The Shadow Tracer

by Mg Gardiner

  Zoe Keller was alive. She was in range—like the charge at the center of a blast radius. She was with a civilian, her biological aunt, a woman with no law enforcement or military training, an amateur.

  Sarah Keller was the pin in the grenade. Pull her loose and the entire thing would blow.

  He drove toward the airport. The prison would be waiting for him. As would Eldrick Worthe.

  14

  The sun rode west, hauling Sarah toward the green horizon at 70 mph. In the back seat Zoe held Mousie and drowsily watched the miles flow by. The heated sky gleamed with anvil-topped cumulonimbus. They passed Weatherford, Elk City, and Sayre. Drive, Sarah told herself. Foot down. Her mind spun, revving so fast she thought it might spit gears like broken teeth.

  There were right and wrong ways to disappear. She’d tracked people who tried to go off the grid and failed. She knew a dozen ways to do it badly.

  One of the dumbest was to create a false identity. A fake driver’s license wouldn’t fool the police, Immigration and Customs, or the FBI. And a black market ID—one that came with a birth certificate and Social Security number—frequently also came with a bad credit score and even arrest warrants. Not to mention that false IDs weren’t necessarily unique. Buy from a crook, and it was possible he’d sold the same identity to ten other people. Assuming a false identity was for spies and the stupid.

  But creating new legal identities hadn’t been an option for her and Zoe. Keller was on Zoe’s birth certificate, and Sarah couldn’t very well go to court and ask a judge to change it. However, she had informally altered the way she spelled her own first name. Neither her birth certificate nor Social Security card read Sarah.

  Even dumber than faking an identity was faking your own death. People who tried it ended up in the newspaper and, frequently, in jail. Yet many found it irresistible. They pretended to drown while kayaking. They bailed out of a Cessna over the Sierras. There was even a name for it: pseudocide.

  Only faking your death got Coast Guard helicopters searching the oceans. It got the NTSB wondering why the wreckage of the Cessna contained no body. It brought TV news crews and sobbing friends to the campsite where bears supposedly dragged you off into the woods. Faking your death sent up an emergency flare.

  No. To disappear successfully you needed to diminish the shadow you cast in people’s lives, so that when you vanished, few people would notice or care.

  Sarah had forced herself to do that. She had given up the amateur soccer league. She didn’t join social networks. She had stopped searching for the truth behind the photo her mother gave her the day she died. Before the war hovered there, beckoning, and she ached to know what it meant. She felt she was betraying her ancestors, leaving them suspended in a netherworld. But she didn’t dare search for them. The dead could finger her.

  The way to disappear was to hang onto your own identity and hide your location. You wanted to stroll out the door and melt into the crowd. And Sarah knew that today she’d done just the opposite. Against that, now she had to evaporate into the vast plains of the Southwest.

  On the stereo she heard ringing guitar chords. Foo Fighters, “Wheels.” She turned it up, and instantly regretted it.

  “And everyone I’ve loved before flashed before my eyes …”

  Her throat tightened and she blinked back tears. Mistake number three was the hardest for most people to avoid: sneaking home. But that wouldn’t be her problem. Home didn’t exist.

  Her mother had not simply come from a refugee family. Atlanta Keller declared herself a free spirit and rejected ties to place, dogma, and tradition. Mother to two girls, daughter of the Earth, she used to say.

  Sarah never knew her father. Her mom would not talk about him or about what had happened between them. She said only that she loved him, he loved her, and he loved the girls. He was gone. But a dark longing hung over Atlanta, for lost love and a lost history that war and flight had cut her off from.

  As kids, Sarah and Beth had imagined their family’s past. They held adventures in their tree fort—fantasies where they were ancient horsemen or people running from the Nazis. Maybe fighting them behind the lines.

  They always defeated the tree fort demons.

  The knot in Sarah’s throat felt like a ball of string. Her sister, who grew up to paint Follow your bliss on the nursery wall above Zoe’s crib, and who tattooed Free Spirit across her shoulder in their mom’s honor, had gone down fighting.

  “Beth, where’s the baby?”

  Through her dread, Sarah had barely been able to get the words out. She knelt over Beth in the pantry, hands bloody. The stab wound wouldn’t stop bleeding.

  Beth wheezed. “They told Nolan—get the kid. He didn’t move fast enough. Grissom, those girls—broke the door down. Caught me coming out of the pantry.”

  Sarah put her hand against Beth’s cheek. “Where’s Zoe?”

  Beth looked over her shoulder. “Behind the wall.”

  Hidden behind the pantry shelves was a crawl space. On the floor, under a pile of blankets, Sarah found her.

  She scooped Zoe into her arms, warm and wriggling. Holding her close, she crawled back through the debris.

  “She’s fine. Look, Beth, she’s safe.”

  In the light Zoe blinked like E.T. and pulled her hands up in front of her face, fists cocked like a tiny boxer. Tears rose in Beth’s eyes.

  You saved her, Sarah tried to say. The words wouldn’t come.

  She grabbed Beth’s hand. “We have to get you to the ER.”

  Beth raised her head, grimaced, and dropped back to the floor.

  Sarah eased her arm beneath Beth’s back and tried to lift her. “We need to hurry.”

  Beth looked at her tiny daughter, then at Sarah. “Get Zoe out of here.”

  “I will. Come on.”

  She can’t. The words rang like a bell, clear and imperative, deep in Sarah’s head. They seemed to come from the night world. It was close by, waiting to swallow her sister. She shook her head to clear it and tried again to lift Beth.

  Beth pushed her hand away. “Go. Before they come back.”

  Sarah’s grip tightened around Zoe. “The Worthes …”

  “Not only them,” Beth said. “Was supposed to be safe. Only went to Arizona because …” She struggled to breathe. “Nolan—the Feds came here. Before.”

  “The Feds. Federal agents?”

  “FBI. Said they’d protect us.”

  “They wanted Nolan to go to Arizona? Why? To …” Dear God. “Inform on his family?”

  “Agent—said we would be safe.” Beth’s eyes were sad and fearful. “I didn’t understand. We were … tools.”

  Sarah felt like she’d been doused with ice water. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “You still don’t understand. Get Zoe out of here. Keep her safe.” With a brief rush of energy, Beth gripped Sarah’s arm. “Don’t let anybody take her.”

  “I won’t.”

  “She’s my life.” Beth’s fingers dug into her arm. “She’s all I have now. She’s everything.”

  Sarah nodded, dizzy.

  “Take her, Sarah. Protect her. Don’t let anybody else touch her. Nobody. You understand?” Beth pinned her with her gaze. “Do you understand? Say it.”

  “I understand,” Sarah whispered. “I’ll protect her. Nobody will take Zoe from me.”

  Beth looked at the baby. Sarah took her sister’s hand and put it to Zoe’s cheek. The little girl blinked and reached out. But Beth no longer saw her.

  Sarah was still bent over Beth, shaking her, crying her name again and again like a litany, trying to fend off the night world and call her back, when she heard a heavy vehicle bump up the gravel driveway toward the house.

  She scrambled to her feet. Panic, a sense of uncontrollable fear, hit her like buckshot. Holding Zoe, she grabbed Beth’s arm and dragged her from the pantry into the kitchen. A slick of blood painted the floor in their wake.

  She peered out the front window. An SUV was creeping dow
n the driveway, lights off in the snowy morning. Fifty yards from the house, still rolling, the doors swung open. Dark figures emerged and loomed on the running boards.

  Run.

  She let go of Beth’s hand and opened the back door. Clutching Zoe, she plunged into the storm.

  In Danisha’s truck, the music rose, plaintive and bittersweet. The lyrics echoed: Been looking for a reason, man, something to lose. Sarah glanced in the mirror.

  Zoe had fallen heavily asleep, as children do—intensely asleep, as though it were work, their little bodies avidly consuming the deep rest they need to grow. Her face was pale and peaceful. Her long lashes lay against her cheeks. Mousie hung loosely in her fingers.

  When Beth died, Sarah had thought nothing could be worse. How wrong she’d been.

  The sun glared white in the windshield. The highway arrowed to the vanishing point on a horizon of wind-bent grass. She wiped away tears with the heel of her hand.

  Disappearing was possible. Look at the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Those posters of sullen criminals showed men and women who had vanished. Some of them had been on the run for twenty years. If they could do it, so could she.

  That’s what he’d told her. Get out of here. Run. Hide.

  Five years earlier she’d done exactly that. Now she was doing it again.

  She blew past a road sign. WELCOME TO TEXAS, THE LONE STAR STATE.

  15

  The sun hung above the peaks of the Rockies, orange against dark crags and slicks of snow. In the high plains desolation of Florence, Colorado, the FBI car turned off the highway into the United States Penitentiary ADX. Neither the Colorado Springs resident agent at the wheel nor Special Agent Curtis Harker spoke. Florence wasn’t the kind of place that invited conversation.

  The building was redbrick with towering concrete turrets. Around the barren perimeter ran two parallel fences. Coils of razor wire filled the gap between them, a deadly garden of shining vines. Dogs patrolled the inner grounds.

  Part of the Federal Correctional Complex, Florence was ADMax: an Administrative Maximum Facility, better known as a supermax prison. It housed felons too dangerous for maximum security institutions. Some called it the Alcatraz of the Rockies. Here the government imprisoned men who had escaped from other facilities, or killed prison guards, or controlled criminal gangs on the outside.

  Men like Eldrick Worthe.

  At Florence ADX, cell windows looked out on walls, so inmates could not discern the facility’s layout or their location inside it. Prisoners got one phone call a month with family, fifteen minutes, always monitored. Uncontrollable inmates were isolated in their cells up to twenty-three hours a day. Florence housed 9/11’s twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, and the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood and the Gangster Disciples. A former warden described the place as “a clean version of hell.”

  They were expecting him.

  In the front lobby Harker deposited his service weapon, phone, wallet, and credentials. The Colorado Springs agent said, “I’ll wait here.” Good choice. Otherwise, she would have had to remove her underwire bra. Harker signed in, had his hand stamped, and was buzzed through the sally port into the visitors’ room. A prison official accompanied him.

  Aside from the guards he was the only person there, but he bet the warden was watching him on CCTV. It was past normal visiting hours. He sat down at the Plexiglas barrier and waited.

  The door on the other side clacked open and two guards escorted in Eldrick Worthe. He wore federal institutional clothing: a white shirt buttoned and tucked into white trousers, an institutional belt, institutional black shoes, and institutional shackles, hand and foot. The guards sat him down and chained him, clinking, to a steel ring cemented into the floor.

  Eldrick’s skin was flaccid and potato-white. His hair flew in gray streaks above his head, like a greasy crown. His wiry beard spread to his chest. His eyes, deep-set and steady, stared at Harker.

  He said, “If you’re here to confess your sins and beg for miracles, you need to get on your knees.”

  “Good to see you, Eldrick,” Harker said. “It’s truly good to see you chained to the floor and so deprived of sunlight that you might come down with rickets.”

  Eldrick continued to stare without blinking. “Begging wouldn’t work, mind. She’s still dead. She’ll stay dead. The angels will not raise her up. The Lord will not breathe eternal life into a minion of the Beast.”

  Harker pressed his hands to the cheap painted surface of the table. His pulse pounded in his neck. Then he sat back and tightened his necktie. “Don’t you get bored, talking all day like a cut-rate Moses?”

  “But that’s why you’re here, ain’t it? To talk about redemption? About finding a way to atone?”

  “I’m here to talk about the killing of Bethany Keller.”

  “Bethany died in the blood of her sins. Nothing to do with me.”

  “You could still be charged with capital murder for that crime.”

  “And you could find out the buzzing in your ears is blowflies hatching in your brain.”

  “Stem-winders count as solicitation,” Harker said.

  Beth Keller had died while Eldrick awaited sentencing in Denver, shortly after he smuggled a bloodcurdling sermon out of jail. Read aloud at his family’s scrub-brush paradise near the Grand Canyon, the sermon ordered the Fiery Branch to remove all obstacles to their work, especially unreliable and disobedient women.

  Eldrick sucked on his teeth and eyed Harker with disdain.

  Part of it was an act. But much of it, Harker thought, was clinical narcissism steeped in fantasies of omnipotence. From what he’d learned through confidential informants, Eldrick’s personality was organized around affirming his extraordinarily grandiose sense of himself. He was in Florence ADMax because, at another prison, he had paid an inmate to knife a female guard who dared to exercise authority over him.

  Narcissists, the shrinks said, felt empty. That was why they craved constant affirmation. And perhaps emptiness stoked Eldrick Worthe’s rage and hatred. His first wife left him and took the kids. He lost money in fly-by-night gold-mining schemes. He was arrested for selling drugs. And his reaction, in every case, was fury at the injustice done to him.

  Narcissists who were not given adoration tended to lash out. They punished those who failed to offer it. And so it came to pass that one night, paranoid and high on methamphetamine, Eldrick heard the Holy Spirit giving him orders—which his family was to carry out.

  Strangely, the Spirit never ordered Eldrick to tend the sick or feed the hungry. It ordered his family to render unto Eldrick whatever Eldrick wanted, and his lieutenants to punish people who crossed him. It directed his subordinates to give him their daughters in spiritual wedlock, to warm his bed and his sagging body. Few objected. Eldrick was heavily armed and most of his clan lived fifty miles from the nearest sheriff’s department. It was the Holy Gospel of I, Me, Mine.

  This led to a chain of slashings, shootings, the stocking of an arsenal for the clan’s periodic showdowns with rival drug dealers and the DEA, and finally the courthouse bombing that killed Special Agent Campbell Robinson and federal prosecutor Daniel Chavez.

  Harker took three photos from his pocket and fanned them on the tabletop.

  Eldrick glanced at them. “So you’ve got my family album. What of it?”

  Harker tapped the photos of the two young women, Reavy and Felicity. “I want to interview them. If you put me in touch, I can help you gain privileges.”

  “In my cell I have the intense freedom of solitude. I don’t need your privileges. And is interview the FBI term for a takedown with a tactical assault team?”

  “Very well. You tell me how to find them, we can arrange for them to surrender themselves safely. And I can keep them off Death Row.”

  “They fear not death, much less Death Row. They are the angel’s fiery wings. They will fly beyond any attempt to cage them.”

  Eldrick turne
d and spat on the floor.

  Harker touched the third photo, thinking: Grissom Briggs is no angel. “Let’s cut the babble. How about you keep your business from dissolving into a war of attrition between your brother, your sons, and your hired thugs?”

  That got Eldrick to eye him, momentarily, sidewise.

  “Who wanted Beth Keller dead?” Harker said. “Who did that serve—Nolan? He wanted to patch things up with the family. He brought Beth and their baby to Arizona to meet the relatives. But Beth wanted no part of the Worthes, for her or her child. After the visit she kicked him out.”

  Eldrick’s eyes had a peculiar light. Maybe it was delusions of godhead. Maybe it was the fact that one eye was brown, one blue. Even to Harker, it was unsettling.

  “Still, I don’t get it,” Harker said. “Nolan wanted to reconcile with you so bad, he brought the clan his child like a tribute, to be blessed.”

  “What of it?”

  “Yet he never married Beth, and he let his daughter take her mother’s name. He didn’t legally recognize the child as a Worthe. Talk about a kick in the teeth.”

  Eldrick didn’t react. But Harker knew what must be running through his mind. Never married? Not a Worthe?

  Eldrick eyed him hard, maybe looking for a tell. Harker emptied his expression.

  He didn’t intend to reveal how shocked he’d been to learn that Zoe was living with Sarah Keller. The microchip had surprised them all.

  Harker knew that Nolan and Beth had visited the Arizona box canyon where the clan had encamped. But he’d never known what happened during the weekend—he never got the chance to interrogate Nolan or Beth. Now he could only face Eldrick Worthe’s hideous mask of godliness, and try to work his own dark magic.

  “You might feel free in your monk’s cell,” he said. “But you can only see a two-foot patch of brick outside the window. You can’t possibly control your entire extended family. The tribe is beyond reach. Even a prophet’s reach.”

  Eldrick sat motionless, his hands loose on the table. Harker leaned forward.