‘Me neither. Internal, internecine feud?’
‘Too broad-based. Aryan Nation, Aryan Brothers, Nazis, Phineas geeks, a couple of breakaway guys from the Order, a former Wizard of the True Knights of the KKK, a Montana Freeman doing time up here. Almost surprised there isn’t a fascist from the Northpoint Tactical Teams there. Wide-ranging slaughter.’
‘And mass murder of LAPD officers in MacArthur Park.’
‘Neat, choreographed.’
‘With more than just recession and gun culture as the catalyst.’
Wood had turned to his computer screen and was manipulating the keyboard with one hand. ‘Okay, we’re looking for a higher source.’
‘We’re looking for anything we can throw on a flow- or flip-chart to keep the Director off our backs.’
He paused and smiled at her. ‘Did I ever tell you you’re a cynic?’
‘Frequently. Blame the job. But I’ll go with your higher source theory. The incidents don’t exactly smell random.’
‘So, if it’s not white-on-white, it’s gotta be …’ He raised an eyebrow, finger poised.
‘Black?’ A sceptical frown. ‘The brothers don’t have the resourcing. You know any posse with the kind of reach, funding and level of motivation to do this? The Cripps? The Bloods? The Mandingo Warriors?’
‘Negative. How ’bout Latino?’
‘Wrong tribe. It’s strict demarcation. No black gangs would do their dirty work and take orders to carry through those wet jobs in jail. Not even for a year’s supply of smack and bitches.’
Wood grunted. ‘You’re right. About as likely as them agreeing to touch their toes in the shower-block. Which leaves us where?’
‘In the same position, touching our toes.’ She flicked open a box file. ‘At least it narrows our search. Could only be an info-rich operator. The guy who detonated in front of me wasn’t on our books as a known Phineas Priest.’
‘The remains of a black leather jacket and the P ankh tattooed on his chest were a giveaway.’
‘We don’t often get the benefit of an autopsy to pinpoint them.’
‘The good ol’ Book of Numbers, huh?’
‘Can’t beat the Old Testament for incentivizing whackos.’
‘Phineas slays an Israelite and his heathen wife with a javelin for violating God’s prohibition on mixed-race marriage, saves his people from plague, and gets high office for his family as a result. It’s manna for copycats.’
‘A headache for us.’ She extracted several pages of closely typed notes. ‘Someone on the fringe of the fringe, close enough to have the gen, distant enough to escape the vortex they create. That’s our man, or our group. Stir, sit back and watch things simmer seems to be their approach.’
‘Until they decide to add more fresh ingredients.’
‘We’ll try and be there to disrupt them. Time to trawl. It’s the white victims who carry the clues.’
‘Their deaths that’ll spark the backlash.’
‘Spot on.’
‘I tell you, Krista. From where I’m living in the Baldwin Hills, I can sense the tension. There’s expectation, real, raw fear. Police are hurting, burying their own. It won’t take long before the community feels the heat, gets covered by fall-out.’
‘Start working your screen, then, Fletch. Give me what you’ve got. The big R.’
Race Hate. There were almost five hundred groups in the United States with this as their motivation and means. Many were linked to Christian Identity, believing to their core that whites were God’s Chosen, that Jews and Blacks were descended from Satan and would burn in a final showdown, a racial Armageddon. They prepared for it, trained for it, colonized compounds and camps from Idaho to Washington State, Texas to Oregon. For God’s Chosen, they had an unusual propensity to rob banks, indulge in counterfeiting and fraud, and to fight amongst themselves. Adopting a cause was expedient, lent logic and legitimacy to what, stripped bare, was basic, unadulterated lunacy. Many were misfits, dangerous and deluded outcasts populating the lower slopes of achievement and insight, dwelling somewhere in the no-man’s-land between criminal disposition and criminal insanity. Could mean a lead. Krista and Wood began to sift, tracing connections, the inbred family trees of loathing, the old branches, the young offshoots. Malice and violence permeated the soil in which such species grew. The recently deceased had associates and rivals, they had existed in the realm of swastika fantasy and distrustful militancy, had died in a blazing paramilitary domain of their own construction. Divine irony, divine comedy. The two Special Agents were in for a long search, a day of doughnuts and coffee, of calls diverted.
Krista yawned, rubbed her eyes. After a time, the photographs – whether mugshots or material from the atrocity-archive – all looked the same. Sullen, vacant faces of the perpetrators; dull, trauma-damaged faces of the onlookers. Destruction created its own form of anaesthesia. She stifled the involuntary impulse to stretch and lay down her head. Perhaps she was inured, perhaps the loss of Emmy had cauterized excess emotion. She shuffled more photo stills, cross-referenced with a trial summary. March 1998. Operation Run for the Border – an original crazy gang who had planned to gun down Mexican immigrants attempting to cross illegally into the US for a lifetime of fruit-picking and domestic service. Another case, different pictures. Colour was turning to muddy sepia. Two hours, three … four.
‘Keeping you awake?’ Wood called over.
‘Sorry Fletch. Some of this makes me want to cover my head in a blanket and lock myself in the closet.’
‘Thought only your ex had that effect.’
‘Nope. When I think of him, a white supremacist goes and vaporizes on the Pacific Coast Highway.’
‘Great. Think of him some more.’
She gave a half-laugh, an expression of her split feelings, her ambivalence towards Josh. She had been his lover and wife, mother to his child. You could not junk that, ditch history or him completely. It was passion and agony, sharing and separation, what she was and who she had become. She had carried part of him, given birth to part of him. He was under her skin, would always be there. The start was Germany, early and mid 1980s. He had been an MI5 officer responsible for liaising with US counter-intelligence, but he had done more than liaise. Their affair produced a wedding and then a daughter, a pairing of two high-achieving, high-grade spooks, a move to London and the Maria Johanna. A lot of commitment, a lot of memories. Emmy had grown up happy and secure, attending the American school in St John’s Wood, walking, running and roller-blading around London’s parks, holidaying at a rustic Cornish cottage in which the remains of decomposing bats would often pressure-spray through the shower heads. Character-forming, and Emmy had character. It was carefree and simple, an antidote to the complexity and nerve-wrenching work patterns of one or other parent. Josh had postings to Northern Ireland and back to Germany; he would disappear and reappear, his face grey, eyes shuttered, his mind and focus directed on a point tangential to his family. For Krista, the early charm faded, was smothered by claustrophobia and resentment. Santa Barbara had seemed so warm, so welcoming, that summer. A shame to leave. The decision not to return to London had come easily.
‘Congratulations. We have ourselves a priority list.’ Wood sauntered across from his work station.
She took the proffered sheet and scanned downwards. ‘Comprehensive.’
‘How d’you think we should approach the interviews?’
‘With caution. Ever since Oklahoma City, they’d just as soon stick a knife in our guts as talk to us. We’re the wrong side of the Timothy McVeigh courtroom.’
‘And I’m the wrong side of white. You’d better front this one.’
