“That’s an interesting turn of phrase. Because I would definitely say that you’re not stupid, overall. But at the same time, it often does seem very much like you’re stupid. I mean, from the outside, watching the things you do—I can see how someone might reach the wrong conclusion about your intelligence.”
Jericho wished he’d never started this conversation. “Well, you’re never going to catch Wade.” Then he frowned. “How come you didn’t tell me Mike DeMonte got killed?”
Hockley’s tone was a little too casual as he said, “I don’t think that information has been released to the public yet. Where’d you hear it?”
“I know a guy who knows a guy. My question is, why didn’t I hear it from you? We were talking about Mike yesterday morning; yesterday afternoon he got knocked off. But it wasn’t something you thought I’d want to know about?”
“It’s a delicate situation,” Hockley said, and Jericho stared at him.
“Shit. You haven’t told Kay?”
That was the end of Hockley’s false nonchalance. “I can’t tell Kay,” he hissed, and turned his back to the room as if worried someone might read his lips. “I can’t put her in that situation!”
“You think she might tell her dad,” Jericho said, realization dawning. “Or she might not. And either way, she’s screwed. It’s the same thing as before, when you were first investigating him. If she told him, he might change his strategy and retract any confessions he’s in the middle of, and that would mean she’d betrayed the people’s trust.”
“And if she doesn’t tell him, she’s betrayed her father,” Hockley finished. He shook his head. “It can’t stay quiet for long. But with all this militia shit going on, nobody in the press is paying attention to anything else, so the story hasn’t leaked.” He frowned at Jericho. “It hasn’t leaked widely. There’s a meeting this morning; the lawyers are going to offer the ex-sheriff a deal based on his confessing to certain charges.”
“But if he doesn’t take the deal, he’ll probably walk. The only real witness against him is dead, and you guys don’t have enough other evidence to make a case.” Jericho paused, hoping to be contradicted, then sighed. “Shit.”
“I don’t care what the hell happens to him,” Hockley said fiercely. “But I care what happens to Kay, and if she knows about DeMonte it is a lose-lose situation for her.”
“Shit,” Jericho said again. “So—who could she hear it from? You don’t tell her, I don’t tell her—the person who told me likely won’t tell her, but I don’t honestly know who told him.”
“Fucking Granger,” Hockley said. “The son of a bitch has a finger in every goddamn pie in this state. And why’d he tell you? He must have known we were trying to keep it quiet. Was he hoping you’d tell Kayla?”
“Kay was thirty feet away from us when he told me. If he’d wanted her to know, he could have told her himself.” Jericho caught himself. “Assuming he’s where I got the information from.”
Hockley didn’t even bother to respond to that. “Might just be one of his games. Maybe it’s more fun to torture you about whether to tell her instead of just telling her directly.”
“Maybe,” Jericho admitted. “But I don’t think so. He’s— I don’t know. Do you think Kay’s dad would have anything on Wade? If Wade thinks he does, then Wade would find a way to get this information to him directly—he wouldn’t take the chance of me not telling Kay or Kay not telling her dad. He’d have too much to lose if Morgan testified against him. So—” So, what? “So if your meeting this morning goes smoothly, it means Morgan doesn’t have any dirt on Wade, so Wade didn’t see a need to pull his fat out of the fire. Sound right?”
“And if the meeting tanks because Morgan knows he doesn’t have to make a deal? I’m going to assume it’s because Granger did tell him, and it’s going to be yet another reason for me to lock the bastard up until he’s old and gray.”
“You can try,” Jericho said, but he wasn’t really feeling the bravado. Had his big mouth just gotten Wade in trouble? “He was surprised last night. Surprised I hadn’t already heard about the killing. I don’t think he was faking it, so maybe he didn’t know it was a secret. I mean, he knows a lot more than he should, but he doesn’t know everything.” He hadn’t known Jericho had survived the shoot-out. “He might not even know you guys are trying to bluff on this one.”
“He might not have known before he talked to you. But if you told him you didn’t know, he’d start to wonder why.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake, Hockley, maybe you should have fucking told me, and then I would have known and I wouldn’t have told him I didn’t.”
Maybe Hockley had an answer to that, but Jericho never heard it, because that was when the simmering activity in the FBI section of the office boiled up into an explosion of movement. Agents came pouring out of the conference room, pulling on their jackets, checking their service weapons, and heading for the stairs.
“Another damn ambush?” Jericho wondered out loud, but the energy was different. There was no panic, here, only purpose.
“Militia’s heading to Helena,” one of the agents told them as she waited for the bottleneck to clear at the top of the stairs. “Five vans left Tennant’s ranch, and all the out-of-staters are moving down too. They’re staging an illegal protest at the capitol building.”
“And the FBI needs to be there for that?” Jericho queried, but she was already gone.
“Maybe they’re going to make some arrests,” Hockley said. “That’d be good. Apparently the guys we’ve got downstairs are pulling the POW thing—name, rank, and serial number only. Hopefully some of the new ones won’t be quite as dedicated to the cause. A little less discipline would be useful about now.”
Kay wandered over to join them, looking about as bemused as Jericho felt. He asked her, “Does this seem right to you? It’s a pretty huge de-escalation, isn’t it? Military-style ambush one day, killing three feds, and a couple days later they’re going to march around holding signs?”
“I assume the FBI agrees with you,” Kayla said. “They think something big’s going to happen.”
“We could go down,” Jericho suggested. “It’s not our case, but we could still—”
“We have work to do here,” Kayla told him, as he’d known she would. She really wasn’t much fun.
“Maybe we could plant some bugs in the conference room while the FBI’s gone,” Jericho tried. “Hockley, you DEA boys got anything like that lying around? Sheriff’s department might be able to come up with two Styrofoam cups and a long piece of string, but they’d probably notice that.”
