Six Seconds

40

Takoma, D.C.

“Be careful.”

Graham looked at the steaming mug of coffee Jackson Tarver held out for him.

“It’s hot.”

They stood in Ray and Anita’s bedroom letting a moment of respectful silence pass.

“What exactly are you looking for?”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. I hope I’ll rec ognize it when I see it.”

“You know, I’m up most nights convincing myself that Ray’s alive, hurt and waiting down along the river. That he’ll come back and we’ll help him through this.”

“You said that he’d quit the wire service, but from the people I’ve talked to I get the sense that that’s not quite what happened.”

“Ray would never talk about it. But I always feared that he’d been forced to leave. Or was fired and it put him in a desperate situation. We only wanted to help him out, so I gave him money from time to time, like when he said he needed to take Anita and the kids on a vacation to the mountains.”

“Do you think Ray was in danger because of his work?”

“Corporal, is there something you’re not telling me?”

“I just need to be satisfied that it was an accident. We still haven’t found his laptop. Did he ever talk about the last story he was working on?”

“The only thing he told me was that it was big and that he was certain he’d get a book deal out of it.”

“Anything to do with terrorists? He seemed to be re searching the subject.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Do you think he may have exaggerated his story?”

The suggestion landed on a nerve.

“Not every lead he chased resulted in a story. That’s the nature of the news business.”

“Did he have enemies?”

“I wouldn’t know. Are you trying to tell me that someone killed my son and his family because of a goddamn story?”

You have to protect key facts of the case, Graham warned himself.

“No. That’s not what I’m saying. The fact is, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to rule out anything criminal, so we can be sure. Ray’s missing laptop concerns me. It could’ve been a robbery gone wrong, or someone took it after Ray and everyone left their campsite. That sort of thing.”

Tarver stared at Graham.

“All I can tell you is that my son was a good reporter. He questioned everything. He dug deep. I know he was a loner, even ostracized. Anita told me. But Ray wasn’t like most reporters in Washington who swallow what ever they’re told.”

“I understand.”

“Now, Ray’s office is in the basement. This way.” The basement smelled of laundry detergent and was divided into a series of small, low-ceilinged rooms finished with paneling that had survived the ’70s. The area contained a small bedroom, a two-piece bathroom with an outdated linoleum floor, a combination laundry and furnace room, then an office.

Graham estimated the office was eight feet square. It was crammed with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, two three-drawer file cabinets and a large desk with a computer and monitor.

“Nothing in this room’s been touched since the day they left for Canada. The file cabinet’s unlocked. Do what you need to do on his computer. Take all the time you need. I’ll be upstairs.”

Newspapers rose in a tower in one corner against the bookshelves. At one end, laminated press tags hung in clusters from chains. A number of framed news awards for breaking news and investigative reporting were piled on one shelf.

Tacked to one frame was a paper target, a silhouette of a man’s upper torso in a scoring ring punctured with holes. A handful of empty shell casings stood next to it.

Yellowing front pages of big city newspapers for San Francisco, Dallas, Miami, Boston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Denver, with Ray Tarver’s bylines hung on one wall. Snapshots of Ray with other reporters in Europe, the Middle East, Kuwait, Iraq, Japan, Africa. Here’s Ray with President Bush. Here he is with President Clinton.

Is that Springsteen with Ray?

The guy got around.

Graham set his mug on the desk, sat down and switched on the computer. As it fired up, he looked at his watch. The time was 10:20 a.m. He began reading every file he could access off the desktop, then searched the hard drive.

Much of it was in the same vein as the file Kate Morrow had given him-articles, reports, notes that made no sense to Graham. Then he looked at the history of Tarver’s online travels and the sites he’d visited, starting with the most recent.

As expected, airlines, car rentals, hotels, tourism sites, U.S. and Canadian travel requirements, passports, borders, online banking, credit-card use. Graham was surprised the passwords had been saved.

Credit-card and banking records offered nothing unusual. All travel and household related. Wait. What was this charge for Investigative Search Services? Graham noted that one before returning to Tarver’s online history.

Further along he’d seen that Ray had visited sites for finding people, located work histories, unions, associa tions, driving records, voting records, property records for various states. A lot of work on California.

He was searching public records for counties in Southern California.

Then the history ended. That was it.

Next Graham flipped through every hard-copy file of news reports, studies, notes, photocopies from text books. Nothing jumped out at him, nothing that con nected anything to anything.

It was nearly 5:00 p.m. when he finished.

He rubbed his eyes and neck and got up to leave when he glanced at the bunches of press tags.

Something among them, almost hidden, was beck oning from a chain.

A USB flash drive.

People used them to back up computer files. This one had a tiny handwritten label. LAPTOP.

Graham held his breath as he held the drive in his hand.

Do you believe this?

He inserted it into the computer port and as it loaded he wondered-no, hoped-that whatever files Ray had put on his missing laptop, he’d backed them up here before the trip.

And, here we go.

Files appeared.

Graham’s hopes wilted. They duplicated what he’d already seen. Before quitting, he ran a search for the term Blue Rose Creek, as he’d done before, expecting it to be futile. As the program searched he rubbed his eyes.

He’d buried his tired face in his hands and had begun considering returning to Alberta, when the computer chimed with the message.

One file located.

This was new.

He opened it. Tarver had made notes, a few weeks before the trip.

The FOIA records indicate one American driver among those in the convoy attacked in Iraq with links to the new weapon operation. Details on the driver were censored to respect privacy laws. A Pentagon source put the driver’s location in Cali fornia, near Riverside County. Further investiga tion with trucking associations and transportation sources confirm the driver’s address.

10428 Suncanyon Rise, Blue Rose Creek, California.

Homeowners: Jake amp; Maggie Conlin.

Bingo.

Graham steepled his fingers to think for a moment. Then he went online to check out flights to Los

Angeles.