John thought she looked very vulnerable and afraid.
Her voice was barely above a whisper. "You can't imagine what they're capable of."
"We have a pretty good idea," Pepperdyne said. "Remember the managing editor of your husband's newspaper?"
"I only met the gentleman once. He died suddenly while Matt and I were engaged."
"We don't believe he died of 'natural causes' like the death certificate said. He had gone on record as disagreeing with your husband's politics. We're exhuming his body for a forensic investigation." Pepperdyne looked at her grimly. "No, ma'am. We haven't underestimated this bunch."
"I'm afraid your own office has been infiltrated. An Agent Braddock" "Is in jail with the rest of them. That's taken care of."
"Is it? How do you know it stops with Braddock? How many members of the Brotherhood are there? Do you know?"
she asked, raising her voice in agitation. "If I testify against them, they'll have me killed. They'll find a way."
"You'll be under our protection." Pepperdyne had gestured toward John, and she gave him a glance that clearly dismissed his adequacy.
"You can't protect me. No matter what measures you take, they won't be enough."
"Your testimony is vital to our case, Mrs. Burnwood."
"Who else is testifying against them?" When Pepperdyne couldn't produce the name of another witness, she laughed scornfully. "I'm it, right? And you think you'll win a conviction on my testimony alone? Their defense attorney will rip me to shreds. He'll say I invented this outlandish tale to get even with my enemies in Prosper."
"What about Matt Burnwood? Is he an enemy, too?"
John was glad that Jim had asked. According to the report, she had tried to brain the guy with a crystal vase. John was curious to know why.
"Are you willing to testify against him, Mrs. Burnwood?"
"I'm willing, all right. The problem is that I didn't actually see Matt at the site of Michael Li's execution. Nor my father in-law.
But they were there. I know it."
"We know it, too." Pepperdyne opened another file and referred to the documents inside. "The Brotherhood wouldn't have carried out a ritual killing without Gibbons Burnwood there because he's its founder and high priest."
She sucked in a quick little breath, then said gruffly, "I should have realized."
"How much do you know about your father-in-law's past?"
She enumerated a few facts, then said, "That's not much, is it?"
Pepperdyne began to summarize from the thick dossier he had on Gibb Burnwood. "His father was a Marine during World War II, serving in the South Pacific. He and a handful of other men volunteered for a special detail. The others were killed during the first week, but he survived for eight months on a Japanese-occupied flyspeck of an island, living off raw fish he caught with his hands. He managed to take out fifty of the enemy without being caught. When the Marines recaptured the island, he was shipped home and hailed as a hero.
"It pissed him off that the war ended before he could return to it. One day in October 1947, he meticulously cleaned his rifle, then put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his big toe.
"Despite the suicide, young Gibb idolized his father and wanted to follow in his footsteps. He joined the Marines, and saw some action in Korea, but that war was over too soon to suit him. By the time Vietnam came around, he was too old to serve. He had missed all the good wars, so he started waging his own, coaching Matt every step of the way.
"Like his father, Gibb was a member of the Klan, but in the early sixties he had a falling out with them. Apparently their methods were too tame for Gibb Burnwood. He decided to form his own group, a closed group limited to members so carefully handpicked that he wouldn't have to answer to any body. We figure he organized the Brotherhood sometime around the midsixties. Naturally, he's grooming Matt to take over for him when he dies.
"We've been on to him for about thirty months, but we have no concrete evidence. It's all circumstantial. You're our best shot at getting this guy, Mrs. Burnwood. If he topples, the others will fall like dominoes."
During Pepperdyne's long recitation, Kendall had listened without uttering a sound. When he laid aside the file on Burnwood, she said, "You still can't prove that he and Matt participated in Michael Li's execution. They've had a year to destroy any physical evidence. A good defense attorney and Matt and Gibb will hire the best will say my testimony is nothing but revenge for Matt's having an affair with one of my clients."
"He was having an affair with one of your clients?"
"Yes."
Pepperdyne winced, scratched his head, and looked to John for consultation.
"I'm afraid she's right, Jim," he said. "If that comes out in court, it'll make her look like a woman scorned and could weaken her testimony."
"Jeez."
"It doesn't matter, Mr. Pepperdyne," she said in an angry outburst. whole discussion is pointless. I'll be dead before they ever go to trial. The Brotherhood couldn't have endured for thirty years without absolute loyalty from its members and their families. Do you think they're going to let me survive?
"I saw them castrate and crucify a wonderful young man simply because he was Asian and dared to love one of their daughters. To them, my crime is a thousand times worse than that. Even if I refused to testify, they would kill me for betraying them. They would murder me without remorse and feel that they were justified, because what is really frightening about all this is that they believe they're right, that God is on their side. They've been anointed. Everything they do, they do in his name. They sang hymns while Michael Li bled to death. In their regard, I'm a heretic. Killing me would be a holy mission.
"And suppose I live long enough to testify, but they're acquitted? Suppose that the evidence you present, coupled with the weakened testimony of a scorned wife, isn't enough to convict, and they walk? If Matt didn't have me assassinated, he would accuse me of desertion and try and get custody of Kevin."
Pepperdyne harrumphed uncomfortably. "Perhaps you should know, Mrs. Burnwood, that he has already obtained a divorce. He claimed physical abuse."
"Because I was defending myself when I struck him?"
Pepperdyne shrugged. "He filed. You didn't respond within the required time, so the court granted the divorce by default."
"Judge Fargo?"
"Exactly."
John wenched her as she digested the face that she was legally free of Matt Burnwood. -He could tell she wasn't emotionally upset over the divorce, but her brow was puckered.
Her next question explained her concern. "Does my ex husband know about Kevin?"
"Not through us," Pepperdyne said. "We didn't know you'd had a baby until we found you. Of course, there's a possibility that word has reached him by another source."
She sank back into her chair, hugged her elbows, and rocked back and forth. "He will stop at nothing to have me killed and turn Kevin over to some secret member of the brotherhood. No," she said emphatically. "I can't go back. I won't."
Pepperdyne said, "You know as well as I that you have no choice, Mrs. Burnwood. You fled the district where several state and federal crimes were committed. Unlawful flight to avoid the giving of testimony is a federal offense.
"You're scheduled to appear before a magistrate judge in half an hour. He'll issue an order directing that you be detained as a material witness and returned, in custody, to the prosecuting district. You, of course, can retain counsel now if you wish."
"I'm fully aware of the law, Mr. Pepperdyne," she said coolly. "And I'll continue to serve as my own counsel."
"We're willing to drop the charges against you if you'll help us convict them." He gave her an opportunity to speak, but she said nothing. "You came in here thinking you were being arrested for murder. I figured you would be relieved."
She shook her head sadly. "You don't understand. They'll see to it that I'm killed."
"We leave tonight," Pepperdyne said briskly.
John knew that his friend wasn't entirely unsympathetic to her predicament. But Jim was a company man. He toed the company line. He had a job to do, and he would do it.
"Our flight is at three," he said. "You'll be transferred to Columbia, where you'll stay in a safe house until the first trial.
I'll be going with you as far as Dallas, then a female marshal and Marshal McGrath will accompany you the rest of the way."
John felt like the rug had been yanked out from under him.
He followed Pepperdyne out into the corridor and confronted him. "What did you mean by that?"
"By what?"
"I'm escorting her to Columbia? Me?"
Pepperdyne's expression was too innocent to be convincing.
"That's the gig, John."
"It's not my gig. Stewart was supposed to be here, not me.
He called in sick at the last minute, and I was sent in his place."
"Guess it's just your unlucky draw, then."
"Jim," he said, grabbing his friend by the sleeve and forcing him to stand still and listen. "I didn't know she had a kid."
"That surprised us all, John."
"I can't accept the assignment. It'll . . . it'll drive me crazy. You know that."
"You're scared?"
"Damn right."
"Of an infant?"
It had sounded ludicrous even to his own ears. Nevertheless, it was true. "You know what I went through after that fiasco in New Mexico. It still gives me nightmares."
Pepperdyne could have laughed at his irrational fear. John would always appreciate him for not doing so. Instead, he tried to reason with him.
"John, I've seen you bargain with the meanest bastards God ever created. You've talked terrorists into laying down their weapons even though they
believed that surrendering would keep them out of heaven. Such are your powers of persuasion."
"Once, maybe. Not anymore."
"You had one bad day and things went south."
"One bad day? You can reduce what happened to one bad day?"
"I didn't mean to minimize it. But no one held you responsible. No one, John. You couldn't have known that the kook was going to carry out his threats."
"I should have known, though, shouldn't I? That's what all my schooling and training was about. That's what the Ph.D. behind my name was for. I was supposed to know how Or to push and when to pull back."
"You're the best in the business, John. We still need you, and sooner or later I hope you'll forgive yourself for New Mexico and come back." Pepperdyne laid a hand on his shoulder. "You've got nerves of steel. Now, realistically, how much damage can a teeny-weepy, toothless infant inflict?"
Chapter 23
As they boarded the airplane in Denver, John had a prescience of disaster. He was gripped by a powerful premonition that this trip was doomed.
Now, weeks later, as he lay in the bed he had shared with his prisoner, his leg broken, a fresh scar on his head, and recently cured of amnesia, he asked himself what, if anything, he could have done to alter the chain of events.
He couldn't have prevented them from boarding that air craft. Pepperdyne would have thought him certifiably nuts if he had pulled him aside and told him that this wasn't a good idea, that his gut instinct was urging him to rethink the situation and come up with another plan.
Pepperdyne was to remain in Dallas while John and his partner, Ruthie Fordham, a pleasant, soft-spoken Hispanic woman, were to fly with Mrs. Burnwood and her child on to Birmingham, then catch a connecting flight to Columbia.
That was the itinerary.
Fate intervened.
Shortly after takeoff from Denver, Kendall's ears began troubling her.
Marshal Fordham called her discomfort to the attention of the flight attendant, who assured her that once the plane reached its cruising altitude, the pain would abate. It didn't.
For the duration of the hour-and-forty-minute flight, she was in agony.
Sensing his mother's distress, the baby fretted and cried. Seated across the aisle from them, John gripped the arms of his seat and prayed that the kid would stop squalling.
But the harder John prayed, the louder the baby wailed.
"Maybe you should order a drink," Pepperdyne suggested when he noticed the beads of perspiration on John's forehead.
"I'm on duty."
"Screw the rules. You're turning green."
"I'm okay." He wasn't, but he focused on one of the rivets in the ceiling of the cabin and tried to block out the baby's crying.
Taxiing to the gate seemed to take almost as long as the flight. When the plane finally stopped, John elbowed aside other passengers in his haste to get off the aircraft. As soon as they came through the jetway, Marshal Fordham hustled Kendall into the nearest ladies' room. Pepperdyne had been left to carry the baby and was looking ill at ease in his new role as nanny. At any other time, John would have laughed at his bachelor friend's awkwardness. Now he couldn't muster a smile or a quip.
"This husband of hers, what's he like?" he asked. He didn't care, he was just talking to ignore the baby in Pepperdyne's arms.
"I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting him." The baby had stopped crying. Pepperdyne gingerly bounced him up and down. "From what I understand, Matt Burnwood is your basic white supremacist in a classy three-piece suit. He's handsome, articulate, educated, and cultured. But he's also a weapons expert' a gung-ho survivalist, and fanatical as hell. He believes his daddy has God in his hip pocket. Gibb says jump and he asks how high." He paused before adding, "Anyone who crosses them is as good as dead." - John looked at him sharply.