THE FARM LOOKED LIKE something out of The Grapes of Wrath, only with less dust and a modicum of water sources.
They pulled to a stop in front of the plank-sided house and got out. There was a dirty and ancient Jeep two-door parked in the front. They could see a barn in the distance, and corrals full of cows collected around a water trough and salt lick. There was also a paddock where some bow-backed horses nibbled grass. The overall operation looked neat and efficient.
The leaning mailbox at the end of the dirt road had said PURDY, so they knew they were in the right place.
Before they could reach the front steps, the screen door opened and a woman stood there, a Remington over-under shotgun in hand. She was in her midfifties, with long gray hair, a slender, wiry build, and a pair of piercing blue eyes. She had on faded dungarees, weathered boots, and a checkered shirt tucked into the pants. The belt holding them up was made of knotted leather. Her face was wrinkled and tanned. And full of suspicion.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Jamison immediately took out her FBI creds and badge.
“FBI Special Agent Alex Jamison. My partner, Amos Decker. Are you Beverly Purdy?”
Instead of de-escalating the situation, this only caused the woman to raise the gun and point it directly at them, her finger near the trigger. “What the hell do you want? You tell me right now.”
Decker stepped forward, putting himself between Jamison and the gun. “We wanted to talk to Ben, if he’s here.”
She snapped. “He’s not. But why do you want to talk to him?”
“We’re not with the Air Force, if that’s what you’re thinking. And we have no interest in whether he might be absent without leave. We just want to talk to him about his last posting, in London, North Dakota.”
“Bullshit. You’ve come to arrest him.”
“Why would we do that?”
“You just said. AWOL.”
“We’re investigating a series of murders in London.”
“Ben didn’t kill nobody.”
“We’re not suggesting he did. He was long gone before the killings took place. But he said something to someone back in London. We just wanted to ask him what he meant by that. We believe it might have ties to our investigation.”
The woman slowly lowered the weapon. “He’s not here, like I said.”
“Was he here at some point?”
“He might’a been,” she said guardedly.
“Do you know where we could find him?”
She shook her head. “Got no idea. Haven’t heard from him in a while.”
“And so you must be worried?” said Jamison, coming to stand next to Decker.
“I’m his ma, ’course I’m worried.”
“Well, we’re worried about him too, so maybe together we can find him.”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“I get that you’re suspicious, Mrs. Purdy. So just to show our good faith, we’ll leave now. But can I give you our contact information so he could call us if you do see him? All we want to do is talk to him, not arrest him. That’s all.” He pulled a card from his jacket pocket and held it out to her.
She looked at the paper warily, as though if she touched it she might feel pain. But, apparently now satisfied that they were not here to arrest her son, Purdy said, “Look, do you all want to come in? I just made some fresh coffee.”
Decker glanced at Jamison and said, “Sounds good. It was a long drive. And it’s colder here than it was in North Dakota.”
They followed her inside. The front room was dominated by heads of animals mounted on the wall.
Purdy caught Jamison gawking and said, “My husband and Ben were avid hunters. Most everybody in these parts are. But it’s not just for show. We eat what we shoot.”
She led them into a small, plain kitchen with pine cupboards and dark, swirl-patterned, laminated countertops. The floor was aged linoleum and the furnishings rustic. The curtains around the windows looked to be about fifty years old. The whole place seemed locked in time from around then.
She set the Remington in a gun rack on the wall and pointed to two chairs around the table. “Take a seat.”
They sat while she got the coffee and cups together.
After she poured and handed out their drinks, she joined them at the table. She moved a stray hair out of her eyes and sipped her coffee, not meeting their curious gazes.
“We understand you live here alone?” said Decker.
The blue eyes flashed. “Who told you that? You been spying on me?” Her gaze darted to the shotgun. “What do you want? You tell me now.”
“We already told you,” replied Decker calmly. “To talk to your son.”
“That’s what you said,” she retorted in a skeptical tone. “Doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“It is true,” said Jamison. “We just want to talk to him. We are not here to arrest him. That is not our concern. We have no jurisdiction over his military career.”
“Feds are Feds,” Purdy snapped.
“It may seem like it, but it doesn’t actually work that way, at least not in our case,” said Decker.
She finally calmed and said, “My husband died three years ago. I was hoping Ben would come back here and help me run the place. But that didn’t happen.”
Decker said, “You told us he might’ve been here. Was he here? Did he talk to you about what might have happened back there, that caused him to leave the way he did?”
Purdy fingered her coffee cup. “They . . . they moved everybody from that place. Meaning the Air Force, Ben, and the others.”
“Right, a private security firm named Vector came in to run the facility,” said Jamison.
“Don’t know about that.”
“What did he do there?” asked Decker.
“Technical stuff. Computers and the like.” She snapped her fingers. “Radar, I think he said. But not anymore, I guess.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Jamison.
“Like I just said, they reassigned Ben and the others. I guess there’s nobody left to do the radar and such. He trained for it, you know. He was good at his job. Real smart. Always has been.”
“So he was upset about being transferred out?” asked Decker.
“Yeah.”
“But surely he’d been reassigned before. I mean, you go where the military tells you to.”
Purdy looked confused by this. “Well, that’s right. He was in Nebraska for a while, then Colorado. Then he got transferred to North Dakota. So that’s right.”
“He never got upset about those transfers?” said Decker.
“No.”
“But he did this time?”
“He . . . he called me one night, over a year ago. He said, ‘Ma, they’re moving us out. We’re going to the East Coast somewhere.’ I forget where he said, and then they were being reassigned to Colorado, I think. Least he was.”
“But he didn’t go?” said Decker.
She looked up at him nervously. “You sure you’re not here to get him in trouble?”
“I give you my word. Did he ever say anything to you that showed he was troubled by something?”
“Not in so many words, no, but I could tell something was bothering him. When he would call, he didn’t sound like himself.”
“Did he know about the changes taking place at the installation?”
“No, he never mentioned anything like that to me.”
“Did he ever mention a Colonel Mark Sumter?”
“No.”
“Has he been back here since then?” asked Jamison.
“Once,” she said, looking down at her long, weathered fingers. “About ten months ago. He’d lost weight, wouldn’t meet my eye. I asked what was wrong. But all he said was he couldn’t tell me without maybe getting me in trouble.”
“Was he in uniform?”
“No, he didn’t always come home dressed up. But he only had a backpack with him. Not big enough for his uniforms and all. I asked him where he was stationed. ‘Out in Colorado?’ I asked. But he just changed the subject. He said if anybody came looking for him, to just say I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him.”
Decker said, “And did people come looking for him?”
She nodded. “The Air Force. Three times. Said he was AWOL. In a lot of trouble. When Ben come here that one time it was late at night, and he didn’t stay long. He left the next morning at the crack of dawn. I told him about the Air Force folks. He said not to worry. I haven’t seen him since,” she added gravely, her voice breaking.
“Did anyone else ever come looking for him, besides the Air Force?” said Jamison.
Purdy took another sip of coffee before answering. “No, just them. Nobody else.”
Jamison asked, “Did he have any close friends in North Dakota? Anyone he served with that he might have mentioned?”
“Not that he said, no.”
“Did he ever mention anyone named Irene Cramer?” asked Decker.
Purdy thought about this but then shook her head. “Not that I recall, no. Who is she?”
“One of the people who was killed.”
Purdy shook her head. “I worry myself sick that Ben’s dead, too. He’s never gone this long without calling me. What do you all think is going on at that place?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Decker. “Does Ben have a room here?”
“In the back.”
“Is that where he slept the last time he was here?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind if we have a look?”
She rose and led them down the hall.
IT WAS THE FADED ROOM of a teenager from years ago. Old movie and music posters. Pictures of athletes from fifteen years past. A small gunmetal desk with a dusty PlayStation console and a pair of headphones. Some dog-eared Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels along with books of a technical nature were lined up on a small bookshelf. The bed was a twin and neatly made. The carpet was old and stained.
Decker and Jamison stood in the center of the small space and looked around, while Purdy remained in the doorway blinking away tears.
“I come in here sometimes and sit on his bed,” she said, staring at it. “He’s thirty now. Enlisted right out of high school. Time goes by so fast. Hard to believe. Seems like I just came home from the hospital with him.”
“Did he have a computer?” asked Jamison.
“One of them laptops. But he took that with him. We don’t get real good whatever-it’s-called, out here.”
“Internet connection? Broadband?” said Jamison.
“Yeah. He would always complain about that. But what can you do? Couldn’t up and move the dang farm.”
Decker opened the closet door and peered inside it. There were a few clothes on hangers. He went through the pockets. On the floor was a cardboard box. He pulled it out and set it on the bed. Inside were some books, magazines, and some loose printed pages. Decker looked at the books and magazines and ran his gaze over the pages. The books and magazines all dealt with technical subjects, mostly having to do with electronic communication applications. The loose pages were about various military installations in Maryland, Colorado, Arkansas, and California. Decker held them up. “Any idea why he was interested in these places?”
Purdy came forward and took the pages from him. “I don’t know. Maybe he was thinking about asking for a transfer there.”
“But they’re not all Air Force installations.”
Jamison said, “Or they could be from when he was thinking about enlisting years ago. He might not have settled on a service branch yet.”
“No,” said Decker, shaking his head. “There’s a time stamp at the bottom right of the page. It shows when it was printed out.”
Jamison looked at the dates. “About a year ago,” she said, giving him a confused look.
“You mind if we take these?” he asked Purdy.
“No, help yourself.”
They went back into the kitchen.
Purdy said, “Do you think I’ll see my son again?”
“I wish I could give you a straight answer on that, ma’am. I can tell you that we’ll do all in our power to find him.”
She put a hand on Decker’s arm. “Thank you for that.”
They took their leave and drove off, with Purdy in the doorway of the little house staring forlornly after them.
“I can’t imagine what she’s going through,” said Jamison. “Her only kid is missing and obviously involved in some dangerous things.”
Decker wasn’t listening. He was staring down at the pages he had taken, lost in thought.
Halfway through the trip it was well dark. They had just crossed back over into North Dakota when Jamison glanced in the rearview mirror. “Well, that’s the first pair of headlights I’ve seen in a long time.”
Decker looked in the side mirror and sat up straighter.
“Brace, Alex,” he called out, right as the front of the vehicle trailing them plowed into the rear of theirs.
The collision slammed both of them back against their seats, momentarily stunning them.
Then Jamison went into action. She floored the gas, and the SUV leapt forward.
“Can you see anything?” she called out.
Decker turned around and looked at the headlights a few feet behind them. “Yeah, and here they come again.”
They were bucked forward once more with a second collision. Jamison was having to struggle mightily just to keep the truck on the road.
She said, “They have more horsepower than we do. I’ve got the pedal to the floor.”
“Well, let’s see if we can do something about that.”
Decker undid his seat harness, climbed over the seats, and settled in the cargo area at the back. “Pop the window,” he called out as he slid his Glock from its belt holster.
Jamison did so and Decker edged the glass further up.
He used the back of the cargo door as his fulcrum, aimed, and fired five shots into the driver’s side of the windshield.
The vehicle immediately started to veer erratically to the left and right.
“Think I hit the driver,” he yelled out. As he said this he ducked down. “Look out, Alex!”
Their SUV was strafed with machine-gun fire.
She bent low, cut the wheel hard to the left, and shot onto the wrong side of the road.
“Decker, Decker, you okay? Decker.”
She glanced frantically in the rearview mirror. “Amos!”
His head poked up into view. “Okay, that was a little closer than I would have liked.”
Their SUV started wobbling badly and Jamison said, “They hit our tires. I can’t hold this speed.”
Decker looked to the right. “Road coming up. Take it.”
Jamison left rubber on the road as she drilled a ninety-degree turn onto another ribbon of asphalt heading south. She eased up on the gas because the SUV was fishtailing so badly. “They must have shredded our rear tires. Feels like we’re riding on the rims.”
“Just keep going.”
He watched as the shot-up vehicle, now revealed as a Hummer, made the turn. And then he watched with a sickening feeling as another Hummer pulled in right behind the first one.
They had reinforcements and machine guns. This would not be a long or fair fight.
He looked toward the front of their SUV and saw what looked to be an abandoned farmhouse with broken corral fencing and a hay barn with rotted doors swinging off.
“Head for that barn,” he told Jamison.
The SUV shot through the opening and she slammed on the brakes, bringing them to a stop right before they crashed into the opposite wall. They scrambled out of the SUV and took up position behind their vehicle.
Decker has already tried to call 911 for help, but there were no bars on his phone. Even if he had, it would probably take hours for even a single cop to show up out here.
Jamison had her gun pointed at the open doors. She glanced at Decker. “What now?”
He was eyeing the interior of the barn, and then his gaze went up. “High ground is the best.”
They hustled to an old wooden ladder and clambered up to the hayloft, which was half full of thoroughly rotted straw.
Decker tested each floorboard with his weight before edging over to the hayloft doors and opening them just a crack.
Twin pairs of headlights were cutting through the darkness around the farmyard. The doors of the Hummer with the cracked windshield opened and four men climbed out. They wore all black, including ski masks, and carried automatic weapons. The doors of the second Hummer opened and three more men got out. In the blink of an eye they fanned out, and within seconds they had the barn surrounded.
Decker turned back to Jamison. “Well, our options seem limited.”
“Yeah, as in zero,” she replied grimly.
Decker reached into his pocket and pulled out the device Robie had given him.
Jamison noted this and said, “Little late for that.”
“I was thinking the same thing but what do we have to lose now?”
The shots outside drew their attention back to the hayloft doors.
As they watched, the lead Hummer exploded and the detonation lifted the multiton vehicle straight up into the air before it slammed back down to earth, a collision that burst all four tires.
“What the hell?” began Jamison.
They dropped to the floor and slid backward as automatic gunfire started up again.
A few moments later Decker crawled forward and peered through the crack in the doors. He watched as two of the men in black were gunned down. Three more rushed from around the rear of the barn and took up position behind the destroyed Hummer.
They fired into the distance and received return fire.
Decker pointed his gun out the crack, took aim, and shot one of the men in the back. He fell to the dirt. The other men turned and fired at the barn.
Decker slammed the door shut, and he and Jamison took up cover behind a thick bale of rotted hay. Multiple rounds ripped through the wooden doors and into the straw.
There was more gunfire, another detonation. Screams, more gunfire, shouts. And then, the sound of a vehicle starting up.
Decker and Jamison crawled forward in time to see the second Hummer racing back down the road. Soon, it had disappeared into the darkness.
Jamison looked at Decker and said breathlessly, “What the hell just happened?”
Before Decker could answer, the phone Robie had given him buzzed. He answered it.
Will Robie said, “You can come down now.”