Runaway (9 page)

“And I’ll get started on her Web activity. Has Harrington gotten back to you with their router information?”

“I left a note at the office with the password to the router.”

“Okay. I’m on my way there.”

She finished her beer and said good-bye to James. She did know one thing. She didn’t want to make any decisions about her job until she’d found Maddy Harrington and made sure she was safe. Every kid deserved that much.

*

Now that it was after five, the offices and desks upstairs were nearly empty. On her side of the floor there were a couple of people in the small conference room with Dave Collins. It looked like he was taking a statement. Jan stopped by her desk to start up her computer and then went into the break room to make a pot of coffee. She heard the sharp tap of high heels behind her.

“Hello,” Catherine said brightly.

Jan nodded hello and watched the coffeemaker, not trusting herself to speak. She thought her voice might squeak. The brown liquid seemed to be trickling down like sap from a maple tree.

Catherine rinsed her mug out at the sink and then came by to stand and watch the coffeemaker also.

“I noticed you had to leave the meeting early,” Catherine said.

“I’m working on a case.” That came out all right, Jan thought.

“Please tell me about it. I’m interested in what sorts of things the investigators handle here.”

Catherine stood with her body angled toward Jan, holding her empty mug in her hand as if it were a glass of champagne and she was at a cocktail party. It was annoying as hell, and completely intoxicating. Jan wanted to say nothing to her new boss, but everything to this beautiful woman.

She took the empty mug from Catherine’s hand and poured the fresh coffee into it, then handed it back handle first. “I’m working a missing teen case, very new, with lots of information still to gather and assess. In other words, I’m pretty busy.”

Catherine sipped the black coffee and peered at Jan over her mug. “I can see you approach your work very seriously. Do you plan to be here for a while this evening?”

Jan focused on blending a huge amount of sugar and creamer in her coffee. Was Catherine flirting with her?

“I suppose I don’t really think or care about the overtime right now,” Jan said. “Time is of the essence in a case like this. Her parents are getting daily reports on our progress and our charges.” Jan struggled to keep her tone business-like.

“Of course.” Catherine stepped aside as Jan walked out of the room, and then followed her to her desk. “I think what I meant to ask is how you approach a case such as this. I don’t care about the overtime either.”

Jan sat at her desk and looked up at Catherine. “I think I’d better get back to it. I have to check out what websites the missing girl was visiting before she left.”

“Ah. Now you’re within my realm,” Catherine said.

“What do you mean?”

“I have a background in computers. It’s one of the things I think you’ll like in working for a bigger company. We’ll have the personnel and equipment to help you track down information in a fraction of the time it probably takes you now.”

Jan shrugged. “We do okay the way things are.”

Catherine looked amused. “You aren’t going to say something about good old shoe leather and gut instinct, are you?”

“We’re not hayseeds here, you know.”

“Of course not. I’m so sorry if I sounded like I thought you were.”

Catherine looked amused still, but her eyes were kind. Jan found it confusing. She turned from Catherine and put her hand on her computer mouse, waking up the screen and opening her remote access software.

“May I ask how you’re going about this search? Perhaps there’s a way I can help.”

Now Jan began to sag a bit. One thing she loved about working for TSI was the nearly total autonomy she enjoyed. The last thing LJ wanted to know about was the details of their investigative process, unless he could use it to look good in front of someone. If she was going to have to detail her work to her new bosses, perhaps it was time to move on.

“I’m about to access Maddy’s home router and wireless network. I’ll log in remotely from here and access the websites she visited while she was on that network,” Jan said.

She typed in the IP address of Maddy’s computer and the screen filled with Web addresses. Jan peered at the long list, with words like “militia,” “Michigan,” “patriot,” and most disturbingly, “Idaho” popping up throughout. These could all have been a part of Maddy’s recent research on right-wing militias. Or they could be a clue as to where she was now. The words seemed like little bombs going off on the screen, so loaded in meaning were they to Jan. Catherine leaned over her shoulder, pointing a finger at a Web address for a Michigan militia group.

“Why was she on these websites? They’re a little scary.”

“I don’t know at this point, other than her social studies teacher showed me a paper Maddy wrote on right-wing militias.”

Jan pulled her chair closer to the computer, farther from Catherine. No good would come of touching.

“Listen, I need to get back to work here. If you want to be briefed on this case I’d be happy to do that, but at a different time. I hope you understand.” Jan addressed the screen as she talked, with Catherine still behind her, her hips just behind Jan’s shoulders. Catherine placed a warm hand on top of Jan’s right shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“Of course. I do apologize. I see that you’re getting the information much as I would and I’m properly impressed.”

Jan looked up at her, waiting to see if she had more to say. Catherine stared down at her, as if waiting to see if she would speak. The silence lengthened.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” Jan said.

“Right. Good luck, then.”

Jan watched her walk down the hallway, unable to look away She couldn’t help it. Naturally, Catherine turned back and caught Jan staring. Her smile was just a little wicked.

*

Hours after David sent the crew out the door, Maddy sat at the rickety kitchen table working on her computer. He had handed lists and cash to everyone but Maddy, telling them to pick up the items they’d need to make their start to Idaho. Some of the items they’d truck out west, some they would purchase when they got there. They had it all planned out to the last literal nut and bolt. Now David was out running errands and the house was silent.

Maddy worked on the database she’d developed that would keep track of provisions, a budgeting system that would keep the money handlers accountable, and an intranet that would keep their communications with the outside world secure. She was proud of her work. She knew what programming to steal from other bits of software and what to make uniquely her own. She loved being in total control of the software world she lived in. What she didn’t have control of was the people David had chosen to make the move to Idaho with them. They’d all been friends of his for years, schoolmates who had long run as a pack. There was no question that David was their leader. Maddy assumed they were skeptical about her, despite their warm welcome. But she was skeptical of them in turn. She doubted that any of the people she’d met that morning had the same purity of purpose she and David did about making their new society work. For the most part, they looked like they didn’t have much else going on in their lives rather than being on fire with a vision of a new way to live. It didn’t matter how big their new place was in Idaho. If she didn’t like her compatriots, it was going to feel like close quarters.

David was trying to run a tight ship, though. He made it clear he wanted everything organized and everyone trained before they made their start out west.

“What do you mean trained?” Maddy asked.

“Basic training,” he said. “Boot camp.”

“What are you talking about? You never mentioned any boot camp.”

In the hours they spent talking and writing to each other, every bit of philosophy was explored on the question of starting their own society. They had made fun of the many groups spread throughout the country that called themselves militias, which seemed to them to be a lot of grown men playing at soldiers. They scoffed at religious cults, were appalled by racist clans, and had no interest in tax protesters or political parties. Their vision was simply to live as they wanted to without any interference.

“We’re working with a local militia that’s been around a long time. We’ve got to know what we’re doing out there, Maddy. We’re doing a basic training weekend that’s going to kick your ass.”

“Wait a second. Is that the group that thinks bombing Congress is a good idea?” Maddy narrowed her eyes and closed the lid on her laptop.

“We don’t need to agree with them in order to take advantage of their military training. Ed and Warren have already been through the two-day camp, and I’ll tell you, it’s useful stuff. And I think I’ve convinced six of his guys to go with us.”

“What?” The people she’d met at that morning’s meeting didn’t seem like intellectual giants, but she allowed for the fact that she didn’t know them at all. She was willing to assume David had picked them for a reason. But militia were bad news. She’d read their “manifestos” on the Internet and didn’t doubt that at some point they would find a reason to fire at real targets.

David riffled through a stack of papers on the table and pulled out a real estate brochure. He opened it to a survey of the land they were buying in northern Idaho. “This is one hundred and sixty acres, Maddy. Do you think that seven of us are going to be able to maintain and secure that amount of land?”

Maddy gazed at the survey and turned the page to look at a map of the surrounding area. It was incomprehensibly huge. The main thing they’d been looking for in land was that it be remote, fed by a river or four-season stream, have good solar exposure, and plenty of pasture land for the animals they planned to raise. As they researched available property, David was saving money, acquiring funds from others, laying the groundwork for actually going off-grid, and starting up something new and separate from everything Maddy had known. It all had to be as close to perfect as possible from the moment they left the Midwest.

She shrugged. “I thought you said we’d be growing the group slowly. You’ve just doubled it.”

David looked intently into Maddy’s eyes. “You’re just going to have to trust me on some of this. You’ll see when you go off to boot camp how useful these guys will be. They’re workhorses, and they know all kinds of survival stuff. I might be able to survive a Detroit mugging, but face-to-face with a bear, and I’m in deep trouble.”

Maddy stared at her screen as the computer compiled her software. It was just as well that she wasn’t out and about with the others, just in case her parents had actually done something like call the police when they realized that she’d disappeared. It was possible they’d been roused from their parental lethargy by now. The last thing she wanted was to be picked up as a runaway minor by the police. How embarrassing that would be.

*

Jan sat at her desk and read through the websites Maddy had been visiting. Every militia and political group had its own website, and each of those had dozens of links to other militias. There seemed to be an endless chain of connection between groups that all believed the government was their enemy. They believed it operated illegally. They believed they would be stripped of their civil liberties. And they believed, above all, that they would go down fighting when the time came.

She fought off the flashbacks to the camp she grew up in, but it was a useless battle. The similarities were so strong, the rhetoric she read identical for the most part with what she had to listen to every Saturday evening in camp, over twenty years earlier, when her father would hold “community meetings.”

“All of you are safe and living free because I had the foresight to protect us from the coming events that will tear this country apart. There are threats out there that you can’t even begin to imagine.”

He would pace back and forth in front of the mess hall, looking like he was briefing a room of soldiers. Everyone in camp was expected to attend.

“It is a commonly accepted fact now that the United Nations has amassed an enormous army for the sole purpose of invading our rich nation and eliminating its borders.”

There was a cabal of communists/socialists/Wall Street tycoons/the United Nations who was running the country in order to strip citizens of their wages, impose evermore crippling taxes, and generally undermine American values. There were hordes of immigrants and people from countries we hadn’t even heard of poised to invade our cities and take all our jobs. The nuclear holocaust was upon us.

The list went on and on. The fact that the same paranoid theories still existed didn’t surprise Jan. In fact, the only difference she saw was the frequent racism and ultra-conservative Christianity espoused by many of the groups freely posting their views on the Internet. Her father considered himself a righteous leader, and he hated everyone not under his control, no matter what their religion or skin color.

By far the biggest difference between then and now was the role the Internet played in linking the various ideologues together. Maybe there had been other camps nearby in Idaho where people felt as fervently as her father did and they just didn’t know it. Perhaps they could have had friendships with other groups, seen other ways to live, had some form of society outside the clearing they’d made for themselves in the middle of nowhere.

If she hadn’t stumbled on the ranch she regularly spied on, she’d never have known what a “normal” family was. One summer day, she watched as the entire family drove away from the ranch with luggage strapped to the top of their station wagon and she guessed they wouldn’t be coming back soon. She slipped through an unlocked back window and studied the home’s interior much as an alien would after opening a time capsule. Next to an overstuffed chair in the living room was a stack of magazines. Jan grabbed a fistful from the bottom of the pile and ran from the house. She buried them by her favorite thinking tree and unearthed them one by one, studying them carefully. Like the moment when
The Wizard of Oz
changes from black and white to Technicolor, a new world opened to Jan.