Ranya Bardiwell had made the 150-mile ride from Charlottesville to Suffolk at least forty times during her three years at the University of Virginia. Saturday morning, after her first full week back at school, she had returned from a three-mile run up Observatory Hill to have a phone thrust into her hands by her frantic roommate, with a number to call immediately. Upon calling she had been connected to a Suffolk police sergeant who informed her that there had been a fire at her house, and she needed to come home as soon as possible.
Why were the police calling about a fire? Could she speak to her father? “Not right now, just come home as soon as possible.”
Without changing out of her running clothes, she threw on jeans and her jean jacket and boots, tossed her purse and a few items into a daypack, pulled on her helmet and in minutes she was screaming down I-64 on her Yamaha YZF 600. On her many trips between school and home she had found the hidden locations of every radar trap that the state police had ever dreamed of, but today she didn’t even bother looking. The angels were riding with her and she made the 150 miles in less than 80 minutes. The road was wide open and where it wasn’t she slalomed around cars as if they were parked, sometimes splitting lanes between pairs of shocked drivers like a streak, rarely dropping below one hundred miles per hour.
On her last half mile, Ranya cut through the Union 76 to shave the corner and shot down 32, downshifting rapidly in succession as she saw the fire truck and all the police cars on the parking lot and along the road next to her family business. There had been a fire all right, the walls of the store were scorched black, and the Freedom Arms sign was barely visible under the soot and charred paint. As she drew nearer and cleared the last stand of pines, she looked across to her house, but it was gone!
She braked to a hard stop by the side of the road a hundred yards away to survey the unbelievable scene: the store was burned and her house was gone. On the lawn between where the house had stood and the store a cluster of men were huddled over a black lump on the ground, and a darker awareness took hold. Ranya kicked her bike into gear and shot around the outside of the wire property line fence, just inside the trees to the open back vehicle gate, and almost dumped the bike as she spun through the turn. She dropped the bike with the engine still running and threw off her helmet as the huddled men scattered before her, and she saw him.
It couldn’t be him, it mustn’t be him, but… She fell to her knees and then onto her face, her eyes shut against upwelling tears, her wet face in the burnt grass next to the charred body of her father. She had only looked closely for a moment, her father’s corpse had almost no face, little of his head at all, just burned teeth and bones, but she had seen the silver cross he had worn around his neck and she was certain.
The Suffolk policemen who had been so surprised by her motorcycle charge reacted quickly, covering the body with a blanket. An older uniformed police officer sat on the ground by her, pulling her face from the ground, pulling her away from the body, cradling her against his chest, his own tears falling on her neck.
“Oh Ranya darlin’ I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I never would’ve… you never should have seen him that way, never, I’m so sorry. I thought for sure you’d be another hour getting here from school, you must have broken every record getting here…thank God you’re safe, but what a thing for you to see...” Her arms were clenched tightly to her chest; her hands covered her face as she sobbed against him.
Suffolk police lieutenant Jasper Mosby had known Ranya since she was a toddler and he was a patrol officer. He had bought shooting supplies and a few guns at Freedom Arms over the years and had considered Joe Bardiwell a friend. Young Ranya had been a fixture around the shop as long as he could remember.
An only child, she had tried to fit into the macho world of the gun culture which revolved around her family business, but her amber eyes and long brown hair and ready smile had always betrayed her femininity. Countless boxes of ammunition had been purchased over the years by wistful men who had stopped by Freedom Arms secretly hoping to win a laugh from the increasingly curvaceous “tomboy” Ranya Bardiwell. During her teenage years customer visits to the store seemed to increase during the after-school hours when Ranya did her homework and helped at the counter.
Hundreds of cartons of reloads had been bought two at a time by customers willing to spot Ranya a free box, in exchange for an impromptu match on the indoor pistol range. As a teen she had mastered all calibers, and customers would buy her boxes of .45 and .44 magnum just to see her out-shoot grown men. She was considered a minor celebrity within local shooting circles, and she was the secret sweetheart of most of the men who knew her, including Jasper Mosby.
A similar pattern developed for her in the world of motorcycle riding. Customers who saw her zipping around the property on her lawn mower engine powered mini bike offered her rides on the back of their Harleys and Gold Wings, and this fine addiction also grew deep roots from an early age. Ranya was racing motocross by the time she was thirteen, and she was winning her share, but serious talks by her father and her orthopedic surgeons convinced her to give up competition, before her knee and shoulder damage became permanent and debilitating.
So Suffolk police lieutenant Jasper Mosby didn’t care what anybody thought as he sat on the grass in his uniform with a young woman crying herself out against his chest. It was the least little favor he could give to his friend Joe Bardiwell, and he did not hurry her. After a while the sobbing stopped and he pulled her up and walked her away from the covered body.
“What happened Jasper? How did it happen?” Ranya’s hair was full of grass, her eyes reddened and her face smeared with dirty tear tracks.
“After midnight. It was an arson attack. Not just here, all around Tidewater. About a dozen gun stores were burned. It looks like your dad came out, I don’t know, maybe an alarm went off, and he was shot. From the looks of it he was shot four or five times, then the arsonists burned him and burned your house. And they shot your dog too.”
“Armalite? My dobie’s dead too?
“Yep. He’s over there, by the fence. You just rode by him on the way in. He must have heard them and alerted Joe. They were both shot… If Joe had a weapon, they took it.”
“…I can’t believe this is happening, I talked to him yesterday… I just can’t believe… My father, my house, everything…”
“I know it darlin’, I can’t believe it either.”
“What’s going to happen to my father now? I don’t know what to do.” Ranya forced herself to talk as her tears kept falling. “Do I have to make…arrangements today? You know, I’m the last of my family, I’m the last one. The last one.” She was trying very hard not to completely break down again.
“Not today Ranya. The M.E. has to take him first, it’s the law. It looks like they tried to burn him to hide the gunshots, or maybe who ever did it was just crazy.”
“God, I just can’t believe this, any of this.” She sighed deeply, and wiped her face with the sleeve of her denim jacket. “Well, I’ve got to bury my dog. I can do that can’t I? Do they have to take my dog too?”
The dog had been killed by a single through-and-through bullet wound, and Mosby told her that she could have him.
“And Jasper, can you please get my father’s silver cross? It was from my mother, from her family…”
****
“Hey, anybody have a shovel in their unit?” Mosby asked around among his subordinates and colleagues on the parking lot. Nobody did. Some friends of Bardiwell stood behind the yellow police line tape, and Mosby asked them too. A tallish young man with light brown hair standing alone behind the tape said that he did, and retrieved a soldier’s folding shovel from the cab of his red pickup truck.
“Are you a friend of the Bardiwells?”
“I knew him,” said the man, a steady enough looking fellow in his late twenties or early thirties, one that Mosby did not recognize as a local.
“The owner’s daughter wants to bury her dog. Her dog was killed too. You mind helping her out? It’s up to you.”
“Sure, why not?”
“What’s your name?”
“Brad Fallon.”
“Fallon… you have a sailboat with no mast?”
“That’s me.”
“What were you doing here? Today I mean.” Mosby had to ask, he couldn’t leave a loose end like that hanging. Everyone who showed up at a crime scene had to be looked over carefully, especially arsons. In this case, with eleven gun stores burned, it was more a matter of professional habit than real suspicion that he asked.
“I heard the ammunition cooking off, and the sirens. Joe Bardiwell was working on a rifle for me.”
“Okay Brad, I appreciate your help. Her name’s Ranya Bardiwell. Let me grab a blanket from my trunk and we’ll go around back.”
****
Ranya was sitting cross-legged a yard from her dog, staring across the field to the smoldering wreckage and ashes of her house, and the silent pine woods beyond. Lieutenant Mosby crouched by her and put the silver cross into her hand. He had needed to clip the chain to remove it from Joe Bardiwell’s remains.
“Ranya, this fellow volunteered to help you bury your dog.” She said nothing, and after a few moments Mosby left them to return to his police business. Brad stood off a little to the side with his shovel and Mosby’s gray army blanket.
After an uncomfortable minute she asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m just the guy who had the shovel. My name is Brad Fallon.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I knew your father. As a customer I mean. He was working on a rifle for me.”
“Looks like your rifle got burned up.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What a great dog. I raised him from a puppy, he was nine years old. There was never a better dog. We named him Armalite, like the rifles, because he was skinny and black and fast. He was the best dobie there ever was, and he died trying to defend my father. I guess you can’t ask for more in a dog.” She began to quietly weep again, tearing up little pieces of grass and staring at the Doberman.
“I’m sorry. I’m just real sorry about all this.”
Another pause, another deep breath, and she said, “…Yeah.”
“Looks like he was shot right through. It would have been quick anyway.”
She said, “That’s what they do. They shoot the dogs first.”
Brad didn’t know how to respond to that remark, so he unfolded the blanket next to the dog’s back, rolled his stiff body onto it, and covered him in wrappings of gray wool. Then he slid his arms underneath like a fork lift and picked him up.
“Where are we going?”
“Into the woods behind the house. What used to be our house.” Ranya carried the little shovel and they walked together through the back vehicle gate into the trees, walking across brown pine needles until she found a little shifting pool of golden morning sunlight which seemed right.
“Do you mind? I hate to ask…but I don’t think I could do it.” She was getting numb, still crying but no longer shaking.
“No. It’s all right.” Brad gently placed the stiff bundle on the ground and then unfolded the shovel and locked it in position and began to dig. Ranya stared deeper into the woods, her arms crossed, squeezing the cross tightly in her right fist. Brad didn’t disturb her reverie. When the grave was deep enough he laid the wrapped bundle into the hole, and then covered it with sandy earth, and finally a covering of pine needles. “Listen,” he said gently when he was done, “if you need anything, I’d be glad to help. I’ve got a truck, and you might need to move something from your house or the store, I don’t know…but I’d be glad to do what I can.”
Ranya didn’t answer, her mind was a whirl of images and memories, so many happy memories, and some painful ones, now all burned to ashes like her family picture albums in the house. She hurt. And she knew from experience that the pain would not go away. But she had been well-trained over the years to endure pain, to focus on her target, to strive for her goal, and not to collapse under pressure. Her mother had died of brain cancer when Ranya was only eleven, she knew about grief and despair and survival. She had worked two summers as an ocean lifeguard on Virginia Beach, and she had saved lives and she had seen death. But this time she was alone.
“I need to talk to some people, there’s so much to do… I didn’t bring anything from school… I go to UVA, and now my whole house is gone…” She fought off her need to collapse again in tears. She could not permit herself that indulgence, she was a woman, she was twenty one, she was all that was left of the family and she needed to take care of her father and his affairs. There was no one else, she was the last, so she had to carry the burden or it would not be carried. She would not let her father down. The only way to honor the memory of her father and mother now was to be strong, and take care of business. She could cry later.
While they were in the woods burying her dog the crime scene investigators finished with Joe Bardiwell’s remains and released them to the medical examiner. His body was gone when they walked back to the ruined gun store. All that was left was the burned section of grass, which was now marked by four little yellow flags. The CSIs had left them marking the spot where he had been killed, in the unlikely event that they might come back to look for more evidence. The fire truck and some of the police cars had also departed. Her motorcycle had been picked up and pushed across to the parking lot.
Lieutenant Mosby met them at the back of the ruined gun store. The heavy wooden back door had burned away, but the iron-barred burglar door was still locked firmly in place. “The M.E. took your father to his office in Suffolk. You’ll have a few days at least, or as long as you need to make the arrangements. Your mother is buried here isn’t she?”
“Yes, at Saint Charles.”
“Okay, that’s Father Alvarado, right? He’ll take care of you. Ranya, do you want to hear what we know so far, about what happened?”
“Yes. I can do it, I can listen. I want to know.”
“All right then. The arson investigator is gone, he’s got a lot to do today with all the fires, but he had some good information. There were eleven gun stores burned across Tidewater last night from Suffolk to Virginia Beach. They were all hit between eleven and one. Figuring the times and distances, we’re looking at several groups working together in coordination.
“Gasoline was used at all of them. Molotov cocktails made from old liquor bottles were found at several sites. Arsonists screw up a lot with these things, that’s what the arson investigator said. When they drop one or it bounces back, they don’t tend to pick them up for another throw, not when they’re lit. So they’ve recovered enough gasoline bombs all made from the same kinds of bottles to know it was a planned, coordinated attack.
“And we found long pieces of half-inch iron rebar at several sites, they were used to smash in the windows through the burglar bars. Gasoline was then poured in using jerry jugs with long spouts, we recovered one of them, and then Molotovs were dropped in. Simple, but very effective. We’re guessing no more than a few minutes were taken at each site. By the time the fires flared up, the arsonists were gone.
“And your father wasn’t the only one killed. A husband and wife who lived over their store in Norfolk were trapped and burned alive. And another owner who lived near his store was killed in Portsmouth, and another was wounded in Virginia Beach. So we’re looking at three groups of arsonists, based on the geography and the times. Each probably consists of a driver, at least one armed lookout, and at least one arsonist. That makes it at least nine bad guys, but probably more.”
Ranya had no reason to disbelieve Jasper Mosby’s hypothesis, but it couldn’t explain her father’s death in the open over a hundred feet from both the house and the store. She could understand armed lookouts, but they would have been on the parking lot side of the store. Her father would have been approaching in the darkness with his twelve gauge pump shotgun, unseen by them on the other side of the store. How could he have been shot so easily in the darkness, over a hundred feet from any cover which could have hidden his killer? Before he died he would have killed or at least wounded some of his assailants, Ranya felt certain of that. It all made no sense.
Brad, the grave-digging volunteer said, “I guess this is all about the Stadium Massacre, like some kind of retaliation, but by whom? Liberals, I mean your typical gun control liberals, they don’t normally go out on midnight arson raids with armed lookouts. None of this makes any logical sense. It just doesn’t add up.”
“Nope,” said Mosby, “none of it makes much sense. But whoever did it likes cheap wine and malt liquor, if that narrows it down any. And now there’s four people dead and eleven gun stores and a couple of houses torched, and that most definitely adds up.”
A news truck from a local television network affiliate had parked on the shoulder of the road near the parking lot, and a perky blond reporter climbed down from the passenger seat while the telescoping microwave mast ascended into the sky. Brad walked over to the young male producer type who was talking to his cameraman behind the truck. He smiled at them and made the “come here” gesture with his finger, the folded shovel held casually in his other hand. The producer, eager for a local tip, walked out of earshot of the cameraman who was busy getting his gear ready.
Brad said, just audibly, “Do you see that attractive young brunette in the tight jeans over there talking to my good friend Lieutenant Mosby? You do? Great. If you point a camera in her direction today, you’ll be walking back to Norfolk, do you get my drift? And if a microphone happens to get put in her face, it’ll take an operation to get it out of you. Okay? She’s not part of your story.” Brad smiled again at the shocked young man with slicked-back black hair, and then he turned and tossed his shovel into the back of his truck where it bounced with a clang. He rejoined Ranya and Lieutenant Mosby, and when he looked again at the TV truck the antenna was going back down.
Mosby was talking to a fire department official about the arsons at Freedom Arms and the Bardiwell residence. By midnight fire trucks were already working two earlier arson attacks, and there was some confusion as to whether a new fire was being reported, or the same fire was being called in twice. As a result Bardiwell’s store and home burned for nearly an hour before the first drop of water reached them. The decision had been made to put the available water onto the gun store, and let the wood framed house burn: it was already far beyond saving. Only much later were the lingering embers of the house fire quenched.
Although the gun store was built with cement block exterior walls, there had been ample fuel inside in paneling, flooring, interior walls, furnishings and so on. The roof had collapsed, adding fuel, then ammunition and gunpowder had cooked off or burned, causing the fire fighters to spray their load from an ineffective distance. (In fact, in a fire uncontained gunpowder does not “explode,” and loose ammunition does not fire itself, and they present no greater danger than other types of common household products.)
The store and its contents were a total loss, and the fire department would not permit anyone inside until it was completely cool, due to the perceived risk of more ammunition cooking off in the cinders. The doors and windows were covered by burglar bars, so security was not an issue. Inside the gutted cinderblock walls the debris and ashes still let out steam and a little smoke while they peered inside through the iron bars, trying to visualize where everything had been before the fire.
Mosby asked “Ranya, where did your father keep his important family papers, like his insurance and bank documents?”
She snapped back into the present. “Oh, in a firebox. Actually it’s like a safe built into the floor of his bedroom closet.”
“Do you think you can find it?”
“Um, yeah, sure…I guess so.”
“Then that’s where you should start. You’ll need those papers, the sooner the better.”
“I’ll get my shovel,” offered Brad.
****
He scraped and cleared and dug in the corner of Ranya’s former home until he found the square cutout in the cement slab where the safe had been hidden. A flush-fitting concrete plug had protected the top of the safe from the heat, and once they lifted it out the combination dial still turned. Ranya had no trouble remembering the combination; it had been set to her mother’s birthday. She loaded the contents of the safe into her black daypack, a few folders and envelopes and some small wrapped boxes that weighed a few pounds.
They walked around the burned home site looking for anything salvageable. Ranya poked and prodded around in the ashes with a piece of metal conduit but there was nothing. Beds and furniture were reduced to blackened springs and scrap metal. A five-foot-tall gun safe stood alone, burned to bare metal with buckled sides, it had clearly surpassed its rating, and the contents would be ruined. Her father’s pickup truck and car were blackened hulks resting on their chassis where the carport had been. The odors of burnt wood and plastic and paint and rubber were nauseating.
Behind the house but inside the wire fence there was a little barn-like shed that had escaped the fire with only blistered paint. Ranya suppressed a bitter laugh. “I’ve got no father and no house, but at least I have three motorcycles.” She used her keys to remove the padlock, and swung open the plywood double doors. Inside there were two motorcycles under a green dust cover. She lifted it up and gave them a look. “They seem okay.”
“I don’t have a house either,” said Brad.
“Oh? Where do you live?”
“I have a sailboat up the east fork of the Nansemond, not far from here. I’ve been working on it.”
“A sailboat? Up this far? How’d you get it under the bridges?”
“Well, at the moment it’s got no mast. I’ve got the new mast at a yard in Portsmouth.”
“What are you doing so far up the river?”
He laughed. “I got a great deal on the dockage; it’s free. And I can use power tools day or night, because there’s no one around to bother. I’ve been rebuilding the interior, and I just put in a new engine. None of the commercial boat yards want to let you ‘do it yourself’ any more. They make you hire their yard labor for fifty bucks an hour, no thanks!”
“Don’t the mosquitoes drive you crazy up the river?”
“Those aren’t mosquitoes. If you want to see real mosquitoes, go to Alaska. That’s where I’ve been working for a few years.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a machinist, but up there I’ve mostly been bolting big valves and machines together. But I’m done with that for a while; I’m getting ready to take off sailing. That’s been my goal forever.”
“You’re lucky. Almost achieving your goal I mean.”
“I guess so. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”
Ranya snapped the lock back onto the shed’s hasp, and then she turned around to face Brad. “You’re a shooter, right? You said you had a rifle in our shop. Do you shoot much?” Ranya knew that many hunters fired less than ten rounds a year at deer or elk, and then put their rifles away until the next hunting season.
“Oh sure, I’d call myself a shooter.”
“All rifle? Any pistol or shotgun?”
“Both. I’ve spent some time stomping around the boonies in Alaska, and I usually carry a .44 magnum for bear protection. I’ve owned a few shotguns, but none right now.”
“Okay, fine. I just wanted to throw some ideas at you, things only a shooter would understand. I’m trying to figure out how it happened last night, because it just doesn’t add up, it doesn’t make sense to me. Say my father hears our dog barking like crazy after midnight. Or he hears the alarm from the store—it was set up to go off quietly in the house. Either way, he’s armed and ready when he comes out. He’d have his twelve gauge shotgun for sure. The house would be all dark, inside and out, so he wouldn’t be back-lighted, and he wouldn’t be carrying a lit flashlight or anything stupid like that. The arsonists are on the other side of the store, the road side, smashing windows and pouring in gas and lighting Molotovs. My father is on this side, in the dark, almost two-hundred feet away, and these drunk and probably stoned home boys managed to hit him four or five times? In the dark, on the other side of the store? I can’t see how.”
Brad looked all around the property. “Do you remember where we found your dog, over on the side near the fence? Why was he over there, and not by the store going after the bad guys, or by your father?” They walked back to where the Doberman had died, a hundred feet from the state road near the front corner of the Bardiwell’s fenced in property. Just over the fence was the narrow dirt road which Ranya had ridden her bike around when she had arrived, and beyond that the brush and pine woods began.
Ranya went to the wooden fence post closest to where her Doberman had been found, and climbed the square-checked wire with practiced ease. Brad followed after she jumped down on the other side. From the tree line they had a clear view of the burned home site, the back and side of the gun store, and the places where both the dog and Joe Bardiwell had been shot and killed.
The morning sun was slanting across the narrow road into the woods. Ranya looked around her and moved to an ideal shooting position under a cedar tree with widely spaced lower branches. She laid her arms across a thick limb jutting out at shoulder height, and with her hands together in a pistol grip she sighted from the home site across the yard to the gun store. Then she looked around her on the forest floor, she walked in a small circle around the cedar tree, and found nothing. She expanded her search area, and twenty feet from the tree, off to the right from the possible shooter’s perspective, she caught the glint of gold.
“There’s the brass! There it is—the shooter was here.” Ranya crouched over the gold metal and brushed away some leaves, then picked up an empty shell case with a twig in its open mouth. She looked closely at the head stamp, the imprinted manufacturer’s markings around the base of the shell case. “Oh shit… Look at this, ten millimeter. And see these marks on it, these little lines? And this dent on the lip?”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means the feds killed my father. That’s what it means.”
“The feds again? The feds! Everywhere I go these days, it’s the feds.” Brad took a deep breath. “Ranya, do you have a cell phone on you?”
“What? A cell phone? No, it’s back on my bike. Why, do you need to make a call?”
“No, I don’t need it. But before we say anything else about the feds, I think you should know something about cell phones. Sometimes cell phones can be used just like microphones, even if they’re turned off. As long as the batteries are in them they can be switched on to track you, and even to listen to you.” Brad’s own “free” government cell phone was safely back in his truck’s glove box.
“Are you serious? They can do that?”
“Hell yes they can.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s not exactly a very well-kept secret; they just don’t talk about it. I mean they don’t announce it, but the word gets out. The technology is built right in; they put in all kind of ‘back-doors’ for the government to use. They’ve tracked and killed terrorists just by their cell phones, tracked them and killed them.”
“That’s right, I’ve heard about that. They can shoot rockets from drones now, and I remember reading about how they homed in on their cell phones.”
“And not only that, they can listen to what’s being said around the phone, even when it’s supposedly turned off. So be careful. Don’t keep your cell phone too close if you’re talking about the feds, and yank the battery out if you’re going somewhere you don’t want to be tracked.”
“Big Brother is really here, isn’t he?”
“Yeah he is, and that’s one of the big reasons why I’m taking off. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is for the feds to track you any more, to know every damn thing about your life. Anyway, how did you know about the ten millimeter ammo?”
“Because I know guns—I mean, I was raised in the business.”
“Oh right, sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, nobody ever expects a girl to know about guns. Look at the brass, see these little black lines? Heckler and Koch uses a funny grooved chamber, it leaves those marks when the shell is extracted, and it dents the lip like this too. So these shells were fired from an MP-5, no doubt about it.
“A few years ago, even before 9-11, the FBI bought thousands of brand new Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine guns, right from the factory in Germany. They made a special production run in ten millimeter, just for our feds. Nobody else has ten millimeter sub guns. Don’t ask me why, but the FBI was hot on ten millimeter for a while. It’s a great caliber but it never really caught on with civilians, because it’s a little too hot for most pistols. It’s sort of a .40 caliber magnum. Hey, there’s another shell case!” Ranya scooped up several more empty brass shells in succession in the same area until she had collected five.
Brad said, “If these guns are so unique, isn’t it almost like leaving a calling card? It wouldn’t be very professional for a killer to leave that kind of brass around, would it?”
“Who ever said the feds were professional? Remember 9-11, and all the warnings that they ignored? Besides, who gets to do all the forensic analysis? They do! Do you really think the feds ever worry about leaving evidence around? They don’t care about evidence; they can do anything they want with it. Do you remember Waco?”
“I read about it.”
“Well, some guys that used to come into the store had some books and videos about it. It’s really amazing what the feds got away with. Like the sheet metal front doors, they were critical evidence, absolutely critical. They’d prove who shot first by which way the bullet holes were going. Guess what? The FBI ‘lost’ the doors. Lost them! Big steel doors! They have pictures of them at Waco, after the fire, and the FBI ‘lost’ them. Can you imagine that? Lots of evidence that goes to the FBI lab gets ‘lost.’ And what they don’t lose, the FBI labs get to work on it until it comes out just the way they want it.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I’m guessing the killer used a government-issue ten millimeter MP-5 for a good reason: because it’d already be set up with a night vision scope and a sound suppressor. The feds have all the best gear; they use suppressors all the time. They even buy some submachine guns with suppressors built right in. And the killer wouldn’t have any trouble tracking my father across the yard if he was using a night scope. A silenced submachine gun with a night scope…my father never had a chance. He was an easy target.”
She stared across the fence, imagining the government assassin aiming at her Doberman as the dog streaked toward him. Armalite could have cleared the waist-high fence in a bound, but killing the dog would have been simple using a night scope. And then her father came out of the house with his pump shotgun, heading for the back of the store. He would have been moving right across the killer’s line of fire, just fifty yards away from this very spot. The entire fatal exchange unfolded in her mind like a movie. Her grief and shock were still present, but a new kind of quiet rage was flowing into her heart on top of the sadness. She stood behind the fence with her arms folded, staring at the four tiny yellow flags that marked the location of her father’s murder.
After an awkward minute, Brad said, “Ranya, did you ever hear of the Black Water Rod and Gun Club?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Well you’re not going to believe this, but Thursday afternoon when I drove back to my boat, the FBI was there waiting for me. By my boat. You know why? Because I was at Dixie Hardware in Highpoint on Tuesday morning, and someone filmed everybody there with a hidden camera. They were looking for accomplices of Jimmy Shifflett in Highpoint. I’m not kidding. I was in the pictures from the hardware store.
“So Thursday the FBI came to my boat and showed me a bunch of pictures of men from around here. Here’s the kicker: they think the Black Water Rod and Gun Club is a militia front, and Shifflett was part of it. Really, that’s what they think.”
“That’s a joke,” Ranya retorted. “Anybody from around here knows that’s a joke! The rod and gun club is just what it says it is, it’s just a bunch of local rednecks who like to tear around the woods on ATV’s, fish and shoot and drink beer. And mostly drink beer! They’re no more a ‘militia’ than I’m G.I. Jane. It’s got to be a joke; somebody must be goofing on the FBI, feeding them that kind of bullshit.”
“I don’t think so. They’re convinced Shifflett was one of them. They think the gun club might have helped Shifflett do the Stadium Massacre.”
“That’s a crock! A total crock!”
“The FBI sure doesn’t think so. They wanted me to join the gun club, just because I’m a shooter. They put the squeeze on me, big time. They want me to rat out the gun club and be an informant. They threatened to freeze my bank accounts and take my passport if I didn’t cooperate! They had me meet them at Lester’s last night. They think I can just walk up and join the gun club, like it’s joining the Elks or something, just because I’m a shooter.”
“The FBI doesn’t have a clue. So what happened?”
“I went and I had a few beers with them in the back room of Lester’s, and I made sure they brushed me off. I had to go in case the feds were watching, or getting a report from somebody else. You can’t just tell the FBI to go to hell, not when they’ve got your bank accounts and your passport in their hands. Believe me, all I want to do is get my boat finished and get the hell out of here before it all gets any crazier, and now I’ve got the FBI on my back.”