The Last Good Guy

27

FBI Special Agent Mike Lark was not quite a friend but much more than an acquaintance. We had had the same boss, though at different times in our careers. Her name was Joan Taucher. Joan was a tough and complex woman, and her death last year — shot by a terrorist on my property — rocked Mike’s world and mine considerably. I killed that terrorist, a few seconds too late to save Joan’s life. A soul-bruising series of events. I will take them to my grave.

Mike Lark had been not only Joan Taucher’s FBI understudy but her lover, too. I hadn’t seen him since her funeral, late last December. Now he looked more than nine months older. Mid-twenties. Same short blond hair, but leaner in the face and harder in his brown, Taucher-like eyes.

We met in the pay lot at Torrey Pines State Beach, shook hands. I told him I’d explain my most recent facial improvements later. We headed north on the dry, low-tide sand. Plenty of surfers on the small waves. Walkers and runners and kids with beach toys. On this mid-September day I could feel the change of seasons coming on. Just a liner of cool in the air that hadn’t been there a week ago.

The license plate number I’d taken down from Old Hawk’s CTS had led me to Lark, whose FBI database had swiftly revealed the registered owner of the car, and his history.

“Alfred Battle is the godfather of San Diego’s once formidable white supremacists,” said Lark. “Two years ago returned from Idaho. Even Hayden Lake was glad to be rid of him. He told the media here he was ‘returning to the land of the mud people’ to live permanently. ‘Mud people’ being blacks and Hispanics. He bought his old spread up in Escondido, where he held the Aryan rallies and conferences in the seventies and eighties. Hoping to recapture his glory days, like everyone else. He has informal rallies on Sunday mornings. Bills them as the ‘White Power Hour.’ Guest speakers, glossy propaganda, fruit punch and sandwiches. Late in the morning, though, so he’s not competing with church. I stopped by with a couple of other agents one Sunday and they were happy to escort us out. We’ve got nothing actionable on him. We’d love to shut him down, but it’s a free country. He’s got the city and fire permits, the porta-potties, plenty of parking. It’s a big compound. Views to the ocean, much too nice a place for him. Battle’s a hateful sonofabitch and it shows. A nasty dude in his day. Yet he’s never spent a night behind bars. What else do you want to know about him?”

“I’d like to know why he picked up a Halliburton case from Pastor Reggie Atlas last night,” I said. “For starters.”

A sharp-eyed question from Lark. “You’re sure it was Reggie Atlas?”

“I’m sure.”

“It tracks. If Battle worked for a college, you’d say he’s in development. He raises money. He lectures, gives these long, booming speeches. He writes propaganda blogs on Reddit and 4chan and any other Internet platform that will have him. Agitates. Riles people up. Big in Europe. He’s a modest trust-funder himself. His wife has the deep pockets, though — Marie. An heir to the Knippermeir family fortune — Knippermeir’s Breakfast Meats. She’s the nominal owner of most of Alfred Battle’s portfolio. Law-abiding, a generous donor, protected by money. Reclusive. There have been questions about her mental health, over the years.”

I thought that over for a moment. “You think we have a briefcase full of cash meant for the Cathedral by the Sea, but actually going to Alfred Battle’s haters?”

“They’ll take money anyplace they can get it,” said Lark. “They prefer Bitcoin, but church dollars spend well, too. Plus, the Cathedral by the Sea gets the big tax breaks, which drives our lawyers bats.”

“Is Battle on your watch list?”

Lark stopped, picked up a flat black oval rock, and skipped it over the incoming soup. I wanted to do that, too, but my rib shrieked at the thought. Mike gave me a long look.

“Probably,” he said. “There’s social buzz about the Cathedral by the Sea discriminating against blacks and browns. That catches our federal attention. Hate crimes give us certain, well, latitudes. Nothing actionable yet, like I said.”

“Atlas insulted Mexico in his Sunday sermon.”

“Why are you looking at him, Roland?”

I told him about runaway Daley Rideout, the murder of Nick Moreno, Daley’s link to Adam Revell of SNR Security, and my discussion with said security guards when I surprised them at Paradise Date Farm. Also about Penelope Rideout’s and Reggie Atlas’s sharply divergent stories regarding Daley’s nativity, and her most recent sighting at the Blue Marlin restaurant in La Jolla. Told him that I’d staked out Atlas’s house and Alfred Battle had come up in the net.

Mike mostly frowned at the sand as he walked and listened, but again, he studied me intently when I spoke of Reggie Atlas.

“So you really don’t know if the girl is being held against her will or not,” said Lark.

“She wasn’t at first, but now I’m not so sure,” I said. “She left for school that morning, came home at lunch with Moreno, changed clothes, packed, and went to Moreno’s condo. Followed by Connor Donald and Eric Glassen of SNR. She knew them. She and some of her girlfriends had accepted rides from them after school to an Oceanside teen club. More than once. She left the condo with them, after they’d killed Moreno. Left willingly, too — although she couldn’t have known what they’d done to him at that point. Later seen on the beach at San Onofre, possibly partying with friends. Who either scared her or pissed her off or both — no details. Maybe they said something about Nick. They took her phone. I think they were SNR handlers, based on a description from a surfer who talked to her — possibly Connor and Glassen, possibly not. She surfaced late that night in San Clemente, apparently trying to ditch them. She called her sister from a 7-Eleven in San Clemente to come get her. Or her mother. To be determined. Then left, possibly with the same SNR handlers she had gotten away from. Vanishes completely for days. Last seen at dinner with SNR people from Paradise Date Farm, at an expensive restaurant in La Jolla. She flips and flops, Mike. I don’t get her.”

“Drugs, fear, and hunger,” said Lark. “Throw in some expensive clothes and fancy restaurants and it will take the fight right out of her. Pimps ’R Us.”

“I don’t think these guys are sex traders,” I said. “They’re up to something else, but I don’t know what.”

We picked our way around a spit of boulders buffed to ovals by the centuries. A huge raven overtook us from behind, shadow first.

“Who do you believe?” Lark asked. “Penelope or Atlas?”

“Neither all the way,” I said.

“It’s a sad story, if what she says is true.”

“Oh, I think she’s telling mostly truth.”

He squinted to acknowledge the way I’d contradicted myself. “Then you’ll return Daley to her?”

“I believe so.”

“But she won’t allow a paternity test,” said Lark. “Which means you still won’t know who the mother or father are. That doesn’t sound like you, Roland, not getting to the truth. Good former lawman that you are.”

I knew he was right. And once again — for probably the thousandth time since that night in Penelope’s house, when she’d told me the story of the lovestruck girl and the lust-bitten preacher — I tried to weigh her story against Atlas’s.

“I’ll make sure to get a test,” I said.

“You can’t,” said Lark. “Only the court can order it.”

“I’ll find a way.”

Mike raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Unbelievable what some people will do. If Atlas did what she says, I mean.”

I had nothing to add.

“I wish Joan was here,” said Lark. “She’d have some choice words on Atlas. On human nature in general. Get into a lather over it. Then she’d say something critical of herself and make me laugh.”

I laughed softly, first time in a long time, knowing exactly what he meant. We continued north in a long silence, lost in separate remembrances. Taucher was a fierce cop. Devoted, indefatigable, principled, and resourceful. Haunted by an opportunity that her San Diego FBI had missed in the days before 9/11. That ghost seemed to swirl around her, and she made little effort to deny it. She told me once that she thought about the FBI’s having an informant living with two of the hijackers — but, thanks to CIA silence about these men, no knowledge that they had been linked to al-Qaeda — “every damned day of my life.” It showed on her face and in the way she spoke and in the ceaseless energy she brought to her work. She had loved her job and her city — she’d grown up here in San Diego — and the attacks on our republic had left Joan Taucher feeling like a mother whose children had been betrayed. She was ferocious and, somehow, I have come to believe, cursed. She left her dying blood on me. A lot of it. All I could do was try to talk her through the divide. But I had tried that in Fallujah and had already lost my faith in words.

Mike skipped another rock. Went three hops into the mouth of an oncoming wave. “This is what we do...”

“... and this is where we do it,” I said.

One of Joan’s favorite lines.

She made it sound comprehensive and sufficient. A simple reason for being. I’m not sure how it sounded from Mike and me. My mind is a looser thing. Private First Class Avalos died in a Fallujah doorway holding a small plastic cross in one hand. Titus Miller died pointing his wallet at me. My wife, Justine, told me once that she was not afraid of dying, but she was afraid of being forgotten. And I will not forget her. Nor the others. Taucher among them. This is what I do, in addition. Not forget. My private promise. Nonverifiably of use to anyone. Maybe Joan was expecting us to fill in the details. According to our own needs. How could she have not? If I’m not making sense, it’s because I sometimes can’t.

“SNR has four freezers full of wooden crates at Paradise Date Farm,” I said. “People coming and going all the time who have nothing to do with growing dates. They’re running a children’s school of some kind. Silver SNR vehicles everywhere. They beat me senseless just for being there and asking about the girl.”

“Slow down, Roland,” said Mike. “Start at the beginning. Crates in freezers? Crates of what?”

By the time we got back to my truck I’d told Lark almost everything I knew about Paradise Date Farm. I could see the concentration on his face as he tried to collate the strange intelligence.

“Can you feed that video live to me?” he asked.

“Can you give me what you have on Atlas?”

“FBI property is...”

“And call me immediately if Daley Rideout pops onto your radar?”

Mike frowned, following a squad of pelicans as they V-ed through the sky. “Joan said you always tried to get more than you gave.”

“I’m a sole proprietor.”

Lark considered me for a beat, then nodded. “Deal.”

“Thank you. I miss her.”

Lark inhaled deeply, looked toward the diminishing pelicans, then to me. Again, that moment we’d shared once before, at Joan Taucher’s funeral. He didn’t have to say the words for me to hear them: You were with her and I wasn’t and she didn’t make it but you did.

“I do, too, Roland,” he said. “I hope you find the girl. And I hope you get some payback from those guys who dinged you up like this.”

Nodded and smiled my anguishing little stitch-lipped smile. “Me too,” I said.

I sat in my truck and checked messages. Watched Lark pick his way out of the crowded parking lot in his assigned Bureau take-home, an unmarked white Chrysler with a not-quite-hidden light package built into the roof. Younger agents get the hand-me-downs. He stopped for a family of four scuttling from the lot toward the sand, bristling with beach chairs, towels, and toys.

Then a buzz of phone, and Penelope Rideout’s name on the screen.

“I found something of Daley’s that might help us,” she said. “When can you be here?”