Southern Cross (27 page)

06:02:10

Command
Central was buzzing when we got there: more troops, more equipment, more
intensity. I walked down the school hallway to the dancing tiger on the wall
and stood outside the war room for a minute, thinking of Diggs. He was still
alive—I was sure of that. Barnel wanted us to know his victims, those sinners
who’d strayed from his path to glory. He had something planned…

I
just didn’t know what it could be.

Something
big, we all assumed. Something to rock Justice to its foundation. Something
that took him back to the beginning; back when it all went wrong.

Blaze
nodded me into the room, and I pushed those thoughts aside for the moment. She
looked exhausted. Clearly, that three-hour nap she’d given the troops hadn’t
extended to her.

There
was a place of honor waiting for me at the front of the room. Jack nodded at me
and I sat, feeling strangely out of place without Diggs beside me. I spotted his
laptop on a desk off to the side, with a computer tech tapping away on it. I
bristled, thinking of how much Diggs would hate that. Blaze followed my gaze.

“We’re
having a hard time getting in there,” she said. “He has good security… and so
far we haven’t been able to figure out his password.”

I
stood and went over. The computer tech was a woman, fifties to sixties, plump
and blonde and efficient.

“I’ve
got it.”

“You
know the password?” she asked.

“Yeah.”
She wasn’t moving. “Just let me in there and I’ll get you what you need.”

“We’ll
need to scan the full hard drive,” she said.

“Not
without his permission, you won’t.”

“You’re
not authorized to work with our equipment.”

Clearly,
the woman had a death wish. “It’s not your equipment, you—” Juarez intervened
before I pulled her away from Diggs’ computer by her bleached blonde ‘do.

“It’s
all right, Mandy,” he said calmly. “Let her take over.”

Mandy
got up, purposely bumping into me when she brushed past. Juarez grabbed my arm
before I went after her.

“Let
it go,” he said under his breath.

Right.
Instead of beating up the technology Nazi, I took her seat and got to work.

It
only took two tries to get in. Juarez looked at me in surprise. I shrugged.

“Lucky
guess.”

Blaze
came over and looked over my shoulder. I stopped typing and turned around.

“I’ll
let you know when I find anything,” I said.

“There
may be files you’re not familiar with that are relevant to this investigation.”

I
didn’t budge. Diggs’ entire world was on his computer—he didn’t let anyone in
there. Not even me. Certainly not Big Brother.

“Can
you give us a second?” Juarez asked Blaze. She nodded and walked away. I didn’t
even look at him as he pulled up a chair beside me.

“We
need to get in there, Erin,” he said. “We have programs that will scan the
files in a matter of minutes; it won’t even be people looking at them.”

“Not
at first,” I said. “But what about when the keywords you’re looking for come
up? Then, people will be going through everything here. And what happens when
national security keywords that don’t have anything to do with Barnel start
popping up? His work is important too, Jack.”

“Erin,” he said seriously. He leaned forward in his chair and took my hands in his. There
were maybe a dozen people in the room, and I realized that all of them were
waiting for me. “This isn’t negotiable. We’ll be as sensitive as we can be, but
I can’t make any promises. You can oversee things if you like—let us know if
there’s a file that we think is pertinent but you know isn’t. That’s the best I
can do.”

I
pulled my hands away and nodded. I got up abruptly, nearly knocking my chair
over in the process. “Yeah, you’re right. Go ahead.”

Mandy
came back over, just a trace of a smug smile on her lips when she reclaimed her
chair. We had six hours to find Diggs—there wasn’t time for me to get into it
with her now. Jack put his hand on my shoulder awkwardly while I stood by, arms
crossed over my stomach, watching as they picked Diggs’ life apart.

I
excused myself after a few minutes and commandeered a computer, intent on doing
a little investigating of my own.

I
started with Marty Reynolds—the anomaly in all this. I knew why Billy Thomas
was dead; I knew why Wyatt was dead. I wasn’t completely clear on the reason
for Roger Burkett’s death, but the fact that it came on the heels of all this
other violence suggested it had something to do with Barnel and Company’s grand
plan. But Marty Reynolds just seemed so random.

After
I’d done some digging, though, I found I wasn’t any clearer on motivation. He
had a lengthy rap sheet: drugs, violence, everything we’d already found before.
On a whim, I pulled up his wife—the woman he was suspected of killing. I found
a photo of Glenda Reynolds online from an article in 2001 about the local Qwik
E Mart, where Glenda worked as a cashier. She was surprisingly pretty: tall and
slender, with long dark hair and striking eyes. Twenty-three at the time, she
was younger than her husband by seventeen years.

I
didn’t find her maiden name until I pulled up the marriage announcement in the
local paper, dated July 15, 1999.
Glenda Clifton to Marry Marty Reynolds
Saturday, July 18
. Clifton didn’t ring any bells for me, but I looked her
up anyway. She’d been Junior Miss Kentucky Stars in ’90, won blue ribbons in
4-H for horsemanship four years running, and made straight A’s up until her
junior year in high school. She dropped off the map in ’92, no longer mentioned
in any archived articles I could find online. If this were a real investigation
with a manageable deadline involved, I’d head to the local library from there
and look up hard copies of everything I could find.

Since
the world was ending in six hours, however, I didn’t really have that luxury.

Instead,
I managed to find Glenda’s birth certificate and Googled her parents.

Pay
dirt.

Glenda’s
father was killed in a car accident in 1991. That year, I found an article on
Jesup Barnel, with Glenda’s mother pictured with a group of six others listed
as new members of Barnel’s church. Then, I looked for articles and images from
Barnel’s church youth group, since Glenda would be about the right age for
that.

The
fifth photo I pulled up told the story I’d been looking for:

Jesup
Barnel stood with about fifteen teenagers, all of them looking appropriately
pious. Glenda Reynolds had changed since her days as Miss Kentucky Stars. Now,
she wore her hair shorter and her dress much longer. She stood beside Jesup
Barnel, his arm around her shoulders in an unmistakably proprietary way.
Glenda’s own posture was tense, and you couldn’t miss the way she tried to hold
herself apart from the reverend.

I had
no proof, but I was still willing to stake my reputation on it: Jesup Barnel
had been sleeping with Glenda Reynolds, back when she was still Glenda Clifton.
And Glenda, sixteen at the time, hadn’t been happy about it.

I
called Juarez and Blaze over and they listened to my theory. Blaze hedged as
soon as I was finished.

“You
may have a point in all this, but I’m not sure what it has to do with today.
Even if Barnel was molesting this girl, and that had something to do with the
reason Marty Reynolds was murdered… I don’t know how that leads us to what he
has in mind tonight. We can follow up on it later—right now, I need my people
focused on more immediate leads.”

“And
what are those leads, exactly?” I asked. I was well aware of the edge to my
voice.

Blaze
hesitated. “We’re looking at Billy Thomas’s childhood home right now.”

“What
about Barnel’s childhood home?” I asked. “For all we know, going back to the
beginning means going back to Barnel’s roots.”

“We’ve
got agents there now,” Jack said quietly. “Erin, you need to believe that we
know what we’re doing here.”

I
nodded, though I was far from through yet. “What about Diggs’ files? Have you
found anything?”

I
followed Blaze back to the Technology Nazi’s desk. The Nazi was immersed in her
task of dissecting Diggs’ inner life; she didn’t look especially pleased to be
interrupted. Or to have to admit, once again, that she might need my help.

“I’ve
set aside a dozen folders here that look suspicious, but we haven’t found a
direct relationship to Jesup Barnel.” She looked me up and down for a minute.
“You’re Solomon?”

“Yeah,”
I said. I pushed her out of the way and sat down. “Why?”

“No
reason,” she said primly. “You just take up an awful lot of space on his hard
drive.”

Juarez
was standing beside me, hovering just over my shoulder. He
glanced at me, then back at the computer, doing his best to pretend none of
this pertained to him. Or us. 

“We’ve
known each other a long time,” I said. I refused to give her the satisfaction
of trying to justify it beyond that.

“So I
gathered,” the woman said. She walked away.

“You
really know how to get on people’s good sides, you know that?” Juarez asked.

“I’m
not going for Miss Congeniality here. I just want to find Diggs.”

“Yeah,”
Juarez said shortly. “I got that.”

He
left me to my work.

Of
the dozen questionable files the Nazi had saved to Diggs’ desktop for easy
reference, nine I identified immediately: stories Diggs had either finished or
been working on over the past couple of years. Three others were encrypted, and
apparently no one thus far had been able to break that encryption. One was
labeled simply ‘Hood,’ but I knew it immediately: that would be Mitch Cameron,
our hooded man. I couldn’t identify the other two.

“You
can try these two,” I called over my shoulder. The Nazi returned, Juarez on her heels.

“You’re
sure about the others?” she asked.

“Positive,”
I said. “And I’m assuming you’ve already found the primary folder he had.”

“Of
course,” she said, like I’d suggested something completely idiotic. “It’s
mostly names and newspaper clippings. He’s very thorough.”

“He’s
good at what he does,” I said.

For
just a second, I thought I saw a glimmer of humanity in her eyes. “We wouldn’t
be doing this if he wasn’t.”

05:30:49

When
I came to, it was to a red glow and nausea and the cotton-throated feel of
chemicals in my blood.

“Diggs?”
someone whispered. I opened my eyes wider, searching for the source. The world
came into focus and suddenly Danny was there, kneeling beside me.

“Where
the hell are we?” I asked. I tried to sit up. I failed. My hands were bound
behind my back, plastic ties cutting into my wrists.

“Give
yourself a minute,” Danny said. “It’ll get better—you’ve just gotta adjust.”

My
synapses weren’t firing right. I stayed where I was and counted down from ten,
slowly, before I finally forced myself upright.

“If
you’re gonna puke, do it that way,” Danny said. He nodded toward my right. My
stomach rolled at the stench.

For
the first time, I realized we weren’t alone. I looked around, trying to focus
on the details. About a dozen people were gathered in the small space. The dirt
floor was damp and cool beneath me, but the rest of the room was suffocatingly
warm. The entire scene was lit by a bare red bulb mounted above a very
solid-looking steel door.

“Who
else is here?” I asked.

“Casey,”
Danny said. “A friend of mine from this band—”

I
nodded impatiently. “I know who she is.”

“Right,”
Danny said. “Yeah, she told me you guys talked. And there’s a couple kids from
school.” He lowered his voice. “And there are some other guys, too. It’s not a
good crew, Diggs.”

He
wasn’t kidding. I counted at least three tweakers just going into withdrawal,
another couple of burly guys with a look in their eye that intimated
deep-seated anger and a tradition of violence. I thought of the shacks we’d
come across the day before: crosses burning in the front yard, trash and debris
inside. We’d already found the kids… Apparently, this was what had happened to
the adults.

“So,
I’m assuming you don’t know where we are,” I said. The nausea was fading, and
with it that sense of panic. I was alive. So was Danny.

That
was something.

“We
don’t know,” Danny said. “They only bring us here while we’re out of it. No
idea how long it takes—we reckon we’re not far out of town, though.”

“Somebody’s
cellar, most likely,” someone else said. A teenage boy with dirty gauze on one
side of his face, a yellowish fluid seeping through the bandage. I recognized
him immediately: the boy I’d spoken with about his friend just after the
explosion Thursday night.

Danny
shook his head. “You kiddin’? How many houses you know with underground rooms
and halls and passages that go on forever? It’s gotta be something else. Rick
did this project about all the places in Justice with secret tunnels underneath
them. This has to be one of those.”

“How
many people are here?” I asked.

“You
make eleven,” Danny answered promptly. “I was alone for a long time, then they
brought a few folks in. They been throwin’ ‘em in pretty steady for the past
few hours, though.”

For
the first time, I noticed a timer mounted beside the door, digital numbers
counting backward.

“What’s
that?” I asked.

Danny
didn’t say anything for three seconds—I watched them tick by in fire engine
red. Then:

“That’s
all the time we got,” he said. “I don’t know what happens when the numbers run
out, but I get the feeling it won’t be good. The reverend said we had to make
our peace. Beg forgiveness.”

I
stared at the clock as the seconds counted down:

05:09:20,
05:09:19… Five hours ‘til midnight, and whatever Barnel had promised came to
pass.

I
tried to get my head back in the game. Five hours wasn’t a lot to work with,
but it was something.

“What
about sounds?” I asked.

“There
was a boiler room—heard that pretty clear. And there’s music once you’re
outside this room.”

That
brought me out of my stupor. “What kind of music?”

“Good
stuff, actually,” he said, sounding surprised. “They were playin’
Blonde on
Blonde
, I think, when Jenny Burkett come to get me. Then maybe Chuck
Berry.”

“So,
nothing religious?”

“Nope.
It’s not coming from them—one of the guys got mad about it when he was takin’
me.”

I
felt a sudden surge of hope.
Blonde on Blonde
would have made Jake’s top
twenty-four list without a doubt. As would Chuck Berry—probably
The Great
Twenty-Eight
. Most of the area had no power, so what were the chances we
were in someone’s basement while they cranked WKRO? Slim, at best. It was a
good lead, I was sure of it. I just wasn’t sure where it was leading.

The
rest of what he’d said suddenly clicked. “Hang on—you said Jenny Burkett? She’s
here?”

I
wasn’t actually surprised to hear the name: from the start it had seemed like
too much of a coincidence that Wyatt and Roger Burkett were last seen at Jenny
Burkett’s place. Add to that the fact that the sheriff made no effort to bring
her in and it only made sense.

Danny
lowered his eyes and nodded. “She’s how come I’m here in the first place… I heard
her whisperin’ to me outside Casey’s place. When you see her, you’ll get it.
You take one look at her, hear a little sweet nothin’ from that pretty mouth,
and you’ll risk just about anything for a taste.”

I let
that go. I’d been seventeen before; if memory served, there weren’t a lot of
women on the planet for whom I wouldn’t have risked anything if I thought the
promise of sex—or anything close to it—was on the table. 

“Do
you know who else is behind this?” I asked. “Have you talked to Barnel?”

“We
all talked to the preacher,” the other teenage boy said. “You’ll get your
chance soon enough. Gotta make your confession. He don’t mention anybody else,
though. Just him and Jesus.”

“Well—them
and Jenny,” Danny agreed.

“She’s
been draggin’ us back and forth, doin’ whatever Barnel wants,” Danny continued.
“There’s a big guy, but I haven’t seen his face. So far we make out one other
guy besides Barnel, but we reckon there must be more.”

“And
you don’t recognize any voices?”

“Nope,
not so far. Seems like they know what they’re doin’, though. They know how to
keep us in our places, keep everybody quiet.”

Yet
another sign of the organization Blaze had been talking about earlier. There
was no way in hell Jesup Barnel could pull this off on his own. I set aside the
maddening question of who he was working with, and focused on more pressing
issues.

“Have
you looked for a way out?” I asked.

“No,”
Danny said with a practiced roll of the eyes. “We been sitting here playin’ Tic
Tac Toe, hopin’ for a miracle.”

“No need
to get snippy,” I said. “What’d you find?”

”Not
much,” he said. “There’s just the one door leading in here. Floor’s dirt. Walls
are cement. I can’t find no wires or pipes, so wherever we are, we’re far
enough out of the way that they don’t put the electrical or the plumbing
through here. We got the bare bulb and our countdown clock. Not much to work
with.”

I
nodded. It wasn’t much to work with at all.