The Travelling Man (16 page)

CHAPTER 12

too many cooks

Special Agent John Harper took a quick swig of the bad coffee and pushed his plate aside. The local diner seemed to be the only place in town to eat and he wasn’t impressed. His stomach churned with acidic tension, threatening to expel anything that he consumed.

He stared down at the poor excuse for pancakes and wished for a cigarette. There had been a day when no self-respecting agent would have been seen without wearing a trilby hat and having a smoke in one hand and a shot of bourbon in the other. But a man had to change and adapt in the modern world. 

He had rolled into Granton to finally take down the Herod, a serial killer that had been plaguing the country for months and sending his superiors into a nosedive of panic. The press had been rampant and the pressure unbearable, with the Bureau taking the blame. When the big break had come, a big break that somehow he couldn’t quite remember no matter how hard he tried, they had finally taken down their man.

Marshal Dinkins’ apartment had been a treasure trove of damning evidence. At first, he had been filled to the brim with satisfied pride but the more he thought about things, the more he was unsure. The Herod had somehow managed to elude authorities across the country for months. No evidence had been found at any of his crime scenes, no prints, and no forensic traces of any kind. And yet his apartment had contained multiple weapons still stained with his victims’ blood and even a photo album of every poor soul to fall under his knife; soulless selfies with Dinkins leering over the bodies.

He had been ready to wrap things up and return back to DC when he had been diverted to the actress Becky James’ murder. He was confident that the local Sheriff was more than capable of handling the case, but his superiors had ordered him to take over given the already swarming media in town. He was sorry to run roughshod over the Sheriff as he liked her; she was big and smart and carried herself with a lawman’s authority.
Lawwoman’s authority
he reminded himself -
adapt to the changes
. But he had little choice when his masters said jump. He only asked how high.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

Harper looked up, expecting to see another reporter on the prowl. Instead he saw an elderly guy dressed smartly in a slightly worn suit. The old guy looked a little tired and Harper had been raised the right way. “Please, sit,” he said, pointing to the seat opposite.

“Thank you, young man,” the guy said, sitting down gratefully.

Harper couldn’t help but smile a little; he was 54 and it had been a long time since anyone had called him “young man”. The old guy sagged in the seat opposite and up close Harper could see that there seemed a weary weight on the man’s shoulders but he was still too proud to let it stoop him for long.

“Such a hectic schedule, so many people and never enough time. Excuse me, Agent Harper, I’m afraid that my weary bones are forgetting their manners. Gilbert Grange.”

For a horrifying second, Harper was terrified that the old British guy was going to offer out a hand for him to shake in time honored tradition. He knew that he would respond in kind but his flesh crawled at the thought. He breathed an internal sigh of relief when Grange made no such offer. “Do I know you, Mr Grange?”

“No, not exactly, Agent, but I have watched and admired you from afar. I have nothing but the highest regard for your profession, I assure you. You hold the line and protect the innocent - a noble pursuit.”

Harper heard the man’s voice as if from some distance. It was like listening to poetry through a seashell.

“I expect that you’re all finished up now in town, Agent. Everything is tied up in a neat bow and ready to be placed into a file box marked solved.”

Harper opened his mouth to say that he was far from finished in Granton, that he still had weeks of leg work to do, but somehow that wasn’t really true. He had two cases wrapped up, every “I” was dotted, and every “T” was crossed. “Yep, I guess that I’ll be moving on now,” he heard himself say.

“Time to hit that old dusty trail?” Grange cooed.

“Yep, well it was nice talking to you, sir,” Harper replied, “but if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way now. Lots of ground to cover before nightfall”.

Grange watched as the agent stood and walked out of the diner. He climbed into a large black SUV parked outside and started to bark orders into the radio mic.

Grange leaned back on his chair and felt his insides start to slide around worryingly. He knew that he must look a right state. He prided himself on his meticulous appearance; it was the mark of good salesman to make the right first impression, after all. But now he was tired, more tired than he could ever remember being before. His firm grip was starting to slip a little now and it was taking more and more of him to make even the slightest alteration. Normally he could shape the realities of a whole city without breaking a sweat, but now he was struggling to hold onto a small hole in the middle of the desert.

Granton had been overwhelmed with a swell in her population that threatened to derail his plans. Right now, there were too many eyes to potentially turn his way and he had to thin the herd. Sending away the Federal Agents was a good start. They had their killers and their cases were solved. Grange was still annoyed that he hadn’t foreseen the problems and hadn’t planned his actions better. There had been a time when he could hear the string quartet of a million crickets playing at dusk and see each moving pair of legs all in unison. He could decipher the prayers of a hundred thousand kneeling men and women, sifting through their hopes and desires, cherry picking only the juiciest fruit. But now he was having trouble telling what was going to happen tomorrow; his field of vision was growing narrower by the day. He still had so much to do before it was over and time itself was now starting to run against him.    

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Cassie took the back road out of town. When she had driven through Granton that morning, she had seen a lot of movement from The Feds that she hadn’t expected just yet. A cavalcade of black SUV’s had been loading up and moving out and she could only imagine that something big must be happening elsewhere. That thought had been stopped in its tracks when she’d checked in with Kevin at the station who’d told her that nothing had come over the wire. She was undoubtedly uncomfortable with the thought that something secretive was causing the exodus.

She was heading out to the coordinates of Harlan Harris’ plot of land. As far as she knew there was nothing out there, or at least there shouldn’t be. Her internal filing system had kept the details of Harlan and
Mackie’s death and no matter what Special Agent Harper wanted her to think, she didn’t believe that Dinkins must be guilty solely by association. If Dinkins had been a coast to coast serial killer as the FBI thought, then that didn’t explain the local deaths.

The dirt road was empty as she drove out, the red dust swirling as her truck created a vortex around its huge wheels. She narrowed her mind to only the hardware store deaths. Dr Stewart had told her in a roundabout way that Harlan’s business stretched beyond nails and screws and she wanted to know what the hell had been going on under her nose. There may have been more important things to be concentrating on at the minute, but she desperately wanted to regain some kind of sense of control in her town.

She soon reached her destination and saw a small Winnebago that had seen better days. The vehicle looked like it was in the throes of being stripped. As she got out of her truck, she saw a small man scurrying around carrying various bits and pieces to a parked rusty truck of his own.

Cassie saw that the man was too engrossed in what he was doing to hear her approach. She recognised him as
Bud Burrell, a local from Granton that she’d met in a professional capacity more than once. The odd thing was that she hadn’t seen the man about town for some time now and she’d thought that he must have left for good. He was a ratty man with perpetually nervous darting eyes that always looked guilty of something. He had a record for a bit of dealing, his own products if she remembered rightly. Despite the man’s shambolic appearance, he was possessed of a talent for chemistry.

She watched as he hurried back and forth with some intensity and as such, his attention was solely focused on the job in hand and not on her.

“Hey, Bud,” she called out.

His head snapped up in a flash and she did not like the look in his eyes one little bit. His shock at her voice was evident on his face, as was the guilt. He dropped the box that he was carrying and ran back towards the Winnebago, ducking inside.

“Bud? BUD!” she yelled, her hand automatically reaching down to the revolver on her hip, snapping off the harness in one fluid motion.

She walked slowly and carefully towards the vehicle, her eyes fully focused on the dark doorway. “
Bud Burrell, can you hear me? I just wanted to ask you a few questions. I need you to come out slowly and with your hands up.”

The ratty man didn’t answer and she couldn’t see him through the door or the grimy windows.
There was a smell lingering around the camper van; it was undoubtedly chemical in nature and surely illegal.

She withdrew her weapon and held it out in front of her in steady hands, knocking off the safety, dimly aware that it was becoming a regular occurrence.

She was about 10 feet from the Winnebago’s door when a glint of light made her instinctively leap to one side. The silent desert was shattered by the roar of the shotgun blast that peppered the air where she’d been standing only a split second before.

She rolled up onto one knee and fired three times towards the origin of the blast. She heard a grunt of pain and something heavy hit the floor inside the van. She regained her feet, never taking her eyes from the doorway, ready to either fire or move again. She moved quickly to the side of the Winnebago, by the side of the door, with her back pressed against the metallic siding. She sank back down into a crouching position again and whipped her head to the side to peek quickly into the van before yanking her head back out of the line of fire. She had seen a pair of legs lying on the floor barely moving and she stood. This time she moved fully in front of the doorway with her gun still aimed carefully inside.

Burrell was lying face down and a trail of fresh blood leaked out from under him and ran across the floor. She could see that he still held his shotgun in his right hand but his breathing was shallow and came in awkward pants.

“Lose the shotgun, Burrell,” she ordered but he didn’t move.

She knew that she could call for backup, but that would mean leaving the man who may or may not be faking. She could enter the van, but again he could be faking his incapacity. Her decision was made when Burrell’s hand opened and his finger slipped out of the shotgun’s trigger guard. She leaned in over him and shoved the weapon further into the Winnebago, further away from her but also him. Stepping inside the vehicle, she could see that the inside of the RV had been stripped clear of any home comforts and now there was a long counter top that ran around the inside of the van with only a break for a sink on either side. There were a multitude of glass bottles and containers most of which were smashed about the place spilling their contents across the floor and up the walls. Several had chemical logos pasted on their sides and more than one had a warning of one kind or another, including flames denoting “highly flammable”. Cassie smelled the flame rather than saw it and knew that Burrell had been cleaning house in the most permanent way possible.

She reached out to grab his ankles and pull him free of the imminent explosion, slipping her gun back into its holster in order to use both hands. As soon as she took hold of him, she felt the immediate sense of dead weight and knew that he was gone.

A rush of flames suddenly lit up the back wall as the chemicals caught and she knew that she had to move. She dropped Burrell and turned for the door. Even as she leapt out back into the hot desert, she was suddenly airborne for far longer than she should have been able to be. A hot blast of air lifted and carried her, propelling her further across the red sand as the Winnebago blew. She crashed back down to earth some 12 feet or so away, landing down hard on her shoulder and feeling the limb pop free from its joint. She felt her back scorched with heat and realised that her thin jacket was on fire. She struggled free, ignoring the huge waves of pain from her dislocated shoulder, desperately wanting to be free of the manmade fabric before it melted against her soft skin.

She kicked the jacket away once she was clear and turned to sit and view the burning RV as the flames leapt high into the air, destroying everything within.

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Father Bruce Luther stared out of the church doorway at the town below. Granton had been home for Luthers for as long as there had been records kept at the Town Hall. Although the Luther line was fiercely religious, Bruce was the first priest in their ranks.

He was a rotund man of 63 but still fit and healthy. The hot climate agreed with him and he thrived under the sun. He was around 5 feet 11 with a clean shaven face and deep set light blue eyes that could be warm and kind, but also were not adverse to flashing with sternness should the occasion arise.

Bruce saw himself as the spiritual leader of the community and St Michael’s had many programs which reached out into the town, solidifying his position. They ran bake sales, Christian camps, and an annual Carnival; they ran a food and clothing drive, along with a whole myriad of other occasional events that assured the church’s place at the heart of the community. But even he had to admit that attendances were not what they could be and the church did not seem to command the mandatory respect that it once had. He knew that his opinion was biased, but he could not quite manage to get his head around why God had slipped a few places on the top 10 list of what modern society deemed most important. He found it sad that so many people were being denied God’s love and guidance.