Kayla stepped behind Jericho, put her hands on his shoulders, and shoved him gently toward his office. “You have paperwork. You have files to review. You can go do a foot patrol if you want, do more of your vague poking around. If all else fails, then, yes, you should go check to be sure Mr. Williton isn’t trapping his neighbors’ cats.”
Jericho took a couple of steps, then half turned and said, “It was my vague poking around that made Sam Tennant get in touch with me, you know.”
“So go do some more of it. But do not go down to Helena.” She squinted at him. “And don’t even think about going out to the compound. Just because most of the feds are in Helena doesn’t mean they all are, and they’ll definitely have their digital surveillance tools set up. Plus you have no idea what their overall strategy is, and you could mess things up if you aren’t careful.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” Jericho retorted. “At least, not before you brought it up.”
“Bad idea, Jericho,” Hockley said.
“Jay—” Kayla started.
He turned the rest of the way around and grinned at them. “Take it easy. I’ll be a good little boy and do my paperwork. Go, team!”
Well, he’d have paperwork on his desk, and in a minimized window on his computer screen. But he’d mostly be scanning the internet, looking for news out of Helena. Trying not to think about Kay’s dad having his meeting, and how things would be different for Kayla depending on how things went. Damn it. If Morgan knew the feds had lost their witnesses, he could refuse to deal, and the whole thing would just go away. Kayla’s career wouldn’t be destroyed when the feds finally released the details of whatever Morgan confessed to, Jackson would have to crawl back under his rock and shut the hell up, Jericho could quit his job and move on with his life . . . and a corrupt cop would get away without any punishment. Shit.
Jericho couldn’t get involved. Wouldn’t get involved. It was too late, anyway. The meeting had probably already started, and Jericho had no secure way to get in touch with Morgan, no way that wouldn’t likely be picked up by the feds. He couldn’t send a warning, even if he wanted to, and he really wasn’t sure he did. So for once it was actually good to be ineffective.
He tried to go back to the internet. Hundreds, maybe thousands of militia members and supporters expected to converge on the capitol, some already there. Strong law enforcement presence. Traffic snarled, police and news choppers overhead. Jericho checked the time. The Mosely FBI had left forty minutes earlier and had a few hours more before they’d get to Helena. They weren’t going to get there before the big event, whatever it was. But that was what the FBI were best for, anyway: investigating and mopping up. It wasn’t like they were equipped for crowd control or any real action. They’d shown that pretty clearly the other day when they’d been ambushed. So let them go rushing down to the city.
He stared at the screen. The other day had been an ambush. That had been smart. The militia had set a trap and they’d sprung it with deadly effect. Sure, they’d lost some guys, but—what had Wade said? The militia members weren’t stupid. They’d known how things would go down at the ambush site, more or less. They could have jumped in their vans and driven away well before police reinforcements arrived, but they hadn’t done it. They’d wanted to be arrested.
To be martyrs, or at least to get maximum attention. To have a big, spectacular trial that would give them an audience for all their antigovernment bullshit.
Okay, but then why the protest? Why go to all the trouble of turning Sam Tennant and his family into virtual hostages if the next step involved abandoning the compound and heading down to Helena? Had they changed their strategy? If so, why?
He stood up and headed for the door of his office at the same time as he pulled out his cell phone and set it dialing. The main room was deserted, the first time Jericho had seen it totally empty since he’d arrived in town. Hockley, Montgomery, and Kayla were in her office, and he stepped inside just as his call was answered.
“Is something going on?” he said into the phone. “Something besides Helena.”
“I don’t know,” Wade answered cautiously. “Do you have reason to believe something is?”
“I’m not playing, Wade. I need to know this. If you’ve got intel, I need to hear it. Because—” Because why? And why the hell had he come into Kayla’s office first, before he’d had this conversation? Well, maybe because it was easier to just think it through out loud, all at once, with everyone listening. “If anyone knows about setting up one event in order to distract police attention from a different, more important event, it’s you.” He looked at the others in the room, frowned, and added, “Allegedly.”
Then he regrouped. “I’m trying to understand this militia shit, and I can’t see why they’d change tactics. Guerilla warfare was working for them. I mean, they got caught, but we all pretty much agree that they wanted to get caught, and they took out three feds at the same time. So why go from tactics that work to a totally different approach? Why announce their damn intentions on the damn internet, setting up a huge damn target on themselves down in Helena? Why would they do that, Wade?”
Wade was quiet for too long, then said, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up.
Which left Jericho with no answers and three people staring at him, waiting. “He’s going to call back,” Jericho said. “But I’m not wrong, am I? I know, Kay, I’m supposed to stay out of it, but . . . this doesn’t feel right at all.”
“And Wade Granger is going to help you feel right again?” Montgomery asked with a bit of an eye roll.
“You’re welcome to try too, big boy, but I honestly think Wade’s got a better chance of getting the job done.”
“Okay,” Kayla said quickly. “Jericho’s got a point. I mean, we need to be careful, but you’re not wrong, Jay—this does feel like a strange shift in their strategy.”
“The problem is we don’t know what intel the FBI is working with,” Hockley mused. “They may have rock-solid reasons to know Helena’s a real thing, a real threat.”
“It’s not out of the question that there could be a real threat in Helena and a real threat up here,” Jericho said. “We don’t have an accurate number for how many out-of-staters have moved in over the last couple days. The motel’s full of media guys, or at least it was, but it’s good camping weather and there’s millions of acres of empty forest around here to hide in. If a few thousand show up in Helena, how many does that leave to cause trouble somewhere else?”
They sat for a moment, then Kayla leaned forward in her chair, focused on Hockley and Montgomery. “We need more information. You guys aren’t FBI, but you’re feds and not currently under investigation, so you’ve got an edge. Get in touch with whoever you can and try to discover what the FBI knows. Don’t be shy about making people aware of our concerns. Jay, talk to the deputies in the field; tell them to play it safe and to communicate anything suspicious back to us immediately. I’m going to call the state troopers, the school, and the radio station to advise them of a possible situation. We all report back here as soon as we have any intel to share. What am I missing?”
“Nothing I can think of,” Jericho said, and he headed for the door, Hockley and Montgomery on his heels.
Downstairs, Garron listened to Jericho’s suspicions with his usual grumpy calm, then picked up the phone and started making calls. Jericho didn’t ask who Garron was contacting; he just got on the radio to the deputies in the field. There were only two cars out there, one deputy in each, and he gave them a lecture about being careful and taking off at the first sign of trouble, then sent them out to scout a wide perimeter around the Tennant compound.
Then he stepped outside and stood on the front steps, gazing out at the town. The sheriff’s office was at the west end of Main Street, only a few two- and three-story buildings between it and the wall of trees that marked the edge of town. Everything seemed calm.
This was all probably an overreaction, and that was fine. There was nothing wrong with being cautious.
