Alexei stood with his hands up, facing the officer, the bone gun slipped down into his right sleeve.
Weapon drawn, the state trooper approached him.
Alexei ran through what a typical civilian might say, how he or she might respond. “Is there a problem, officer?”
“No problem,” he replied tersely. “As long as you keep your arms outstretched.”
Windblown snow sliced through the air between the two men.
How would Neil Kreger, a used furniture salesman from Des Moines, Iowa, respond?
“I don’t think I was speeding or anything. It’s fifty-five along here, right? I was even taking it slow because of the-”
“Turn around and place your hands on the vehicle.”
Okay.
So.
“Officer, I-”
“Turn around.” The officer leveled his gun. “Now!”
Alexei silently complied.
The trooper approached him from behind.
Typically, you don’t want your gun in your hand when you’re patting down a suspect because it’s too easy for him to knock it away or disarm you and acquire the weapon himself, so Alexei waited for the soft swish of the gun being holstered so that the officer could frisk him.
And he heard it.
Even though Alexei did not want to do it, he had to respond appropriately to the situation.
Three moves-rotating while bringing his arm down to knock the officer’s hand away, a round kick to the knee, and, as he collapsed, a straight, direct punch to the temple, sending him reeling to the ground. It only took Alexei a second to disarm the officer and use the bone gun on each of his wrists.
The man went instinctively for his radio, but as he did he cringed and cried out in pain.
“I’m sorry about that.” Alexei tossed the officer’s Glock into the woods. “A little surgery, a couple months of physical therapy, and you’ll be able to feed yourself again.”
“What?” Desperation quavered in his voice.
The shattered scaphoids wouldn’t heal on their own, and until reconstructive surgery the officer wouldn’t be able to grasp anything without debilitating pain. As long as he didn’t try to move his fingers he would be okay.
But even now he was trying to move them and was crying out in a helpless, childish way.
“Just don’t flex your fingers. Wait for the paramedics to arrive.”
Alexei didn’t bother to cuff him, really, there was no need, but he did place the man in the back of the cruiser. Not wanting him to go hypothermic in this weather while he waited for help to arrive, Alexei started the engine and dialed up the heat.
Since this man had called in his location, Alexei knew that additional state troopers would undoubtably be arriving any time. He needed to change vehicles as soon as possible.
At first he thought of using his rental car to get to a place where he could switch vehicles but immediately realized that since law enforcement was aware of the make and model, that wouldn’t be wise.
His attention returned to the cruiser. A police cruiser always draws attention, even from people obeying the law. So that had its drawbacks as well.
However, in this case, taking into account the condition of the roads, the cruiser had better traction, more power, and he could monitor the radio while he drove.
So, the cruiser.
To take care of his electronic equipment in his car, he initiated the countdown of the small explosive device he’d brought with him, positioned it beneath the dashboard, and set the timer for two minutes. A nominal loss, considering everything.
He climbed into the front of the cruiser. The sawmill was less than five minutes down the road. He figured he could find another car there, or even better, a snowmobile, and disappear into the national forest.
Ignoring the groans of the man in the backseat, he ran down his priorities.
First, elude the authorities.
Second, contact Valkyrie.
Third, deal accordingly with the environmentalists.
There was nothing in Donnie’s personnel files that indicated why he would have a government-issued biometric ID card with above top secret clearance.
Using my phone I clicked onto the Federal Digital Database and came up dry there as well.
But there was one person I knew who could give me some answers.
I tapped in Margaret’s number.
“Director Wellington,” she answered, even though I knew my name would’ve come up on her screen.
“Margaret, Pat. Listen, I need you to look up Donnie Pickron’s military service records.”
She responded promptly, “He didn’t kill them, did he?”
Her words surprised me. “Why do you say that?”
“Jake filled me in on what we know. I’ve been doing some checking. Donnie was a Navy information warfare officer.”
“Was or is?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s still active duty.” I told her about the ID.
“I have no record of that information.” Her tone held a nuanced threat, and I knew I wouldn’t want to be the person who’d kept that information from her.
Although I was familiar with some jobs in the Navy, I’d never served in the military myself. “What is an information warfare officer, exactly?”
“Mainly they’re involved with cryptology and intel evaluation or dissemination. Some of them work in deployment.”
“Can you find out conclusively if Donnie Pickron is still active duty, still involved in either cryptology or deployment?”
I waited while she typed. It didn’t take long.
“Not officially.”
“In other words, yes.”
“Yes.”
“So what was a covertly commissioned Navy information warfare officer with a biometric ID card that gives him Sensitive Compartmented Information access doing here in the middle of northern Wisconsin working at a sawmill?”
The blank silence I got was not encouraging.
“Help me out here, Margaret. Is there anything more you know? Is there a regional information processing facility or cryptology center? A missile deployment base that hasn’t been disclosed to the public?”
“None of those.”
“Then what?”
“I need to check on something.”
“We have at least two people dead and a third-”
“I know that, Agent Bowers. But I’m not going to make unfounded inferences here.”
Margaret, as pernicious as she could sometimes be, was thorough, there was no question about that, and I did respect her for it. So although I was impatient, I knew that for the moment I had everything I was going to get. “Call me as soon as you find out anything.”
“I will.”
We hung up and I looked over Donnie’s arrival times at work.
If, as his emails had indicated, he checked his messages just before he left home every Monday and Friday, then it apparently took him nearly two hours longer to clock in at the sawmill on those days than it needed to.
He might just take a scenic route.
Or, he might have another stop to make.
I pictured the trails in my mind, evaluating the most likely routes he might have chosen and their relationship to his house.
My thoughts raced back to the Navy and their interest in this case.
Why here?
Why now, this week?
I needed to take a closer look at a topographic map of the region to see what areas the trails from his house might have passed en route to the sawmill.
While I was pulling them up on my cell, Deputy Ellory phoned.
“Pat here,” I said, “what’s up?”
“We have a suspect in the Pickron slayings.”