13
Cash stepped into Colcord’s office. She liked the smell of it, of old leather and books, and the atmosphere was more like a study than an office. It was the complete opposite of her own. A large bookshelf covered one wall, lined with Jonah Hex and Lone Ranger graphic novels, a complete shelf of Louis L’Amour hardbacks, along with books on fishing and hiking. An old bridle hung on one wall, above a bronze sculpture of a cowboy on a bucking horse. Several pictures were hung neatly on another wall, and as Cash stepped closer, she realized one was a photo of a young Colcord with a full head of hair, looking handsome and fit, laughing as he slung an arm across the shoulder of a burly man in a cowhide vest. A modest barn stood behind them, a field of purple-and-green alfalfa beyond that.
“Just hung that one. Me at twenty and my dad,” Colcord explained, shuffling a huge sheaf of papers that cluttered his desk. “He was a real cowboy. Earned his stripes through a lifetime of calluses, rope burns, and dusty Justins.”
“Wow, you look like you could have been on the cover of a magazine. What happened?”
Colcord looked at her with a half smile. “The stress of working with you aged me beyond my years.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” Cash said, with a laugh.
Colcord gestured for Cash to sit in the empty leather chair across the table from him. “Want some coffee?”
Cash nodded, and Colcord busied himself peeling open a new jar of instant Bustelo.
“I didn’t know you liked Bustelo,” Cash said.
“I don’t. Stuff’s awful.”
Cash wondered why he had a new jar in his office if he didn’t like it. “Well, thanks… I guess.”
Colcord settled down across from her, with an espresso for himself pulled from a fancy machine in one corner.
“Got an update about the wafers. Followed up with that convent in the town of Penne, Italy. Convento di Santa Chiara Offreduccio.”
“Yeah?”
“Apparently, they make wafers specially for priests conducting the conservative Tridentine Mass, but they only sell within Italy. Our killers, or their supplier, must have brought them into the US themselves. They were pretty cagey about their clients, but they claim that none were sold to Americans.”
“So basically a dead end,” Colcord replied.
“Not totally. We now know the murderers might not be American or at least were in Italy at some point.”
“What’s the Tridentine Mass?” Colcord asked.
“A Mass that the traditionalist Catholics want to resurrect. I looked it up. Very formal and all in Latin—not like modern-day Mass. Now let’s see what you got,” Cash said.
Colcord slapped down a file and opened it. On top was a standard search warrant for a cell phone and another for a sat phone, followed by documents with rows of phone numbers on them. He laid a black satellite phone next to them.
“I had a deputy go out and collect Margie’s Iridium sat phone through a warrant. The parameters of the warrant allow us to search outgoing and incoming calls and texts during her visits to Willy Grooms’s cabin. I plugged in the GPS location data and narrowed down the scope of our search to these ninety-eight days that she visited the cabin, which occurred over the course of several years. That’s the warrant we served on BlueCosmo, the company that provides sat service for Iridium, and got back these call records and text messages on those dates as well—so wecan cross-reference in case she’s deleted anything. So… what we need to do now is run these numbers through TLO and Accurint. And here’s a stack of her text messages to read through.” Colcord paused. “And last but not least, I brought pecan buns from the Ore House for sustenance.” He whisked a box of pastries from under his desk and opened it, shoving it under her nose.
Cash eyed them: flaky, gooey, buttery. Colcord’s café—the Ore House—was legendary when it came to pastries—all family recipes. “You’re killing me, Colcord.”
“A cheat day won’t hurt.”
“Damn you,” she said, and picked one up. It was still warm. She bit into it with her eyes closed, savoring the sweet mix of nuts and sugar. It was a hell of a lot better than the kale and granola she had been living on these past couple of months.
They began their work, Cash sifting through the printed stacks of text messages and running the numbers through the TLO and Accurint databases on her clunky CBI-issued laptop. Colcord did the same using his iPad. There were 106 pages of texts, and they started with the recent ones, working backward. Most of the texts were between Margie Brooksfield and her husband, talking about domestic matters and the medical problems of one of their children. Cash learned more about Paul Brooksfield’s ongoing back rash than she had ever wanted to know.
After a couple of minutes had passed, Colcord interrupted the silence. “I think I’ve found something.” He slid over a number that he had circled in pen. The number repeated on the last seven days Margie had visited Willy Grooms before his death. The calls ranged from one hour to two hours long.
“That last call was around the same time the torture of Grooms started.”
“You don’t think she was involved, do you?” Cash asked.
“I don’t think anything—yet. But the timing doesn’t look good.”
“So who does the number belong to?”
