The President's Killers (8 page)

TWENTY-NINE

Less than an hour after Agent-in-Charge Jim Moran arrived on Old Church Road where the white Hyundai was recovered, an FBI van pulled up and Edwin A. Bambrick stepped out.

Moran took a deep breath and braced himself.

Bambrick was a legendary figure, the most feared man in the Bureau. His title was Special Assistant to FBI Director Geisler, a position he had held under each of Geisler’s two predecessors as well. He had come out of the Bureau’s dreaded Inspection Division, the unit charged with investigating misconduct by agents.

His specialty was handling the director’s dirty work. He shut down programs that no longer appealed to the director. He shoved aside individuals of rank who’d fallen out of favor. He got rid of balky agents and marginal performers.

Bambrick had been dispatched to St. Louis in a Justice Department plane. It was already circling Lambert-St. Louis field when Moran got word the suspect’s car had been found. The agent who met the plane drove Bambrick directly to Old Church Road.

When he arrived, Old Church Road was swarming with federal agents and uniformed state troopers. Some knocked at the doors of homes. Others searched backyards and garages, peeking under parked cars and trailer homes. A phalanx of troopers moved slowly across an open field.

From the moment Moran greeted him, Bambrick was unhappy. He didn’t like the fact some agents were still in the suits they wore in the office instead of the military-style gear they should be wearing to track down an armed assassin hiding in rugged woods. He didn’t like the fact there were no canine teams at the site. And he didn’t like the rain clouds hanging over the area.

The sky looked as though it was ready to open up at any moment and swamp the entire search effort.

“Is there some fancy dinner out here tonight I don’t know about, Moran?” he demanded, his fierce dark eyes magnified by the huge glasses.

“Sir?”

Bambrick nodded towards two agents in street clothes.

“We just got the word on the suspect’s car,” Moran said. We haven’t had time to get fully organized yet.”

“A couple of dogs would be helpful trying to find a man in these woods,” Bambrick said. “If I’d known the state of Missouri was all out of dogs, I’d have brought a couple along with me.”

“We’ve got six teams coming. They’re on the way.”

“Well, they’re not going to do much good if they’re standing in water up to their asses.”

Doing his best to hold his tongue, Moran led Bambrick around the area. When they found Captain Woodson, the St. Louis County Police Department’s ranking man, squatting beside the suspect’s Hyundai, Bambrick barely acknowledged him.

“The Highway Patrol got a couple of calls on the car,” Moran explained. “Some kids spotted the suspect driving along Old Church Road, and one of the neighbors saw him dump the vehicle.”

As they walked away, Bambrick peppered Moran with questions.

Did the county cops know what the hell they were doing or were they a bunch of bumpkins? How many agents did Moran have at the site? How many would be here by tomorrow morning? How would they be deployed? Was there any evidence anybody else was involved, or was the suspect a lone nut with a gun who wanted to get on TV?

In no position to answer most of the questions, Moran found himself stammering, embarrassed at his inability to provide quick and precise responses. But he knew Bambrick’s specialty was making agents feel stupid.

“Have you got the area sealed?”

“We’ve got several roadblocks in place. We’re still working on that. It’s a big area.”

“How many square miles?”

“A dozen maybe. I’m not sure.”

Bambrick snorted. “Roads on all sides?”

“I think so.”

“Think so?” The huge dark eyes stared at him in disbelief.

“I just got here myself,” Moran replied hotly. “We don’t have all the facts yet.”

Bambrick glared at him. “The facts are a good place to start, Moran. You get this goddamn search organized. And quick.”

As he stalked away, the downpour began.

In Washington, Warren Crittenden looked up from the memo he was reading at his desk. He could hear Susan’s voice outside his office. She was on the phone with Groark.

“Oh,” she said, “isn’t it terrible! Everybody feels so bad… Just a minute, I’ll put you through.”

Crittenden grabbed his phone. “Everybody’s in a state of shock here.”

“I’ll bet,” Groark said.

“It’s a tragedy. Colin Patrick was one-of-a-kind.”

“He sure as hell was.”

“We’ll talk about it when you get back to Washington. Listen, on that other business, are things still up in the air?”

There was a pause. “Afraid so. Our backup system didn’t work.”

“I hope it’s something you can work out. Before everybody else gets into the act.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

THIRTY

In the fading light, Denny studied the run-down cabin less than a hundred feet from a creek. Could somebody be inside it?

A battered gutter dangled against the front wall. One window was covered by a bed sheet, another by yellowed newspapers. The place looked as though it hadn’t been used in years.

He squatted beneath the dripping bushes, ignoring the rain. Beads of water clustered in his eyebrows and at the corners of his eyes. The hair on top of his head was matted, completely soaked. But the rain no longer mattered. He couldn’t possibly get any wetter.

He was exhausted and hungry. Seeing no sign of life in the cabin, he dashed from the edge of the woods to a small pine near a corner of the building.

In the small clearing in front of the cabin was a pile of rubble. It looked as if someone had cleaned out the place and simply abandoned what they didn’t want in the middle of a crude dirt road.

There was a broken chair, an old broom, a gasoline can, a yellow plastic pail, a rusty saw, a broken mirror, a battered table lamp, a kitchen drawer.

The door of the building was unlocked. He eased it open. Inside was a large, empty room that looked as though it had been stripped clean by thieves.

Near the entrance was a sink. Cabinets hung on one wall. There was a bare wooden table, two folding chairs, a bed frame without a mattress, two cardboard boxes.

As dark and squalid as the place was, at least it was dry. Famished, he searched for food, checking the cabinets and turning over the cardboard boxes. One was empty, the other filled with rags and newspapers. A tiny, black mouse darted from the second box, scurried along the wall, and disappeared into the corner.

In a drawer beside the sink he found two small jars of baby food. One was applesauce, the other plum. He sniffed the contents. With his fingers, he spooned the moist strained fruit into his mouth. It tasted wonderful.

He went outside into the rain and rooted through the rubble in front of the cabin. The kitchen drawer contained an old paint brush, scraps of sandpaper, tubes of glue and sealants, a small jar of nails and screws. At the bottom of the jar was a single-edged razor blade.

There was water in the yellow pail. He brought the water, razor blade, and broken mirror into the cabin and peeled off his clothes. Everything was soaked. Even his socks and jockey shorts

The air was still warm, and getting the wet clothing off his body felt good.

He checked his wallet. He had taken plenty of cash along because Lott didn’t want him to use credit cards, pre-paid cash cards, or anything that required proof of his identity. The outer bills in the wallet were damp, but the rest were fine.

Scanning the skies from the doorway, he wondered if the police, state troopers, and federal agents had any idea where he was.

He squatted with the mirror and razor blade in the dim light. Slowly, gingerly, he cut and scrapped away his mustache and stubble beard. Getting rid of the mustache was especially difficult. It felt as though he were yanking the hairs out. The pain made his eyes water.

When he finished, his skin was raw. The face in the mirror looked odd to him. It had been almost two years since he’d seen himself clean-shaven.

An hour later, it was too dark to see anything in the mirror. The rain began to let up. By nine, it stopped. Ten minutes later, he heard the familiar sound.

Tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa.

He froze. He tugged on his wet pants and slipped out the doorway. In the black sky were three choppers, each shining a beam of light down into the woods. Two were far off to his right, the direction from which he had come. The third one was much closer.

They knew he was in the woods.

THIRTY-ONE

The microphones from the TV and radio networks poked up in front of Jim Moran’s chin like the branches of a thick bush.

Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, the FBI agent-in-charge looked out at the sea of skeptical faces in the school gymnasium where he and the Highway Patrol had set up their command post.

Despite the late hour, there were nearly eighty people — reporters and TV crews and photographers of every stripe, from all over the country — hanging on his every word.

“Is it true,” the striking blond TV correspondent asked, “there was some shooting over by the Interstate?”

“Somebody heard a noise on his front porch,” Moran said. “A farmer. He got a little excited and blew away his living room window.”

“Anything to it?”

“We don’t think so.”

“We heard you made an arrest,” a newspaperman with wire-rim glasses said. “Some guy in a pickup truck.”

“No, there haven’t been any arrests. The young man you’re talking about had a rifle in the pickup with him. He’d heard all the reports about the suspect being in this area, and he was a little nervous. So he had the weapon with him. And he has a goatee, so some of our people thought he might be the suspect. They brought him in for questioning, but he’s been released.”

“We’ve heard rumors the suspect was seen at a Shoney’s along the highway. Anything to that?”

Moran smiled. “We’ve had a lot of calls,” he said. “People who’ve heard suspicious noises, or seen someone crossing a road or looking into a window. That sort of thing. We’re checking out all of these reports. So far there’s no evidence the suspect was involved in any of these cases.”

The next question came from Garnett, one of the hot shot TV correspondents from New York, the only journalist Moran really disliked. No bigger than a racehorse jockey, he had a deep, booming voice and clearly loved the sound of it.

“What makes you so positive the shooter is still in the woods? Someone could have picked him up, and he could be halfway to Mexico by now, couldn’t he?”

The FBI and local police departments were checking out reported sightings from as far away as Dallas and Los Angeles, but Moran didn’t want to get into that. None of those reports were credible. They were the sort of nuisance calls that highly publicized cases always provoked.

“Anything is possible at this point,” Moran said. “The only thing we know for certain is the suspect was here. Along these woods, just three blocks from here. We have roadblocks on all the roads bordering the woods, and we’ve been checking people’s ID’s, inspecting every vehicle, controlling movement in and out of that area. We have no reason to believe he’s gotten past us.”

“On the other hand,” Garnett responded, “he could be sitting in someone’s house right now, or in a motel room somewhere, watching all this on TV, true?”

Moran shrugged. “Anything is possible at this point.”

County Police Captain Donaldson stepped forward.

“There are houses and farms scattered all over this area. Including dozens of places that have been abandoned. There’s house trailers, there’s camper trucks, there’s old abandoned cars — you name it. He could be hiding in any one of those places.”

Moran felt the news conference was going as well as could be expected. He glanced at Bambrick, standing unobtrusively against the brick wall, his face expressionless. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

Bambrick was letting Moran run the show. Whatever his faults, he never sought attention for himself. None of the reporters knew he was an HBO, or High Bureau Official, as the agents called him. His willingness to stay out of the limelight was one reason he’d survived so long at the top of the agency.

“What’s the next step,” asked a plain-faced woman with one of the small Missouri papers. “What are you going to be doing in the morning?”

“We’re going to check every home and business around here,” Moran said. “We want to make sure everybody is all right. We want to find out if they’ve seen or heard anything. We had aerial photographs taken this afternoon, before the rain wiped us out, and we’ve divided the entire area into grids. We’ll have the dogs out there as soon as its light — they weren’t much use today — and we’re going to start searching those grids, one by one.”

“We’re sure our man is in those woods,” Capt. Donaldson added. “He’s somewhere within a ten-mile radius of where we’re standing right now, and we’re going to find him.”

THIRTY-TWO

He had no choice. He had to get out of the woods.

If he stayed where he was, he would be forced to take greater and greater risks to find water and food. It would be just a matter of time until they caught him.

As soon as it was light enough to see, Denny set out. He stayed in the woods but kept within sight of the narrow dirt road. In the dim light, the oaks and hickories were a blurred mixture of gray and brown. It would be an hour or so before the sun came up.

His damp shirt and khakis clung to him. He was chilly, but he couldn’t afford to wait for his clothes to dry. This was the best time to travel. He could see where he was going and was much less likely to be seen by others now than in an hour or two.

If he could slip through the dragnet while people were still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, he might have a chance. With any luck, he might find a car or truck he could steal. Or he might stumble upon railroad tracks somewhere and be able to hop a freight train.

The dirt road brought him to a narrow blacktop road that appeared to run east and west. Beyond it were open fields. The road looked like one of those he had driven along when the two teenagers were hounding him.

He picked his way through the woods. Ahead of him, the sky was already growing lighter. Before long, the birds would begin to chirp. The road swung in a broad curve. Beyond the curve, on the other side of the curve, there was a white clapboard house, with a garage behind it.

He crept closer, wondering whether anyone was in the house.

A dog began to bark.

Suddenly, a huge black Labrador shot onto the driveway, charging toward him.

When it got to the end of the driveway, it stopped.

It stood there, staring and barking at the spot where he was hiding.

In the house, no lights flicked on. He could see no movement.

Slowly, Denny backed away, retreating deeper and deeper into the woods. Then he moved in a wide arc until he was well past the house. When he no longer heard the dog, he started back towards the road.

A mile or so farther, he saw a house under construction on a grassy ridge a few hundred feet off the road. The foundation had been laid and the skeletal frame erected.

It was still only five-ten, and there was no sign of life. He moved closer and saw a pickup, an old gray Toyota, parked beside a pile of lumber and a wheelbarrow.

He crept up to the building. There was a red water pump in the yard. On the ground beneath the wheelbarrow was a toolbox. He opened it. Inside were pliers, a screwdriver, a hammer.

His father had known everything there was to know about cars and trucks. From their earliest years Denny and his brother Rob had heard about engines and transmissions and brake systems. And they heard about the tricks people used to steal cars.

In the cab of the pickup, there was a crumpled denim shirt on the seat and a soiled red Cardinals baseball cap on the floor.

With the screwdriver, he pried the chrome knob off the steering column, broke an armor washer, and chipped it out. He slammed and yanked the ignition cylinder until he could remove it, then manipulated the actuating rod with the tip of the screwdriver.

Nothing happened. Damn! He examined the rod, fiddled with it, and tried again. The engine sprang to life.