Triangle Conspiracy

Prologue When Lee Morgan first saw the woman hanging in the tree, he thought she was a drunk, or maybe a homeless person who'd found a clever way to spend the night. As a security guard for the Oklahoma City National Memorial, most of his job consisted of making sure drunks didn't pee in the reflecting pool and the homeless didn't try to set up housekeeping among the 168 empty chairs. The memorial was open-air, and tourists came at all hours of the day and night. Every now and again Morgan would come across someone praying at the fence at midnight, or staring at the lighted chairs at three A.M., and would shake his head at how terrorism had turned into tourism. He'd just done the leg along the west side of the memorial and was circling back to the Survivor Tree, the big old elm that overlooked the site where the Murrah Building had actually stood. It was about a half-hour circuit if he did it at a deliberate pace without stopping, which he rarely did. He would occasionally stop to read the newspaper under the lights on the Harvey Avenue side, and now and then he would sit down on a bench and call his girlfriend. She was an overnighter as well, an ER nurse at Mercy Hospital. At first he actually laughed at the woman in the tree. These people were nothing if not creative. "Hey!" he called. "Hey up there! Time to wake up!" He took a few more steps, his boots echoing on the flagstone walk that led to the tree. As he drew closer, the shape began to define itself more and more, even in the weak predawn light. "Hello!" he called, then stopped as if he'd run into an invisible barrier. The way the woman was situated...it wasn't natural. At first he'd thought she was sitting on one of the low branches and dangling her feet. "Oh, shit," Morgan whispered. The first thing was her shoe. One of her sandals had slipped off and fallen to the ground. Morgan's eyes trailed upward. She was wearing jeans and a light-colored polo-type shirt, except there was a dark splash of a stain beside her left breast. Morgan stumbled backward. The woman was young and attractive and had a rope around her neck, the other end of it securely wrapped several times around the thick tree branch. Morgan tripped on the flagstones and tumbled over the low chain-link fence that lined the sidewalk. He fell into the dewy grass, breathing hard. Somewhere nearby, he heard a car. Hands shaking, he fumbled his cell phone out of its harness on his belt, then stopped. Who did he call? He started to simply punch in 911, then remembered that the local cops wouldn't have jurisdiction here.Federal,he thought.This is a federal reservation.Who, then? The FBI? The National Park Service, for God's sake? In the end, he called his supervisor at ITB Security. The boss would know what to do. After the call, Morgan got back to his feet, but he couldn't make himself go any closer to the tree. Morgan said a silent prayer, something he hadn't done in years. Then he settled in to wait, his eyes still drawn to the pretty young woman who had been both shot and hanged. It had all happened so fast. That was Sean's only thought as he sat in the car in the early June predawn, in a McDonald's parking lot not far from the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Everything had happened too fast, and now he didn't know what to do. His hands shook a little, and he rubbed them together. They felt dirty. The light was beginning to glow off to his left, beyond the state capitol building. He hadn't grown up in this city, and didn't even live here -- you couldn't call what he'd been doing here living -- but he'd come to appreciate it for what it was: a medium-size prairie city with clean air and nice people. A good place to settle down. His sister thought so. Settle down,he thought.Not now. Not after today. Not anywhere. Sean swallowed. HisKent, David is the author of 'Triangle Conspiracy', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743497527 and ISBN 074349752X.