Threat warning

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ryan didn’t just hide in the trees, he hid way back in the trees, far enough off the road that he was completely invisible. With all the leaves missing, that meant twenty or thirty yards off the parking lot.

Now that he wasn’t moving, the nighttime noises seemed louder to him, but because his ordeal was about to end, they seemed less frightening. Fear, he realized, had the same effect on you as heavy exercise. It was exhausting. Hope-which he guessed was the right word for the opposite of fear-brought lightness. It felt good to rescue someone you loved.

He was surprised how quickly the police car got there. The guy must have either been around the corner or driven a million miles an hour. Ryan saw him first as approaching headlights. It could have been anyone, and that twisty feeling returned to his gut. But when the blue light bar painted the night, he nearly cheered out loud.

He started to run out of his hiding place, but just as he was rising, he thought better of it. This was a time to be very, very careful.

Let’s see what the cop does.

After the light bar came on, and the vehicle stopped, Ryan saw the interior light come on, and then a guy in regular clothes stepped out of the driver’s door and stood. It was hard to tell at this distance, but he looked big as he stepped around the front of the vehicle, shielding his eyes from his own lights. When the lights were behind him-when he was looking in Ryan’s general direction-he stopped and planted his fists on his hips, like the Jolly Green Giant in a suit.

“Ryan Nasbe?” he whisper-yelled. “Are you here?”

That was it. The man knew his name and he drove a police car. That was all Ryan needed. He rose to his full height and held up his hand, as if being called on in class. “Right here,” he said. He spoke in his normal voice, but in the silence of the night, it sounded more like a shout.

The cop’s gaze came closer, but he still didn’t see. “You can come out now, son.”

Noise didn’t matter anymore. Ryan allowed his feet to drag through the dried leaves, and he didn’t cringe a bit when his foot broke a stick. It was difficult to fight the desire to run, but he worried that it would look, you know, too babyish.

“Are you Ryan?” the cop asked. He spoke in regular tones, too, and absent the whisper, his voice sounded like one that should do movie trailers. It had that deep, gravelly quality.

“Yes, sir.” He kept his stride even as he walked a direct line toward the man.

“Well, you are a man of your word, Mr. Ryan Nasbe,” the cop said. “You said you were going to be in the woods, and you are, by God, in the woods.” He leaned on those last words, and then laughed as if he’d told himself a joke.

As Ryan closed to within a few yards, the cop raised his hand, and a bright flashlight beam nailed him in the eyes. He recoiled and raised his hands as shields. “Jesus, Mister.”

The light shifted down a little. Concentrating more on his chest than his face. “Sorry about that. I just wanted to see what you look like.” He held out a friendly hand. “Kendig Neen,” he said. “I’m the sheriff of Maddox County.”

Ryan hesitated, though he didn’t know why. His warning radar had picked up something that wasn’t right. “How come you’re not in a uniform?” he asked.

He laughed again. “You’re lucky I’m not in pajamas,” he said. “You know what time it is? Cops have to sleep, too, you know. I got the call, and these were the best duds I could find. That okay with you?”

Ryan found himself nodding without really intending to. “Sure,” he said. He accepted the handshake.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Everything about Sheriff Neen was big, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that his handshake hurt. It just went on a little too long. “You’ve got to be freezing. Let’s get in the car and have a chat.”

“We need to get my mom,” Ryan said. “She’s in a basement just down this road.” He dislodged his hand from the sheriff’s grip so he could point with it.

“Yet another reason to get in the car,” the sheriff said.

Venice rested the phone on its cradle. “Well, there you go,” she said. “No such call ever happened.”

Jonathan wished he was surprised, but he’d been listening to her end of the conversation. “That’s it? Just didn’t happen?”

“Exactly. You heard me on the phone with her. I had to soft-pedal a little around the whole illegal eavesdropping thing, but I asked her about a missing-person report, and she said that they’d received no such report. Those were her words, actually. ‘We’ve received no such report.’”

Jonathan scowled. “Theories?”

“How sure are you that it’s the right Maddox County?” Gail asked. “Are there any others within a reasonable drive of Alexandria?”

It took Venice ten seconds and a few keystrokes to do the Google search. “No other Maddox County in the whole U.S. of A,” she proclaimed.

“And we’re all sure we heard the operator answer, ‘Maddox County,’ right?” Jonathan asked.

They both nodded, and Venice added, “I’ll go so far as to say I think I just talked to the same lady that Ryan did.” She checked her notes. “Her name is Phelps.” She tapped her keyboard again, but this time it appeared to be a more complicated challenge, eating up the better part of a whole minute. “Stacy Phelps,” Venice announced. “Average grades in high school, no college. She-”

Beyond the glass windows of the War Room, the door to the cave burst open and Boxers strode into the outer office. He wore a long black topcoat over a black turtleneck with a black watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows. No one said anything until he rounded the corner and stormed into the War Room.

“God damn, this had better be good,” he said.

“What’s with the outfit?” Jonathan teased. “We interrupt you in the middle of a burglary?”

Gail and Venice both chuckled.

“Snigger away,” Boxers said. He peeled off the overcoat and revealed a tailored black suit. He looked very Hollywood-or at least like the man who ate Hollywood. “I was on a date.”

The words hung in the air like a cloud.

“What are those looks?” Boxers asked, noting their expressions of

… shock? “I go on dates just like everyone else.”

Jonathan let it go. “We intercepted a call from the Nasbe boy,” he explained. It took a few minutes to catch him up on the essentials. “Venice was about to give us details on the dispatcher who took the call.”

With that, the floor returned to Venice. She squinted as she read from her computer screen, scrolling and clicking with the mouse as she summarized. “Stacy Phelps attended John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Maddox County, followed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Intermediate School and then graduated seven years ago from Maddox County High School.”

She paused as she clicked and typed and switched to a new database. “Looks like she worked at McDonald’s for a couple of years. No, wait, that was in high school. Right, and then six months after high school she started work for the sheriff’s department at eight twenty-five an hour. She started as an assistant clerk, then progressed to clerk, and then senior clerk.”

Jonathan smiled as Venice clicked through to another page. This was Venice self-actualized. She loved nothing more than tickling restricted databases and then showing off by spouting ridiculous levels of detail. He’d let her run for a little longer, but if she didn’t get on point soon, he was going to have to interrupt.

She continued, “Three years ago, she was promoted to dispatcher, at which she’s making fifteen thirty-eight an hour.” Venice looked up. “Pretty good career track in just a couple of years.”

“Are you going to get to anything useful?” Boxers asked. His bullshit tolerance was considerably smaller than Jonathan’s, and given the circumstances, his reservoir was about empty. “Tonight, I mean. You know, within the next hour or two.”

Venice pretended not to hear. “She has a completely clean criminal record. Not even a moving violation, which is actually kind of creepy.” An otherwise law-abiding, straight-shooting model citizen, Venice Alexander was by anyone’s estimation, a speed demon. Wrapped in Glow Bird-the name she’d given to her butt-ugly blaze-orange Miata-her right foot turned to solid lead when she got on the road.

After a few more taps, Venice continued her monologue. “She lives in the Nathan Bedford Forrest Mobile Home Park, where she pays…”

Jonathan knew to wait for it.

“… three twenty-five a month in rent.”

“That’s all?” Gail gasped.

“We’re talking rural West Virginia,” Venice said.

“But I come from rural Indiana, and-”

“You ever been to rural West Virginia?” Boxers asked with a smirk. “There is no rural like rural West Virginia.” To Venice: “We’re talking coal country?”

She nodded. Then scowled. “Only coal is not the big industry there.” She used her finger to follow the words on the screen, the way other people might read a newspaper. “Apparently, the mines in Maddox County are pretty much played out. The big corporate taxpayer there now is Appalachian Acoustics. They make acoustic shells, those things that go up behind orchestras and choruses to direct the sound out to the audience.”

Boxers looked to Jonathan. “Are you seeing the relevance to any of this?”

“Intel is intel, Box. It’s like ammunition-I’ve never wished that I had less.”

The look Venice gave to the Big Guy would have been more complete if she’d stuck out her tongue, but she restrained herself. “They employ nearly two hundred workers in a factory there that makes…” She strained to read further on the page. “Wow. A hundred million a year.”

Jonathan’s jaw dropped. “On acoustic shells? A product I’d never heard of until right now?”

“Despite your love of concert halls,” Gail joked.

“They’re a big company,” Venice said, reading on. “International, in fact, with exports to just about everywhere. And they supply to the federal government. Their brochure says even the White House uses their products.”

“I’m a little lost myself,” Gail confessed. “Why is all this demographic data important to us?”

Venice started to answer, then deferred to her boss. “Go ahead,” she said. “You tell her.”

“Leverage,” Jonathan explained. “We don’t get to play with warrants and court orders, so we need to be persuasive in other ways. The more we know about the community, the more we can strategize about leverage.”

“Who are we leveraging?” Gail asked.

“Whoever we need to. We know for a fact that the Nasbe family has been taken to someplace called Maddox County, West Virginia, and we know that a call for help is being covered up. I think that Ms. Stacy

…” He looked to Venice.

“Phelps,” she prompted.

“I think that Stacy Phelps is a good place to start. Why would a law-abiding public servant pretend that a call never happened?”

Gail’s eyes narrowed. “And we’re going to extract that information from her through leverage ”-she used finger-quotes-“without any legal authority to do so.”

Jonathan shrugged. “That’s as good a summary as any.”

“That means blackmail?” she asked.

“Persuasion,” Jonathan countered. “Whatever it takes.”

She didn’t like it. “I thought we made it a point not to tangle with domestic law-enforcement agencies. I thought you thought that was the ultimate recipe for disaster.”

“I still feel that way. Up to but excluding the point where the law enforcers become a part of the problem. Besides, Stacy Phelps isn’t a cop. She’s a dispatcher.”

“Who works for cops,” Gail said. “You really think that we can mess with one without messing with the other?”

Boxers asked, “Maybe her bosses have no idea what she’s doing. If that were the case, then we’d be doing the Maddox County Sheriff’s Department a favor by ferreting out someone who’s covering up a crime.”

“Then let’s call the sheriff’s office and tell them what we know. Why not let them handle it?”

“First, there’s the source of our information,” Jonathan said. “That’s one hundred percent off the table.”

“And then there’s the fact that the sheriff’s office might be in on it,” Venice added.

Jonathan was impressed. Venice rarely weighed in on conspiracy theories.

She saw it in his expression. “Don’t give me that look. I’m not as Pollyanna as you think I am.”

Jonathan and Boxers laughed. “Oh, yes, you are,” they said in unison, making them laugh again.

Venice’s eyes returned to her screen, and her brow furrowed. One day, Jonathan figured that practicality would trump vanity and she’d get some glasses. Such words would never pass his lips, however.

“Now this is interesting,” Venice said. “I did a data search on the Nathan Bedford Forrest Mobile Home Park. That is one tough neighborhood. They could have their own police substation for all the calls that run out there.”

“Can I go home?” Boxers said. “If we’re going to chat, I’ve got other stuff to do. If we’re going to go to Maddox County and kick some ass, I’ll stay.”

Jonathan asked Venice, “How far is this place?”

She tapped. “As the crow flies, three hundred twenty miles. Throw in the mountain roads, and I’d guess an eight-or nine-hour drive.”

As he’d figured. “Too far to drive. Take too long. Box, find us a way to get in by air, and do all the planning you need to make that happen. Make sure you work with Venice to make any arrangements we need for landing zones and such.

“Ven, keep researching the area. If it looks interesting or relevant, make a note of it, and send it all to me electronically. It’ll give me something to read on the flight. Also, I need you to get us some wheels. Usual methods. Find us a place to set up a CP, too.” He knew that she would understand the abbreviation for command post.

Jonathan looked at Gail. “You come with me to the armory and we’ll load up the Batmobile.”

“What are we bringing?” Boxers asked, clearly annoyed that he wasn’t involved in the arms selection.

“A little bit of everything,” Jonathan said. “I have no idea what we’re looking at on the far side of this thing. I’ll plan for the worst.”

“How big a ‘worst’ are you talking about?”

Jonathan’s shoulders sagged. “Would you like me to let you see it before we load it up?”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Boxers said. “You know, since I’m the one who’s likely to be carrying it all.”

“Plan for a heavy load.”

“I’ll get us a chopper with horsepower to spare.” Boxers knew as much about mission planning as any five logisticians in the business.

Jonathan checked his watch. “I show that it’s zero-three-twenty-five. I want to be airborne by oh-six-hundred. Everybody good with that?”

He asked it as if there were a choice.