“Watch your toes!” Frankie cautioned the news crews as she crept through the pack. “Feral dogs. Man.”
“No statement yet,” Art informed them.
“Is it true there’s a spill of a chemical used in military weapons research?” a reporter asked.
“We’ll have a statement later.” They hated this, Art knew, being told no! like children. And, of course, they would react as such. But he really couldn’t give them much more than they already knew. His and Frankie’s quick stop at the L.A. office hadn’t yielded much information, and the news they’d listened to on the drive north only mentioned a major chemical accident, possibly involving hazardous materials stolen from an Army depot in New Mexico. What really was going on was yet to be discovered.
“Why are there Army personnel here?” the closest reporter asked, pressing the attempt for information.
“Later.”
“Jefferson! Come on!”
Early in his career with the Bureau, contact with the media had infuriated him. Now he knew how to play the game, and how to win. It was time for the trump card. “No comment. Let’s get in there, partner.”
Frankie gave the Chevy a bit more momentum and pressed through the pack, stopping at the first roadblock a hundred yards ahead. There, their identification was checked by the four sheriffs deputies manning that checkpoint. After being allowed in they drove another half-mile on Avenue B to the intersection of Riverside. Where the roads met, a sheriffs department patrol car sat blocking the streets’ north and west lanes of travel. A deputy, windmilling his arm as he stood in mid-intersection, directed them right onto Riverside. Heading south now, they could plainly see the glow from the incident command post ahead. Far ahead.
“This isn’t like any perimeter I’ve ever seen,” Frankie commented. “It’s got to be two miles as the crow flies.”
A chemical accident, Art thought. Must be some nasty stuff if it’s true.
“Slow down, partner,” Art said, seeing the orange-vested deputies standing at roadside. The lights of the Chevy painted them as the agents neared, causing the wide reflective stripe on the vest’s front to fluoresce and mark their positions. There were a half-dozen visible, spaced fifty or so yards apart, each holding a road worker’s sign that read SLOW. To that admonition they added hand gestures, pressing downward on the air before them. The message was clear.
Frankie slowed the car to under fifteen miles per hour and continued on to the incident command post. What had been just a half dome of light on the horizon became much more as they neared. Portable light standards, their self-contained generators humming, ringed an area about a quarter the size of a football field. Two trailers were nose to rear on one side, one each from the sheriffs and fire departments. A dozen fire engines lined Riverside opposite the trailers, and, parked in the trampled sage off the road were more vehicles, including several with the familiar G plates assigned to government agencies. These also had the mark of the United States Army stenciled on their doors.
When you were a cop, parking was no problem. Frankie simply pulled across Riverside into the empty oncoming lane and stopped, leaving her flashers on.
“There’s Lou,” Frankie said.
Lou Hidalgo, the assistant special agent in charge of the L.A. office, saw their arrival and broke away from a small group he was part of to greet them.
“Lou, how are you?”
“Art.” The A-SAC, his face drawn, met the two agents at the front of the Chevy. “We’ve got a bad one.”
Agents, especially those in command, usually referred to situations as “tough” or “sticky.” For the A-SAC to call this one otherwise set it apart more than just descriptively.
“How so?” Art asked.
“You heard the chemical spill story, right?”
“On the way up,” Art replied.
“And the reporters asked us when we pulled up,” Frankie added.
“Some road worker who dropped off a bunch of signs overheard something and then shot his mouth off,” Hidalgo explained. “Fortunately he only heard part of a conversation.”
“So, was Allen cooking up some more explosives?” That would explain the massive perimeter, Art theorized, and Freddy had certainly shown a fondness for things that made noise.
“I wish,” Hidalgo said honestly.
Wish? “What was he doing, Lou?”
Hidalgo looked over his shoulder to a spot of light a mile off in the distance. “Somebody over there was making nerve gas.”
Frankie looked to her partner just a second before he did the same. “Nerve gas?” she said. “What do you… Like the military stuff?”
Lou nodded. “There’s an Army guy here who knows the technical stuff, but, from what this cop brain of mine can figure, yeah. Like the military stuff.”
“Jesus,” Art said softly. He shivered briefly, wishing it was from the chill in the night air. “So there must have been an accident.”
“That’s what I gather, but only some Army guys and a couple of firefighters have been up there. The Army is keeping a tight seal on the whole area, and on the site in particular.” Hidalgo paused for a second. He was shaken by all this, the agents could see. Very shaken. “Art, there are more dead in there than just Allen.”
“Who?”
“Some cops. Paramedics. Someone else in the house. From what we can piece together no one knew what was going on when they showed up on-site,” Hidalgo explained. “There was a nine-eleven call about someone collapsing outside the house. Two deputies were first on scene. Then another arrived and saw his buddies down. He went in. Then a county fire rig and a paramedic unit pulled up together. One of the paramedics and a fire captain went to help them, then they went down. Thank God the other paramedic sounded a warning. He had haz-mat training and held the others back.”
Art saw that Lou was emotional. “Are you okay, Lou?”
“Yeah. I’m all right.” Hidalgo sniffled, then continued. “County fire got a haz-mat team out and they detected something nasty, then they asked for help from the Army. They brought in a gas detector and got a positive. Then all this happened. Three-mile perimeter. Reporters. This is big.”
“But how did they ID Allen?” Frankie asked. “He wouldn’t have been running around with anything that had his name on it.”
“His face,” Hidalgo answered. “The haz-mat team ran a cable from a camera at the scene to a truck a quarter-mile out. They did a tape of everything, all the victims, and then brought it to the ICP so they could identify the bodies.”
“So they called you down to ID Allen,” Frankie said. She watched a single tear roll down from Hidalgo’s eye.
“No. They called me down here because one of the firefighters that went down was my son.”
“Oh my God, Lou,” Art said. Frankie could only bring a hand up to cover her mouth.
“I saw Luis lying there, and I recognized Allen on the ground next to him.” Hidalgo stopped for a moment to regain his composure. He was a senior, Luis, his oldest boy, being his namesake. Now that was all gone. “Luis was trying to help that scum when he died. Can you believe that?”
“Lou, I’m so sorry,” Frankie said, stepping closer and placing a hand on the A-SAC’s back.
“Yeah. Me too.” Hidalgo took a handkerchief out and wiped his nose. “Jerry said to get you guys up here since Allen was yours.”
Jerry Donovan, the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office, had proven one thing in the time Art had worked with him: he didn’t like Art. But he also didn’t let that prevent him from assigning the more difficult cases to him. Maybe it was Donovan’s form of quiet warfare against him, but Art had learned to live with it since William Killeen, the former SAC, had packed it in for a retirement consisting of trout-filled Montana streams.