a deputy, rising through the ranks for five years, and before that he’d been a lawyer with a less than grand practice. He still thought of himself as an attorney rather than a lawman. During the next three years, he intended to network tirelessly and take advantage of all the legal and quasi-legal ways a sheriff could enrich himself, and then run for the district attorney of Pinehaven County. With the ultimate goal of becoming attorney general of the State of California, he had already begun using the resources of his office to obtain information damaging to a list of public servants who he anticipated would be his competition in future elections.
Therefore, this business with Dexter Frawley—transferring the bodies of Painton Spader and Justine Klineman to Sacramento, that nest of vipers, and relinquishing jurisdiction in this case to the state—left him uneasy. On the one hand, the attorney general, Tio Barbizon, now owed him a favor. On the other hand, if this situation couldn’t be contained and if it blew up on them, Hayden might suffer some damage to his image for having acceded so quickly to Barbizon’s request.
What most disturbed him was that he couldn’t be sure he was getting the straight story from Barbizon. The AG claimed to be working in conjunction—unofficially—with the National Security Agency, which was eager to keep its connection to the case secret. But Barbizon withheld large parts of the story, and he had a reputation as a sharp operator.
There was reason to think the claim of NSA involvement was legit. When the wallet containing the Nathan Palmer driver’s license was found near the woman’s corpse, Hayden had gone to the NCIC website to check if there might be a criminal history or an outstanding warrant on the guy. The warrant had been issued by a court in Salt Lake City, at the request of the attorney general of the State of Utah, rather than by a court in the county or the town, Springville, where the crime had been committed. Palmer was wanted for suspicion of larceny, arson, and murder. While Hayden was reading what little was in the Nathan Palmer file, the screen of his computer had blanked to white, and a silhouette of his shoulders, neck, and head appeared in black. His screen remained locked for maybe three minutes before control was returned to him. He knew this meant his photograph had been taken and his location identified, which was a capability only of the nation’s major security agencies. One of them had a watch on the NCIC’s Nathan Palmer file, to see who might check it out.
Twenty minutes later, before he could contact the attorney general of Utah, Hayden had received the call from Barbizon, who surprised him by asking why he had been inquiring about Nathan Palmer. When Hayden described the double homicide and the horrific savaging of Justine Klineman, Barbizon put him on hold for five minutes while he conferred with others. When he returned, he’d suggested that in this matter he was a front for the NSA, which wanted the Pinehaven case against Nathan Palmer transferred to Barbizon for prosecution. He was permitted to reveal more than the details in the warrant issued by the Salt Lake City court: Palmer had been a highly placed executive employed by Refine with oversight of the Springville facility where ninety-three people died in the fire that had been big news for two days; the Palmer ID was in fact false, one of several that the man had obtained prior to events at Springville and thought were known only to him. Barbizon wasn’t permitted to reveal the fugitive’s real name. Nathan Palmer had bought a custom red Dodge Demon via an offshore shell corporation that he had formed; although he thought his employer didn’t know about the vehicle, he was wrong. Apparently after purchase, the Dodge had been stripped of its GPS, so that it couldn’t easily be tracked; that was something his all-knowing employer hadn’t known. Any lead that Hayden might develop on the Dodge would be welcome. Finally, this was a matter of national security, and Hayden was enjoined by law from repeating to anyone what little had been disclosed during this conversation.
Now that Frawley and Zellman had come and gone, Hayden Eckman sat in his office, working on a pot of black coffee, wondering why Nathan Palmer, under his real name, had thought it necessary to acquire false ID and a hard-to-track vehicle. It sounded