J.M.J.

A/N: Thank you so much for continuing to read! In particular, thank you to ErinJordan, Cherylann Rivers, max2013, beachgirlsrule, and Highflyer for your reviews since I posted the last chapter! The entrance for the Hardys is drawing nearer...

Chapter VI

Revelations

The officer at the desk of Calliope Police Headquarters looked up at Nancy and smiled pleasantly as the amateur detective approached. "Can I help you?"

"Yes, I'm here to see Captain Ellis," Nancy replied. "He's expecting me. My name is Nancy Drew."

"Just a moment." The officer picked up a phone and dialed an extension.

As he told of Nancy's visit, Nancy thought back with a small smile to Bess and George's reactions to her announcement that she was going to meet Jason. Bess had shook her head and made dire predictions about purposely meeting "creepy stalkers", while George had volunteered to act as look-out. Nancy had assured them that there would be no danger and no need for a look-out at a police station, but for all her confident words, she couldn't help feeling a little apprehension as she waited to be directed into Jason's office.

Back home in River Heights, it wasn't unusual for the police to ask for Nancy's help in a case. While a few officers considered her an unwelcome rival, Chief McGinnis and most of the other officers recognized that she had a definite knack for detective work. However, whenever she worked on a case away from home, the police tended to be more skeptical of the abilities of an eighteen-year-old girl. It was odd that Jason was so insistent on having Nancy work with him. She wondered if, perhaps, more than anything, Jason wanted to keep an eye on her so that she wouldn't interfere with his investigation.

The desk officer broke into her thoughts to give her directions to Jason's office and Nancy thanked him before setting off down the hallway. The frosted glass door to Jason's office was blank, but Nancy could still see the faint outline of a name of another captain that had been removed. Evidently, Jason hadn't had time to get his own name painted on his door.

"I'm glad you came, Ms. Drew." Jason stood up to greet her as she entered the office.

"Captain Ellis," Nancy replied as she took a seat across the desk from him. "What exactly did you want to talk to me about?"

"About Cole Warner, mostly," Jason said. "How do you know him?"

Nancy hesitated, considering whether it would be better to tell her cover story or the truth. She decided the truth was better. "He's a cousin of a friend of mine. He asked me to come help him with a mystery."

A smile played at the corners of Jason's mouth. "So I was right; you are here on a case. What exactly is the case?"

"First," Nancy said, "why are you interested in Cole? He's not a police officer, so if he's suspected of something, it seems one of the other departments besides Internal Affairs would be investigating him."

"Good point," Jason admitted. "The fact of the matter is that he's not suspected of anything, except possibly withholding information in a police investigation. I happen to know that he's been meeting with the chief suspect in an ongoing investigation that I'm working on, but he denies this. To me, that spells 'covering up'."

"Or he doesn't want the police interfering in his personal life," Nancy pointed out.

"He seemed pretty nervous both times I talked to him," Jason insisted.

"That seems to be the way he is at the moment," Nancy told him. "He's under a lot of stress right now."

"That may be," Jason said. "However, the fact remains that he has been seen meeting a my suspect in out-of-the-way places multiple times, but he denies even knowing this person. Whether this person is a friend of his whom he's trying to protect or if he's involved in criminal dealings, I'm going to need his cooperation. I'm hoping you will help me with that."

"You want me to spy on my host?" Nancy asked.

"You don't have to make it sound so underhanded." Jason grinned lop-sidedly, but then his face froze as he looked over Nancy's shoulder.

Nancy glanced behind her to see what it was that had caught Jason's attention, but all she saw was people walking past in the hallway.

Jason leaned forward over his desk and spoke in a low tone. "Listen, Ms. Drew. I know your reputation. When I first got the appointment to Internal Affairs and got this whole mess handed to me, I contacted Fenton Hardy to see if he could help with the investigation. He couldn't; he had some other important cases to work on. He offered that his sons might be able to help me out, and when I found they were teenagers, I'm afraid I dismissed the suggestion a little too...Well, I might have laughed at him."

"That considerate of you," Nancy said dryly.

"I've realized since then that that was a mistake," Jason told her. "Too late, of course, but I see it now. I did some research on the Hardy Boys and came to find out that they've solved more cases than I have. In researching them, I couldn't fail to stumble across your name and reputation as well. I've had to swallow all my pride to ask you to help, but...I need someone I can trust. You're the only one I can."

"Can't you trust the rest of the police force?" Nancy asked.

"I would trust any one of them to save my life if it came down to it," Jason said. "I'd trust any of them with the keys to my house or to babysit my kids, if I had any. But there's not a single one that I would swear wouldn't get me killed if they found out what I know."

"That certainly sounds ominous," Nancy said. "What's going on?"

"I don't think there's a secret society at work in this town; I know it." Jason sat back and wrapped his hands around his knee. "I've known it since Roger Arden first disappeared. It was nonsense to think it was an accident - if it had been, we would found his car somewhere along his route to work, which is entirely in town. He wasn't the sort of man to pack up and leave on his own, and if it was an ordinary murder done by an individual, they couldn't have made the car disappear completely. And then that paper with the initials M.C. on it; could there be any other explanation besides a secret society?

"I've spent the last six years investigating it every time I had spare minute. My superiors knew this, and they kept me snowed under with cases. Honestly, I think they made up some of them to keep me from having time to look into the Arden case."

"Seriously?" Nancy asked.

"I know, I know." Jason sighed. "I sound like some sort of paranoid, crazy person, but the truth is, I'm scared. It wasn't so bad before the threats started, or even until the threats started getting more serious."

"Threats?" Nancy repeated, sitting up a little straighter.

"Yes." Jason opened a drawer in his desk and took out a stack of envelopes. "I've got quite a collection of them now. I started getting them about three months ago, before my promotion. I've gotten at least one every day since then. They show up in my car, in my apartment, in my office, in my seat in restaurants if I step away from it for a few minutes, tucked between the pages of my reports if I leave them out in the open. Anywhere, really, and no one ever sees who puts them there."

Nancy took a few of the threatening messages from the envelopes. They matched the ones that Cole had been receiving exactly, except for one thing: there was no mention of any unions in this one. The writer was merely threatening Jason to leave the area.

"Of course, I took this straight to the chief right away," Jason went on. "He dismissed it as a prank. I investigated on my own. After two frustrating weeks of not getting anywhere, I started leaving my own notes in the places where this other person was putting them, telling them what I thought of them and where they could put their threats. The very next day, I found windshield of my car smashed along with another note that said that if I didn't want the same thing to happen to me, I'd give up the investigation and leave."

"That was a long time ago," Nancy said. "Have they ever actually tried to hurt you?"

Jason grinned. "No. That was the most violent they ever got. See, I went to the police commissioners next to tell them about this and how I thought some of my fellow officers might be involved, since the notes showed inside headquarters. They told me that a few other officers had reported getting similar threats, and that's when they decided we needed an Internal Affairs division and put me in charge. They gave me a promotion to captain partly so that officers who used to have a higher rank than me would respect and cooperate with me, true, but also so that they couldn't order me around and I'd be free to spend all my time on this case. The commissioners also made it clear that if anything happened to me, such as me conveniently disappearing or turning up murdered, they'd call in the State Police. Apparently, whoever is behind these threats doesn't care much for that idea, because even though the threats haven't stopped, no one's even tried to hurt me or my property since then."

"Why did the commissioners choose you?" Nancy asked.

"Because I'm the only one this secret society seems to consider a completely lost cause," Jason explained. "My only options have ever been to leave town or die. Everyone else who has gotten threats has been given a third option: to join the local police union."

"Somehow I had a guess that might be the case," Nancy said.

"Oh? How?" Jason asked.

"Because the fire department has been having the same problem," Nancy told him. "That's what Cole asked me to investigate."

"The fire department, too," Jason muttered. "That makes sense."

"Please tell me how," Nancy requested. "Why threaten someone to join a union of all things?"

"Because it's not a union," Jason said. "I mean, it is, but the local unions around here are the most ineffective and poorly run unions in the history of unions. That's because they're a front; they're a way of gauging who can be trusted and who needs to be eliminated, as well as an excuse to meet."

"For the secret society?" Nancy asked. "But if they have honest people join…"

"Then they'll never see anything but the legitimate union part of it," Jason told her. "If any of them get snoopy, they get eliminated. It's not too hard to do with police officers, you know, and a firefighter wouldn't be too hard to get rid of without raising suspicion, either. And, of course, the advantages of having as many members of both the police and fire departments in the secret society aren't hard to imagine. If you have them and the city officials, and you have the city. Then they can do whatever they want, and no one can stop them."

"The police makes sense, but why the fire department?" Nancy asked.

"I imagine so that when one of the enemies of the secret society finds themselves the victim of an unfortunate 'accident' or their house in flames, the fire department won't in any hurry to respond."

"All right." Nancy took a deep breath, trying to process all of this. "What do you want me to do?"

"The suspect Cole Warner has been meeting with is Sergeant William Valence," Jason explained. "He's a patrol sergeant and the founding member of the police union. He goes skiing up at Mount Calliope all the time, except when the ski resort's closed. When that happens, he goes hiking up there. That's what I was doing there when we met. I'm not much of a skier myself, but I try to keep an eye on him up there anyway. I've seen him meeting with a lot of people, including Cole Warner. I've seen them ride the lift up together and then split at the top and meet in the lodge or any other place where they could talk briefly and then separate." He rubbed his chin. "If Cole is still receiving threats, he must not be one of them yet, but they're working on him pretty hard. We need to find out why, and maybe, if he turns out to be trustworthy, we could convince him to act as our agent in this."

"That would be risky," Nancy said. "Cole is pretty nervous as it is. If he was to act as undercover agent, he'd give himself away for sure."

"Do you have a better suggestion, then?" Jason asked.

"Possibly." Nancy paused to think a moment, and then went on, "Are there women in the police or fire departments?"

"We've got several women officers," Jason told her. "Then, of course, we also have women in the building working in all sorts other positions: dispatch, DMV, administrative assistants, media liaisons, and just anything else. There are no women firefighters, but the department also has women working in administrative positions. Oh, and our one and only paramedic in the department is a woman, as are a number of the volunteer EMTs."

"Have any of them received threats?" Nancy asked.

Jason thought for a few moments. "Not that I know of. What are you getting at?"

"A lot of times, secret societies are for men only," Nancy said, "or, sometimes, for women only. It sounds like this is one of those. In that case, our undercover agents - or agents - will need to be male. It will be hard to pull off and definitely dangerous, but I think I know just the people for this job."