“Looks like the fire is mostly out,” Beth said.
My eyes went to the downed clerk then to the area behind the counter that had been lit up. I could still see flames but nothing that looked like it would spread enough to do the damage that had been done.
“What’s he doing?” Beth asked.
I looked at Burr. He was jabbing his pistol in the air at the men. “He’s keeping the guys at bay until the fourth guy comes in.”
When the last man entered, just as I’d thought, Burr went into action. He grabbed the guy by the shirt and swung him toward the other three. With the fourth guy lined up by the rest, Burr started shooting—straight down the line, like he was part of a firing squad. One dropped after the next. The moment the last guy dropped, Burr hit the exit.
“Let’s check the other camera feeds,” Beth said.
“Hang on. There has to be more. This place isn’t burning yet.”
Thirty seconds later, Burr burst into the gas station with a pair of gas cans.
“From the guy’s truck with the trailer and lawn equipment,” Beth said.
“Probably.”
Burr splashed the fuel everywhere in the store, including on the men—a couple of whom were still moving around. He tossed the cans as he finished with them, stood for a moment and appeared to be admiring his work, then lit the place up. Burr walked out of the store. Beth and I continued to watch the feed as the flames grew and grew. The footage finally cut out around the five thirty mark.
“Let’s see the other feeds,” Beth said.
“Yeah. While I’m getting the next one up, send this information back to the twins. Get them working on getting us copies of all of this.” I tapped a fingertip on my notepad with the website and log-in credentials. Beth scooped it up while she pulled out her phone.
Chapter 22
Chuck cracked an eyelid then stopped before opening the other. The pain had started immediately. The back of his head felt like someone had hit him with a pipe—but he hadn’t been hit. At least if he was, he was too drunk to remember it happening. Chuck opened both eyes and tried to get a better look at the room he was in. He saw a closed door across from him and pictures on the wood-paneled wall. A small television sat on a dresser next to an alarm clock that said it was just before eight in the morning. None of it was familiar to him—as if he’d never even seen it before.
He tried remembering what happened after leaving the bar the night before. He remembered that just about everyone who had been at the bar when it closed went back to the clubhouse. He remembered Jerry showing him around and to a room that he could stay in. But it wasn’t the room that he was currently in, and what he could see of the place looked more like a house than the motorcycle shop did. The room he was in had carpet, and Chuck didn’t remember seeing any at the clubhouse.
Movement behind him almost sent him clear off the bed. Chuck snapped his head around to see what the hell it was.
“What the—”
Chuck saw a leg sticking out of the blankets and bare shoulders and a head on a pillow. He squinted, trying to identify the woman lying in bed with him. Chuck couldn’t get a good look at her face with her hair hanging over it, but the tattoos gave her away—it was Jerry.
Chuck swung his legs off the side of the bed and sat up. He looked down, seeing that he was in his T-shirt and boxer shorts. His pants were lying on the floor, his sweatshirt and vest on the chair a couple of feet away. Chuck saw one of his shoes near his pants, and the other was over by the room’s door. He gripped the back of his head and squeezed. The daylight coming through the room’s window was like someone shining a flashlight in his face.
“Hey.” Chuck reached behind without looking and pushed Jerry’s leg.
She moved but didn’t respond.
“Hey.” He gave another push.
“What?” Her voice was gravelly and sounded half asleep.
“Where the hell are we?”
“What?”
“Where are we?”
“We’re at my house.” She rearranged herself in bed and pulled the blankets up over her shoulder.
“How did we get to your house?” Chuck tried cracking his neck from one side to the other.
“We drove. Just go back to sleep,” she said.
Chuck shook his head and winced from the pain. He remembered doing shots and playing pool. There was loud music and laughter, and he remembered seeing some women dancing together. It had to have been at the clubhouse. He’d sat on a couch and told a story about prison. It seemed that Jerry was sitting on his lap. He remembered kissing her and someone saying that it looked “like trouble.” Chuck scratched the side of his head then turned and got a look at her. He couldn’t recall if they’d had sex, but with the memory of kissing her—and her appearing to be naked in bed—he imagined that they did. He scanned the room. Women’s clothes were piled about. Taped to a big lighted mirror attached to a desk filled with makeup were some photos of Jerry with a few other women. Chuck noticed a prison photo of Leland. He continued looking around, hoping something would trigger more memories. A rifle, AR-based, leaned against the wall in the corner of the room—an odd item in a woman’s bedroom. He saw a few bottles of beer but didn’t remember drinking any. Some car keys sat on a small table near sliding patio doors. The blinds were drawn over the patio doors, and the keys weren’t from the stolen truck. He rubbed his temples. Thinking of the stolen truck brought up a vague memory of seeing it on the road, yet it wasn’t him driving it. He remembered seeing a fire. A big one. Chuck looked down at his arm, which had singed hair all over it.
“Did I light something on fire?” he asked.
“It’s too early. Come back to bed.” Jerry grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt and pulled him toward her. Chuck lay down. After being incarcerated for years, if a woman was trying to pull him into bed, he had no intentions of fighting it.
Chapter 23
Beth and I had finished watching the video and were grabbing a quick breakfast at the hotel before we started getting things checked off for the day. While none of the video had audio, three of the four camera feeds had captured Burr’s actions. The one camera mounted on top of the building facing the gas pumps captured Burr, and the BOLO pickup truck, coming and going from the gas station. It also caught him taking fuel cans from the lawn mower trailer—cans he’d used inside to douse the place before lighting it up.
I had my phone pressed to my ear, having just filled in Disick with what we’d gotten. With my other hand, I stabbed at my breakfast that the waitress had just brought. Beth, opting for the buffet, had already finished eating by the time my order arrived. She’d just walked over to the coffee station to get a refill. She was filling a cup and talking to the guy on omelet-making duty at the end of the buffet line.
“You said that you have him from pretty much all angles?” Disick asked.
“Yeah, our guys in Manassas are working on getting copies of the footage,” I said. “But it was definitely Burr, and we’ve got almost everything that went down at the gas station on video.” I shoveled eggs into my mouth and chewed as I grabbed a slice of bacon.
“Good,” he said. “Even though we’d already concluded that it was him, it’s always good to have video evidence to back it up.”
“We recovered some burned phones, right?” I asked.
“Burned and then soaked, I imagine,” Disick said. “As far as I know. They’re with the local PD.”
“We’re going to need them. On the video, it looks like the employee was showing Burr something on his phone. Probably a snowball’s chance in hell that we’ll ever know what that was, but we need the phones to try.”
“I can call over there and see what’s going on with them. They’ll have to get transferred to the Dallas Field Office’s forensics team.”
“You can get it taken care of?” I asked.
“I’ll call as soon as we’re off the phone.”
“Okay. Nothing with the bar overnight?”
&n
bsp; “My guys who were watching it, Carroll and Comley, they tagged out with my other agent, LaFleur, about an hour and a half ago.”
“Did you put someone on it for today?” I asked.
“Well, we didn’t really discuss what was going to happen after we watched it overnight, so I figured we’d work that out today, but in the meantime, it seemed smart to just park someone on the place.”
“All right, um, we’ll figure that out in a bit.” I took a sip of my coffee—black. “No action overnight, though?”
“Didn’t sound like much. Hang on. I jotted some notes down from what they said.”
I could hear Disick rustling around.
“Here we go. They said that a couple people cleared out just before two o’clock. One bike and one pickup truck. Too far away to get tags.”
“It was probably the truck that I was parked next to.”
“They said it was on the side of the building, so probably. The open sign, neon lights in the windows, and the light on the sign by the road cut out shortly after that. Um, let’s see. They had everyone else leaving around the same time—right around three o’clock. Guessing that was the bar staff and whoever else was left. Three guys on bikes and a pair of cars. One car they had was a Nissan sedan, maroon. The other vehicle was a newer Mustang, blue. No tags due to the distance they were at, but we have Gerrianne Walters owning a Mustang, so that was probably her.”
I tried to recall seeing a Mustang anywhere around the building in my short time there, but I didn’t remember it, so it was probably parked in the back.
“When you drove past the place, did you see any vehicles in back?”
“I saw a couple cars parked back there, but none were the truck that we were after, so I didn’t pay them too much attention,” Disick said.
“Did your guys mention any of the people leaving? Descriptions or any of that?”
“Not really,” Disick said. “Even with binoculars, we’re talking five hundred yards at night.”
“Okay,” I said.
“What are you guys’ plans for the day?” he asked.
I glanced at Beth, who was still in the same spot but had her phone to her ear. Our plan was to discuss how we wanted to proceed as we ate our breakfast.
“Not a hundred percent sure yet,” I said. “But one thing that I know we wanted to do was bring Detective Maddox in on things. He, or someone at his station, probably is familiar with the motorcycle club. Might know of other properties, other hangouts, where they’d hide someone if they were so inclined.”
“Good chance,” Disick said.
“That’s what we were thinking, at least. Plus, the police department has the manpower to keep an eye on things at the bar and get your guys off it. If Burr isn’t there or doesn’t have anything to do with the people running it, I wanted to get it checked off the list and behind us.”
“Sure,” Disick said.
Beth left the guy standing at the coffee station and made a beeline toward our table. She took her phone from her ear as she walked. Her face said she had something.
“Let me give you a buzz back, Disick.”
“Yeah, all right.”
I clicked off from the call and gave Beth my attention as she reached the table.
“We’ve got the truck,” she said. “I just got a call from Ball.”
“Where was it found?”
“Groesbeck. Texas. It’s about forty-five minutes east of here.”
“All right. What do we know?” I scooped another forkful of eggs into my mouth.
“The Limestone Sheriff’s Office got the call of a torched truck on the side of the road this morning. A local called it in. Guess the guy lives just a half mile or so from where it was found. The guy who called it in said it wasn’t there yesterday and wasn’t there when he passed the area on his way home last night.”
“What time was that?”
“After midnight,” Beth said.
I looked at my watch. “He was still in the general area eight hours ago.”
“Looks like it,” she said. “And now he’s going east. Maybe he’s headed toward his father’s or son’s place.”
“Could be, but what the hell was Burr doing between the gas station and eight hours ago?”
“Don’t know. But the truck is still there on the side of the road. They aren’t moving it until they get the go-ahead from someone to do so.”
“Do we have any kind of contact at this sheriff’s office?”
“I have it,” she said. “A sergeant named Schumann.”
“You ready to get on the road?”
“I need to run to my room quick,” she said.
“All right. I’ll pay for breakfast, finish my food, and meet you in front in ten.”
“Sounds good.” Beth walked to the elevators.
I waved down my waitress, asked for the check, and had finished my breakfast by the time she was back. As I waited for Beth to meet me in front of the building, I checked in with Scott to see what time he and Bill were flying in to Dallas—right around six o’clock, he’d said. I told him to message us when they were on the ground. Beth stepped off the elevator just as I wrapped up with Scott.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Let’s roll.” I slid my phone into my pocket.
“I got a message from Lewis,” Beth said. “We have the videos. He said he would get them added to the department’s server and send us the link.”
“Perfect,” I said.
We left the front of the hotel and hopped in our car. Beth drove. I dialed Disick as we were pulling from the lot to let him know that we found the truck and were on our way to have a look at it. He asked if we needed him to meet us or if there was anything that he or his guys could do while Beth and I were out there putting eyes on it. While the investigation looked like it was headed east, the timeline of Burr’s movements didn’t sit right with me. What went down at the gas station happened around five o’clock Friday evening, and by Sunday morning, Burr had gotten only forty-five minutes out of town. He’d been staying in the area. I wanted to know where and why, and our only real lead in Waco was the bar.
“Keep your guy on that bar,” I said.
“All right. That it?”
“Nah. See what the hell you can find out on this motorcycle club. Everything. Who the guys are, where they live, where else they hang out.”
“You want me to reach out to Maddox?” Disick asked.
“Yeah, let’s do that,” I said. “See what he can tell you. Also try to find out where Leland Walters lived exactly and if he has any property in the area. Give me a ring if you get anything. Barring something more than looking at a burned truck and talking to a couple people, I imagine Agent Harper and I will be back in a few hours. We’ll all get together and try to put a plan of action together.”
“That’ll work,” Disick said. “What’s the plan with the truck?”
“Meaning?”
“Where’s it going to be towed? I imagine we’ll need someone from Forensics to have a look at it.”
I hadn’t put a ton of thought into it, but he had a good point.
“I can ask Maddox where the truck and trailer from the gas station are. It may be a good idea to just have the thing towed to the same lot. If we have to have someone from Dallas come have a look at them, at least they’ll be in the same place. Worst case, we can have someone from the local PD go over both vehicles and get a report to us if we don’t really think we need one of our guys down.”
“Okay. Yeah, why don’t you just have Maddox call me. I can get the tow lot info from him. Wrecker company and all that.”
“I’ll let him know.”
“Talk to you in a bit.” I ended the call and dropped my phone into my lap.
Beth pointed us toward the highway that would take us east. As she drove, I stewed on Burr going to Waco. It was out of the way if he was headed east toward his son or father. And the odds of Burr fleeing to a bar and biker gang that were connected to someon
e he had been friends with inside? That couldn’t just be a coincidence.
“What are you thinking?” Beth asked.
“That if nothing sends us somewhere else, we come back to Waco and single out a couple of these local guys and girls.”
“From the motorcycle club?” she asked.
“Yeah. Lean on some of them a little and see what they actually know. Burr being here wasn’t a coincidence.”
Chapter 24
We were a few miles out from where the truck had been dumped when my phone rang—the screen showed a Texas call. I swiped to answer.
“Hank Rawlings.”
“Agent. It’s Detective Maddox. I just wrapped up a call with Agent Disick.”
“Yeah, Detective. Did he bring you up to speed?” I asked.
“Pretty sure I’ve got everything. Burr in connection to a guy named Leland Walters. The Lost Souls. The Iron Mug.”
“Are you familiar with him?”
“No, not him personally, but the department has been dealing with the Lost Soul guys for years. Usually we have kind of an understanding. They operate legally from their businesses and we don’t have a problem. They stray from that and we’ll come down on them hard. Seems it goes in waves. They won’t make trouble for a bit, and then we’ll start hearing rumblings, then something will come to a head, then it’ll die down again.”
“What are they into?” I asked.
“Same thing most biker gangs are, drugs and guns.”
“Do they have other properties besides the bar?” I asked.
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