Fire And Steel (The Merryweather Chronicles Book 2) Read Free Page A

Central Bank and Goldman's Antiques and Curiosity shop, the parade picked up speed as it reached the High School and began to leave the more populated neighborhoods. The road curved where it turned into Bachman Rd, leading up to a place called Highgarden and two people who knew more about what was currently going on in the town of Matheson than anybody else. If only the right people knew enough to ask the right questions.
          The Black S.U.V.s sped past the turn, and the answers that might've greeted them at that old fortress, and moved further from the center of town. When they finally turned off of the main road, it was onto the washed out dirt and gravel road leading to the Old Kirkman Mill. They reached the cracked and broken parking lot and came to a halt. The big rusted out silos were stark against the late afternoon sky when Special Agent Darius Faux climbed out of the lead vehicle and surveyed the crime scene. Faux was a big man, dressed in a standard issue black suit and wearing dark glasses. His gaze was immediately drawn to the cluster of parked vehicles at the back of the lot. A mixture of cars and trucks, they had an empty and abandoned look to them, not helped by the yellow police tape that stretched around them. Their owners were nowhere to be seen. 
          A Matheson Police cruiser was parked about twenty feet off from the other vehicles, the engine running and its lights flashing. There were two other cruisers, parked at an angle behind the first. A handful of officers stood next to the car, watching as the arriving vehicles unloaded their passengers. Seven officers of the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation, not including Faux. Four men and three women. Each of them highly trained and motivated, with about a hundred years experience between them. They were in street clothes, badges and guns on their hips, not quite hidden by their coats.
          Faux was the odd man out. He was FBI. His current assignment had him teaching advanced investigative techniques to the O.S.B.I. while working closely with their own forensics specialists and field agents as an example of inter agency cooperation.
          That's what his official assignment was according to his Bureau Chief.
          Faux stood beside the other agents and stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. There was a bite to the morning air, misting his breath. He tried to ignore the looks that the others gave him. Tried and failed. It wasn't the one or two distrustful glances that got to him, he was more than used to people's opinion of the Federal Government by now, but the looks of sympathy and outright pity that he caught on some of his new companion's faces. They knew, as well as he did, that he wasn't really in Oklahoma to teach them anything. He was there as punishment for stepping on the wrong set of toes during his last investigation, something he tended to do when he was on the trail of his query. Political considerations never came into his thinking when it came to hunting bad guys, which oft times put him at odds with very powerful people. As well as his superiors.
          Which was why he was in Matheson, Oklahoma. The drive from McAlester, where the O.S.B.I. forensics lab was based, took around two hours. During which time, Faux was impressed by how much the countryside differed from what he'd expected to find. In his head, Faux had always pictured Oklahoma as being made up of rolling fields of pastureland and open stretches of flat land. What he found in Matheson was far from what he expected. Beautiful mountains and forests, a lush river valley that jarred with his Broadway inspired vision of Oklahoma.
          At first glance, Matheson was the perfect postcard image of a small resort town, built around a central lake, with surrounding mountains and deep forests. Lots of restaurants and stores. Parks and playgrounds. Mini golf. A bowling alley. All the little things that make life worth living in America, according to