Devoted(57)

What most disturbed him was that he couldn’t be sure he was getting the straight story from Barbizon. The AG claimed to be working in conjunction—unofficially—with the National Security Agency, which was eager to keep its connection to the case secret. But Barbizon withheld large parts of the story, and he had a reputation as a sharp operator.

There was reason to think the claim of NSA involvement was legit. When the wallet containing the Nathan Palmer driver’s license was found near the woman’s corpse, Hayden had gone to the NCIC website to check if there might be a criminal history or an outstanding warrant on the guy. The warrant had been issued by a court in Salt Lake City, at the request of the attorney general of the State of Utah, rather than by a court in the county or the town, Springville, where the crime had been committed. Palmer was wanted for suspicion of larceny, arson, and murder. While Hayden was reading what little was in the Nathan Palmer file, the screen of his computer had blanked to white, and a silhouette of his shoulders, neck, and head appeared in black. His screen remained locked for maybe three minutes before control was returned to him. He knew this meant his photograph had been taken and his location identified, which was a capability only of the nation’s major security agencies. One of them had a watch on the NCIC’s Nathan Palmer file, to see who might check it out.

Twenty minutes later, before he could contact the attorney general of Utah, Hayden had received the call from Barbizon, who surprised him by asking why he had been inquiring about Nathan Palmer. When Hayden described the double homicide and the horrific savaging of Justine Klineman, Barbizon put him on hold for five minutes while he conferred with others. When he returned, he’d suggested that in this matter he was a front for the NSA, which wanted the Pinehaven case against Nathan Palmer transferred to Barbizon for prosecution. He was permitted to reveal more than the details in the warrant issued by the Salt Lake City court: Palmer had been a highly placed executive employed by Refine with oversight of the Springville facility where ninety-three people died in the fire that had been big news for two days; the Palmer ID was in fact false, one of several that the man had obtained prior to events at Springville and thought were known only to him. Barbizon wasn’t permitted to reveal the fugitive’s real name. Nathan Palmer had bought a custom red Dodge Demon via an offshore shell corporation that he had formed; although he thought his employer didn’t know about the vehicle, he was wrong. Apparently after purchase, the Dodge had been stripped of its GPS, so that it couldn’t easily be tracked; that was something his all-knowing employer hadn’t known. Any lead that Hayden might develop on the Dodge would be welcome. Finally, this was a matter of national security, and Hayden was enjoined by law from repeating to anyone what little had been disclosed during this conversation.



Now that Frawley and Zellman had come and gone, Hayden Eckman sat in his office, working on a pot of black coffee, wondering why Nathan Palmer, under his real name, had thought it necessary to acquire false ID and a hard-to-track vehicle. It sounded as if he either planned to sabotage the Springville plant and go on the run or anticipated a disaster for which he might be blamed. Whatever work might have been underway there, it sure as hell hadn’t been the cancer research that the media reported, in which the NSA would have had no interest.



And why would Palmer’s boss, knowing of his preparations to go on the run in a crisis, have kept him employed at that facility? What a snake’s nest this seemed to be—a tangle of threats, yes, but also, for a man like the sheriff, a squirming mass of opportunities.

Now, following the departure of Frawley and Zellman with the bodies of the victims and all associated evidence, Sheriff Eckman had settled at his desk to write a memo describing that transfer, giving special attention to the behavior of Dr. Carson Conroy. The medical examiner had questioned the propriety of the transfer, had raised issues of protocol and ethics, infuriating the sheriff. If this ever ended up in a court, Hayden wanted a version of events, composed immediately afterward and time dated, that would diminish Conroy’s credibility. According to Hayden’s reimagining of events, the medical examiner hadn’t shown up uninvited, but had been called to assist in the transfer and had arrived inebriated; Conroy hadn’t questioned anything about the procedure, but in fact had been both confused and abusive toward the men from Sacramento.

Hayden enjoyed writing dialogue for the drunken medical examiner and inventing convincing details of his erratic behavior, careful not to make him unbelievably clownish. If ever he needed to present this memo in court, he would first share it with Frawley and Zellman, so that they could corroborate it in their testimony.

Hayden had just finished the memo, printed it, and personally filed it both electronically and physically, when Carl Fredette, the watch commander currently on duty at the front desk, buzzed him on the intercom to report a home invasion with shots fired at the residence of Megan Bookman, on Greenbriar Road.



Home invasions hereabouts were as rare as incidents involving elephants.

Although Hayden always put his own interests above those of the community and defined corruption less strictly than did the law, he had a cop’s good intuition. He suspected at once that Nathan Palmer, whoever he might really be, had not moved on from Pinehaven County.





62



Like all members of the Mysterium, Kipp could turn the Wire on and off as if it were a radio, though emergency transmissions always came through.