The Dead Town

Chapter 7

Behind the wheel of his Land Rover, Dagget followed a serpentine course through Rainbow Falls, hoping his lawman’s intuition inspired the many turns he made. He suspected that he was probably guided by nothing more than whim.

In the passenger seat, Frost studied his laptop. On the screen, a blinking red dot on a partial map of the town revealed the current location of the patrol car driven by Rafael Jarmillo, the chief of police. The day before, they had secretly affixed a transponder to Jarmillo’s vehicle, and thereafter they had monitored his movements. Since the previous morning, the chief had visited a lot of places around town, only one of them with any apparent law-enforcement connection.

“Yeah,” Frost said, “he’s not just paused at Montana Power and Light. It’s a full stop.”

The Land Rover was fitted out with a police scanner, but Dagget and Frost no longer bothered to listen to it. More than twelve hours earlier, Chief Jarmillo and his men stopped using a common ten-code that any cop anywhere might understand, and began to use a code of their own creation. Frost had tried to crack it with his computer, but he had failed. The portions of the police transmissions that weren’t in this code were crisp statements, revelatory of nothing.

“You want to go to the power company?” Frost asked. “See what’s happening?”

“What I’m thinking is, while the chief is out and about, maybe we stop by his house, have a little chat with his wife.”

Dagget and Frost, who had been in town three days, were agents with a unit of the FBI so secret that it was unknown even to the director of the bureau. They believed something was badly wrong in Rainbow Falls, but they didn’t have any clue what it might be. The whistle-blower who had alerted them to the situation knew only that during the past couple of years, enormous money had gone into some operation in this burg, channeled to a nonprofit named Progress for Perfect Peace. The sum was so huge — the funds laundered through so many accounts before arriving here — that it suggested a criminal enterprise of extraordinary proportions.

And this past afternoon, from their unit boss, Maurice Moomaw in D.C., they had learned that the Moneyman, source of those funds, was scheduled to arrive somewhere in the Rainbow Falls area the following day. Weather permitting, he would come in by helicopter from Billings. The Moneyman was a high-profile individual. If he was making a personal appearance, the conspiracy — whatever the hell it might entail — must be approaching one critical point or another.

“Talk to Jarmillo’s wife?” Frost didn’t like the idea. “I’m not ready yet to drop our cover.”

“I didn’t say we’d flash bureau ID. We snow her with some story just to see what she might say, just to get a look in the house.”

Frost shook his head. “I’m not a good bullshit artist.”

“You’ve seen me in action. I can produce more than a herd. You just stand there smiling and nodding, leave the rest to me.”

Frost considered the blinking light on the laptop map and then gazed through the windshield at the falling snow. All day, the atmosphere in Rainbow Falls had been strange, disquieting. He could not say why. The behavior of the police suggested they were engaged in some secret and perhaps illegal activity, but that alone wasn’t what made him so deeply uneasy. For the past several hours, he had sensed that the apparent normalcy of Rainbow Falls was a deception, as though the quaint and pretty town were only a hyper-realistic painting on a stage curtain, which at any moment would be swept aside to reveal a different municipality of strange and hideous structures in a state of advanced decay, narrow twisted streets, and in every shadow some creeping feral thing without a name.

Now, as the town succumbed to the bleaching snow, it seemed not to be vanishing beneath a shroud that would later be drawn aside by the restorative sun, but seemed instead to be fading entirely from the world. As if, when the snow eventually melted away, Rainbow Falls would be gone as though it had never existed.

Frost was not a man who spooked easily. Until now, he’d never had the kind of imagination that made hobgoblins out of shadows and sensed boogey-men around every corner. The problem wasn’t him. The problem was Rainbow Falls. Something was very wrong with this place.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go have a chat with Jarmillo’s wife.”