Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  The Grand Teton shooting had happened on Wednesday the third, he thought. How could Tracy have been at work at ten o’clock Tuesday night and then be found dead Wednesday morning up on top of a mountain four hundred miles away?

  “Could she have left early?”

  “Like, I don’t remember specifically, but my managers keep the records real sharp. If it says it in the book here, it happened.”

  “How long do you keep video? A month?” Gannon said.

  “Yep, a month,” Dettmar said as he clicked at his computer. “You want to see inside or the parking lot?”

  “Try the parking lot first,” Kit said.

  Dettmar brought up an array of screens and clicked his mouse and began fast-forwarding.

  “Right there, see? Ten fifteen and there she is. That’s her leaving after her shift,” he said.

  They stood looking as Tracy stepped out into the gray-toned parking lot. She looked skinnier and meaner than the photos of her Gannon had seen in her apartment. The lot was empty of people and there were about ten cars in it.

  “Is this Tracy’s car here in the corner?” Kit said, pointing at what looked like a Camry.

  “Yep, the Toyota right there. That’s her blue Toyota.”

  They watched her cross toward it and get in and close the door. She was in there for a full minute, then two, and then the brake lights on the car flashed and it began to back out.

  “That’s it. She left. I’m sorry I can’t help you with anything else,” Dettmar said.

  “Can I see the part where she gets into her car again?” Gannon said.

  “Sure,” Dettmar said, rewinding slowly.

  “Now stop it there. Pause it,” Gannon said as he watched Tracy open the door.

  “What is it?” Kit said.

  “The dome light doesn’t go on when she opens the door,” Gannon said. “The interior dome light should go on.”

  “You’re right,” Kit said.

  “Can we rewind some more?” Gannon said.

  Dettmar started rewinding. Tracy went backwards into the building and then there was just the car.

  The time stamp said it was nine thirty-five when they saw her car door open and the figure emerge from her car walking backwards.

  “There was somebody already in the car!” Kit said. “Pause it! Pause it!”

  Dettmar paused the video and they looked at the darkly dressed man on the screen standing there in the lot. He had a ball cap and a hoodie on. Facing away from the camera, his features weren’t visible. He didn’t look tall, but it was clearly a man because his shoulders and back were almost bodybuilder wide.

  “Look, he’s wearing gloves,” Gannon said, pointing.

  Dettmar hit Play and they watched as the hooded man walked with his wide back to them toward the car. As he approached the driver’s side door, both hands went to the front of him. He did something with his hands and the door popped open, and then he climbed in and closed the door.

  “He slim jimmed it,” Gannon said. “He waited in her car until she got off her shift.”

  Kit took out her cell phone and brought the video app up on it and turned it on.

  “Do you think you could roll that footage again for us, Mr. Dettmar?” Kit said.

  56

  “You notice the way the guy walks to the car?” Kit said as they sat back in the Armada in the parking lot, watching the footage again and again.

  “Yeah, he has like a prison yard hop roll thing going on. You think he’s a gangbanger or something?” Gannon said.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think that’s it. I’ve seen that kind of shuffling before on another case. There’s a name for that. I forget what it is but it’s a type of gait that people with prosthetics have.”

  “You think he lost a leg or something? Like a soldier maybe?”

  “Maybe,” Kit said. “It’s definitely something to keep in mind. And I definitely think she was taken in the car. Just as she sits right there, he’s in the back behind her and he gets a cord around her neck. Then when she’s dead, he moves her over and drives out.”

  “Then only nine hours later she’s found up on Grand Teton elaborately carved up and bound?” Gannon said.

  “Something doesn’t exactly add up with the time there, does it?” Kit said. “How the hell does he get her up there that quick? It’s a seven-hour drive just to the base of the mountain.”

  Gannon put the car into Drive.

  “Let’s start driving back and see if we can find her car on any more surveillance cameras,” he said.

  They got back on I-25. Five minutes later, Kit pointed ahead at a gas station at the bottom of the first exit ramp.

  “Let’s start there. That station looks pretty new,” she said.

  The old black woman they found behind the counter inside had to be eighty if she was a day. She was named Jessie, according to the plastic name tag on her vest.

  “Glad to help ya, of course,” she said after carefully studying Kit’s credentials through her thick eyeglasses.

  The sharp-as-a-tack lady locked the front door before she led them past the chips and drink coolers into the back.

  “This is a really great camera system, isn’t it?” Jessie said as she showed them her computer. “These cameras just keep getting better and better. My husband, Bob, was a cop in Colorado Springs and he insisted we get the best system we could when we decided to open a new station.”

  “Wait, wait. Hit Pause,” Gannon said two minutes later.

  Kit tapped the mouse and the screen froze to show Tracy Sandhurst’s blue Camry on the exit ramp.

  “Hot dang! You nailed it, Kit. There’s her car. Press Play. Let’s see where it goes,” Gannon said excitedly.

  The Camry pulled down to the red light and its left clicker went on. The light turned green and the car went left.

  “Come on,” Gannon said, leading them back out of the closet-sized room. “Let’s go left and see if we can find another camera.”

  Gannon pulled the Armada back out of the station onto the exit ramp and quickly made a left under the highway overpass like the Camry had done.

  As they got out on the other side of it, he suddenly slowed as he saw there was something unusual in the road ahead.

  There was some kind of black-and-white-striped barrier across the road and beyond it some sort of tollbooth and a high fence.

  “What in the hell?” Kit said.

  There was a large sign in the grass off to the right of the road, and Gannon and Kit both stared up as they pulled alongside it.

  It said:

  Francis E. Warren Air Force Base

  RESTRICTED AREA

  PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED

  HAVE IDENTIFICATION READY

  NO TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS POINT

  57

  Seventeen hundred miles almost exactly due east along the beach in Osterville, Massachusetts, there was a whir and fwump and a crisp pock followed by the squeak of sneakers on hard court.

  Dawn Warner’s tennis whites glowed in the sunset dimness as she wiped sweat from her brow. She waited with knees slightly bent as the machine fwumped out another ball, a lob this time. She groaned as she crushed it down the baseline hard enough to make the chain-link edging the beach sand jingle.

  That’s it, she thought as she jogged over and checked her steel-and-gold Rolex lady’s Oyster beside her towel. She had to stop now or she’d be late to meet her husband, Neil, at the club for dinner.

  Coming around the net to turn off the machine, she stopped for a moment as she heard the soft hum of a motor.

  She turned out to look at the water, laughing softly to herself as a large catamaran skimmed past a quarter mile out.

  For some people, it was the scent of suntan lotion or maybe the taste of saltwater taffy that flipped the endles
s summer nostalgia switch.

  For her, out here on her father’s old family vacation compound, it was the jolly purr of the Hyannis Port ferry heading out to Martha’s Vineyard.

  At least some things didn’t change, she thought to herself as she clicked off the machine.

  She heard the thump of bass coming from the pool house as she came across the cobblestone walkway a moment later. It was her brother’s oldest twin boys, she knew. They were going to be seniors in high school now and were as rambunctious as that implied. She wondered if Auntie Dawn should knock on the door and get them to turn it down a tad.

  No. She’d let it slide, she thought as she went into the side door of her seven-thousand-square-foot cedar-shingled beach house.

  This time.

  After her shower upstairs in her sumptuous master suite, she went into her vacation office in her robe and put on some Brahms. As she waited for her iMac to power on, she looked at the photographs on her wall. She and her daughters on a hike in Kenya. She and Neil at an art gallery in Stockholm. Her youngest daughter’s wedding on the beach in the Galápagos the year before.

  The email she was waiting on wasn’t there, so she found her phone.

  “Control,” said a voice.

  “Yes, this is Dawn Warner. Harris was looking into something for me. Is he still there?”

  “He left but there’s a note on his desk. Let me see here. Something about flight logs leaving out of some regional airports in... Wyoming, is it?”

  “Yes. Flights from there to DC. I’m looking to see if there’s a Kit, I mean, a Katherine Hagen on any of them.”

  “Hmm. Let’s see. No. There’s no Hagen.”

  “Okay, thank you.”

  “You got it,” Control said.

  Her new section chief had failed, Dawn Warner thought, shaking her head as she went back into her bathroom.

  “Shocker,” she said to herself as she took some skin cream out of a drawer.

  They’d covered their tracks pretty well in Casper, she thought as she cracked the lid of moisturizer.

  Lotion splattered the base of her makeup mirror as she slammed the bottle onto the counter.

  “Shit,” she said.

  But maybe not well enough, she thought.

  What if Hagen was in Cheyenne right now?

  She took a deep breath as she stood and went to find her phone again.

  She had to do it. It meant heading back to DC early but that didn’t matter. There was no other choice.

  One last grisly push and then they’d be home free.

  She dialed the number.

  The line picked up.

  “Westergaard,” said a voice.

  58

  The rest stop was near the Colorado border and as the sun set, Kit and Gannon were sitting at a concrete picnic table, eating ice cream.

  They’d stopped to get gas and were going to get a burger when they saw that the tourist center ice cream shop had gelato.

  “Funny, I’ve never had double scoops of chocolate chocolate chunk in a waffle cone for dinner before,” Kit said.

  “I’m seriously considering finding out how well it pairs with a bottle of Jack Daniels after making that left turn under that overpass,” Gannon said as he bit into a chocolate chunk.

  “I hear you,” Kit said, nibbling the edges of her waffle cone. “So you’re thinking what, Mike? Free association time. Start chucking out whatever you got. Wild speculations. I don’t care. What the hell do you think this is? Some serious upper echelon top-secret-clearance behind-the-curtain shit that involves both FBI pressure to get me off the case and now even the military?”

  When Gannon pulled his face out of his waffle trough, it was comically chocolate-covered.

  “Hey,” he cried. “You really can read minds.”

  Kit laughed.

  “I think Tracy was flown up to Grand Teton from that air force base. That explains the time crunch. And she was flown up by someone with clearance. That’s an actual nuclear weapon silo base that no one can get onto unless they have the right colored badge.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Gannon said. “Now, how are we going to find out who drove in at 10:27 p.m. that Tuesday night? Ask the guard? Good luck with that.”

  “I know,” Kit said. “Maybe we should put off trying to open that can of worms right now. I think we need to shift focus. And I think I know the perfect way how.”

  “You do, huh? I have to hear this,” Gannon said, wiping some chocolate off his chin with a napkin.

  Gannon watched as Kit chucked the remnant of her ice cream into the trash bin and came back.

  “I never did it before, but Dennis did it once,” she said. “He knew a guy in the NSA, and one time Dennis called him and he got Dennis some stuff. Some intel stuff. It was against every rule known to man but he did it anyway.”

  “What kind of stuff was Dennis looking for?”

  “A facial recognition scan on one of the most dangerous serial killers we ever caught. His name was Rodrigo Vargas and he preyed solely on kids. We had him on a liquor store security video in Rhode Island but we couldn’t identify him because he was totally off the grid, totally in the shadows. Turned out he was a woodsman from South America. He lived under overpasses, along railroad tracks.”

  “Then you caught him?”

  “Yes. The file Dennis got from his NSA friend said Vargas was in Mexico. In Juarez living in a run-down hotel. Dennis and I went down by ourselves and found him and brought him back.”

  “How’d that happen? Finding him I mean. NSA satellites or something?”

  “No, I don’t think they need satellites anymore, Mike. They have facial recognition technology that is scary and it’s tapped into not just the internet but virtually every public or private video feed on earth with a connection to the internet.”

  “Comforting,” Gannon said. “Then what happened?”

  “Vargas hung himself ten minutes before his arraignment.”

  “Uplifting story. So what are you thinking now?” Gannon said. “Give the NSA guy another call?”

  “It’s a violation of the highest order but since we hit a dead end with Tracy, I could call him and ask him to put the photo of the first victim, the Asian woman, into the NSA facial recognition system.”

  “What are you hesitating about? Let’s do it. Full speed ahead. Call this NSA spook.”

  “I will but there’s a glitch. If he has the info, I’ll need to be in a SCIF to receive it. You know what a SCIF is?”

  “An intel top secret room, right? A cone of silence room for super-duper extra-sneaky spy bullshit. They had them in Iraq.”

  “Right. Well, every major FBI office has one. There’s actually one in Denver. That’s the closest. We could go to the one in Denver.”

  “So, what’s the problem?” Gannon said as he bit off the bottom of the cone. “Denver’s what? A half day’s drive south?”

  “What’s the problem?” Kit said, shrugging. “Take your pick. First, I need a pretense to go in there. Second, I’m supposed to be on leave. Also, I’m supposed to be in DC tomorrow morning for that meeting, lest we forget. And you said that we’re probably already on their radar.

  “Mike,” she said, looking him right in the eye, “this NSA backdoor move is highly, highly, highly illegal. I get busted, I’m not just getting fired. I’m probably going to jail. Dennis’s friend, too, probably.”

  “You did say this is the Denver office though, right?” Gannon said. “Rocky Mountain High town? Think about it. The Bureau’s greatest minds are in Denver? Not likely. Besides, you’re a hotshot profiler. The one in the paper who was recently shot no less. And don’t forget, you’re quite an attractive woman, which tends to open doors all by itself for some strange reason, at least when men are around. We can come up with a story to get you in and out of the
re.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said. “But it certainly won’t be easy.”

  Gannon looked out as a restored old fifties pickup went past, the sleek silver skin of the Airstream camper behind it glittering in the sunset.

  “Denver it is,” he said, winking as he lapped at the ice cream that began dripping off his wrist. “This is some summer road trip, huh?”

  “Oh, yeah. The best,” Kit said. “Serial killers to the right, some mysterious corrupt government cover-up situation to the left. Who needs Disneyland?”

  “Exactly,” Gannon said with a wink. “This is more kicks than Route 66.”

  PART THREE

  THINGS TO DO IN DENVER

  59

  The fourteen-passenger Dassault Falcon 900LX left out of San Francisco International at a little after seven o’clock in the morning. Heading due east, it seemed like it had only just reached its 50,000-foot cruising ceiling when it began its long bullet-like parabolic descent into Cheyenne Regional.

  They were beginning to taxi in off the main runway when Westergaard got the beep on his laptop.

  He was laid out half-asleep in one of the aircraft’s aft cabin sofas, and he sat up and looked out the porthole window.

  The text that he read quickly said the target wasn’t in Wyoming anymore. The satellite had picked up Hagen’s rental car on the move over the border in Colorado. The ground support team out of the base in Colorado Springs was already rerouting the vehicles to Denver.

  Westergaard rose from the sofa and quickly came forward. Snoozing in the luxury jet’s bespoke club chairs he passed by were the four other men in his unit. Large and broad-shouldered with headphones on, they could have been a professional sports team resting up before an important away game.

  “Change of plans,” he said to the pilot. “We need to head south now. Can you get us to Denver without refueling? Time is of the essence. We need to move as quickly as possible.”

  The Falcon’s pilot frowned up at Westergaard with his scruffy flabby round face. Hollywood liked to show American pilots as charming devil-may-care masculine types but this one was much more Tom Arnold than Tom Cruise. He gave a walrus yawn as he checked his electronic instruments.