She’s looking at a video on her laptop.
I ease to the side of the road and park in front of a darkened dental office.
She turns her computer toward me. “Look.”
It’s a shot from Bergen’s house. He’s sitting on his living room couch, his face i
n his hands. At first I think the picture is silent, but it’s not.
He’s crying.
I look at Jar. “This is live?”
“Yes.”
As we watch, his body begins to tremble. He slouches forward even more, his head now hanging just above the space between his legs, and sobs rack his body in waves, like the swells of a tsunami hitting one after another after another.
It’s an extremely personal moment, a letting loose that can only happen when one is alone. And I can’t help feeling that by watching him this way, we are committing a violation. But I can’t look away.
What could possibly be causing him so much grief?
At first, I barely register the sirens. They’re coming from somewhere north of us. As they grow louder, I finally look up and see two fire engines and an ambulance racing toward us, southbound on Central.
Jar and I exchange a look, and I see the dread I’m feeling reflected in her eyes.
As soon as the fire trucks pass us, I pull a U-turn and follow.
The farm is four miles southeast of town.
We watch the flames from a road about a quarter mile away. Just a house this time. No barn. No outbuildings.
“According to county records, the property is owned by Hayden Valley,” Jar says, glancing over at me from her computer.
If we have the tally right, this is only the second time Hayden Valley has been hit by the arsonist. But statistics aren’t really what’s on my mind right now.
The blaze couldn’t have been going for more than an hour, probably more like half that, putting its ignition squarely in the middle of the time frame when Bergen was away from his house.
Have we just uncovered the identity of the Mercy Arsonist? And discovered there’s not just one person involved, but at least three others?
Holy crap.
But why would they want to burn down farmhouses?
Is it some kind of protest against corporate farming?
If all the places hit had been owned by Hayden Valley Agriculture, I could easily see it as a revenge plot by Chuckie for the denial of the job he believed should be his. But most were owned by Gage-Trent.
Did Gage-Trent also turn him down for a job?
Even if that was true, it still doesn’t make sense. Chuckie appears to be the middleman here. It was the old guy at the barbecue, Huston, who gave him instructions.
Is this new fire starting at the same time Bergen was away from his house just a coincidence?
Eh, maybe. But experience has taught me to always err on the side of events being connected.
“Nate,” Jar says. “The name of the family who sold the property to Hayden Valley is Penny.”
I look at her, not getting the significance.
“As in P,” she says, like that should clear everything up. It does not. She sighs. “The dot between s and p on the postcard? P as in Penny?”
Now I get it. If we understood the conversation at the barbecue correctly, the message Chuckie passed to Bergen listed two places. Maybe it was left up to Bergen to decide which one he does first.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s assume that Bergen started the fire because Chuckie told him to, because Huston told Chuckie to. If so, then I’d say we’ve found the hammer to bring Chuckie down.”
With typical Jar caution, she says, “We need to be sure first.”
She’s right, but we’re a lot closer to doing that now. I put the truck in gear.
Chapter Twenty-One
The rain starts right around two a.m. A smattering at first, but it isn’t long before it becomes a steady downpour.
Jar and I use this as an excuse to finally stop working and go to sleep. Until this is over, we probably won’t be getting much more rest, so even Jar is operating under the grab-it-while-you-can rule.
My problem is, I have so many thoughts running through my head that I’m not sure my time spent on the Travato’s bed qualifies as rest, let alone sleep. My mind is looking for connections, trying to piece the puzzle together. This happens to me a lot, especially when I’m so close to figuring something out.
But answers elude me.
We did clear up a few items before heading to bed. From all appearances, Chuckie has never applied for a job at Gage-Trent Farming. He has had several contacts with them, both directly through Price Motors and indirectly via RCHB Consulting—the company Huston and Decker work for that counts Gage-Trent as a major client. His direct contacts center around selling Gage-Trent a dozen pickup trucks a year ago. It was the single largest vehicle sale at Price Motors in the last thirty months.
The communications we’ve found between him and Nicholas Huston are all very short and to the point. Messages like:
10 a.m. Monday.
Huston
Or:
Confirmed.
Price
Or:
Need meeting.
Huston
Regular novelists, these two.
The interesting thing is that their email exchanges had started up about three months prior to the first time the Mercy Arsonist struck. In fact, a survey of their communications—all as short and vague as those I just cited—shows that the number of messages increased in the days leading up to every fire and then dropped to zero afterward, anywhere from two weeks after the first couple of blazes to just a day after the fire I pulled Harlan Gale out of.
Again, all circumstantial, but the flashing neon arrow pointing at Chuckie Price and his friends is getting easier and easier to see.
I swing off my bed at 6:30 a.m. and shuffle into the bathroom. Outside, the rain continues to fall, thick and steady. I usually sleep great to the sound, and I can’t help but feel betrayed by myself for not being able to do so this time.
After pulling on a clean shirt, I get the coffee going. When the aroma begins to fill the RV, Jar slowly sits up on the bed in the back, where she sleeps. After a stretch, she says, “I’ll take a cup.”
A few minutes later, we’re at the table again, computers open, coffee mugs in our hands. Jar takes a sip, her eyes on her screen.
“We have a message from JP,” she says. “He wants us to call him.”
In case you forgot, JP is the forensic accountant I suggested Jar contact.
“Cool. Let’s do it.”
She calls him via video chat.
Two rings, then the screen goes blurry for a moment before resolving in a live shot of JP. He’s sitting in front of a wall filled with paintings of various sizes, all of which feature preindustrial sailing ships. It’s kind of a thing for him.
JP is a slight man with a short beard and a head of wavy hair, which has turned a lot grayer since I first met him several years ago. He’s wearing square, wire-rimmed glasses and a dark blue V-neck sweater over an open-collar white shirt. He’s English so he probably calls the sweater a jumper, and he lives in London, where he does most of his work from the basement office of his three-story Notting Hill townhouse.
“Greetings and salutations, my friends,” he says with a beaming smile. I’ve never heard him start a conversation any other way.
“Hello, JP,” Jar says.
“Hey,” I add. “How are you doing?”
“Wonderful, as always. Beautiful day here. Just gorgeous.” JP has a distinctive rhythm to his voice. Fast and clipped, and always filled with a bit of cheer.
“You have us beat, then.”
“Have you finished?” Jar asks.
“Indeed I have,” he says. “Where would you like to start?”
Jar looks confused. “We only asked about Charles Price.”
“That is true. But every question leads to other questions. Branches, everywhere branches.”
“Let’s start with Price,” I say, “and see where that goes.”
“Right. Price it is. That makes the most sense.” Though we can’t see JP’s hands, we can hear the clicking of a keyboard. At the same time, his eyes shift back and forth as he reads something. Then he says, “Your friend is not exactly
the best businessman in the world.”
“He is not our friend,” Jar says.
“Ha. Of course, of course.” Another pause. “Mr. Price took over Price Motors from his father fifteen years ago, who had owned it for twenty-five years prior to that point. The only year the senior Price had not been profitable was his very first. That’s not to say the company was a…what do you all call it? A cash cow?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase in my life,” I say.
“No matter. You understand what I mean.”
“Price Motors was making money, but no one was getting super rich from it.”
“Exactly. But it was more than enough for a decent life, especially in a lower-cost area such as eastern Colorado. Son Charles, on the other hand, has not been quite as lucky.”
According to JP, the first few years of Chuckie’s reign were much like his father’s, then profits began to decline. Still, the company remained in the black until three years ago. To offset the early losses, Chuckie sold the farm that had passed from his grandparents to his father to him when his father passed away seven years ago of a heart attack. (For the record, Chuckie’s mother died from breast cancer when he was a teen.)
“He’s been using the money from the sale of the farm to keep the business afloat since then, but that’s almost all gone,” JP says.
“Things have been that bad?”
“Actually, at the dealership’s current revenue level, the money should have been able to last for another two years.”
“Why hasn’t it?”
“Because not all his money has gone to Price Motors.”
I wait for him to go on, but JP can be a bit of a showman at times and he’s clearly enjoying the reveal. Finally, I bite. “Okay, where’s the rest gone?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know?”
“No, no. I do know.”
I take a breath so that I won’t lose my patience. “Then how about telling us?”