Cold Case Manhunt
Page 5
Hader started to retreat into the house, a sly expression on his face. “I’ll go later today, before the court closes.”
Leon stepped onto the threshold so Hader couldn’t slam the door in his face and shook his head. “Later won’t work. We’ve got to go now.”
Hader’s eyes widened in panic. He looked beyond Leon, like he might actually be considering trying to run past him and flee. But then he apparently saw Harry waiting nearby and realized making an escape wouldn’t be so easy. Finally, he rubbed his shaved head and sighed. “I need to put on my shoes first.”
Leon motioned Harry forward and they followed Hader inside the house, where they quickly made certain no one else was lurking. They waited for him to put on his shoes before cuffing him. After a quick check to make certain the doors and windows were locked and the building secured, they headed out the front door. Leon kept control of their captive fugitive while Harry radioed Martin and Cassie to let them know their bail jumper had been captured and the situation was secure.
Martin responded and came around from the back to join them at the front of the house. The bounty hunters and their fugitive headed down the driveway toward the street to meet up with Cassie. But when they got there, she was nowhere in sight.
Immediately feeling sick with worry, Leon grabbed his radio and asked her for her location. There was no response. He did it three more times. But his radio remained silent.
FOUR
“What do you want with me?” Cassie demanded of the masked man pointing a gun at her.
“Shut up!” he snapped, shoving her toward the open door of the van parked on the street around the corner from bail jumper Louis Hader’s house.
Climbing into that van was the absolute last thing Cassie wanted to do, but what choice did she have? She’d been standing at the edge of Hader’s property when two assailants had moved silently through the trees and gotten the drop on her. One of them had been clever enough to point his gun at Leon and Harry as they’d made contact with Hader, threatening to kill Cassie’s bounty hunters if she didn’t keep her mouth shut and come with them. She wasn’t about to let Leon or Harry be shot for the sake of her own safety, so she’d cooperated with the masked men’s demands.
They were likely the two who’d tried to kill her last night. It was odd that they hadn’t killed her as soon as they’d seen her today. The only reason she could figure for that was that they didn’t want the group of bounty hunters in the vicinity chasing them as soon as they heard the shot. So the kidnappers probably intended to take her into the nearby forest, shoot her and dump her body there.
So far they’d hustled her down the street and around the corner, using the cover of the trees with efficient precision. Maybe these guys were professionals. Her thoughts raced to the fugitives her team had recovered or helped to recover who were connected to organized crime, but there weren’t many. Bail bond companies out of Los Angeles and Miami had asked for local help to recover fugitives who’d thought it would be easy to hide in a small town. Daisy and Martin, with a little help from Leon and Harry, had captured the Miami fugitives over in Montana. Cassie and Leon had quickly tracked down the fugitives who were hiding in Idaho. In the case that Cassie and Leon worked, there had been nothing especially dramatic about the capture. No reason for a grudge. And she’d just testified at Rogan’s trial, so her theory that the attacks were intended to prevent her from giving her testimony didn’t hold water anymore.
This had to be about Jake’s murder. The attacks had started after she’d gotten that lead on a possible witness. At this point it seemed too much to believe that the timing of these attacks was simply coincidental.
She balked at the door of the van. “Wait, where are you taking me?”
They hadn’t said much to her or to each other in front of her, and now she wanted to get them talking. She might recognize their voices. Or maybe something about the way they talked would give her a hint about who they were or where they were from. Maybe there actually was some kind of organized crime connection. But it had been Jake, not her, who’d made an enemy and that person had subsequently killed him. Maybe that enemy had gotten wind of Cassie’s possible lead on her husband’s killer and was worried about being found out.
“Move!” The thug shoved his gun into her side.
If she got into that van, she’d never get out alive. Lord, give me strength and guidance. If only she hadn’t left her weapon in the safe back at the bail bonds office.
“If you take a shot at me, my bounty hunters will be on you in a heartbeat,” she declared boldly, even as icy fear tightened its grip and she felt herself beginning to tremble. “They’ll hear the shot and they’ll come running.” She could see their weapons weren’t fitted with sound suppressors. “I’m sure they’re already looking for me.”
The creeps had taken her radio and tossed it aside when they’d grabbed her. Her phone was still in her pocket, but moving her hand toward it was too much of a risk while they were watching her so closely. She’d turned off the sound notifications just before the move to bust Louis Hader, something she typically did so a badly timed incoming call would not give away her location when she was trying to sneak up on a fugitive. It was in vibrate mode and she’d felt it going off several times now. Someone was trying hard to get hold of her. Probably Leon.
“People living on this street will hear the gunshot if you shoot me,” she continued.
The gunmen must have been following her since the attack last night. Or maybe since she and Leon left the ranch this morning. She had the impression that this abduction might have been planned on the fly. Their goal of getting her away from the others and back to the van had worked well. But they hadn’t looked at the bigger picture. Like the potential for witnesses in this residential neighborhood.
“If people hear gunshots on their street, they’re going to look out the window,” she continued, desperate to convince them to not just shoot her on the spot while she resisted getting into the van. “The local residents might not be able to see your faces because of the masks, but they’ll see this van. And when they call the cops, the investigators will be able to track it down. They’ll find images of it on security video. Lots of people have a home security camera outside their house. You’re not going to get away with this.”
The closest gunman glanced at his partner.
That’s when Cassie tried to twist her upper body out of his grip while kicking at him.
Both thugs immediately grabbed her arms. Their grips were painfully tight.
She lifted her feet off the ground, hoping that the sudden weight of her body would throw them off balance, make them stumble, give her a chance to escape. But it didn’t work. Despite her body dropping closer to the ground, they didn’t lose their hold.
One of the abductors kept a hand on her arm while he tucked away his gun and then wrapped his free hand around her neck. The other shoved his gun into his waistband and reached for Cassie’s feet.
She kicked and thrashed as hard as she could. She screamed, louder than she’d ever screamed in her life. Instantly, she felt a viselike pressure on her throat followed by a sudden sharp pain to the side of her head. And then everything went dark.
* * *
“Call the police and let them know Cassie might be in danger.” Leon barked out the words as he ran to his truck.
“What about Louis?” Martin asked.
Leon quickly considered the question. His first thought was to let the bail jumper go. If they’d captured him once, they could capture him again. And Cassie was by far Leon’s highest priority. But the possibility existed that Cassie was not in danger. That she was talking to someone and had chosen to ignore his radio calls and attempt to contact her by phone. That would be highly unusual behavior for her, but it was possible.
“Cuff him to the porch rail,” he said. “Let the cops know where he is when you tell them ab
out Cassie. They can send a patrol unit to come get him.”
Harry, who’d been scouring the immediate area looking for Cassie, jogged up to Leon. “What’s the plan?”
“We’re going to find her and make sure she’s okay,” Leon said. “I had to secure my weapon in the safe at the office before going to court with Cassie. Give me your gun.”
Harry pulled his handgun from his holster and handed it over.
Martin quickly cuffed the bail jumper and then hurried over to Leon and Harry, all while talking to a 9-1-1 dispatcher.
Harry gestured at the phone in Leon’s hand. “Can you see Cassie on your phone’s tracker app?”
Everyone on the Rock Solid Bail Bonds team was registered with the company’s tracking app account. It was a basic security requirement. The problem was that, in a town like Stone River in the mountainous region between Idaho and Montana, reception could be iffy. And right now, as Leon looked at his phone, all he could see was a screen showing a partial map with several blank sections of missing data and an endlessly spinning wheel hovering over the top of it all.
“First thing we’ll do is a quick look up and down the surrounding streets,” Leon said. “You and Martin head south. I’ll head north. As soon as one of us gets some useful data, we’ll let each other know.”
And, hopefully, when one of them did finally get a strong enough signal to see a location, it would show them where Cassie actually was in real time. Not just some spot where her phone had been tossed.
Leon yanked open his truck door, got inside and fired up the engine. His heart was pounding in his chest. Abductions and disappearances were terrifying. He’d worked a few of them, volunteering his services, along with other Rock Solid bounty hunters, to search local wilderness areas for a missing person.
It was one thing to directly square off against someone in a fight. You knew what you were up against and what you needed to do to take care of the dangerous situation. It was something else altogether when you didn’t know which way to look. Didn’t even know what had happened. And now he was facing that situation with Cassie. Her sudden disappearance when he knew someone was trying to kill her was the stuff of nightmares.
Lord, please protect her.
The wheel on the locater app on his phone was still spinning, so he connected to the hands-free device, tossed the phone onto the console alongside his radio, looked up at the road ahead of him and hit the gas.
The last time anyone had had contact with Cassie was roughly twenty minutes ago. If someone had grabbed her at about that time, they could be pretty far gone by now. They could have taken her deep into the wilderness.
Chill, he commanded himself. He had to stay cool if he wanted to find her. The police would be on the hunt for her, too. At the moment, he would stay close to her last known location and look for any clue that could tell him what had happened to her.
After he’d tried to call her several times and hadn’t gotten a response, he couldn’t make himself believe she was just ignoring his calls anymore.
He reached the end of the road and made a right turn. There, on the right a short distance from the corner, he saw a section of tall wild grass that had been recently tromped. Last night’s rains had left the exposed dirt near the grass a mud pit and, in the mud, there were footprints and a tire tread.
He got out of his truck for a closer look, noting two sets of large footprints probably belonging to men. There was also a set of smaller prints, possibly belonging to a woman. Two men, like in the attack in the woods last night. And Cassie.
He reached for his phone as he climbed back into his truck. He wanted Harry to turn around and head in this direction while having Martin relay what Leon had seen to the police. But as he glanced at the screen he saw that the spinning wheel on the tracking app was gone. Instead, there was the familiar map of Stone River and a small dot identified as Cassie. And that dot was moving.
“Her tracker app shows her moving west on Cataldo Street,” Leon said into his phone after connecting with Harry. That was the street Leon was already on. He punched the truck’s gas pedal and started moving. The road was curvy and tree-lined so he couldn’t see very far ahead. “I don’t have a visual yet. Looks like she’s about seven miles ahead of me.”
Please let this be Cassie. Maybe it was her up ahead of him. But maybe whoever she was with had tossed her phone into the bed of a truck going in a completely different direction just to throw off anybody trying to find her.
“I’m on Ponderosa Street,” Harry said. “I should reach the intersection with Cataldo just about the time you get there.”
Through the speaker, Leon could hear the sound of Harry gunning his engine. And the sound of Martin relaying the information to the police via his phone. Good. Maybe the cops would be able to quickly set up a perimeter so the driver wouldn’t get away.
Leon was frustrated that the curves in the road slowed him down, but at least they also slowed the vehicle he was pursuing. He tried to figure out where it was headed, but that was hard to say. They’d started in a part of town with residences somewhat widely spaced; now they were headed toward the more heavily populated area near downtown Stone River and the public beaches along Lake Bell.
Leon’s truck had a powerful engine and big, deeply treaded tires that gave him high clearance. If they went off-road he could keep up with them. If they stayed on-road he’d definitely catch up with them. But he hadn’t yet seen the vehicle he was pursuing. If they’d found Cassie’s phone and tossed it, and then were able to get away without Leon seeing them, he wouldn’t be able to tell the cops anything about the vehicle they were searching for.
He fought to shake off the dark thoughts creeping up on him. Bounty hunting was all about paying attention to what was happening in front of you and anticipating what could happen next. You considered all the possibilities you could think of, made your best choice and then lived with the results.
Choices and results. He’d made some bad choices in his life, and some days it was hard to live with the results. Dark thoughts and connected emotions not even related to the pursuit at hand started slipping into his mind, all of them fueled by fear.
Again, he pushed himself to shake them off, to focus on something positive and helpful instead.
Cassie was smart, he reminded himself. She was strong. She was tough, even though she was kind of small. Leon would focus on those facts and drive the darkness out of his thoughts with the light of faith.
He needed to come up with a plan. If the police caught up with him by the time he found the bad guys, he’d let them take over and do their thing.
If not, Leon would take care of the situation. He couldn’t just wait for someone else to arrive and complete the rescue mission. Not when Cassie’s life was at stake.
He reached the intersection with Ponderosa Street and, as promised, Harry and Martin were there. Harry pulled onto the street behind Leon as soon as he passed by.
“Did you see a vehicle ahead of me as you drove up on the intersection?” Leon asked over the phone line he’d kept open after he’d called Harry a few minutes ago.
“No. Didn’t see anybody.”
There wasn’t much traffic out here, but there would be closer to town. According to the tracker app, Leon was closing in on Cassie’s phone. And, hopefully, Cassie. He rounded a hairpin turn and there in front of him was an older yellow-and-tan camper van with a sleeping berth above the driver’s area. A strategically placed thick swipe of mud covered the license plate.
The tracker showed Cassie’s phone straight ahead. And since he wasn’t looking at the bed of a truck where her phone could have been tossed to steer him chasing in the wrong direction, Leon was certain she was in there.
“This van is it,” he said to Harry. “Cassie’s in there.”
Leon could hear Martin giving a description of the van and its location to the police.
“What do you want to do?” Harry asked.
Leon’s first thought was to get in front of the van so that he and Harry could box it in and force it to stop.
“Cops should be here any minute,” Martin reported.
The van took a sudden right turn, heading into a more densely populated neighborhood. Leon stayed on it, with Harry close behind. A sign announced a drop in the speed limit, but the van driver sped up even more.
“Get ready to box him in,” Leon said to Harry. He couldn’t hold off and wait for the cops to arrive and risk the van getting away.
Bang! Bang!
Somebody leaned out of the van’s passenger-side window and fired in Leon’s direction as they passed a sign announcing that they were nearing a school with an adjacent park. There was no way Leon could return fire. Not only would he potentially put children in danger, but any bullet he fired could go through a window and strike Cassie.
“You okay?” Harry’s voice came through the speaker.
“Yeah.” Leon’s focus stayed locked on the van. He would not let it get away. But he also didn’t want to put Harry and Martin in further danger. “Slow down,” he said to Harry. “Back off the pursuit.”
“You back off, too,” Harry snapped. “Getting yourself shot isn’t going to help Cassie.”
Leon wasn’t going to back off.
Through his open window, he heard police sirens. Maybe the abductors heard the same thing. As the road hooked right, and the driver was forced to slow to make the curve, the side door on the van slid open and Cassie’s body was tossed out, landing in the park and rolling down the hill.