Resolve (33 page)

“No. Neither of them ever mentioned it.”

“Sure would have liked to talk to Kasko about those calls. Too late now.”

Hartz rolled his neck and took a thoughtful inhale. He continued, “You know, it just so happens that Kasko received a few calls from Lindsay Behram prior to her death. On top of that, Virginia Richmond also called Kasko just before she was murdered. It’s funny how people tied to Kasko kept ending up dead. Especially since Virginia Richmond only called him one time and the next thing you know, she’s on ice.”

The lady on the bicycle passed by in the other direction, and seemed to wonder why this guy wouldn’t just give me the ticket and move on.

As if he was coming out of a daydream, Hartz shook his head and explained something I already knew.

“When a guy Kasko’s age dies during a marathon, they don’t normally do an autopsy. I was going to have him dug up and see what the M.E. could find, but at this point it might be impossible to detect anything in his system.”

Several beats passed before the detective seemed to reach a final conclusion.

While coaxing his tree trunk legs to walk away from my car, he said, “Well, Karma’s a funny thing. Maybe he had something coming to him. You can’t mock the gods of fate and then stand outside in a thunderstorm.”

With that, the detective covered the ground between our cars in six thunderous steps and drove back into a city that would never appreciate him enough.

S
ix weeks passed before I found myself back on campus. Of all the stupid reasons to revisit TRU, I ended up back there because of $125. That was the cost of the extra pair of running shoes I had left in my locker. Earlier that morning, I had come to realize the running shoes I had been wearing had seen their last miles. That’s when I remembered I had a relatively new pair sitting inside my locker at TRU. My locker—and the shared locker—still contained some of my personal items. The spare socks and Pop-Tart boxes didn’t concern me, but the expensive running shoes demanded that I not leave them there to rot. As I drove south on I-79, I cursed my thriftiness and vowed to get on and off campus as surreptitiously as possible.

Less than two minutes after entering the recreation building, I was walking out of there with the pair of shoes tied together by the laces. Brent was standing beside my double-parked Jeep, admiring the fine machine. So much for my covert operation.

He wore jeans and a plain green T-shirt. The gym bag on his shoulder told me he was on his way to a racquetball game.

“I saw the oil burner sitting out here and figured you’d be right out. I haven’t seen you around. Off for the summer, huh?”

“Gone for a while longer. I’m calling it a research sabbatical, but truth be told Kaitlyn and I will be traveling and researching the finest cafes of Krakow and Prague. ”

“Uh huh,” he replied after some hesitation.

Dragging a finger across the dust on the hood of the car, he said, “I guess you probably heard—the official word came down that Silo is hanging them up. Some health thing.”

I shrugged and managed, “Well, I can’t say I’ll miss him.”

Brent smiled without smiling.

He said, “Is it true that your buddy Aaron quit?”

Aaron had sent me a rambling letter from his treatment center in which he told me that his wife had filed for divorce, and that he’d made the decision to retire. He wished me well and made no mention of ever seeing me again.

“I heard something about that,” I said.

Brent manufactured a lighthearted tone and said, “I need to stretch my legs before I go in there and clean Rixey’s clock. You would think a Kinesiology professor would be able to win a few games. Walk with me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he started walking toward the center of campus. Not wanting to offend the last TRU employee who could stand me, I caught up to him. He let several minutes pass wordlessly before he broke the silence.

“Did I ever tell you what I did for most of my time with the Secret Service?”

I had always assumed that he had done things like protect the President, work some fraud cases, and arrest counterfeiters, and I told him so.

“Sure. I did all that, but most of my years were on the intel side of things. I kind of became an expert on what we called protective intelligence. Basically, I identified and evaluated people who were deemed to be a possible threat to anybody who we were responsible for protecting.”

I really wanted to get out of there. Normally, I wouldn’t have minded a nice round of war stories, but this wasn’t
normally.

“Brent,” I interrupted, “Kaitlyn and I have to meet with the travel agent. Do you think I could call you—”

“I started off in Atlanta, did my time in D.C. and then back to where I started. I worked all kinds of threats: the nut jobs, lone gunman types, serial bombers . . .”

The way we were strolling leisurely through the open patches of the campus, you would have thought we were out bird-watching. My running shoes bumped against my knee as I dangled them by the laces. I silently scolded myself for not throwing them in my car when I had the chance.

“But my real specialty was working the groups. Militias, biker gangs, drug organizations . . . the groups like those were the interesting ones. Usually, they kept to themselves, but every once in a while they would get it in their heads to knock off one of our people—the politicians, I mean—and that’s where I came in. I teamed up with some DEA and ATF guys and we kind of started our own little task force. Between drugs, guns, and threats, we pretty much had everything covered. Mostly we just watched the groups and prepared to jump in if a threat started to look credible.”

We were almost to the yard in the center of the campus by this point. The skyline of the city peered over the tops of the university bell tower.

“So every once in a while some gang leader or wannabe-military commando would start firing an AK-47 in the air and start talking about taking out the old government and building a new one, or some similar craziness. And do you know what happened after that?”

“You arrested them.”

“Wrong. Nothing happened. That’s the thing, Cyprus, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, nothing happened. Studying the group dynamics of these whack jobs was fascinating. As soon as some loudmouthed leader started spouting off reckless threats, four or five strong personalities in the group would start to push back. They didn’t want all the heat that some grandiose plan would bring down on them. They went into self-preservation mode. They positioned themselves to wrest control from the leader who was becoming the threat; the infighting would start and before you knew it—Boom! All-out war would rip through the organization.”

Brent came to a halt and turned to me when we reached the statue of Gadson, overlooking the fruits of his labor.

“The most interesting aspect of all was that whenever the smoke would clear from their civil war, and all the main players had duked it out, there was always just one of them left standing.”

He paused for effect and squared up to face me.

“It wasn’t always the loudest. It wasn’t always the smartest. It wasn’t always the meanest, the most popular, or the most daring. The last man standing was always the one who had the most
belief.
Right or wrong didn’t matter. It was always the one who
believed
he was doing the right thing, no matter how twisted that thing might be.”

We listened to a train whistle in the distance.

“You seemed to have gained a lot of insight,” I said.

“When you stand back and watch, it’s amazing what you can learn. The guys I’m talking about, the survivors, they didn’t all last very long. For some of them, victory went to their heads and they didn’t get out when they should have. Some of them had truly evil intent to begin with and it ate away at them. Their beliefs, no matter how strong, couldn’t save them in the end. But the ones who thought they were righteous. Those guys . . . well, they may have had some screwed-up values, but they could live with themselves. So, I guess we all have to ask ourselves, what are we prepared to live with? And if we can live with the evil we have done, what does that make us?”

Brent let out a long sigh, and took one more look at the city glowing from a setting sun.

“I better get back to the courts. Rixey’s going to say I forfeited if I’m too late. And guys like us . . . never forfeit.”

With that, Brent Lancaster retreated from the field and left me standing with a pair of running shoes dangling from my hand. My only company was a deranged steel icon and the most terrifying thing I have ever encountered—a clear conscience.