Thomas took a sip of single-malt. “Why would I shoot you when I’ve admitted to needing you?”
“About that.” Trapper crossed his arms and his ankles. “That’s why I’m here. Time to renegotiate, Tom. The power has shifted.”
“How can that be, when you were robbed of that flash drive?”
“I was robbed of a flash drive. The one taken out of the wall had porn on it.”
Well, that explained why Jenks hadn’t mentioned finding the buried treasure. The deputy had been made a fool of. More galling, Thomas had fallen for Trapper’s bluff as well. “Your inflection indicates that there’s another flash drive.”
“Sure is,” Trapper said. “And its contents are even juicier than the nasty movies.”
“What’s on it?”
“For starters, a video of Berkley Johnson, telling all. The time burn-in is dated two days before he was killed.”
“If I’m not mistaken, the authorities dismissed his allegations as sour grapes.”
“But his soul-searing video, plus this audio recording…” Trapper gave Kerra a silent signal. She took a cell phone from her handbag and went through the appropriate steps to engage it. Thomas’s voice came through the speaker.
Thomas listened to half a minute of the recording and then quietly asked Kerra to turn it off. “You would never use that,” he said. “It would violate your integrity as a journalist. You had agreed that we were off the record.”
“I don’t intend to publish or broadcast it,” she said coolly. “Besides, it was a unique circumstance. I was in fear of my life.”
“Are you recording this conversation?”
“No.”
“I’m to believe that?”
“Same as we’re to believe that you didn’t have Jenks put a tracking device on Kerra’s car,” Trapper said.
Wilcox turned back to him. “I didn’t.”
“See? Some things we just gotta take each other’s word for. Now answer Kerra’s question.”
“About knowing if she was the girl in the picture?” He looked her straight in the eye. “Of course I knew. Within a few weeks of the bombing, I knew your name and that you’d been shuttled off to Virginia by an aunt and uncle.”
Her lips parted.
“How can you be surprised?” he asked. “I had to know everything about every single survivor, where they were inside the building when the bombs were detonated, who or what they might have seen.”
“Even a child of five years old?”
“I don’t take chances. Since your identity had been so scrupulously protected, it took some ingenuity and money, but a wily individual on my payroll, the likes of Mr. Trapper here, identified and located you.
“I kept track. Years passed. You grew up, a normal little girl in every respect. Neither you nor your relatives ever referenced the bombing or drew the connection between it and yourself, not even as you pursued your profession when that level of notoriety would have been a boon to it. I believed I had nothing to fear from you. Until you moved to Dallas.”
“The wily likes of me would have sat up and taken notice,” Trapper said.
“Shortly after your arrival,” Thomas said, still speaking to Kerra, “you began requesting to do an interview with me.”
“Panicksville.”
Again Thomas ignored Trapper. “I agreed to the interview to test you, Kerra, to see if, while profiling me, you had somehow linked me to the Pegasus.”
Trapper said, “You told us you did the interview to make those who killed your daughter nervous.”
“That’s true, in part. Definitely. But I had to know if Kerra posed a threat.” Going back to her, he said, “You didn’t touch on anything remotely connected to the bombing or the complex I developed on the hotel’s former spot. Again, I relaxed.”
“Then you learned that I was going to interview The Major,” she said.
He took a sip of scotch. “That was one coincidence too many.”
“You decided he and I had to be killed.”
“Initially.” He could tell the admission stunned them, Kerra in particular. He rolled the highball glass back and forth between his palms. “However, I was advised to reconsider the fallout that a double murder would generate, the subsequent investigation, etcetera. I agreed that perhaps I had overreacted.”
“You called off our execution.”
“I postponed it,” he said with bald honesty. “I would wait to see what repercussions, if any, came from the interview and then make a decision. I watched the broadcast, but nothing about it unnerved me.” He paused before adding, “Obviously someone was of a differing opinion.”
Trapper raised his index finger. “I’ve just figured out why the attack occurred after, not before, the interview. Unlike you, these someones didn’t know Kerra’s significance until she announced it Sunday night.”
“When she made the public disclosure—”
“The shit hit the fan.”
“They acted with remarkable speed.”
“Jenks and who else?”
Thomas didn’t say anything to that.
“Come on, Tom. Cough him up, and I’ll take it from there. The G-men might listen more attentively if I deliver a crooked deputy sheriff to them.”
Thomas tipped his head toward the cell phone in Kerra’s hand and said to Trapper, “That audio recording is of little consequence. You did most of the talking. I responded with nothing incriminating or even affirming, except to say that you told a captivating story.”
“You said you would direct me. In my summation, tell me where I went wrong.”
Thomas didn’t say anything.
Trapper said softly, “You’ve got to give me more, Tom, or I am not—and you can record this your ownself, spray paint it on the field of the Cotton Bowl, skywrite it over downtown, carve it into your skin, whatever—I am not going to the feds and sticking my neck out for you.
“If you continue to hold out, I’ve a good mind to call your buddy Jenks and tell him you’ve ratted him out. That’ll guarantee that I won’t have to waste another minute of my life obsessing over you because you will be O. V. E. R. Talk to me, now, or all bets are off.”
Thomas assessed his situation and, although it rankled, acknowledged that Trapper did hold the advantage. Thomas had only one chance to see justice done for Tiffany. The tradeoff was admitting to Trapper his own wrongdoing.
He swirled the liquid in his glass as he carefully chose his words. “Where you went wrong was overthinking it. You envisioned a conclave of like-minded men, a clan. You imagined it being founded on a doctrine, because you couldn’t conceive of it of being so incredibly simple. There is no higher cause. Never was. No philosophy or creed or anything like what you surmised. Nothing idealistic or anarchist or radically inspired.”
“Then how did you get your converts?”
“When something needed doing, I looked for a candidate or candidates to do it, singled them out, discovered what their heart’s desire was—”
“And provided it.”
Thomas didn’t admit it out loud but gave a slight nod. “A public office, a piece of real estate, a seat on the board of a lending company, a national championship. The object of desire could be something as highflown as that, or as plebeian as a married woman’s sudden availability.”