“Most cops are good guys.”
“I know that. But tell me something: These days, the cops who rise to the top in the system…are they usually the best, or are they more often the ones who’re politically astute, the great schmoozers. Are they ass kissers who know how to handle a senator, a congressman, a mayor, a city councilman, and political activists of all stripes?”
“Maybe it’s always been that way.”
“No. We’ll probably never again see men like Elliot Ness in charge of anything—but there used to be a lot like him. Cops used to respect the brass they served. Is it always that way now?”
Spencer didn’t even have to answer that one.
Valerie said, “Now it’s the politicized cops who set agendas, allocate resources. It’s worst at the federal level. Fortunes are spent chasing violators of vaguely written laws against hate crimes, pornography, pollution, product mislabeling, sexual harassment. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see the world rid of every bigot, pornographer, polluter, snake-oil peddler, every jerk who harasses a woman. But at the same time, we’re living with the highest rates of murder, rape, and robbery of any society in history.”
The more passionately Valerie spoke, the faster she drove.
Spencer winced every time he looked away from her face to the road over which they hurtled. If she lost control, if they spun out and flew off the blacktop into those towering spruces, they wouldn’t have to worry about hit squads coming in from Las Vegas.
Behind them, however, Rocky was exuberant.
She said, “The streets aren’t safe. Some places, people aren’t even safe in their own homes. Federal law-enforcement agencies have lost focus. When they lose focus, they make mistakes and need to be bailed out of scandals to save politicians’ hides—cop politicians, as well as the appointed and elected kind.”
“Which is where this agency without a name comes in.”
“To sweep up the dirt, hide it under the rug—so no politicians have to put their fingerprints on the broom,” she said bitterly.
They crossed into Utah.
They were still over the outskirts of North Las Vegas, only a few minutes into the flight, when the copilot came to the rear of the passenger compartment. He was carrying a security phone with a built-in scrambler, which he plugged in and handed to Roy.
The phone had a headset, leaving Roy’s hands free. The cabin was heavily insulated, and the saucer-size earphones were of such high quality that he could hear no engine or rotor noise, although he could feel the separate vibrations of both through his seat.
Gary Duvall—the agent in northern California who had been assigned to look into the matter of Ethel and George Porth—was calling. But not from California. He was now in Denver, Colorado.
The assumption had been made that the Porths had already been living in San Francisco when their daughter had died and when their grandson had first come to live with them. That assumption had turned out to be false.
Duvall had finally located one of the Porths’ former neighbors in San Francisco, who had remembered that Ethel and George had moved there from Denver. By then their daughter had been dead a long time, and their grandson, Spencer, was sixteen.
“A long time?” Roy said doubtfully. “But I thought the boy lost his mother when he was fourteen, in the same car accident where he got his scar. That’s just two years earlier.”
“No. Not just two years. Not a car accident.”
Duvall had unearthed a secret, and he was clearly one of those people who relished being in possession of secrets. The childish I-know-something-that-you-don’t-know tone of his voice indicated that he would parcel out his treasured information in order to savor each little revelation.
Sighing, Roy leaned back in his seat. “Tell me.”
“I flew to Denver,” Duvall said, “to see if maybe the Porths had sold a house here the same year they bought one in San Francisco. They had. So I tried to find some Denver neighbors who remembered them. No problem. I found several. People don’t move as often here as in California. And they recalled the Porths and the boy because it was such sensational stuff, what happened to them.”
Sighing again, Roy opened the manila envelope in which he was still carrying some of the photographs that he had found in the shoe box in Spencer Grant’s Malibu cabin.
“The mother, Jennifer, she died when the boy was eight,” Duvall said. “And it wasn’t in any accident.”
Roy slid the four photos out of the envelope. The topmost was the snapshot taken when the woman was perhaps twenty. She was wearing a simple summer dress, dappled in sun and shadow, standing by a tree that was dripping clusters of white flowers.
“Jenny was a horsewoman,” Duvall said, and Roy remembered the other pictures with horses. “Rode them, bred them. The night she died, she went to a meeting of the county breeder’s association.”
“This was in Denver, somewhere around Denver?”
“No, that’s where her parents lived. Jenny’s home was in Vail, on a small ranch just outside Vail, Colorado. She showed up at that meeting of the breeder’s association, but she never came home again.”
The second photograph was of Jennifer and her son at the picnic table. She was hugging the boy. His baseball cap was askew.
Duvall said, “Her car was found abandoned. There was a manhunt for her. But she wasn’t anywhere near home. A week later, someone finally discovered her body in a ditch, eighty miles from Vail.”
As when he’d sat at the kitchen table in the Malibu cabin on Friday morning and had sorted through the photographs for the first time, Roy was overcome by a haunting sense that the woman’s face was familiar. Every word that Duvall spoke brought Roy closer to the enlightenment that had eluded him three mornings ago.
Duvall’s voice now came through the headphones with a strange, seductive softness: “She was found naked. Tortured, molested. Back then, it was the most savage murder anyone had ever seen. Even these days, when we’ve seen it all, the details would give you nightmares.”
The third snapshot showed Jennifer and the boy at poolside. She held one hand behind her son’s head, making horns with two fingers. The barn loomed in the background.
“Every indication was…she’d fallen victim to some transient,” said Duvall, pouring out the details in ever smaller drops as his flask of secrets slowly emptied. “A sociopath. Some guy with a car but no permanent address, roaming the interstate highways. It was a relatively new syndrome then, twenty-two years ago, but police had started to see it often enough to recognize it: the footloose serial killer, no ties to family or community, a shark out of his school.”
The woman. The boy. The barn in the background.
“The crime wasn’t solved for a while. For six years, in fact.”
The vibrations from the helicopter engine and rotors traveled through the frame of the craft, up Roy’s seat, into his bones, and carried with them a chill. A not unpleasant chill.
“The boy and his father continued to live on the ranch,” Duvall said. “There was a father.”
The woman. The boy. The barn in the background.
Roy turned up the fourth and final photograph.
The man in the shadows. That piercing stare.
“The boy’s name wasn’t Spencer. Michael,” Gary Duvall revealed.
The black-and-white studio photograph of the man in his middle thirties was moody: a fine study in contrasts, sunlight and darkness. Peculiar shadows, cast by unidentifiable objects beyond the frame, appeared to swarm across the wall, drawn by the subject, as if this were a man who commanded the night and all its powers.
“The boy’s name was Michael—”
“Ackblom.” Roy was at last able to recognize the subject in spite of the shadows that hid at least half the face. “Michael Ackblom. His father was Steven Ackblom, the painter. The murderer.”
“That’s right,” Duvall said, sounding disappointed that he had not been able to hold off that secret for another second or two.
>
“Refresh my memory. How many bodies did they eventually find?”
“Forty-one,” Duvall said. “And they’ve always thought there were more somewhere else.”
“‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy quoted.
“You remember that?” Duvall said in surprise.
“It’s the only thing Ackblom said in court.”
“It’s just about the only thing he said to the cops or his lawyer or anyone. He didn’t feel that he’d done anything so wrong, but he acknowledged as how he understood why society thought he had. So he pleaded guilty, confessed, and accepted sentencing.”
“‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy whispered.
As the Rover raced through the Utah morning, sunshine angled among the needled branches of the evergreens, flaring and flickering across the windshield. To Spencer, the swift play of bright light and shadow was as frenetic and disorienting as the pulsing of a stroboscopic lamp in a dark nightclub.
Even as he closed his eyes against that assault, he realized that he was bothered more by the association that each white flare triggered in his memory than he was by the sunshine itself. To his mind’s eye, every lambent glint and glimmer was the flash of hard, cold steel out of catacomb gloom.
He never ceased to be amazed and distressed by how completely the past remained alive in the present and by how the struggle to forget was an inducement to memory.
Tracing his scar with the fingertips of his right hand, he said, “Give me an example. Tell me about one of the scandals this nameless agency smoothed over.”
She hesitated. “David Koresh. The Branch Davidian compound. Waco, Texas.”
Her words startled him into opening his eyes even in the bright steel blades of sunshine and the dark-blood shadows. He stared at her in disbelief. “Koresh was a maniac!”
“No argument from me. He was four different kinds of maniac, as far as I know, and I sure wouldn’t disagree that the world is better off with him out of it.”
“Me neither.”
“But if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wanted him on weapons charges, they could’ve collared him at a bar in Waco, where he often went to hear a band he liked—and then they could’ve entered the compound, with him out of the way. Instead of storming his place with a SWAT team. There were children in there, for God’s sake.”
“Endangered children,” he reminded her.
“They sure were. They were burned to death.”
“Low blow,” he said accusingly, playing devil’s advocate.
“The government never produced any illegal weapons. At the trial they claimed to’ve found guns converted to full automatic fire, but there are lots of discrepancies. The Texas Rangers recovered only two guns for each sect member—all legal. Texas is a big gun state. Seventeen million people, over sixty million guns—four per resident. People in the sect had half the guns in the average Texas household.”
“Okay, this was in the newspapers. And the child-abuse stories turned out to have no apparent substance. That’s been reported—even if not widely. It’s a tragedy, for those dead kids and for the ATF. But what exactly did this nameless agency cover up? It was an ugly, very public mess for the government. Seems like they did a bad job making the ATF look good in this.”
“Oh, but they were brilliant at concealing the most explosive aspect of the case. An element in ATF loyal to Tom Summerton instead of to the current director intended to use Koresh as a test case for applying asset-forfeiture laws to religious organizations.”
As Utah rolled under their wheels and they drew nearer to Modena, Spencer continued to finger his scar while he thought about what she had revealed.
The trees had thinned out. The pines and spruces were too far from the highway to cast shadows across the pavement, and the sword dance of sunlight had ended. Yet Spencer noted that Valerie squinted at the road ahead and flinched slightly from time to time, as though she was threatened by her own blades of memory.
Behind them, Rocky seemed oblivious of the sobering weight of their conversation. Whatever its drawbacks, there were also many advantages to the canine condition.
At last Spencer said, “Targeting religious groups for asset seizure, even fringe figures like Koresh—that’s a major bombshell if it’s true. It shows utter contempt for the Constitution.”
“There are lots of cults and splinter sects these days, with millions in assets. That Korean minister—Reverend Moon? I’ll bet his church has hundreds of millions on U.S. soil. If any religious organization is involved in criminal activity, its tax-free status is revoked. Then if the ATF or FBI has a lien for asset forfeiture, it’ll be first in line, even ahead of the IRS, to grab everything.”
“A steady cash flow to buy more toys and better office furniture for the bureaus involved,” he said ruminatively. “And help to keep this nameless agency afloat. Even make it grow. While lots of local police forces—the guys who have to deal with real hard-core crime, street gangs, murder, rape—they’re all so starved for funds they can’t have pay raises or buy new equipment.”
As Modena passed by in four blinks of an eye, Valerie said, “And the accountability provisions of federal and state forfeiture laws are dismal. Seized assets are inadequately tracked—so a percentage just vanishes into the pockets of some of the officials involved.”
“Legalized theft.”
“No one’s ever caught, so it might as well be legal. Anyway, Summerton’s element in ATF planned to plant drugs, phony records of major drug sales, and lots of illegal weapons in the Mount Carmel Center—Koresh’s compound—after the success of the initial assault.”
“But the initial assault failed.”
“Koresh was more unstable than they realized. So innocent ATF agents were killed. And innocent children. It became a media circus. With everyone watching, Summerton’s goons couldn’t plant the drugs and guns. The operation was abandoned. But by then there was a paper trail inside ATF: secret memos, reports, files. All that had to be eliminated quickly. A couple of people were also eliminated, people who knew too much and might squeal.”
“And you’re saying this nameless agency cleaned up that mess.”
“I’m not saying they did. They really did.”
“How do you fit into all this? How do you know Summerton?”
She chewed on her lower lip and seemed to be thinking hard about how much she should reveal.
He said, “Who are you, Valerie Keene? Who are you, Hannah Rainey? Who are you, Bess Baer?”
“Who are you, Spencer Grant?” she asked angrily, but her anger was false.
“Unless I’m mistaken, I told you a name, a real and true name, when I was out of my head, last night or the night before.”
She hesitated, nodded, but kept her eyes on the road.
He found his voice diminishing to a softness barely louder than a murmur, and though he was unable to force himself to speak louder, he knew that she heard every word he said. “Michael Ackblom. It’s a name I’ve hated for more than half my life. It hasn’t even been my legal name for fourteen years, not since my grandparents helped me apply to a court to have it changed. And since the day the judge granted that change, it’s a name I’ve never spoken, not once in all that time. Until I told you.”
He fell into a silence.
She didn’t speak, as though in spite of the silence, she knew that he wasn’t finished.
The things that Spencer needed to say to her were more easily said in a liberating delirium like the one in which he’d made his previous revelations. Now he was inhibited by a reserve that resulted less from shyness than from an acute awareness that he was a damaged man and that she deserved someone finer than he could ever be.
“And even if I hadn’t been delirious,” he continued, “I would’ve told you anyway, sooner or later. Because I don’t want to keep any secrets from you.”
How difficult it s
ometimes could be to say the things that most deeply and urgently needed to be said. If given a choice, he wouldn’t have selected either that time or that place to say any of it: on a lonely Utah highway, watched and pursued, hurtling toward likely death or toward an unexpected gift of freedom—and in either case toward the unknown. Life chose its consequential moments, however, without the consultation of those who lived them. And the pain of speaking from the heart was always, in the end, more endurable than the suffering that was the price of silence.
He took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say to you…it’s so presumptuous. Worse than that. Foolish, ridiculous. For God’s sake, I can’t even describe what I feel for you because I don’t have the words. There might not even be words for it. All I know is that what I feel is wonderful, strange, different from anything I ever expected to feel, different from anything people are supposed to feel.”
She kept her attention on the highway, which allowed Spencer to look at her as he spoke. The sheen of her dark hair, the delicacy of her profile, and the strength of her beautiful sun-browned hands on the steering wheel encouraged him to continue. If she had met his eyes at that moment, however, he might have been too intimidated to express the rest of what he longed to say.
“Crazier still, I can’t tell you why I feel this way about you. It’s just there. Inside me. It’s a feeling that just sprang up. Not there one moment…but there the next, as if it had always been there. As if you’d always been there, or as if I’d spent my life waiting for you to be there.”
The more words that tumbled from him and the faster they came, the more he feared that he would never be able to find the right words. At least she seemed to know that she should not respond or, worse, encourage him. He was balanced so precariously on the high wire of revelation that the slightest blow, although unintended, would knock him off.
“I don’t know. I’m so awkward at this. The problem is I’m just fourteen years old when it comes to this, when it comes to emotion, frozen back there in adolescence, as inarticulate as a boy about this sort of thing. And if I can’t explain what I feel or why I feel it—then how can I expect you ever to feel anything in return? Jesus. I was right: ‘Presumptuous’ is the wrong word. ‘Foolish’ is better.”