Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  “So this means...?” Barber said.

  “The bodies were switched?” Kit said, throwing up her hands. “Somebody took away this murdered Asian woman your brother saw here. And then switched it with this new murdered white woman here.”

  “How does that make any sense?” Gannon said.

  “That’s the thing,” Kit said, slowly shaking her head. “It doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  34

  An hour and a half later, they were sitting outside at Barber’s picnic table beside his compound’s small lake. They’d just finished lunch and were looking out over the water where Gannon’s son, Declan, and the Barbers’ children, Stephanie and her two high school–aged brothers, Ryan and Nate, were playing water basketball against a backboard hammered into the side of the old gray wood dock.

  On the deck itself, Barber’s wife, Lynn, sat in an Adirondack chair reading a book. They all waved as she looked over at them. Gannon noticed how she didn’t wave back.

  “So, Kit, have you been doing any thinking?” Gannon said, looking across the table at the FBI agent.

  “You could say that, Mike,” Kit said, lifting her iced tea.

  “I’m still trying to get this all straight, Kit,” John Barber said.

  “You and me both,” Kit said.

  “From what you told us before, you think the initial killer you’ve been looking for, the real NATPARK killer, is this Ketchum guy,” Barber said. “This guy they have in custody in Kansas. And he’s not the shooter on the mountain.”

  “Correct,” she said. “With the evidence we already have, the sibling link DNA evidence from the stolen truck and Ketchum’s previous history of sexual violence and his whereabouts matching up with the other three murders, there isn’t a prosecutor anywhere in this country who wouldn’t sign an arrest warrant on him.”

  “But only for the first three murders,” Gannon said.

  “Exactly,” Kit said. “Ketchum’s been in custody in a Kansas penitentiary for nearly the last year. His being the shooter up on Grand Teton is literally impossible.”

  “But the crime scene on Grand Teton, the way the victim was posed, the details match Ketchum’s other crime scenes?” Gannon said.

  “Yes. To a T.”

  “So the Grand Teton murder is a copycat or something?” Barber said.

  “Or maybe Ketchum has a partner,” Kit said with a tilt of her head. “As he sat in jail, it’s possible he might have thought that we would eventually catch up with him, so he had a partner kill another victim in the same exact way while he was in custody to throw the suspicion off himself.”

  “But how do the two bodies come into play?” Gannon said.

  Kit looked out at all the young people in the water. The two Barber brothers were trying fruitlessly to block the much taller Declan, who dodged in the water and leaped up and hooked a shot over them.

  “LeBron at the buzzer!” Declan screamed as the ball clunked heavily off the backboard and then made a cartoon boinging sound off the rim as it ricocheted away and splashed in the water.

  “You got me on that one,” Kit finally said, shaking her head. “That’s new to me. I can’t even begin to come up with a reason why. I was actually going to head out to Kansas to interview Ketchum after I left here. But now with the switcheroo bombshell we just saw on your brother’s phone—that there were actually two dead women and one of them is still missing—I have to say I’m pretty much at a complete loss what to do.”

  35

  “What would you do if you were still lead on the case and found this out?” Gannon said. “That Grand Teton doesn’t look related to the other three murders and that the bodies had been switched?”

  Agent Hagen put down her glass and looked steadily at him.

  “Can I ask you a question, Mike?” she said.

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “You seem pretty familiar with investigative work. I saw on the resort website that John was in the Special Forces. Are you military as well or law enforcement or...?”

  Gannon took a sip of iced tea.

  “Both actually,” he said. “Or at least I used to be. I was in the service with this joker, John, here, in the Middle East, but when I cycled out, I worked as a cop in the NYPD. I’m actually recently retired now. My son and I are RVing for the summer, and John was nice enough to let us park our tenement on wheels up in his hills here.”

  “In the service. Listen to him,” Barber said. “So modest. That’s an actual genuine navy SEAL commando sitting over there, Kit. C’mon, Mike. Show her your frogman tattoo.”

  “A navy SEAL? Wow,” Kit said.

  “Like I said, was,” Gannon said, holding up a finger. “A long time ago. And despite what my good friend here says, there’s no tattoo.”

  “Were you a SEAL, too?” Kit said, turning to Barber.

  “No,” Gannon said with a laugh. “Bite your tongue. John wishes but he was just in the army, poor guy. But you didn’t answer my question, Kit. What would you do if you were still on the case?”

  “Well,” Kit said, nodding, “I’d separate out Ketchum for the time being and treat what happened in Wyoming as a brand-new case, then. A new case with two victims. Since one victim is known and the other one unknown, I’d start with the known victim, obviously.”

  “The white woman?” Barber said.

  “Yes,” Kit said. “I didn’t get a chance to see the autopsy report before they took me off the case so I think I would start there. I’d put Ketchum on the back burner for now and go straight back to Jackson to look at the crime scene again and try to get the results of the autopsy.”

  “Do you have the paperwork on the shooting itself, the ballistics report?” Gannon said.

  “No,” Kit said. “I wish. They didn’t show me anything before they forced me to go on leave.”

  “In that case I can do one for you,” Gannon said. “I did over a dozen ballistic reports with the NYPD. Even testified in court a few times. Once the brass heard I’d been an instructor in the SEAL sniper school, I started to get assigned over to the CSU to help out whenever it got busy. I also worked some homicides as a detective in Brooklyn, in East New York. Over thirty of them, and cleared most of them, too. So I know a bit about how murder investigations work.”

  Kit peered at him.

  “I really could use a ballistics report. But I don’t know if getting someone else involved is such a good thing. I mean, I’m not even supposed to be here talking to you. Like I said, I’m supposed to be off the case. I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble.”

  Gannon smiled.

  “Trouble? For what? Going for a hike with a tape measure?”

  “Mike’s right,” Barber said. “You two need to partner up on this and pronto. To get a handle on all this damn craziness, you’re going to need all the help you can get. Hell, after hearing about the way your bosses are sitting on this, I’d go with you myself except my mother is still in the hospital.”

  Kit sat looking out at the lake for a bit. Then she went quickly into her bag and fished out something.

  “Okay, let’s try this, Mike,” she said, offering him a business card. “Here’s my number. Despite your wife’s generous offer, John, I’m going to head back to my hotel at the airport to get a few things done. But if you want, Mike, how about I meet you tomorrow at the airport. There’s a Delta flight at noon back to Jackson. This is a free country, right? I can’t stop you from being on the same flight as me, can I? How does that sound? Make sense?”

  Gannon took the card and looked at it.

  Be careful what you wish for, he thought as he played his thumb over the raised embossing of the FBI seal.

  As he began to slip it into his pocket, out in the water all the kids started laughing and howling again as the ball bonged hard off the rim.

  “Sounds like a plan,�
� he finally said.

  36

  Back up at the bus late that afternoon after Kit Hagen had left, Declan came in to catch Gannon already clean-shaven and in the back bedroom, packing again.

  “Dad’s leaving again. No, it can’t be. Oh, well. Whatever. I’m not even going to ask,” Declan said as he left the room.

  Gannon put down the pair of folded jeans he was holding. When he went out and sat on the couch, Declan was putting some popcorn into the galley microwave.

  “Son,” he called, “why don’t you go into the fridge there and get us a couple of beers and bring them in here. I’d like to tell you a story.”

  Declan went and got two Coors Lights, handed Gannon one and sat down in the seat across.

  “A story?” he said, opening his can.

  Gannon cracked his own.

  “Yes. This one’s a true story, and after you hear it, I think you’ll understand a few things better. Why I chose to come out here. Why John and I are so close. The title of it is called, ‘The Day I Met John Barber.’”

  “Whoa,” Declan said, sipping at his beer. “A war story? You never tell those.”

  “I know. Not normally, but this is important,” Gannon said, licking at the foam atop his can.

  “When 9/11 happened, I was in San Diego training with the SEAL team I was attached to and within a week, we were on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf doing VBSS operations on any vessel that even remotely looked like it might have terrorist ties.”

  “VBSS. That’s what again? Visit, board, something, something?” Declan said.

  “Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure,” Gannon said as the Orville Redenbacher’s in the microwave started to detonate.

  “Got it,” Declan said.

  “But then after a few weeks, we got a call to send one of us over to some covert special ops task force they were putting together, and I got the short straw. First, I was flown into Oman of all places to some air force base and six hours later, very early in the morning, I was flying nap-of-the-earth on a blacked-out Black Hawk chopper with a team of folks crossing over the border into Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.”

  “No shit,” Declan said.

  “No shit,” Gannon said, looking out the window at the darkening land.

  37

  “Was John with you?” Declan said.

  “No,” Gannon said. “The guys with me were special tactics forward observer air force guys that they needed on the ground to call in air strikes. They were going in to bolster a bunch of their buddies who were already there in the theater of combat and my job, whether I chose to accept it or not, was to provide security for them as we were inserted at some LZ just north of Bagram Airport.”

  Gannon paused and took another sip of beer as the microwave shut off.

  “Now, son, there’s this thing called the fog of war. Once things start going hot, there’s a lot of moving parts in a very tight area, and friendlies sometimes forget to tell other friendlies what they’re doing. Unbeknownst to us as our boots hit the ground, we had all just been dropped smack-dab in the middle of an ongoing fiasco of megalithic proportions.

  “The Taliban, who had already been pushed away from the airport a month before, were that very morning about to mount a counterattack. We had no idea, but within a mile west of our LZ was a group of over a thousand heavily armed Taliban jihadis chomping at the bit to chop off some juicy infidel heads.”

  “Get out,” Declan said.

  “Gets worse,” Gannon said. “The enemy had been spotted by the forward observers already at the airport, and they had already called in an air strike basically right on top of where we were standing.”

  “No effing way.”

  “Yes effing way,” Gannon said, staring at the bus floor between his sneakers. “And it wasn’t just any old kind of air strike either. As we stood there, a B-52 bomber loaded with fifty five-hundred-pound bombs was on its final approach to the drop zone. And as our terrific luck would have it, they weren’t even those famous precision munition smart bombs the networks gush about but what they call dumb bombs. The kind that the air force bomb monkeys just kick out the open bomb bay doors and cross their fingers as gravity takes over.”

  Gannon watched his son shake his head.

  “I remember hearing it coming,” he said. “B-52s are big-ass planes and this one was flying low, and the rumble of it was like thunder coming down from a mountain. As we were standing there, oblivious to the fact that we were about to meet our maker, over the hill we were walking up appeared a beat-up pickup truck traveling at a very high rate of speed. I immediately got a bead on it with my rifle and was just about to pop the turban-headed driver when I saw an American uniform sitting next to him waving like a nut out the passenger window.”

  “It was John,” Declan said.

  Gannon smiled with a nod.

  “It was John. His Delta Force guys were attached to the controllers at the airport and by some miracle, he had been on the horn with someone at the base we had just left. He had pieced it together that we were in harm’s way so he had grabbed some stone-cold crazy Northern Alliance Afghani he knew with a pickup truck, and they had raced into the zone of imminent destruction to come and get us.”

  Declan shook his head in wide-eyed awe.

  “We only found this out after. As the truck screeched to a stop before us, John leaped out and yelled, ‘No questions get in the mother bleeping truck now.’ So we did. As the thunder above got louder, into the truck we piled and the Northern Alliance guy dropped the hammer back up the hill. As we reached the crest, I looked up between the three air force guys who were piled on top of me and we all saw the plane. It was coming over us like a gargantuan gray vulture, and there was already a slanted column of large gray objects dropping out of it.”

  There was silence as Gannon took another sip of his beer in the dimness of the living room.

  “We watched the bombs drop down toward us. I remember one of the guys saying a Hail Mary as we began to hear the metallic teakettle whistling of them. Then we looked behind us and watched stunned as the line of the carpet bombs just cleared the top of the hill we had just come over.”

  Gannon took a breath.

  “And then there was a sound like you wouldn’t believe. The truck actually started to bunny hop like a BMX bike from the ground swells as five-hundred after five-hundred after five-hundred sank in their teeth and bit a mile-sized chunk out of the stone ass of Afghanistan. It was like we were driving over a fault line during an earthquake. I thought at any moment a hole was going appear in the earth’s crust and we would all be swallowed.

  “They had counted over a thousand Taliban at the outset and when the smoke cleared into the early-morning air, they and all their shit—their trucks and their tents and prayer rugs, all of it—was gone. Just gone. One moment they were there and the next, the entire army of them had vanished bippity boppity boo like Merlin had waved his magic wand.”

  Declan stared at his father as Gannon took a long pull from the can.

  “You get it now. Why me and John are tight?” he said with a wink. “Why the man commands a prominent portion of my respect and gratitude. Why I need to help him find out what in the world actually happened to his brother. I mean, the man drove toward that, okay? Toward it. Think about it. Who would do that?”

  Gannon took another pull of his beer as his son took a few moments to absorb all that.

  “So,” Declan finally said in the silence. “How long will you be gone?”

  PART TWO

  ON THE ROAD

  38

  Gannon needed to get a haircut and to do some last-minute shopping so he was a little late getting to the Salt Lake City Airport just before noon.

  When he finally arrived at the Delta gate, he saw Kit straight off standing at the airport lounge window where a big white 747 airliner was being refuele
d.

  Instead of sitting down near her, he sat away near the flight desk, watching her. He noticed she was wearing business attire now, a nice blouse and skirt with heels. She scrubbed up pretty nice.

  He wasn’t the only with that opinion, Gannon realized with a smile as he noticed all the converging sight-line angles of nearly every male in the lounge.

  When he looked back, she had spotted him. He watched as she walked out into the concourse and bought something at a kiosk. Then she picked up her bag by the window. All the heads of the men swiveled as she brought it over to where he was sitting.

  “You like Twix?” she said as she tore open the wrapper of the candy.

  “Of course. You kidding? Who doesn’t like Twix,” he said, taking one and biting into it.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you in your business duds without the scruff,” she said, biting into the other one.

  “I was coming down the highway and saw a Macy’s,” Gannon said as he smoothed down his new gray linen summer suit jacket. “I thought since we’ll probably be talking to other human beings, it might be a good move to go for something slightly less caveman-ish.”

  They sat chewing. He smiled as he saw all the men now looking at him. Every single one of them was frowning. It took everything he had not to give them a wave with his Twix as they finally started to look back down at their phones.

  “I’m sorry for not coming over straight off,” Gannon said, slapping crumbs off his slacks when he was done. “I wasn’t sure if I should sit down next to you or not. You said back at John’s to keep it under the radar. I didn’t know exactly how incognito you wanted to take this.”

  “I think we’re good now,” she said, nodding. “This flight looks empty. We can even sit together on the plane if you want.”

  “We leave in what? Forty-five?” Gannon said.

  “More like thirty. You cut it pretty close.”