“Where are you staying, Mr. Barber?” Bonhomme asked.
“I just got into town... from Represa.”
The name of the prison town grabbed the attention of both the inspector and his sergeant. But Barber barely noticed because he was watching that woolly fly.
“You were up at the prison?” Briggs asked.
Miles jumped up and slapped the fly right out of the air. The stunned creature bounced against the gray-green wall and fell on Bonhomme’s blotter. Before the fly could recover, Barber smashed it with a powerful open-hand blow.
When he lifted his hand all that was left was a mess of fly fragments and blood.
“I hate flies,” Barber said lamely.
“What were you doing in Represa?”
“Winch Fargo,” Barber replied. “Could you close that window?”
Briggs moved to slide the window shut. “What about Fargo?” Bonhomme asked.
“The woman who died in the massacre, Eileen Martel. She visited Fargo every week up until she was killed. This Fargo had murdered her husband.”
Briggs nodded at Bonhomme.
“What about her?” the inspector asked.
“As far as I can tell,” Barber explained, “she was smuggling in some kind of drug. The cult members told me that there was something wrong with this Fargo, like some kinda nervous disorder, and their leader, William Portman, also known as Ordé, gave Eileen something to give Fargo to keep him calm.”
“Did they say what it was she gave him?” Briggs wanted to know.
“Everything with them is blue light. The Blues, blue light, blue gods. If she brought him anything, it would have been called blue somethin’.”
“Did they ever talk about blood?” Bonhomme asked softly.
Ex-Detective Barber knew, at that moment, that he was back on the inside. All he had to do was choose his words carefully, omit some of the truths as he knew them, and he would have what he wanted.
“Yeah,” Barber said. “That fella Portman was always talkin’ about blood and blue light. He was always talkin’ about how the chosen ones, the Blues, kinda like priests, had different blood. We found four of his followers poisoned with some kind of toxic mixture, which had been combined with blood, in their stomachs.”
“We should try to get a look at those files,” Bonhomme said. “Call down to the Berkeley PD, Lonnie.”
“No need,” the ex-detective said. “I’ve got copies of all the files right here in my suitcase.”
“You do?”
“Yes, sir. It was my case. I had taken them home to study them before the massacre.”
Christian Bonhomme put down his pipe and leaned forward on his elbows.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Barber? What do you want from us?”
Miles first took out his squeeze bottle and pressed a few drops down the top of his patch to soothe the naked eye. He reminded himself not to drift into the fear and hatred that was always so near the surface of his feelings. The hatred and fear of the man who had laid down the imprint of death upon his mind. He couldn’t let them suspect the killing he had in store for Gray Man. He’d already gone too far by killing that fly.
“I want...,” he said, “I want the people who did this to me to pay for it.” Barber closed his good eye and saw the afterimage of a gray cloud that always hovered there. “They took everything from me. They made me a freak.”
“And you think your own police department can’t handle the investigation?”
“They have the same files that I do, Inspector. Did they come to you? Did they go up to Folsom?”
“They would if you went to them now.” Bonhomme was trying to sound reasonable, but his eyes were intent.
“Claudia Zimmerman is in the desert somewhere. Lester Foote has disappeared from the Bay Area, along with three minors and a woman who may have Portman’s child. Fargo escaped from jail. There’s nothing the Berkeley police can do.” Barber suddenly felt a wave of calm come over him. He told me, much later, that he realized that it was fate for him and the SIB agents to work together. He was sure that they had no other choice.
“Listen,” he said. “I know these people. Anyone you run across from this cult and I’ll recognize ’em. I know the names and crazy talk. I even understand what they mean. Fargo’s escape has something to do with the killings in Berkeley. Probably somebody from the congregation got to this Robert Halston. I can help you. And if you find out what happened, it will lead to their boss — and that’s the guy I want.”
“I thought you said that Portman was the boss?” Briggs said.
“Uh-uh. I don’t know the big boss’s name, but you better believe that I intend to find out.”
In the weeks that followed, Miles Barber became a fixture at the fourth-floor offices of Christian Bonhomme and Lonnie Briggs. The SIB was completing its first central building at that time, so the bureau was still spread out in individual offices all around Sacramento. So no eyebrows were raised when Miles set up in the receptionist’s space outside Agent Briggs’s office.
Briggs wasn’t bothered, because he divided his time between fieldwork and conferring with Bonhomme in the larger back office.
No one complained about ex-Detective Barber. On the contrary, Bonhomme was very pleased. Not only did Miles take the secretary’s space, he did the secretary’s work. There were dozens of boxes of handwritten files and reports that dated back to the beginning of Bonhomme’s career with the SIB. He was supposed to have typed, classified, and filed each document but never had. Now the new director wanted everything turned into input cards for the new IBM-360. Barber agreed to take on the task. He told Bonhomme that he wanted to look for leads in the Blues case amid the mass of paper. Each morning when Bonhomme came in to work, he found Miles, his one eye scanning a scrawled report that was tacked to the wall, his ten fingers battering the old Royal typewriter. Every evening when the inspector left, Barber was still typing and squinting at the wall.
Bonhomme must have wondered if the one-eyed ex-detective freak was living in the temporary office. But there was no suitcase in the cloak closet or bedding or even a toothbrush to prove it. That was because Miles Barber never slept. He kept his toothbrush in his pocket, stowed his suitcase in a locker at the bus station, and did his latrine with a washrag, a bar of soap, and a ceramic mug. Once a week he took his clothes to a French laundry on Spring.
Barber spent every night working on Bonhomme’s files. He typed and filed, ordered and reordered until the inspector returned. He worked because that kept him from heeding the changes happening on the inside.
Miles Barber, while he pecked and hunted, was going through a metamorphosis. On one hand, he was dying, fading out just as his best friend, Brad Sanders, had after a chest wound at Anzio. But on the other hand, there was a life growing from the inside. This new life was coming out of what he had always known as himself, but it wasn’t him — at least, it didn’t have to be. Barber feared that if he fell asleep for long, he would die and this bean sprout in his heart would take over. So he stayed awake, working, playing the radio, and denying the changes that were trying to take hold.
He went on like that, working twenty-hour days and talking to Bonhomme and Briggs now and then about the Close Congregation and their possible relationship to Fargo. Miles had almost finished with the files when he began to worry that Bonhomme had meant to keep him only till all the work was done.
But the ex-detective had a plan. There had been nothing of interest in the files he copied. He would, instead of working on his typewriter at night, break into the inspector’s active files in the back office. He’d transcribe all the information that had to do with Winch Fargo, so when he was released, he’d be able to shadow the SIB investigation until they led him to his prey.