“And are they?”
“Well,” Canfield said, “a whole lot of them are lying their heads off. This is really fertile ground for running a scam. You have all these people, afraid of the government, afraid of their television sets. I mean, what do you do with people who think magic wands and witches’ spells are real? Critical thinking is not their strong suit here. There’s this guy out there who’s got a whole little thing going—he claims to have been a Catholic priest, a Freemason, a Mormon, and a priest in the Church of Satan. Sit down and try to add up the times and places and dates, and he’d have to be a hundred and fifty years old. But when people do add up the times and places and dates, he just says he did all this stuff at once and nobody thinks to question him. He sells books and tapes and lectures. People send him money.”
“Then there isn’t really anything odd about Michael Harridan not being named Michael Harridan,” Gregor pointed out.
“No, but it was a compilation of things. The more we checked, the odder it got. We got hold of their mailing list and did gun checks. Practically everybody on it had at least one gun license. The more we looked into it, the creepier it got. And Harridan himself, that newsletter, it was so—”
“So what?”
“So targeted,” Canfield said. “Most of these newsletters just give you big long lists of names. These are the people who were at the Bilderberger retreat this year. These are the people who work for David Rockefeller. That kind of thing. But The Harridan Report was always talking about specific people doing specific stuff. Charlotte Deacon Ross giving that party. That kind of thing.”
“Okay,” Gregor said. “So you got assigned to come up here, and you came. Then what?”
“Then we came,” Canfield said. “And Steve went to one of their lectures, and then he went to another one, and then he joined up and started going to meetings.”
“And?”
“There isn’t much else. It’s like I said. Nobody ever sees Michael Harridan, and nobody ever claims to have seen him except this one woman, Kathi Mittendorf. She says she went to a lecture Harridan gave personally. Steve and I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. She could be telling the truth, but she could just be, you know, making herself hot. She doesn’t have much else going for her to make herself hot. She’s middle-aged. She works on the floor at Price Heaven. Part-time, by the way. Hell, she might not even have that for a while. From what I can tell from the papers, Price Heaven seems to be exploding.”
“Did you check into Kathi Mittendorf? Or any of the others?”
“Of course we did,” Canfield said. “Mittendorf and this other woman, Susan Hester, went to gun shows a lot, and sometimes they bought, but not usually. Steve and I were both convinced that they were buying on the black market, but we couldn’t prove it, and until we could—” He shrugged. “You know how that is.”
“How did Harridan keep in touch with the group?” Gregor asked. “Did he send letters? Send e-mail? Set up chat rooms?”
“He made conference calls,” Canfield said. “Steve was there for one. They set up a speakerphone so that everybody could hear. Sort of a low-tech virtual meeting.”
Gregor thought it over: the letter to the Bureau; the meeting-by-speaker-phone; the gun shows. He tried not to think about Walker Canfield.
“All right,” he said. “I’m going to want some contact information on a couple of people, if you have it. And if you don’t have it, I’m going to need to know where to get it.”
3
He began by going to the Price Heaven on Altaver Street, a small store without distinction crammed into a row of other stores, not the sort of place he associated with Price Heaven at all. Maybe this was what the papers meant when they said that Price Heaven had made the mistake of hanging on to older, outmoded stores that they would have done better to close down in order to give themselves more resources to compete in the suburbs. At least the people going into this store looked as if they needed a bargain outlet. The kind of people you saw going in to Price Heavens in the malls often looked as if they’d been just as comfortable at L.L. Bean or Coach. He looked around inside for a while, noting a few things that made no difference. Most of the shoppers were African-American or Latino. Most of the saleswomen were white. All of the managers were white. The clothes hanging on the racks in women’s wear were stretched against their hangers. The wide-open plan of the store made it feel oddly empty, in spite of having far too many small and inconsequential things crammed into it. He did not intend to question Kathi Mittendorf in Price Heaven. He didn’t even intend to introduce himself to her. Doing something like that could get someone fired, especially from a place like this. All he wanted to do was to get a look at her.