The morning after the fire, Special Agent Mercy Kilpatrick stared at the smoking pile of burned boards. The old barn hadn’t had a chance. It’d been ancient, brittle, and dry when she was a child, so no doubt now, two decades later, it’d gone up in flames as if it’d been soaked in gasoline.
A childhood girlfriend had once lived on the farm, and Mercy had spent several hours rooting around in the barn and surrounding grounds, searching for small animals and pretending the barn was their castle. After her friend had moved, Mercy hadn’t seen it again until today.
Now she was an FBI agent assigned to investigate the murder of law enforcement officers. A very angry FBI agent. Cold-blooded murder of her fellow officers in blue did that to her. And to every other person in law enforcement.
She wished she could return to playing princess.
Was the fire set to draw the deputies out here on purpose?
She didn’t like to think such a thing could happen in her community.
Truman was nearly killed.
She shuddered and put the image out of her thoughts.
Our relationship could have abruptly ended after only two months.
She still hadn’t seen Truman. She’d talked briefly with him on the phone, relieved to hear his voice, but he’d been pulled in a dozen directions since he arrived at the fire at midnight. Thankfully he’d suffered only some minor burns. Last night she’d flown into the Portland airport at ten o’clock after two weeks of special training at Quantico. Not wanting to drive home to Bend in the middle of the night after flying all day, she’d slept in her Portland condo, which had been on the market for nearly a month without a single offer.
Seller’s market, my ass.
The 3:00 a.m. phone call from Truman had immediately gotten her up and on the road for the three-hour trip home to Central Oregon, the news of the fire, shootings, and explosions driving all sleep from her brain. By the time she’d arrived at her apartment, her boss from the small FBI office in Bend had called.
The two murdered county deputies were now her priority.
As she surveyed the scorched disaster, a frosty breeze shot down the neck of her heavy coat. Thanksgiving was rapidly approaching, and hints of winter had been in the Central Oregon air for several weeks. She’d spent the first eighteen years of her life in the tiny community of Eagle’s Nest, but had never returned until she’d been assigned temporary duty in the Bend office for a domestic terrorism case and discovered she’d missed living on the east side of the Cascade mountain range. Less than two months ago, she’d decided to move from wet Portland to the high desert of Bend.
Life in Central Oregon was different from life in Portland. The air smelled cleaner, the snowy mountain peaks were more plentiful, and traffic was a hundred times lighter, although the locals might disagree. Everything moved slower over here. The people were an eclectic mix of families, retirees, ranchers, farmers, cowboys, millennials, and business professionals. Farther out from the main city of Bend, the population drastically thinned and trended toward ranchers and farmers.
Some people moved to Central Oregon to leave all society behind. If you weren’t picky about the location, a parcel of remote land could be purchased for a very reasonable price. Some wanted to live on their own terms without relying on the government for their safety or food supply. Sometimes they were called preppers; other times they were called unpleasant names. Mercy had grown up in such a family. Her parents had built a self-sufficient home and lifestyle and embraced the prepper label. It’d been a good, down-to-earth life until she turned eighteen.
After Mercy left Eagle’s Nest, she discovered she couldn’t fully cut herself off from the prepper lifestyle, so she’d created a balance to ease her mind. While she’d lived and worked in Portland, she’d maintained a remote secret getaway, spending weekends stocking and preparing her Central Oregon cabin. If disaster struck, she was prepared.
She was always prepared.
But no one needed to know that. Only Truman and some of her family knew she slaved like a madwoman in her spare time to ease her worry about a possible future disaster. Her new coworkers and even her closest workmate, Eddie, had no idea that she hid what she thought of as her “secret obsession.”
It was her business. People were judgmental. She’d seen it all her life and didn’t want that judgment aimed at her.
Plus she couldn’t help her entire office if disaster struck and they turned to her because they knew of her resources. She believed in keeping her “wealth” hidden from onlookers. Her hard work was for herself and her family.
She dug the toe of her boot into the wet ground, the area soaked with the thousands of gallons of water trucked in by the fire department. This rural area didn’t have fire hydrants every hundred yards, and thankfully, the fire hadn’t spread beyond the barn. Pines still stood proudly beyond the smoking pile of rubble. The usually brown ground was black and gray, from the burning of low brush and a thick coating of soot and ash.
She watched the county evidence recovery team crawl through the barn’s remains and carefully search a large perimeter under the watchful eye of the fire marshal. Earlier they’d recovered four rifle casings that Mercy’s FBI supervisor, Jeff Garrison, had immediately sent to the FBI laboratory instead of the backed-up local labs.
Mercy had never worked a case involving a fire investigation, and she felt out of her element. Truman had been working several arsons around Eagle’s Nest, the first of which had occurred just before she went back east for training. Someone had set fire to an ancient abandoned Oldsmobile at the end of Robinson Street. Before the fire, nearby residents hadn’t called to have it towed away because they’d assumed someone would eventually come back for it.
Truman had laughed as he repeated the words of an older witness to Mercy. “Hate to mess with someone’s car. That’s their transportation . . . maybe their livelihood . . . don’t want someone getting inconvenienced because I made a phone call to a tow company.”
The car had been sitting there for six months.
People had more patience on this side of the mountain range.