Endangered Species (19 page)

“What kind of building? Did he describe it?”

“Not at first. He talked about half a dozen different kinds, with different variables: exposed concrete, earth-sheltered concrete, double walls, windows, no windows. I got the feeling he didn’t have a specific building in mind.”

“What do you mean, ‘at first’?”

Pipkin shifted uneasily. “Well, a little later, he brought me a set of plans. Building plans.” He nodded toward the table.

“When?”

“A while ago. A couple months, at least. It’s been a while.”

“When you were in California?”

“Yes.”

“Did you give him the information?” asked Wager.

“I mailed it to him. Yeah.”

“When?”

“Maybe three weeks ago.”

Mallory stated, “From here. You finished the problem here and mailed him the solution.”

“Not a solution, exactly. What I did was point out the types of demolitions needed and the most likely points to—ah—incapacitate the structure. You know: different options.”

“You sent that to Denver?” Wager asked.

“No. I didn’t know he was in Denver then.”

“To California?”

Pipkin closed his mouth, uncomfortable at admitting anything more.

Wager sighed. “You know we had to identify Pauline by her dental records, Mr. Pipkin? Her body was burned that badly. She was a very pretty girl, but even her parents wouldn’t have known what they were looking at. They got her back in a rubber bag inside a closed casket.” His voice tightened. “Somebody not only killed her; they tried to erase her from the earth.” He stared deeply into the man’s wide eyes. “What you tell us might help us find her killer. Where’d you send the plans to?”

“Boulder. Dick Simon. Libeus told me to send them to him.”

“We’d like to see copies of everything you sent him, Mr. Pipkin,” said Mallory.

He shrugged. “I don’t have much left.” He slid off the barstool and pulled together some papers from the back of the worktable. “These are some of the rough drafts.”

Mallory studied them.

Wager asked, “Is that why Pauline called you? To tell you what building they were going to blow up?”

“No. But I think she may have found out.” His voice dropped. “I think that’s why she was worried.”

“Worried how?”

“She didn’t say anything directly. Like I said, we just chatted a bit about people and things. But it was like she wanted to say something but couldn’t quite find the words for it. Tell me something, maybe, or ask me.”

“About King’s next project?”

“That was the feeling I got.”

“You think she disapproved of whatever it was?”

“I think she had doubts anyway. But why, I don’t know. We—ah—we don’t say much specific over the telephone.” He nodded at Mallory, who was still studying the diagrams. “Security.”

“Would she disapprove enough to want to quit?”

“I don’t think that was the issue yet. Like I said, she would have made up her mind after a final powwow.”

“But she had learned enough to be worried?”

“I’m just guessing—I really can’t say for sure. It was her tone … her mood, more than anything she said specifically.”

“If she threatened to do something to stop him, would King have killed her?”

He took a long time to answer, and when he did, it was oblique. “Did you know that developers are selling houses at Love Canal again? Change the name, make a profit. And Detroit’s garbage incinerator’s pumping tons of mercury into the air, and no one’s stopping them because the only people being hurt are the poor? The Department of the Interior’s in bed with Mobil Oil to drill the whole eastern seaboard regardless of fishing grounds or wildlife refuges. And all the time the administration claims to be pro environment, while it guts every rule and regulation that industry complains about. We’re all angry!” The man’s voice quieted. “But Libby’s talked more and more about doing something major. Something that will really hurt the bastards.” He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “He and Simon together. That’s the scary one—Simon. That guy ….” Pipkin shook his head. “He or Libby might have lost it. If they thought she was going to screw up a big project that they really wanted, then, yeah, Libby might have lost it.”

Mallory looked up from the drawings. “Do you think King was in Denver because that’s where his next project is?”

Pipkin nodded again. “That’s how he does it: moves to the area and studies it, details a plan and backup alternatives, then finalizes the project.”

Wager asked, “What’s Simon like?”

“I only met him once, out in California. But I didn’t like him.”

“Why’s that?”

“He thinks no one else is doing enough. That nobody else really cares enough to do what’s needed—you know?”

“What did he say was needed?”

“Some kind of war. I mean, he’s the one who wants to hurt people. Says we’re already at war with the earth-murderers, but we just don’t know it.” Pipkin shrugged. “He’s one of the fringe people Libby’s picked up lately.”

“You say he lives in Boulder?”

“Up in the hills behind town.”

The FBI man watched Pipkin closely. “Did Tillotson or King or Simon ever mention the Rocky Mountain Arsenal?”

“Arsenal?” He frowned, thinking. “No … I don’t think so.” His eyes widened. “That’s the biological and chemical warfare place, isn’t it? The one the government claims it’s closing down?”

“Yes.”

And widened further. “Sweet heaven! If he blows that up …. It could spread. …” He sucked in a deep, unbelieving breath. “There’s supposed to be all sorts of stuff still stored out there: mustard gas, nerve gas, anthrax bombs!”

The men stared at each other, seeing not one another’s faces but the vision of a flaming building that spewed smoke and anthrax and nerve gas over the northern half of Denver. Outside, in the quiet wind, the only sound was a dry, steady chatter from the aspen leaves.

9/24

2111

T
HEY TRIED TO
get more out of Pipkin, but he said he’d told them all he knew, and neither Wager nor Mallory doubted the pale and worried man. Mallory said he would like to know if Pipkin decided to leave the Steamboat Springs area, “just in case we have questions about these diagrams”; Wager left his business card and the order for Pipkin to call at once if he heard anything from or about the homicide suspect Libeus King.

When Mallory dropped Wager off at the DPD Administration Building, he waved a hand at the bundle of drawings and plans on the seat beside him. “I’ll fax these back to headquarters. Maybe someone there can make something of them.”

“What about alerting the arsenal?”

“I’ll take care of that.”

Wager was relieved to hear it; the arsenal’s officers would pay a hell of a lot more attention to a warning from the FBI than from a local Denver cop. “Was Tillotson ever afraid King suspected that she was an informant?”

“Not to my knowledge. I worked with her for almost a year. We were both very careful about contacts, and it’s my guess that if King did suspect something, she wasn’t aware of it.” Mallory’s fingers slid restlessly around the steering wheel.

“Of course, if he did suddenly learn about it—if someone told him. …”

That was one of the possibilities. King would have felt—would have been—betrayed. And with all that anger, all that self-righteousness, he could have killed out of blind rage. “How soon before she died did she talk with you?”

Mallory acknowledged that it was a couple of weeks.

The phone call to San Diego that had led Wager to the FBI was dated sixteen days before her death. “Is that William Johnson an agent or an informant?”

“I’m not comfortable answering that one, Gabe. For security reasons. And I don’t know that he has any bearing on the homicide aspect of this.”

He might or he might not; that was why Wager was asking. “I’d like to know what she said to him.”

“Oh—that’s easy. On those calls, Johnson was just a cutout for Tillotson; she didn’t talk to him at all. Johnson transferred all her calls directly to me. On that particular one, she said they were in Denver so King could work on a major project. The ‘headline grabber.’” He shook his head. “That was the last time I talked to her, and she had no suspicion at all that she’d been discovered. She was to find out more about King’s project—who was involved, what was targeted—and call back.”

That still left sixteen days, and all it took was a thirty-second message or a scrawled note. Wager opened the car door. “You don’t think King’s given up on that ‘project’?”

The FBI agent scratched at the corner of his mouth. “I’ve alerted all my sources to notify me if he shows up anywhere in the country. So far, no response. So I assume he’s still in this area. Besides,” he added, “I can’t take the chance he isn’t, can I?”

No, Mallory couldn’t take that chance, and Wager found himself almost hoping that King had given up. But if he had, he could be anywhere by now, in or out of the country, and Tillotson’s murder would stay open for the months or maybe years it would take to find King. Still, that would be far better than Wager’s vision of poison smoke drifting across half a million souls.

When they parted, Mallory had once more promised to let Wager know immediately if the national FBI alert turned up any leads, and Wager had once more told Mallory that he’d call right away if DPD came up with anything. Then he went up to his office to check his message box and to telephone Max.

Max’s wife answered the phone on the second ring, her voice straining to be polite. “Oh, hello, Gabe.”

“Max wanted me to call, Francine. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. I’ll let him know. Just a moment, please.”

When Max picked up the extension, Wager asked, “Meet you at Quintana’s place in an hour?”

“See you there.”

That gave Wager time to let Elizabeth know he was back from Steamboat and to answer the few and disappointing messages that waited in his box. One was from Stovepipe—“Please call.” He did.

“Gabe, I took your advice—you know, about seeing a lawyer?”

“And?”

“It sounds like so much crap. I never heard so much pure crap. You got any idea what we have to do to have my old man declared dead?”

“No.”

“Aw, man, we got to prove that he doesn’t have all sorts of things. No voting record, no automobile registration, no medical records … You name it, we got to prove he doesn’t have it. Anywhere in the goddamn country! Lawyer says it’s because we’re trying to deprive him of his property. Where the hell was all this protection for me, man! Swear to God, if my rights had been protected half as well, I’d’ve never been sent up.”

“Maybe things are improving, Stovepipe.”

“Yeah. And maybe I’ll do better next goddamn vault I crack.”

“You really want to take that chance?”

A sigh. “No. But goddamn, Gabe, I can’t get the hang of doing things by all these rules! I mean, it was so simple before: I wanted something, by God, I took it. I didn’t hurt nobody, I didn’t take any more than I needed, nothing to worry about. But now—Christ, I try to do things the right way, and there’s all these rules and laws and crap, and they all say I can’t do this or I got to do that. It’s like every time I turn around, there’s a goddamn law! How in hell do citizens live like this?”

“They’re used to it, Stovepipe.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. I just don’t know.”

“You can make it.”

A heavy sigh. “Yeah, I guess I better. For Mother’s sake anyway.” He added, “She really likes the place.”

“What?”

“The place up in Weld County. What I did was rent it for a month, you know? Told the guy I was having trouble selling Mother’s house and that we really want this place, and so could we rent it by the month. Even if we can’t buy it, he makes some rent on it, and it’s lived in, so the place is kept up.”

“Smart move, Stovepipe.”

“Yeah, it was. My case officer gave me leave to take Mother up there yesterday. It’s way the hell out in the country—nothing but farmland all around, man. Just what we wanted.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. Mother’s getting settled in. Next leave I get, I’ll go up and unpack the heavy stuff. You know, washer and dryer.”

“Well, you should be able to get things settled in that time.”

“I sure as hell hope so. But I’m beginning to goddamn wonder, man.”

“Give me a call later, let me know how things are going.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

The only other message was from Gargan, ace reporter for the
Denver Post
, who thought he was on the verge of his greatest scoop and that Wager should help him with it. He dropped that in the trash can on his way out.

Caithness was a two-block street in the Highland Park area, just west of downtown. Like its neighbors, Argyle and Dunkeld, it marked the original settlement of Scots engineers and managers hired to work in the smelters of nineteenth-century Denver. But that was a long time before, and Wager could barely remember when the neighborhood had been Italian. Now there were only a few Italian restaurants left, and most of the area was Hispanic. And even that was changing—the low cost of housing and the nearness to work in Denver had started luring the Anglos in, and property values were rising. Pretty soon it would be a neighborhood “renewed” by “urban pioneers.” But, Wager reflected as he parked on the quiet street, that was better than what could happen if the arsenal went up and the wind blew this way. Even better than what had happened to his old neighborhood, the Auraria barrio. There, the people had been moved into low-income housing projects, and the hundred-year-old homes and cottages had been turned into rubble to make way for a university campus. As if the state needed another playground for a bunch of fraternity kids to drink beer.

A few minutes after Wager parked, he saw Max’s Jeep Cherokee turn off Zuni and come slowly down the two blocks. This late at night, the ground-level shops were closed and only an occasional pedestrian made a shadow in the dim street lights. In the upper stories, dark windows showed where offices and commercial spaces were empty for the night. Here and there among them, lights marked clusters of apartments; Wager counted down a fourth-floor row of windows to the one or two that he guessed were Quintana’s.