Endangered Species (14 page)

“She said the third door from the west end.”

It was closed, the two windows dark behind their rust-colored screens.

“I’ll go around back,” said Wager. “Give me a couple minutes, then knock.”

He tried to listen for Max’s large knuckles rapping on the warped door, but the steady noise of tires and car engines on the avenue filled the afternoon. Wager stood in the trash-littered alley that ran behind the row and watched the back door of the third unit. Patches of dirt provided back lawns for each apartment, and a lot of them had kiddie toys scattered here and there. Most of the back doors were open, and from this side the inhabitants enjoyed the sour smell of Dumpsters and scummy water caught in the alley’s potholes. A woman leaned out and stared at Wager for a long moment, then she said something to someone inside and her door closed gently. Beyond the unpainted board fence behind him, Wager could hear the monotonous pat-pat-pat of a basketball on somebody’s driveway. Max showed at the building’s corner and shook his head.

“No answer,” he said. “I called in for a warrant. You want to take the left-hand neighbors?”

The residents probably spoke English, but they were more comfortable with Spanish and got talkative when Wager used it. No, they didn’t know anything about the
hombre
next door; he wasn’t real friendly and was gone a lot. He moved in maybe a month or two ago—people are always moving in and out of these places. No, no visitors—he stayed to himself and a lot of times came in real late. They could hear his car—he liked to pull it up into the backyard under his window in case somebody tried to steal it. It was real fancy—one of those Z cars—and made this deep rumble when the motor ran. They hadn’t seen the car or him for a few days now.

Max had pretty much the same results. “The warrant’s been signed. Try the door?”

Wager did. It was unlocked. Front room, kitchen, bedroom, and shower—the whole place might have fit into a single medium-size living room. The drawers hung open, scraped clean, and the stained mattress on its rusty springs and plywood support had been stripped. The bathroom cabinet was empty of everything except a little trash and grime. The refrigerator held some milk and bread and a couple of eggs, and in the sink a frying pan caught a drip from the faucet. A crust of gray grease had gathered where the pooled water met the iron sides of the pan. No telephone, no television.

“The people next door recognized his picture,” said Max. “I told them to call if they saw him.”

“He won’t come back here. No reason to.”

Max agreed. “You know anything about Roy Quintana?”

“Never heard of him.” Wager smiled. “But I bet Fullerton has.”

“Right. Thanks.”

They reached the Admin Building around seven-thirty. Max didn’t bother to take the elevator up to the office; Francine had wanted him home early and was probably royally pissed by now. Wager checked him out on the location board before looking in his own box for any messages. A brief one had been phoned in from San Diego: “Agent Mallory, FBI San Diego, CA, arr. Stapleton tonight, United 358, ETA 2314. Positive ID victim.”

9/23

2302

W
AGER DROPPED
E
LIZABETH
off at her home after dinner and promised to call in the morning. He’d stay at his own place tonight; there was no telling how late he’d be with the FBI man, and no sense disturbing her when the meeting was finally over. He arrived early at Stapleton airport, and so did the flight. He didn’t know what Mallory looked like, but he had seen plenty of FBI agents, so he stood by the exit and watched the passengers trail off. A lot were families with hyper kids who tugged on stretched arms or others who hung asleep over weary shoulders. College-age people carried backpacks and wore T-shirts advertising various products and messages. Elderly men and women trailed out anxiously looking for relatives and friends. A few businessmen carried attaché cases and dangled jackets over one shoulder. One tall, dark-skinned man with a conservative suit, gray hair whose tight curls were clipped close, and almost black eyes seemed to be looking for Wager.

“Mallory?” Wager showed his ID.

“Yes.” A brief and proper smile. “Wager—good of you to meet me.”

“Any luggage?”

The man hefted his clothes bag. “Just what I’m carrying.”

They began walking rapidly past the clumps of passengers in the long concourse. “The victim has been positively identified?” Wager asked.

“Pauline Tillotson: dental charts and two surviving fingers on the left hand.” He explained, “It was clenched tightly enough to protect the flesh. The lab managed to get prints from the inner skin.”

Wager didn’t say anything until they reached his car in the no parking zone just outside the luggage carousels. “Where to?”

“The Marriott City Center—it’s near the Federal Building.” They were halfway down Martin Luther King Boulevard before Mallory asked, “Any leads on the man you’re looking for?”

“Just that it’s someone who knows how to hide his identity.”

That was no surprise to the agent. “If it’s who I think it is, he’s had a lot of practice.”

They were silent for the rest of the ride. Mallory checked into the hotel and sent his bag up to the room; then he and Wager went into the bar. This late on a weeknight, it was quiet and the large piano stood silent. They sat away from the escalator that formed one wall behind the serving counter, and took a table half-sheltered by a plant with large, shiny leaves, whose name Wager didn’t know. He thought the place was more like a patio café than a real bar: open to strollers in the lobby and filled with light from the large chandelier. Maybe all the plants were supposed to make people think they were outside, but it only made Wager think about bird crap. He had a beer, Mallory a martini—”dry, up, with a twist.” After the waitress brought the drinks, the FBI agent took a long sip and sighed comfortably.

“All right, Detective Wager, I suppose your patience has been tested enough.” Another perfunctory stretch at the corners of a thin-lipped mouth. Wager drank at the foam in his tapered glass and watched a couple ride up the escalator to the second floor. Mallory wouldn’t have come this far if it weren’t important and, Wager suspected, if he didn’t need something from DPD.

“Pauline Tillotson was working for us as an informant.” Mallory leaned forward slightly, his voice barely carrying across the table with its glasses, cocktail napkins, bowl of salted munchies. “She volunteered. She came to us—to our San Diego office—when the activist group she was affiliated with split off from Earth First!”

“Earth First!? The kiss-a-tree people?”

Blinking, Mallory smiled briefly. “I suppose that’s one way of describing them. Ecology, utopianism, Greenpeace, socialism, the Green Party—it’s a mixed bag of isms; but yes, that’s where these people originated. If the splinter group has a single leader, it’s William Libeus King—he prefers his middle name. He’s been implicated in the bombing of a high-power transmission line near the atomic warhead plant in Amarillo.”

Wager tried to dredge up what he’d read in the newspapers about power line bombings. “Somebody tried something like that out at Rocky Flats a few years ago. Was he in on it?”

“We don’t think so—we attribute that job to Dave Foreman, who founded Earth First!” Mallory’s thin lips twisted in an ironic smile. “Now Foreman’s one of the people King thinks isn’t radical enough.”

“The Amarillo plant’s a federal installation, right?”

Mallory nodded. “Right. That’s when we got interested in Libeus King.”

“I thought that was Department of Defense or Department of Energy territory.”

Filling his hand from the snack bowl, the FBI agent finished chewing before he answered. “By charter, DOE is supposed to provide security for the installations, that’s true. And they do a fine job! They do indeed. But domestic espionage and sabotage are clearly the Bureau’s responsibility. There’s an overlap of authority there, but we work quite closely and harmoniously with DOE security forces, of course.”

Wager nodded as if he believed the man.

And Mallory, as if he didn’t believe Wager’s nod, emphasized, “After all, we all want the same thing—the safeguarding of federal installations.” He rinsed his mouth with icy gin. “Anyway, Tillotson came to us after King’s group split off from the main movement. She didn’t like their increasing emphasis on violence, and she was worried because King started focusing on what he called the ‘pollutions of the military-industrial complex.’ In fact, the incident that brought her to us was an attempt to set fire to a nuclear submarine at the pen in San Diego harbor.”

“I didn’t read anything about that.”

“That’s because the attempt failed. And we kept it out of the papers. All we need is a series of copycat arsonists going after nuclear subs! Anyway, Tillotson had been part of it, without—she says—fully realizing what she was participating in. It scared her enough so that she came to us to cover her tail.”

And that gave the FBI leverage over the woman—the usual immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation. “So you had a snitch.”

“We had a snitch.”

And Wager had a good motive for the homicide. He took the police sketch from his breast pocket. “This is the man who rented the house. Is he familiar?”

Tilting the paper to the bar’s dim light, Mallory studied it carefully. “It certainly could be Libeus King. Do you have a physical description?”

Wager told him what little he knew about Marshall. “Can you get me a copy of his jacket?”

“Sure. No problem. I’ll have his file faxed in the morning.” The tall man amended, “It’ll have to be sanitized, of course, but it’ll still give you plenty to go on.”

“What about known associates?”

“Do you have additional suspects?”

Wager told him about the other people seen at the house, and the agent sipped again. “So he’s had his brigade meetings.”

“He what?” asked Wager.

Mallory explained, “They think of themselves as ‘Eco-warriors.’ Libeus King calls his group the Edward Abbey Brigade of the Green Army.” He saw Wager’s look. “Hey, they’re not the only militant ones; a number of small groups think of themselves as ecological guerrillas. The Sea Shepherds out of Redondo Beach even run advertisements soliciting money and volunteers for guerrilla actions. They claim to have sunk seven illegal whaling ships.” Mallory smiled, “It’s unclear who defines the ships’ legality, and so far, they say, it’s without loss of life. But it’s only a matter of time. Fortunately, they do their work outside our jurisdiction.”

“King is part of a whole army?”

“It sounds a lot bigger than it is, which is what they want. But it’s big enough to cause trouble. We estimate at most a couple hundred members and associates of the ‘army’ nationwide; they’re loosely affiliated, but they share the same feeling that they can use any means necessary to save Mother Earth.” Mallory’s hand emphasized what he said. “King’s is one of the best-organized brigades—and potentially one of the most violent. He may have as many as thirty people spread across the western states. Despite the man’s pretensions, we don’t take his group lightly. They’re dedicated, they’re imaginative, and they’ve made some serious threats and attempts.” He added, “And Tillotson’s latest reports indicated that King’s attitude is increasingly hostile. He apparently feels the federal government is actively working against all that he’s trying to defend.”

“Is it?”

The agent’s dark eyes rested on Wager’s face to see if he was joking. “He accuses the government of being unresponsive to the need to save the earth. Of sacrificing the citizenry to the interests of industry and the military. He thinks people should strike back before it’s too late.”

“Strike back how? And too late for what?”

“Too late to save the earth, for humanity to survive, for democracy to triumph—I’m not exactly certain what demons he’s fighting, except they seem to be embodied in the federal government. Tillotson said that the submarine attempt showed King’s increasing desperation. He felt he had to strike back in some major way. He wanted to make a public statement that people couldn’t ignore.”

“Is that why all those people were meeting here?”

The quick lift and fall at the corners of Mallory’s mouth. “That’s what we wanted to talk with Tillotson about. Her last information was that King had called a war council with his brigade lieutenants, and in the past a war council has meant some kind of action.”

Wager thought about that. “How many lieutenants?”

“Anywhere from four to eight.” The man hesitated and then shrugged—Wager might as well know it all. “They’re people King’s known for a long time, people he goes camping and river rafting with, people he’s learned to trust. They think like he does and do what he says. Each lieutenant has his own ‘company,’ recruited in his own area. Who they are, and how many, only that lieutenant knows. But they’re supposed to be experienced outdoor people and long-term acquaintances before they’re invited to join. The lieutenant is the only liaison with the brigade, and they never meet as a group; the lieutenants come to see King one or two at a time, so it’s possible even they don’t know who all of them are. Or how many.”

Wager took a long swallow of his beer. “Organization that tight, you were lucky to get a snitch.”

“Very lucky,” Mallory agreed. “Even Tillotson didn’t have full knowledge of the brigade’s membership or of King’s plans.”

“Most of Marshall’s visitors came in the last couple weeks, the neighbors said.”

“Individuals and small groups? One after the other?”

“That’s what it sounded like. Apparently they drove there—some of the residents complained about losing parking places on the street. But they were quiet. Nobody remembered any loud parties.”

Mallory raised his glass to the waitress for another round. “It fits.” He waited until the waitress had come and gone again before telling Wager the rest. “Tillotson told us they were talking about a major strike in the Denver area. A real headline grabber, she called it.”

“Where?”

The agent shook his head. “If she did find out, she didn’t get a chance to tell us.”