Vineyard Prey (12 page)

Either this concept was murky or my brain was. Maybe both. I skimmed on down through pages of governmentese before giving up and calling it quits. Someone once said that one requirement of research was a love of drudgery. My talent in the field was obviously thin.

One thing was clear, though: the Homeland Security Department was a gigantic bureaucracy at least the equal in size and power of the incredibly huge CI. No wonder people who perceived themselves as humanists and defenders of civil liberties and open government were getting nervous. But then, such people have always been nervous Nellies, according to their critics.

Come back, Cassandra! I'll believe you this time in spite of the gods!

But neither Cassandra nor Maat appeared, so I got off the Net and phoned Joe Begay.

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“Something's happened that might interest you,” I said when he answered his cell phone. “I'm coming over.”

I hung up before he could say no, got into the Land Cruiser, and drove to Aquinnah. Two trips in one day. I seemed to be spending a lot of time there lately. The woods were mostly bare-branched trees, and the few leaves that remained on them and covered the ground beneath them were the color of metal: gold, copper, bronze, and rusted iron. The sky looked cold.

No one seemed to be following me but, just in case I was wrong, when I got to Aquinnah I took Lobsterville Road, then cut right onto Lighthouse Road and pulled over to the side. Nobody came around the corner behind me, so I went on to Uncle Bill's house.

Uncle Bill's old Ford was in the yard, but Kate's rental car was not. Whither Kate? I wondered.

I knocked on the door. No one opened it. I knocked louder, and allowed myself the beginning of a worry.

“Don't beat the door down,” said Joe's voice from behind me. “It's not locked.”

I turned and saw him coming out of the woods from the direction of his own house, which was about a half mile away at the northern edge of the clay cliffs that had given Gay Head its name. He was wearing camouflage hunting clothes and carrying a shotgun. The best possible cover during hunting season.

He poked a thumb over his shoulder. “I got your call while I was in the woods. Come on inside.” He glanced at the two vehicles in the yard, frowned briefly, and led me into the house. “You see Kate?” he asked.

“No. Not since this morning, here with you.”

“She said she was going to stay here.”

“Women don't always do what they say.”

“Neither do men.” He put his shotgun in a closet. “You cut off your call pretty fast.”

“I didn't want to spend much time on the line.”

He arched a brow. “You think somebody's tapping your phone?”

“I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody was trying to trace you through yours. I don't know how they do it, but I know it can be done.”

He nodded. “It can be done, but nobody has bugged this room yet, so tell me about this something that brings you up here into Indian country.”

I told him about Samuel Arbuckle's demise in my driveway and my conversations with Dom Agganis. “I didn't mention you or Kate,” I said, “because I wanted you to know about what happened first.”

He looked thoughtful. “Dom is going to be pretty pissed off when he finds out.”

“Maybe he won't find out.”

“Oh, he'll find out, all right. He's bound to have called Washington about Arbuckle, and DIA agents are probably already on their way. One of their own is dead and they'll want to talk with you about it and with Dom, too. There'll be a lot of narrow eyes and sniffing noses, and it'll be hard to keep anything from them.”

“I'll tell them what I told Dom. No more, no less. The only other people who know about Arbuckle following Kate are you and her. If either of you decides to talk about that, I'll suddenly remember it, too. What are they going to do? Throw me in jail?”

“That's exactly what they'll try to do. Obstruction of justice, lying to the police, Homeland Security, and all like that.”

It wasn't a pleasant prospect. “Did you know Samuel Arbuckle?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don't know the name. You sure of those last words of his?”

“I'm sure. Did you ever hear Kate mention Arbuckle?”

“No, but it's no secret that she has an active social life with a lot of men in it.”

“But she said she didn't recognize him when she was in Vineyard Haven.”

“She also said she really didn't get a good look at him.”

“Yeah, but I can't imagine her not recognizing him if he was a boyfriend. Do you suppose she might have been lying?”

“It's possible. What do you think?”

“I thought she was being straight, but I'm not hard to fool.”

Begay went to the stove and tapped a finger on the coffeemaker. “Still warm. She hasn't been gone long. Kate is a beautiful woman and she lives in a town where a lot of people know each other.”

There was something elusive about him. “Arbuckle was married,” I said. “I saw a photo in his wallet. He had a pretty wife and two kids.”

“A lot of married guys chase the girls, so that means nothing.” Joe got two cups from a cabinet. “What means something is what he said to you: ‘Not the Bunny. Tailgate.' He had to be talking about the Easter Bunny. Anything else would be too coincidental. What was he trying to tell you? That it wasn't the Bunny who shot him? And what's that got to do with a tailgate?”

“That it wasn't the Bunny, whatever that means. Is Tailgate a code name or the name of a place? A bar, maybe? He thought the name was important because he used his last breath to say so.”

Joe poured coffee and handed me a cup. “I never heard of Tailgate. Why did he come to your house to die? Why you?”

It was a popular question and I gave him the answer I'd given Dom Agganis: that it was either coincidental or because he knew who I was and decided to trust me.

“Why would he trust you, of all people?”

“I told Dom I didn't know, and I don't. But if I was to guess, I'd say that Arbuckle probably checked me out after he got my license plate. If he did, he
knew where I lived and he knew I wasn't in the spook business and that I was basically pretty uninteresting except for the fact that I seemed to know Kate. If he was watching when I checked for a tail on her car as she drove out of town, he might have decided that I was a friend of hers and maybe even knew something about her work. Maybe that made me trustworthy in his mind. When he got shot, he didn't have much time to decide what to do, so he may have just taken the best chance he had.”

“Any idea why he was following Kate?”

“You tell me. You're in the spook business.”

He let that go by without comment, and again I sensed elusiveness in him. He sipped his coffee and looked out the window.

“If Kate was here, maybe she could tell us,” he said at last. Then he allowed himself a quick bit of temper. “Where the hell is she?” As quickly as it had come, the anger was gone. “If it isn't the Bunny, who is it?”

I had been thinking about that, but not too clearly. “Did the three other people on the trade mission, the three dead ones, have enemies other than the Easter Bunny?”

Joe's expression didn't change. “Everybody has enemies.”

“I mean enemies mad enough to kill them.”

“There are probably people abroad who didn't shed any tears when they learned they were dead.”

“Who knew about the membership of the trade mission?”

Joe shook his head. “You won't get any names from me, but you can guess that a lot of thought and planning
went into the job and that a good many people were involved. All of them knew something about it. The Boss and his top people knew everything.”

“How about his secretary?”

“He'd know. And so would a few other people with top clearance. Not too many, though, because they'd want to maintain plausible deniability in case something went wrong.”

“You mean that if things got screwed up, you five mission people were on your own?”

“That's how it works. State would try to help us out because we're American citizens, but they wouldn't necessarily know why we were over there.”

“None of you had official government jobs that could be traced?”

He stared at me, then shrugged. “I'm in the private sector. I haven't worked for the government since I retired from the army twenty years ago.”

“But the trade mission, at least the part having to do with the Easter Bunny and his friends, had to be a government job. You worked for a guy you call the Boss. You did contract work for Washington.”

“I don't remember ever saying that, and I don't think anyone will find any paperwork that says it. You'll be better off leaving this alone.”

“So I'll have deniability, too?”

“Something like that. The less you know about this sort of thing the less dangerous you are to certain people. It's not a good thing to have those people thinking about you.”

I felt my hands forming fists. “You must mean some people here in America. No foreign terrorist
would mind if I spilled the beans about any of this business. Are you telling me that there are American agents willing to assassinate other Americans who might know things they shouldn't know?”

His wide face revealed no emotion. “If there are such people, I don't know of them, and I think I'd have heard. I know there are conspiracy buffs who believe there are secret government assassination groups working out of Washington, but I've never heard of any policy authorizing such activities. It's possible that some rogue agent might do something like that on his own, but if he did he'd be treated like any other murderer. Still, it's better if you're not inside the circle of people who interests the authorities.”

That was probably true. Even in small towns it's better not to be “known to the police,” as most local perps are. Once you're known, you get watched. I willed my fists back into hands.

“What I'm wondering,” I said, “is whether somebody besides the Bunny may be in action here, and what that person or those people are up to.”

Joe's stony lips flickered through a brief smile. “I've wondered about that myself, and so have some other people, in Washington. You don't look surprised.”

“I'm not,” I said. “I haven't had very many original ideas during my life. Most of my best ones turn out to have been written down by some Greek or Roman several thousand years ago. What does Kate think?”

His smile was gone. “We could ask her if she was here.”

But Kate wasn't there, and we didn't know where she was or why.

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