Conspiracy Theory (13 page)

“I also know that the Bureau doesn't investigate much in the way of murder,” Gregor said. “National parks, Indian reservations, maybe the assassination of a federal official—but none of that covers in this case. So what are you doing here?”

Canfield blinked. “Lending a hand to local law enforcement.”

“Uh, huh. Lending them a hand in what?”

“In the investigation.” Canfield rubbed the flat of his hand against the side of his face.
Good,
Gregor thought.
I've got him nervous.

“In the investigation of what?” Gregor asked him.

Canfield was now visibly squirming. “In the investigation of the murder. The Bureau helps local law enforcement with murders. You know that. You headed up a whole department that does that. You invented it.”

“The Behavioral Sciences Department provides a clearinghouse for information in serial-killer cases with known or possible interstate implications. Do you expect that the person who killed Tony Ross is a serial killer?”

“It's the interstate implications. That's what it is,” Canfield said. “Anthony van Wyck Ross was an important man. We think the killer, uh, left the scene and then left the state.”

“And that's enough for the Bureau to assign a special agent full-time to the investigation? And only one?”

Canfield started rubbing his hands together. “This is a big case. Local law enforcement needs all the help it can get. The director felt—”

“Bullshit,” Gregor said pleasantly. “I had lunch with the director not two months ago. He's sane.” Gregor turned around and looked at Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner. They were standing so still they were barely breathing. Gregor knew they were both fascinated and a little smug. He could just imagine how Walker Canfield had been behaving since he got here. “Would you mind?” Gregor asked Frank and Marty. “I'd like to talk to Mr. Canfield here in private.”

“Anything you want,” Marty said, pushing himself away from the wall he'd been standing against and heading for the door.

“We'll go get some coffee,” Frank said.

Gregor waited for them to leave and shut the door behind them. Walker Canfield waited too. He had gone beyond nervous. His eyes were darting around in his skull. The palms of his hands were sweating enough to leave visible marks on the knees of his pants when he rubbed them.
Oh, fine,
Gregor thought.
No instincts, and no nerves, either.

When the door shut, the click sounded as loud as a cap gun going off in a playground. Gregor sat down on the edge of the conference table.

“Now,” he said, “let's make some sense. What is it exactly you're supposed to be doing here? And don't hand me that crap about helping law enforcement one more time.”

“I do have a brief for confidential agency business.”

“More crap. Try again.”

“You aren't an agent of the Bureau any longer, Mr. Demarkian. You know as well as I do that it is entirely against the rules for me to divulge confidential agency business without first getting a green light from—”

“You want a green light? Fine. Let's get a green light. There's got to be a phone around here somewhere. I'll call the director himself and we'll—”

“No,” Canfield said.

“No? Why not? If this is confidential agency business you're on, the director will know about it. He has to know.”

“He does know,” Canfield said. “I mean, he knows in general.”

“Then why not ask him?”

“It's not that simple.” Canfield had calmed down, but it wasn't a good kind of calm. His palms were still sweating, and now so was his forehead. His face looked like it was covered with water. It was not a good face under the best of circumstances.

Gregor got a chair and sat down on it, straddling it, resting his chin on its back. “So,” he said. “If it's not that simple, what is it?”

Canfield sighed. “I had a partner. On this investigation.”

“The investigation of Tony Ross?”

“No, no. We were here a long time before that happened. Months, to tell you the truth. He went undercover and I did backup.”

“Undercover as what?”

Canfield gave Gregor an odd look. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled a wad of papers from his inside jacket pocket. “Here,” he said, flattening them on the conference table. “Take a look at these.”

Gregor looked.
THE HARRIDAN REPORT,
the page at the top said, in bold italics. That page was stapled to three others. Then there was another set of stapled pages, the first one with the same logo. Then there was a third set. Gregor picked up the first set and scanned the text. He picked up the second and did the same. He stopped midway through the second page.

“Do you know who this is?” he asked, pointing to the name.

“Bennis Hannaford,” Canfield said. “We checked her out. Comes from one of those old money Main Line families, railroad money and then steel, I think. Went to Vassar. Tends to be a little pink, to use an old-fashion word. Writes science fiction. I don't remember everything else. I'd have to check my notes. She—”

“She's sitting down the hall eating doughnuts. She drove me in from Philadelphia today.”

“What?”

“I hate sloppy work,” Gregor said. “She and I have been plastered all over
People
magazine more than once. It's not like it would have been hard to find out.”

“We weren't interested in her,” Canfield said defensively. “She wasn't our target.”

“Who was? This Michael Harridan?”

“Yeah,” Canfield said. “Sort of. It's this whole organization he runs. America on Alert. You heard of them?”

“No.”

“We got word about six months ago that they were buying weapons. A lot of weapons, and explosives too. So they sent us down to check it out.”

“And?”

“And,” Canfield said, “it was true. They weren't even being cagey about it. These two women, Kathi Mittendorf and Susan Hester, they went to gun shows. They bought on the street. They bought on the Internet. They used false ID, of course, but not good false ID. And they just kept stockpiling the stuff. They put it in Kathi Mittendorf's living room, as far as I can tell.”

“Fine. We're making progress. At least we're finally talking about something the Bureau really does investigate. What about ATF?”

“We got a guy at ATF we're feeding information to, yes,” Canfield said, “but we're trying to be careful. These conspiracist groups are paranoid as hell. They think there's an agent of the New World Order behind every bush. We didn't want to land a bunch of agents in their lap all at once, if you see what I mean.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I do see. So you played backup, and your partner went undercover. Undercover as what?”

“As somebody interested in joining the movement.”

“And that's possible? How do you make an approach in a case like that?”

Canfield got up and started to pace. “It's not like those Islamic groups, where you've got cells and nobody is supposed to know anybody else in the cells. The conspiracist groups are much more open, if that makes any sense. They give lectures that are open to the public, they sell books, like that. We sent Steve to one of the lectures.”

“Steve was your partner?”

“Steve Bridge, yeah. We went down to Price Heaven and got him a pair of chinos and a cheap polo shirt. He really looked the part. And he went to a couple of their lectures, and after a while he started getting asked to meetings.”

“And?”

“And nothing, really,” Canfield said. “He went to meetings, but they didn't trust him right off. They wouldn't. So he tried to be helpful and he tried to sound like he'd gotten religion, so to speak, and they seemed to be buying it. He got the names of the members, the real ones. We did some background checks.”

“Why didn't you raid them? You had the weapons violations. You knew where the weapons were. ATF should have been able to go in there and clean them out.”

“We wanted to get a line on Michael Harridan himself.”

“And did you?”

“No,” Canfield said. “He didn't come to meetings, at least not in the flesh. And he didn't give lectures or attend them. We were pretty certain that the women had met him at some point, because they were always talking about him and the things he said and the things he did, but we weren't able to figure out when they saw him or where.”

“Did it occur to you that there might not be any him to see?” Gregor asked. “Maybe the two women invented him for reasons of their own—because the kind of men who join this kind of movement don't take too well to leadership by women, or something like that.”

“We thought of it, but we knew it wouldn't fly,” Canfield said. “It really wouldn't. Neither of them had the technical skills to produce the newsletter, for one thing. And it was more than that. At one point the group had a remote bug with a satellite relay planted at the offices of the City Planning Commission in Philadelphia. Not one of those deals where you had to have a van parked practically out in front of the place, but a real relay—”

“You must be joking.”

“I'm not. And it worked too. Steve sat in Kathi Mittendorf's living room and listened to the feed for half an hour. He said the quality was lousy, but the thing worked. Neither of the women could have done that. Whoever this Michael Harridan is, he knows what he's doing and he's good at it. He's also smart enough not to show his face.”

“So Steve never actually saw him,” Gregor said.

“Not as far as I know,” Canfield said.

“Which means what?”

Canfield looked at the floor, frowning. “Meaning, Steve might have seen him. Back at the beginning of last week, maybe three or four days before the Ross shooting.”

“What makes you think that? Did he say so?”

“No. He didn't say anything. That's the point.”

“I'm not getting the point,” Gregor said.

Canfield sighed. “That's when Steve went missing. Poof. Gone. Disappeared. That's the last time I saw or heard from him.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gregor said. “He's
gone?
”

“I didn't think anything of it at first,” Canfield said desperately. “It wasn't all that unusual for me not to hear from him for a day or two. We really were being very careful to keep him undercover. But then the Ross thing happened, and he didn't surface—”

Gregor took a deep breath. “You haven't told the Bureau,” he said. “You haven't told anybody that he's gone.”

Canfield cleared his throat. “I didn't know there was anything to tell,” he said carefully. “And then the Ross thing happened and I was distracted—”

“Jesus Christ,” Gregor said again. “I walked in here and took one look at you and thought you were the kind of idiot who couldn't imagine ever doing anything except by the book, and here you've got a special agent, your own partner, missing for—what?—ten days now? And you haven't called anybody. You haven't notified anybody. Have you done anything sensible? Have you searched the morgues?”

“I couldn't do that without—”

“Never mind,” Gregor said. “Let's get the two of them back in here and start making phone calls. Your career just died.”

“There's something else,” Canfield said.

“What?”

“Well, you saw that newsletter. Harridan already had his sights set on that party at the Ross's. The last thing Steve told me the last time I talked to him was that there was supposed to be another feed. At the party itself. Harridan was going to bug the party and the women were supposed to sit somewhere and take notes and make tapes.”

“Did you do a sweep of the house for bugs?”

“Of course I didn't. The secret service might have done a sweep for bombs and that kind of thing, though. Because the first lady was coming. We did inform the Bureau that America on Alert was interested in that party.”

“Thank God for small favors.”

“I'm not anywhere near as stupid as you're trying to make me out to be,” Canfield said. “What I did made perfect sense, whether you're willing to accept that or not. When somebody's undercover, they often have to break off communications for short periods of time. It's not unusual. I didn't want to do anything that might blow his ID.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

Then he got off his chair, opened the door to the conference room, and called down the hall for Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner to come back in.

Usually, Gregor Demarkian told Bennis Hannaford everything he was thinking. She was one of those people who made it almost useless not to, when she focused herself on you. Tibor sometimes said she had X-ray vision. This time, he was silent most of the way back to the city in the car, and she did not seem inclined to question him. The ride back was depressing in too many ways. Gregor hated this time of the year. What vegetation was visible from the highway was either dead or pinched. The evergreen trees looked as if they'd had all the sap drained out of them. There was far too much concrete. Gregor knew nothing about highway design, or about who designed them. He did know that in some places the highway didn't block out all evidence of normal life, but that here it did.
Government incompetence
were the words going around in the back of his skull, but he wasn't about to say them out loud. He hated those old men who had nothing to talk about except how much more awful young people were today than they had been back when they themselves had been young, and the government too. What bothered him was that he couldn't keep his mind off Canfield and what he'd done, or not done. The fact of it was stuck in his brain, and he knew that in spite of the phone calls he'd made from the Bryn Mawr police station—and that he'd made Canfield make—he'd do some calling on private lines as soon as he got to his phone at home. Maybe all the complaining older people and conservatives did had some basis. Gregor couldn't imagine anybody he'd been at Quantico with pulling a stunt like this. Then he thought about it some more, and decided it wasn't true. He hadn't heard of anybody doing exactly what Canfield did, but he had heard of them doing some pretty strange and stupid things, and sometimes when the stupidity was especially high, people were killed. For some reason, it was always worse when Bureau agents got together with agents from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Gregor could remember Jack Houseman the first time they'd had to deal with ATF in the flesh.