Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (12 page)

Me, too.

The next morning I sat in Sheriff Baggett's office in downtown Triboro.

"Thought you'd moved," he said as he read through the patrol reports from the previous night.

"I did."

"So how's this guy know you're there in Summerfield? And where's he getting a flashbang?"

"All good questions," I said.

"This business has gone a little bit beyond Billie Ray Breen, don't you think?"

"That's a fair assumption, but still an assumption."

He nodded. "I used to have a rule about assuming."

"Which you shared frequently, as I recall."

He grinned. "How's about this: we'll pull the string on the flashbang casing, and how he set it off remotely. Plus, I've already sent one of my surveillance nerds out front to sweep your vehicle. Your job is to come up with a motive. Tell me who might be doing this shit. We have to stop scaring the upstanding and increasingly vocal citizens of Summerfield."

"I sympathize," I said. I was probably shouting a little bit, as the ringing in my ears hadn't quite gone away. "I'll clear permanently out of my house there today or tomorrow, and then you can find me in the countryside. Can you brief Sheriff Walker?"

"I will, but I think we'd better be circumspect about all the lurid details--your new neighbors may ask you to leave. Rockwell County doesn't handle urban drama very well."

There was a knock on the door, and Maggie, Sheriff Baggett's secretary, announced that the surveillance tech was back. He told her to send him in.

Her in, as it turned out. She was a petite blonde who looked like
she was at least fifteen. She was wearing plastic gloves, a hairnet, and a blue jumpsuit that bore signs of crawling around under a car in the parking lot. She was holding the frame from a license plate, which I presumed had come off my Suburban. Like most Americans, I couldn't tell you my license plate number if I tried.

"Sat-com," she said. "Same rig they use on semitrailers with sensitive cargo. GPS track report every ten minutes, location to fifty feet. Commercially available, or swiped at a truck stop. If that's what they did, they'd need RFID programming capability."

The sheriff frowned. "This isn't amateur's night."

"No, sir," she said. "Although it isn't rocket science, either. It's a matter of having the right gear and a little bit of specialized knowledge." She handed him the frame.

"For you, maybe," the sheriff said, turning the frame over in his hands. He looked over at me to see if I had any questions.

"On the off-chance that that thing is rough, did you look for smooth?" I asked.

She blinked and then shook her pretty blond head. The sheriff pointed to the door, and out she went.

"Hmmm," he said. "A flashbang, a penny-ante, semidisposable hitter from the barrios of Charlotte, and now this. What's all that sound like?"

"Someone in law enforcement, with a grudge," I said promptly.

"Yeah," he said, nodding slowly. "We'll have input from the phone company in a few days, but I'm not holding my breath. Your line was disabled at the street box, by the way, not up at your house. Not cut, but switched off."

"More specialized knowledge."

"Unfortunately, given the tag, they have to know about Rockwell County."

"He said I owed someone a death," I said. "Inferring that I got someone killed, and now it's payback time. Except I think he, or they, want to play cat and mouse first."

"I think you'll have a better chance out there in the country," he said. "Summerfield's like any other bedroom community. People get up in the dark and come home in the dark. Don't notice anything until Saturday morning, and then they mow their grass. New faces appear in the country, on the other hand, the locals notice and they talk."

He was telling me to plug into the local network as fast as I could, but that presented some problems. I was a new face, and if I was bringing trouble into the county, prospective helper bees might not want the hassle. I was very much still on trial out there. Maybe the major could keep an eye out, as long as I described my problem in Union cavalry terms.

"Keep close to Hodge Walker," he said. "He's good people, been sheriff a long time, and he'll know the ground out there in the sticks. Just lost his wife to some kind of cancer, I'm told. We'll work what we can here in town."

I thanked him for his help, while acknowledging the obvious: If Sheriff Baggett's people couldn't protect me from an ambush in Summerfield, they couldn't protect me at all out in Rockwell County. I left the building to go see what Blondie had come up with, if anything.

My stalker had been pretty good at his work. He'd been able to get into the house, or, now that I thought about it, the back porch, rig a flashbang for remote detonation, and then position himself where he could put a laser spot on me in the dark, which suggested night-vision gear. He'd been able to disable my phone remotely as well, because there was no way he could have gotten from his lasering position to the box on the curb in ninety seconds, unless of course he did have a mouse in his pocket, or a helper up on the street--and he'd disabled my phone but still made a call.

My license plate was lying on the pavement between two legs sticking out from under the Suburban. Two shepherds were trying to see what she was doing under there from the backseat.

"Any luck?" I asked.

"Not yet," she said. "I was looking for induction power supplies near the wheels."

"Can you say that in English?" I asked the legs.

"Tiny generators. You place them on the suspension, close to a wheel, and then use the rotation of the wheel to induce a current by placing a magnet on the rim. The generator then powers the tracking device transmitter, usually by charging a battery embedded in the plate."

"Sweet."

She hauled out from under the car on a mechanic's creeper and spit some dust out of her face. In the sunlight, she had aged somewhat. Seventeen, maybe. Two deputies walking by were giving me the once-over even as they said hey to her.

"Did that license plate thing go off the air when you took it off the vehicle?"

"Nope," she said as I gave her a hand up. "I'll go put it on a California-bound semi if you want, unless it's evidence."

"Yeah, it's evidence. Bag it and give it to the detectives working the house shootings in Summerfield, if you would, please. How esoteric is that device?"

"Ten years ago one of these would indicate CIA or one of the military agencies," she said. "Now, no big deal. DEA uses them extensively, as do trucking companies."

I couldn't stand it anymore. "How old are you, Deputy, if I may ask?"

She grinned and immediately looked fifteen again. "Twenty-six," she said. "I have a master's from NC State in double-E, and I've been here three years."

I shook my head in wonder. "I am definitely getting old," I said. "I made you for seventeen, which meant twenty-one."

"If it makes you feel any better, I get carded all the time. My husband thinks it's hilarious."

"Well, thanks for finding my bug."

"Like you said inside, I found rough. Smooth could still be inside, like integrated with your FM radio and transmitting through that antenna in the windshield. Bring her back to our surveillance lab and we'll do it right. Takes a morning."

"I'll try to do that," I said. "In the meantime, I need to keep in motion."

"One more thing," she said. "If we do find another bug, we can throw some shit in the game."

"You can spoof a GPS constellation?"

"No, but it's the bug that makes the report. We can make it lie."

"I'll keep that in mind," I said, wondering what else I didn't know about surveillance in this age of the Web and GPS satellites. Probably a lot.

I drove back to Summerfield, packed up some more of my stuff, including the contents of my gun safe, and headed back to the country. As I backed out of my driveway I noticed one of my neighbors staring at me from her yard. When I rolled down the window and asked if there was something wrong, she made a face and said something about my attracting a lot of unnecessary violence to the neighborhood. I told her I was leaving but once I was gone, the bad guys would be coming to see her instead of me. She humphed and turned away. Never did like that woman.

I would have to assume my vehicle was still being tracked until I had time to get it in for an extensive bug sweep. Or, I realized, I could simply trade it in and get a new one. There was a Chevy dealer right there in town, and this one was three years old. The damned things were the original gas hogs, and I suspected that I could get one for a song these days. Let my ghost follow one of the locals out to his deer camp and see what happened.

I spent the weekend getting situated in the cottage and taking some more long walks. My new Suburban looked a lot like my old
one. On Sunday morning Carol called and asked if I wanted to go for a trial horseback ride. It sounded like a marvelous opportunity to embarrass myself, but I said yes. An hour later I was sitting atop Goober, who looked to me like a cross between a quarter horse and a camel. He was huge, and I felt like I was sitting on a moving Gel-Pak as he plodded along behind Carol's horse.

We rode around her place for a while as my lower legs slowly became paralyzed and I embedded some new finger grooves in the pommel of my western saddle. The shepherds trailed along on either side trying not to laugh at me. Frick had barked once at the massive beast, who'd responded a few seconds later with one enormous, ground-shaking stomp. Then it made a horrible noise in its throat and I found out why it was called Goober, as did Frick. After that, Frick, expertly slimed, kept her distance, giving both me and the horse reproachful looks from time to time. Carol managed to keep a fairly straight face through it all. Goober mostly seemed to be sleepwalking. I kept checking to see if my lower legs had fallen off.

Carol lived on a thirty-acre parcel outside of town. Her house was a restored eighteenth-century farmhouse, and she gave me a tour to show me what could be done. The before-and-after pictures were amazing. When she'd bought it, the four stone chimneys were mostly on the ground, the roof had fallen in, and the porches looked like wooden hammocks. Now it was spotless, standing on a small knoll surrounded by old oaks and boxwood clumps.

"Ten years?" I asked as we arrived back at the barn. I'd finally taken my feet out of the stirrups, and now my lower legs were improving to the pins and needles stage. My knees felt like they'd been screwed on and the threads stripped in the process. I dreaded the dismount and staggered around like a drunk when I finally did get off. Goober promptly went to sleep. Frick watched from about twenty feet away, clearly appraising her chances to run in and bite him.

"Just about," she said. "Basically we disassembled it, stacked all the useful bits on the grounds, and then rebuilt it from the stone
foundations up. That's actually easier and cheaper than working from the inside out."

I wondered who the "we" was and where she'd raised the money to take on a project like that, but I was learning about country ways: They'll tell you when they're ready; if you press it, they shut down. We had a sandwich on the front porch and talked about the restoration trade and the state of the county's economy, which wasn't great. I remembered the Chevy dealer almost falling out of his chair when I said I'd take that one right there. He said he hadn't sold anything with eight cylinders in six months.

She asked how we were coming on the closing. I told her that the appropriate moles were digging into the stacks for the title search. I also told her what the old clerk had said. She was familiar with the issue.

"When you start talking about the big properties in this county, say, Glory's End size and up, way up, in some cases, the titles can become entangled."

"Entangled?"

"Well, the big planters, the families who came up from the coast or down from Virginia, didn't have a lot of respect for the land. They'd burn it out planting tobacco and cotton and then just move on to new land nearby."

I remembered Mr. Oatley mentioning this. "They'd just abandon it?"

"For farming, yes. It was easier to clear new ground than to invest a growing season and money in reconstituting old ground. Technically, they still owned it."

"Ah."

"Yeah," she said. "So when he says be careful what you wish for, you just might find out there are claims out there that go back a hundred fifty years."

"So why hasn't it been a problem before?"

"Because there are enough claims and counterclaims recorded in
that courthouse to keep a dozen lawyers in court for a decade. As long as the 'right kind' of folk are on the land, usually meaning relatives, prominent landowners are satisfied to leave well enough alone."

"In other words, don't ask a question if you can't stand all the possible answers."

"You got it," she said.

I asked her why the Lees had fallen out.

"Woman trouble, is the way the story goes," she said. "The plantations were called Oak Grove and Laurel Grove back then, 1820s, '30s, or thereabouts. Nathaniel Carter Lee of Oak Grove, now Glory's End, supposedly stole away the sworn fiancee of Callendar Lee of Laurel Grove. Nathaniel was richer than Callendar, and in all probability, the lady probably followed the money. Her name was Abigail, and she was reportedly a great beauty, as is usually the case in these stories. They duly married, but then some years later, just before the war, Miss Abigail had an affair with Callendar Lee. Nathaniel called out Callendar, and they met with seconds on the Richmond-Danville railroad bridge one spring morning."