Chapter Forty-Six
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
By 10 a.m., I had hiked a half mile from where the chopper had dropped me and found my way to a small cabin on the hunting preserve.
Tire marks from a sedan were visible in the gravel beside the structure, and a hundred yards to the right, I saw a white Buick LeSabre, parked under a bough of shortleaf pines. A government sedan.
I tried the knob to the front door of the cabin, and it turned. I pulled my Glock and let the door swing open on its own.
“Director Banning,” I called out. “It’s Gardner Camden.”
The place was one large room with a kitchenette and dining area. A hall led into what I assumed was a bed and bath.
The door swung closed, revealing Banning, dressed in a blue suit, as he was a few days earlier. He lowered a Remington 870 that had been clasped tight in his hand.
Was he simply lying in wait? Hoping Nolan would walk in?
“You alone?” Banning said.
I could’ve asked him the same question, but I already knew the answer. “For now.”
He made his way to the kitchen and laid the rifle on the counter. There, he had a stack of newspapers he was placing tape on.
Looking around, I saw he’d covered all but one window. He was blocking Nolan from seeing into the place.
“Ethan Nolan is assuming you’ll come here,” I said. “We gotta go.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Banning said, taping the newsprint over the last window. “I’m counting on that little shit coming here.”
I leaned my body into the hall. Made sure no one was hiding in the bathroom or bedroom.
All this felt like bad news. Just as they had in their Houston or Big Thicket property, this preserve was probably a place in which Ethan and Jack Nolan had squared off, the father chasing the son.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“The windows are blocked,” the director said.
“With newspaper.”
“Which removes sightline,” he countered. “You take that away, you take away the advantage of hitting me from afar.”
I blinked.
The Bureau had a history of face-offs with men held up in cabins, and most of them had ended badly. The problem with Banning’s strategy was that he was thinking like the FBI. Not like Nolan.
“You’re a by-the-book guy, Camden. I’m sure you already called for backup, right?”
I nodded.
“So what do we got?” he asked. “A half hour before an army descends? If anything, that’ll force him to run for cover and hole up in here. When he does that, the four of us will be here to greet him.”
“The four of us?”
“You. Me. Remington. And Glock.”
Under the polished veneer, Banning was a cowboy. Except he hadn’t drawn up an operational plan since he was in the field fifteen years ago.
I thought about the clues left behind by Ethan Nolan and the riddles he’d told me. The Helleborus that was a nod to his dad’s crimes, the signed paper in Tignon’s mouth.
Ethan Nolan was going to escape somewhere far away or take himself out as he killed Banning. That had always been his endgame. The clues were meant to be an embarrassment, a stain on Banning’s legacy.
One that would’ve been slowly teased out months later if PAR had not been on the case.
I eyed Banning’s rifle. “When’s the last time you shot here?”
“Maybe twenty fifteen.” The director shrugged. “I’ll tell you what—the place was kept up better back then.”
My face must’ve shown something, because Banning scowled at me.
“Don’t give me that look, Camden,” he said. “You don’t know these people. Jack Nolan… he saved my life, all right. By burning down a village. Women. Children. They were like stains on the ground.”
“Sir, I need to get you into that car and off this land.”
“Not a chance,” he said.
“What if Nolan uses some sort of heavy mortar?”
“Heavy mortar?”
“Tosses a grenade at the cabin?”
“A grenade?” Banning repeated, smirking at me.
“What if he—”
Before I could finish my thought, we heard a popping noise, and Banning turned his head.
The sound of a CO 2 cartridge being discharged rang out, and one of the windows shattered. Tiny pellets tore through the cheap newsprint and bounced off the walls, creating a powdery haze.
The director moved away from the smoke, pulling his jacket in front of his face. But more pellets followed. The newspaper on the other windows was sealing us in, rather than airing the place out. The dust began to build up: a mix of salt, tear gas, and capsaicin, the element found in pepper spray.
Outside, heavy glass shattered, and I knew that Nolan had shot rounds into Banning’s car. The powder would coat the seats and dash, making it impossible to drive.
“Shit,” I said.
I pulled my shirt over my mouth and found Banning by the door, ready to flee.
“Wait,” I hollered. The shooting sounds had come from the south. If Banning was making a run for it, he could do better than simply sprinting out the front door.
I glanced through the haze and found a dining table, the top of it a wooden round, four feet across.
“Let’s roll this out as you go,” I said. “As cover.”
The director nodded, helping me get the table onto its side. I kicked at the circular piece of wood twice, and the round top separated from the base.
“Three, two, one,” I said, flinging open the door and shoving the round wood out the doorway. It rolled, end over end, and Banning ran behind it, a perfect device for concealment.
I took off after him, my eyes burning, the powdery haze moving out the door behind me. We cut behind the cabin and headed north, away from where the gun had been fired.
We didn’t stop running for five minutes. When we did, Banning’s chest was heaving.
“Let’s head toward the fire road,” I said. “Get there, and we can start down the mountain.”
“I need to sit down,” Banning huffed. “Rest a second.”
He removed his suit jacket and bent over, his hands by his ankles. Began coughing and spitting.
The forest was too quiet. “We gotta move,” I said.
But Banning held up his palm, as if to say wait.
As he stood up and turned to me, I heard a sound.
Thit, thit.
I ran at Banning, tackling him behind a downed log, its circumference over three feet. It was a giant green ash, and I dragged his body behind it.
Two arrows were stuck into the ground nearby.
“God damn it,” he barked. “I’m gonna get this kid if it kills me.”
Banning pushed me away and scrambled over to where he’d dropped his rifle. He cocked it and stood, aiming at the hillside. But even as he found Nolan, an arrow whizzed down and struck him, right through his slacks, deep into his upper thigh.
“Gahh!”
Banning fell to one knee, his rifle discharging into the air.
I pulled him down, wondering if the arrow was tipped with Helleborus . I took out Warden Terradas’s pocketknife, and Banning’s eyes got huge.
“I gotta cut that out,” I said.
“No.” He shook his head. “No, no, we can wait. We can wait for backup.”
Now he was interested in backup?
He didn’t have that much time. From the length of the shaft, I could tell the arrowhead had broken through his flesh and buried itself under his skin.
“I have a plan to distract Ethan Nolan,” I said. “But you need to stay put. Can you do that?”
Banning nodded, but glanced at the rifle at the same time.
And I knew he was lying.
“I want to thank you,” I said, “for believing in me. For giving me the chance to lead this case. I’m gonna get him now, okay?”
The old man nodded then, happily believing that Ethan Nolan would be dead before backup arrived. That’s when I turned and hit the director with the heel of my palm as hard as I could, right along the jawline, one inch below his ear.
Knocked him out cold.
Then I shimmied down his leg, cut away at his suit pants, and inspected the arrow. Cutting into the thickest part of his thigh, I sliced at the skin around it. Dug the tip of the knife in and flicked the arrowhead out, scraping at the muscle around it.
Blood surged from the wound, and I tore a strip of fabric free from my shirt, winding it around Banning’s leg to slow the bleeding.
He was out cold, and the forest had gone quiet again. I popped my head up for a second. Saw movement in the brush thirty yards up the hill from me.
I’d have four seconds to get to a new location, so I used my hands and knees to crawl behind the log, sixteen feet to its conclusion.
I made sure the safety was off my Glock and rose.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Right at the spot where I’d seen movement.
I fell to the ground, ducking as an arrow cemented into the dirt nearby. A second one landed in the ash tree, an inch from my body.
I was cornered. No way out.
But five seconds later, I heard a cracking sound and saw the impact in the dirt and trees where’d I’d aimed.
Shooter had climbed throughout the morning until she was at the peak that I had first identified as higher ground. Too high for Ethan Nolan to be targeting Banning with an arrow. But the right elevation for Shooter to have an advantage over Nolan if things went bad.
And now Jo Harris, the pride of the 2012 Olympic shooting team, was laying down fire along the ridge where Nolan was.
I took off in that direction. As I ran, I heard the shots continuing. But not aimed at me.
Shooter had eyes on Ethan Nolan, and she was directing me like a quarterback leading a receiver. I heard the sounds shift south and adjusted course. Then lower in elevation.
He was running. I was running. And I was on an intercept course.
I leapt over the brush, popping a new magazine into my Glock and letting the old one fall out as I pumped my fists.
I was heading down a trail that widened onto the fire road. Ethan Nolan erupted from the bushes, just ahead of me. But I was moving faster. I smashed into him with my body, and he hit the ground hard, his arrows and bow flying into the bushes.
I steadied myself and pointed my Glock at him.
“FBI. Stay down.”
Ethan Nolan lifted his head, staring at me. “You’re not gonna shoot me, Agent Camden,” he said. His hands found the ground. Pushed up. “We’ve been through too much together.”
Behind Nolan was that giant pit in the ground, the mining quarry. From my angle, the drop-off looked to be eighty feet.
I steadied my aim. “You run, and you die.”
He nodded, as if understanding, his eyes as big as moons. “Then my mission is complete,” he said. “Banning is dead. Or soon will be. I don’t care if I die.”
Nolan wore a black T-shirt and camouflage pants. He’d changed since last night.
“Oh, you hit the director,” I said. “But I cut the arrowhead out.”
“No.” Ethan Nolan squinted at me. “No, you’re lying again.” He took a step backward.
“He’ll be on his feet in a few days,” I said.
“But that’s not fair.” He stared at me, outraged. “You’re a fair person. My dad saved Banning’s life, Camden. And you know what that son of a bitch did in return?”
“He blackballed him from the FBI,” I said. “We found the letter.”
Ethan Nolan glanced back at the quarry.
“My pop was a force of positivity,” he said, almost as if he hadn’t heard me. “He opened a shooting range. Taught people to defend themselves. He even arranged this get-together for the old crew from ’Nam. And Banning came.”
“You were there?” I asked. “Is that when your father realized what Banning had done?”
“Realized? No, no. He never realized, thank God. No, my dad hosted them all. And afterwards he was inspired. I came home from camp that summer, and he told me.”
“Told you what?”
“That it’s a calling, Camden. Law enforcement. It doesn’t matter if there’s a paycheck. So Dad did what he was born to do. He took out the trash.”
Nolan had been moving backward, little by little. I watched him, calculating his distance to the edge.
“How did you know to look?” I asked. “In Banning’s file.”
“I sent him an invitation to the funeral,” he said. “Did Banning attend? No. Did he send flowers? No. How about a card for the man who saved your life?” His eyes locked on mine. “What do you think, Camden?”
“No,” I said softly, suddenly thinking about my mother. I hadn’t even begun to think about a funeral.
“Dad always talked about how great William Banning was, and I believed it. Saw those ads on TV. But after my dad passed, I started to wonder. I reached out to his office to ask if he could send some letter of recognition to read at the funeral. His secretary called back. Said he didn’t feel like he knew my father well enough to do that.”
And this was when Ethan Nolan’s rage had begun.
“A month later he’s on this book tour,” Nolan continued. “Bragging about some book he obviously didn’t write. I follow him back to the hotel bar. He’s married, but having drinks with this young girl. And then he goes to his room with her?” Nolan threw up his hands. “It all became clear. He’s above the law. And he’s not gonna respond to anything less than a public shaming.”
I thought of the high-profile killers Nolan had eliminated. He’d applied his dad’s approach to a man his father was too ignorant to know was his nemesis. All to make the Bureau look foolish, with Banning the idiot at the top. The least bright person in the field of behavioral science.
“You can’t be mad at me ,” he said. “I did what you couldn’t, Camden. I removed the worst of society for you.”
“And my mom?” I asked.
Nolan put his hands up, palms out. “I regret your mom,” he said. “There was no reason to do that except…”
Except I’d angered him. He worshipped his dad. And I’d made the man into a monster.
“I’m gonna rush you now,” Nolan said. “And you’re gonna shoot me dead.”
The grip on my Glock was rock solid, my aim at Nolan’s head. I heard my mother’s voice.
Don’t do it, Gardy.
I lowered my aim to his abdomen. To injure, but not kill. “No,” I said. “You rush me, and you’ll get a shot to the gut. Another to the leg. You can limp around a concrete cell the rest of your life.”
Nolan glanced back at the quarry again, changing his tack. “I talked to your mother, you know,” he said. “I thought she was buying time at first, chatting me up. But then her questions got personal. My father. My childhood. My mother.”
I flashed to that phone conversation at the airfield, just days ago.
The expression “serial killer” is just a convention of man, Gardy, she’d said to me. At the end of the day, every killer is just a human, searching for something.
“She was trying to understand you,” I said.
He took another step toward the quarry. “She told me what she did for a living. How you showed her pictures of Tignon.”
I made eye contact with Nolan, remembering the first night of the investigation.
“I asked her,” Nolan said, “if I did bad things… did she think I could change? Maybe… be someone like you?”
“And?”
“She said I’d never be like you. That you were special. Then she told me to get on with it. That she got forgetful. She didn’t want to have an episode and think I’d just gotten there.”
A single tear ran down my right cheek.
“That’s when I did it,” he continued, “as a courtesy to her.”
He was baiting me now. Angling for a quick ticket out. But my shooting hand didn’t waver.
“It wasn’t a life for her, Camden,” he said. “I killed her for you . As a mercy.”
Nolan was twenty feet from the edge now.
Eighteen feet.
Sixteen.
“You better stop moving,” I said.
He turned and ran. Out toward the lip of the canyon.
If I didn’t shoot him, he was going to swan dive, right into that hole in the ground. A glorious end to his mission. He would kill the serial killer who’d killed serial killers.
I took aim at his running leg. But inside, I wanted him dead, and I knew the fastest way was not a trial. It was me, letting him make that leap.
And I took my finger off the trigger.