Page 28 of The Right to Remain

“I expect anyone who wants to join the revolution to be able to protect himself from tyrants,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”

Jack stayed where he was. “We shouldn’t be talking without your lawyer. Patricia doesn’t see your interests as aligned with my client’s interests.”

“Patricia speaks for the company, not for me personally.No onespeaks for me. If I thought Elliott could hurt me, I’d fire his ass. I haven’t. That should tell you something.”

“I suppose it does,” said Jack.

CJ led Jack into a small room that served as the company kitchen. They were alone with a coffee machine, a watercooler, and the toaster oven on the counter.

“How did your meeting with the state attorney go?” asked CJ.

“How did you know about my meeting?”

“Patricia told me.”

There was no rule prohibiting the prosecutor from sharing that information, but the speed with which the news had traveled was a little surprising.

“Basically, the state attorney confirmed the legality of a strange but true fact about your business. You don’t really ‘destroy’ much of anything around here.”

“So what? How, in your mind, is the perfectly legal operation of a firearms destruction business pertinent to the death of Owen Pollard?”

Jack wasn’t interested in brainstorming with CJ, but he was curious to watch, firsthand, CJ’s reaction to one possible line of thinking.

“Your company gets paid to destroy firearms. Thanks to a loophole in ATF regulations, you’re really in the business of recycling gun parts. That could piss off a lot of people.”

He smiled and nodded. “I get it. Your theory is that a school in Connecticut or some church in Baltimore gets all excited because they raise enough money washing cars or baking cookies to have a gun buyback and take twenty handguns off the streets. When they find out the guns that they sent to us aren’t really destroyed, some do-gooder gets so angry that he kills the owner of the company.”

“Maybe,” said Jack.

“Nice try. But that theory will never fly.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Your suspects are all sheep.”

“Excuse me?”

CJ walked to the water-bottle filler and topped off his Yeti. “Let me tell you something about Owen and me. Some people can’t understand how we were business partners. He was retired FBI; I think the FBI should cease to exist. He was a capitalist; I’ve been a communist since high school. The points of fundamental disagreement were endless. But there was one thing we agreed on. Something very important.”

“What was that?”

“Have you ever read Dave Grossman’s essays?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Grossman was retired military, but the military disavows most of what he says, so I find him worth listening to. Owen and I completely agreed on the way Grossman divides society into three categories. First are the sheep. They’re ‘kind’ and ‘gentle,’ and ‘can only hurt one another by accident.’ They are prey to wolves, who ‘feed on the sheep without mercy.’ And then there are sheepdogs. They have ‘a deep love’ for ‘fellow citizens.’ But they also have ‘a capacity for violence.’ Sheepdogs ‘live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.’”

“So, when you said my suspects are all sheep, you meant what?”

“Anyone who runs a gun buyback is a sheep. A sheep didn’t kill Owen.”

“Was Owen a sheepdog?”

“Without question. As am I.”

“Was it another sheepdog who killed Owen?”

It was a loaded question, and it was the reason Jack had allowed this conversation to continue—to gauge CJ’s reaction to it.