A. Why did the NJ state cop run our licenses but not call us on the fact that they’re fake?
Art: Possibly, the cop wasn’t a real cop. Perhaps a friend of Butler’s. Perhaps a a friend of Butler’s acting in a non-official capacity.
Liuhua: What would be someone’s motives for identifying a fake, but not calling them on it?
Jessica: He was alone, calling us on it might have been risky for him.
Dr. Yaqub: Why not call in backup then?
Liuhua: Maybe knowing who we were and our intentions was more important?
Art: So, what are the options:
Pagans: Presumably, they don’t know about us at this point. Unless, they are following Butler as well. In which case, they’re finding out the players. Taking us off the street won’t necessarily help them. This seems advanced for Pagans.??
Mob: Might be uncertain about our motives. Another Mob family trailing Butler to take him out? No reason to interfere with us for the moment. Feds? Doubtful they’d be following Butler without Butler knowing about it.??
Butler: He’s alone with a friend outside. There’s two cars of us with at least 4 in one car. 2 against 8 is bad. Especially with up to 4 with unknown whereabouts.??
NY State Police: No reason to let us go. Little reason to get involved in the first place. I think we can rule out that this policeman was only acting in an occiail capacity.??
Conclusion: Most likely information gathering…but for whom?
Frank: Best bet is it was Butler calling for back-up, since we know now that he was on to us well before the restaurant. Maybe the only thing he was checking was for known Pagan or Mob connection. He must have been satisfied that we weren’t a threat, since he didn’t have us arrested for the fake licenses, an easy way to remove us, had they wanted to.
b. Why did DeLuca come here? There’s no linkable tie between him and the Pagans or anyone else in Chatsworth.
Jessica: He had to go somewhere.
Liuhua: You’re assuming he’s in Chatsworth. We’ve never had any confirmation of that.
Art: You’re right. All right, let’s go under the assumption he isn’t and may never have been in Chatsworth. It makes sense if this was a trap for Butler. The only reason Butler’s here is he got a tip. Next thing you know Butler’s ambushed. That would mean the teenage girl was a lure. A sick one, but a lure nonetheless. So why do the Pagan’s want to off Butler?
{ crickets }
Frank: Agree that it’s most likely a set-up to get Butler. We don’t know why the Pagans want to eliminate Butler, but another good question is why the elaborate ruse to get him here rather than just jumping him on the street or taking him out during his long hospital stay?
c. Why did the teenage girls come to the party? Who are they?
See B.
Frank: Maybe the cooperative one wants to be a Pagan woman/groupie/whatever. She brings her friend as the price of admission?
d. Any chance the NY cop in a. is one of the 2 who reported DeLuca is present in Chatsworth?
In light of B, that’s a very real possibility. Maybe we need much, much more on the cop?
Frank: It would be nice to know, but we’ll probably never get an answer to this with research, and short of coming back early enough to eavesdrop on that phone call, I’m not sure we’ll ever know for sure.
2a. Probable connection between one of the girls and Pagans.
Dr. Yaqub: If she’s into a hard core party scene there’s a chance she met one at a party. Some women are drawn to that type of personality. Obviously she was one of them. That might be enough.
Art: If we go back in late May, we’d have time to research her and check out her friends.
Jessica: Ummm …. a bunch of men asking questions about a 16 year old is bound to raise some eyebrows. We’d need to have a darn good reason.
Liuhua: Perhaps a Socialogy study from Princeton? We give a survey to all High Schoolers about their social conenctions. We give her a marked one so we know what her answers are.
Art: That could work. Perhaps, we pick ten or so “at random” for more in depth interviews.
Frank: Seems like overkill, even if it does turn out that the research has identified the right girls. All we really need to do is keep them from getting to the party. Let ‘em “win” some concert tickets or a shopping spree or a trip, something better for a couple of teenage girls to do than go to a biker gathering.
2b. Very tenuous potential link to NJ State Policeman.
See discussion above.
c. Butler stumbled into something big. It doesn’t make sense that Pagans would move so quickly to gather so many of their “best and brightest” in such a short time in response to being watched. This was something special.
Art: It’s clear they were aware of Butler (and us?). It seems an odd reaction for someone just watching them. Chasing him off would probably have been tried first. That’s what they did with Frank, but they didn’t try that with Butler. In fact, they never made any indication they were aware of Butler. If Butler stumbled onto something it wasn’t that night. Perhaps the night before, but what could he have seen or heard from the windows? If they knew he was there they gave no indication. No, they waited until they had a good number of men before springing a trap that was set up before Butler was in place. Butler was watching since 8pm or so and the ambush was already set. 3 hours later, when the girls arrived it was sprung. Sometime between 2 and 8, 14 Pagans arrived. Where’d they come from? Philly, Trenton, New York, Delaware? All an hour or more away. This means they started this course of action earlier than 7pm that night.??
Perhaps, Frank, our visit tipped their hand into action and they set this up around 3pm? Maybe Butler wasn’t trapped, maybe we were? The Tau event occurred two nights later. We interfered. Maybe they knew we were federal? Maybe they spotted us earlier? Was the cop working for the Pagans, reporting on any folks coming in???
If they were having a multi-group conclave, there might me leaders, sergeants-at-arms, and cookers here. Maybe it’s not that Butler stumbled onto something maybe it was us? They reacted in a way to trap us?
Liuhua: You’re forgetting Butler had a tip DeLuca was in here and the people at the diner said they saw him with a Pagan dating Lippensheld. He could have driven off to Trenton. Butler only stopped here to look for the next step on DeLuca’s trail. He knew the Pagans wouldn’t answer him so he decided to watch and wait.
Jessica: Maybe, DeLuca’s behind all this. He knows he’ll have a tail. He calls the tip in himself and leaves a trail to the Pagans house. He promises them fun with some girls and a good beating to an ex-cop with a thing against Bikers. Thus the trap was set long before the tip was ever made.
Art: By the time anyone realized Butler was missing, DeLuca’s trail would be more than a week old. By the time a new bailbondsman would be found, the witness would be killed and DeLuca could surface again. Hmm … It’s a good plan.
Frank: That sounds like a very realistic scenario, and the best one I’ve heard so far.
d. We either changed the course of events or the event we witnessed was only a prelude to the actual Tau event on 04 July. If actual Tau event is still on sched for 04 July, it is likely related to either Butler or the girl on the table, or both.
Dr. Yaqub: I talked to our physicists and their not much help. In their opinion, the death of Bill (she pauses, and takes some time to catch her breath) that…impact to the Tau is so great, it overwhelms the others. It’s not clear if we have one, two, three, or even more Tau events connected with the weekend. It’s havoc over there. All sorts of ideas and thoughts are being thrown around and none of them have any clue what they’re doing. Hard sciences have no answers or directions here.??
Whatever the old timeline was is irrelevant. What is relevant is that we know there are two primary events to overcome:?
1) Save Bill?
2) Save the girl??
We presume there’s a third; save Mr. Butler. However, we don’t know if that’s still on the table or not. In fact, we have never known that.
Frank: Ok, rule number one – we all stop thinking and talking about Bill as if he’s dead. He’s only dead in another timeline that’s never going to happen. We’re all dead in other timelines that aren’t going to happen. In some we never lived through childbirth, in others we were killed in car crashes or fell down steps or had a shiv stuck through our ribs in prison. Doesn’t matter. Those alternate time lies aren’t real – and it’s not real that Bills dead either.
So what do we do? The way I see it, we have four possible targets:
A) Butler himself – we stop him from going to Chatsworth. Easiest way to do that, since we’re now on him like glue from around 11:30 on July 1, is to go back before July 1 and hire him away for an alternate job. However, since we don’t know for sure whether he’s linked to ALL possible Tau events in Chatsworth, we also have to go there.
B) DeLuca – we also stop him from going to Chatsworth. We find him as he leaves prison on June 28, grab him, take him to Atlantic City, and sit on him until the 20th or 21st, when we give the police an anonymous tip about where to find him.
C) The girls – we keep them from going to the party. An offer of fun and prizes should take care of that. We just have to make the offer good enough that they can’t refuse. Of course, the Pagans can always find other bait, so for this particular tack to be effective, we’ll have to get them out of the way last minute, so the trap can’t be reset in time.
D) The Pagans – we haven’t identified enough of them to circumvent them all, and doubt it would be possible anyway. I think the only approach here is to prevent the event itself. One option is another anonymous tip to the police to get them to come break the party up. Problem is that might lead to bloodshed and even death on one or both sides that shouldn’t happen. Another is to go with our original plan of letting things play out until just before things go awry. That’s a tough bit of timing. Too soon and we miss our rescue window. Too late and, well, we’ll have to try again.
I propose a multiple approach. We probably can’t do anything about the Pagans themselves, but we can certainly do something about the others.
- We could start with the girls. It wont take long to make some travel arrangements and deliver the tickets to make sure they’re not around.
- We grab DeLuca and stow him someplace.
- We make contact with Butler and hire him away. That takes care of three of the four essential pieces for the current scenario.
Thoughts?
Art: Elizabeth has an invite to a Biker Party and probably already knows one of the bikers. What would be more interesting to a biker wannabe than a biker party. It would be a long shot to find a concert on that night that she likes enough to ditch the biker party. Especially if she were told or ordered to come and bring a friend. If there was longer travel, parents would normally be notified. It’s probably easiest to take them out on the way to the party. We know where they end up and there’s not that many ways they can get there. A Police roadblock would do the trick.
Jessica: How do we grab DeLuca? The last sighting was at court and he probably walked out with his lawyers and bodyguards. Perhaps if we follow him we can get him alone.
Liuhua: If we did that, then we could ensure Butler didn’t go to Chatsworth at all. Then the only one to protect is the girl.
Dr. Yaqub: Which brings us back to the girls. How do we keep them from going to the party?
There, at First and Main, he parked and entered the Buzby’s General Store and Diner. After having a cup of coffee and, presumably finding out where DeLuca may have gone, he came back out looked around and headed back down 70 East. Turning down 206, he stopped at the Red Lion Diner. I sent Arthur and Liuhua to find a hotel and they headed back down to the road to the Red Lion Inn. Unfortunately, the Red Lion Inn isn’t an Inn. It’s a restaurant. They left to find the Holly Motel–just down the street. Before they could, however, we had the first of several surprises today. I had sent Jessica into the Red Lion to watch Butler and get us some food. I chose Jessica, because Butler had not seen her in the diner in Philadelphia. In any case, we were visited by one of New Jersey’s State Police. I’m not certain why he was there, perhaps someone was spooked by us sitting in the car for a long time. In any case, he collected our driver’s licenses and went back to the car–presumably to check up on us. As this was happening, Butler left the Diner with Jessica in tow. We called in Art to follow Butler, while the cop detained us. 
