by Lee Killough
“Have you run the van through the computer’s VIN program yet?” Since that would tell them where the vehicle had been manufactured and where they shipped it.
“Of course. I’m about to call the factory now.”
The dealership in turn could tell them the name of the initial buyer, then they would try to locate him or her and learn if he/she still had the van or to whom it had been sold. With luck, they would follow the ownership chain to the albino.
During stop for gas, Wendy told him: “Things got crazy and I still haven’t called the Dodge factory. The van’s been hauled to Sterling’s for printing.”
Sterling-Weiss’s location across the street behind City Hall made the funeral home a natural for an unofficial forensics annex. Their garage, windowless and wide and deep enough for six vehicles, was convenient for processing vehicles...out of cold or wet weather, shady in summer, dark enough when closed up to use the blue light for hunting prints and trace evidence, and well-lighted enough for night work.
On his next call Wendy had a dealership name. Garreth blinked. “Excuse me?”
She laughed. “Boggus Dodge--that’s two g’s--Bismarck, North Dakota. They’re searching their records for the sale. Oh, Danzig and Sheriff Reichert came through about fifteen minutes ago. Not too happy. So far it appears the van’s been wiped inside and out.”
Garreth grimaced. Everyone knew about fingerprints these days, so it would have been more surprising if the albino had not wiped the van.
Wendy went on, “They’re going to Super Glue it in hopes of finding a spot the suspects overlooked.”
Super Glue turned the processing into a waiting game. It would take hours for the cyanoacrylate fumes to fill the closed van and react with the proteins and amino and fatty acids to bring up any latent fingerprints. He could be home before then.
By the time they heard back from Boggus Dodge, Sue Ann had taken over dispatching. “They sold that van four years ago to a Mr. Travis Thone. He’s negative NCIC. Nat’s been trying to reach him. Just a minute.”
Nat came on the line. “How’d it go in Cheyenne?”
Garreth gave him a quick report. “What luck have you had with Thone?”
“None. The phone number now belongs to a family named Carpenter, who don’t even know Thone, and Directory Assistance has no listing for him in Bismarck,. The DMV shows no valid driver’s license for him. The Bismarck PD checked out the address Boggs had but no surprise, he hasn’t lived there for three years. Thone is in the PD’s computer as the victim of a burglary six years ago and his description rules him out as our suspect: late thirties, five-ten, heavyset, brown hair, grey eyes.”
That he would be the albino was too much to hope for. “Did you find anything useful in the van?”
“Yes and no.” Garreth could picture Nat rubbing the back of his neck. “No prints so far. They even thought to wipe the jack. I’m pinning my hopes on the Super Glue turning up something. But we do have some long fibers that look like hairs from wigs. There was also alfalfa and brome caught underneath on the frame.”
Once he disconnected, Garreth floored the accelerator. Only to come over a hill and find himself bearing down on the rear end of a wagon stacked with hay bales, and another hill dead ahead. He stood on the brakes. The car skidded, fish-tailing as the tires grabbed at dirt before halting bare inches from the wagon. Heart thundering, Garreth settled into the wagon’s crawling pace until he found somewhere to pass.
Then, staring at the hay, he considered the alfalfa and brome Nat mentioned. Both were kinds of hay. Wherever the trio hid until dark had to be off the road, and presumably the van picked up the stems there. But alfalfa and brome did not grow in the same field. The one place to find them together was a hay barn. He knew of several such barns on the two routes they could have taken into Baumen. Only one of those, however, sat out of view of a farm house...Dell Gehrt’s at the junction of county roads 16 and 17.
Chapter Seventeen
The barn stretched the width of a football field, its high corrugated metal roof supported on a colonnade of telephone poles. Ranks of massive round bales sat between the barn and the barb wire fence along the road. Big as they looked, no van could hide behind them, but the barn afforded plenty of cover. Rectangular bales filled about half of it in irregular stacks, almost to the roof on the ends, lower in the middle, with an area near the center clear all the way through the barn. The gap looked wide enough for a hay wagon, which made it no trouble for a van.
A barb wire gate barred the lane leading to the barn. It had no lock, however, just a loop of wire over the gatepost and the post at the free end of the gate.
“You think those bastards hid in my barn?” Gehrt had said indignantly when Garreth called asking permission to search. “If they did, you find evidence that nails their asses!”
Garreth hoped he could. If they hid out there, they surely left some trace of themselves behind.
He parked at the gate and pulled his Stetson down to his glasses. Carrying a Polaroid camera and a carton of gallon plastic freezer bags he had bought en route, he unhooked the gate and slogged up the lane to the barn.
At the edge of the barn he bent to examine the ground. His pulse jumped. The loose hay scattered in the dust included both alfalfa and brome. Beneath the layer of dust and hay, though, the dirt felt hard as concrete, and the wind, hot as a blast furnace, smelling of dust and sunbaked grass, funneled through as if in a wind tunnel. More than hard enough to scrub away any tire marks. Still, Garreth started a slow sweep that would cover every inch of the clear area.
On his first turn back he stopped short...grinning. Beyond the leading edge of the bale stack the central area widened out another ten feet to his right. The “leading edge” consisted of just a wall one bale deep, perfect to conceal the van behind.
As he suspected, the wind had virtually cleared the space, blowing the loose hay against the surrounding bales. He quartered the area carefully, anyway, watching for anything out of place in a hay barn.
Such as a triangular shard of glass gleaming near the bale wall. The curve of the surface and shape of the smooth edge identified it as a piece of headlight. He charged the flash on the camera. After taking Polaroid’s of the headlight shard where it lay, Garreth picked it up by the edges and dropped it in a freezer bag, then labeled the bag with the date and location.
Glancing around, he tried to imagine what a pair of juvenile females might have done while waiting for dark? Sleep? Go through Maggie’s shoulder bag? The albino no doubt had first crack, but maybe he handed it on after taking all he wanted. If so, when they finished in turn, maybe they discarded it without thinking to wiping off fingerprints...and the bag might have not only theirs but the albino’s.
A long shot, probably, but what better place to be grasping at straws? He shuffled through the loose hay. When that yielded nothing he eyed the piled bales. Maggie had often talked about the games she and cousins played in an uncle’s hay barn, building forts, climbing to where they seemed to be looking down on the whole world. The appeal sounded similar to that of his tree house. Behind the screening wall several bales lay stacked like stairs.
He climbed them. Would the suspects have stayed on this first level above the floor or climbed on up to the far end? It would hide them from view but the heat that close to the roof had to feel like an oven. Here, the wind coming through offered some relief.
He began checking around for any sign of their presence: disturbed bales, candy wrappers, soda cans. Most of the bales had been stacked tight together, but gaps showed here and there. He shined a flashlight into each. When variation in color at the bottom of a gap caught his eye, he lay down for a closer look. Let this be Maggie’s bag.
The object proved be blue denim, not black leather. Maybe just a lost ranch hand’s jacket. He squeezed his arm into the gap to fish it out.
And: not a jacket. A tote bag. Greenstreet said Valerie shoved her clothes into a denim tote. The tote had seen better days, so Valeri
e no doubt dumped it in favor of Maggie’s bag. A big break! When they captured the trio that would link them to the crash. He gave it to Maggie for Christmas four years ago, one of a kind. A custom boot and saddle maker in Hays created it according to Garreth’s design, with a side pocket molded to holster the Desert Eagle. His throat tightened remembering her delight with it. In the meantime, trace evidence in the tote could provide a link to the van and suspects...hair, if nothing else. Every juvenile female’s purse he ever searched contained a hairbrush or comb.
After taking Polaroid’s of the tote and a more distant shot of it sitting by the gap where he found it, then shots of the barn and bale stack, he started to shove the tote in one of the freezer bags. But stopped as he felt an edge through the fabric. In surprise he pulled the bag open and peered inside again. While it still looked empty, he definitely felt something. Possibly a matchbook from its size and shape. The lining had torn at one end and worn through several places near the bottom of the tote. The object must have slipped inside the lining through one of them.
Handling only the edges, Garreth teased the object toward the tear, then fished it out by a corner. A matchbook, stamped Raddison Northern Hotel, Billings, MT. Not the hotel where the Black girl died but still...Billings. So it maybe Valerie had been there, and if so, the tall, pale man at the Sheraton was almost certainly the albino. Anyone else was too great a coincidence.
Garreth laid the matchbook on the tote and took a Polaroid of the two items together. Then holding it by the edges, he opened it. One match had been removed. He grinned. This might be a break. It might have few enough prints on it to read some.
After bagging the matchbook separately, he slipped it with the tote. And headed on to town.
Chapter Eighteen
Garreth drove up the alley behind Sterling-Weiss and parked at the driveway entrance. Two tall traffic cones blocked the driveway itself, yellow plastic tape stretched between them declaring: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Garreth stepped around the end of the barrier. Although pointed toward the two roll-up garage doors, the van sat outside. He understood why. The glue-impregnated paper strips suspended from the van’s headliner needed a heat source to release the fumes, and what better than the August sun. He did wonder, glancing around, why it appeared to sit here guarded by nothing more than the barrier tape.
Then the rear door of the funeral home swung open and Duncan, wearing jeans and a ball cap and t-shirt emblazoned: POLICE, lounged in the opening...obviously having kept watch from the air-conditioned interior of the building. Not that Garreth blamed him. “Well, well...look who came flying home.” Duncan glanced at his watch. “And I do mean flying. I won’t even ask how many citations you badged your way out of.” He pulled a thin cigar from a box in his t-shirt pocket and lit it. “Did they tell you you’ve got me to thank for finding the suspects’ vehicle?” The sweet aroma of brandy-soaked tobacco curled around Garreth. “You’re not the only one with investigative talent in this department.”
After spending the whole day awake, focusing for so long on the road, and enduring the headache the sunlight gave him, having Duncan crow when he had merely fallen over the van set Garreth’s teeth on edge. He pleaded to an imaginary judge, as a suspect he once arrested had, It was aggravated battery, Your Honor. He aggravated me into battering him.
“I heard, yes.” He circled the van.
A film of white forming on the windows indicated progress of the fuming, but unfortunately it also prevented seeing inside and learning what prints might be developing. Or did it? Standing on the bumper and leaning across the hood to peer through the thinner film on the upper center area of the windshield, Garreth spotted a fine tracery of white lines on the rearview mirror.
He forgot his irritation, headache, exhaustion, and the press of daylight. “Hey, Duncan!”
Duncan came on the run, took a look in turn, and jumped off the bumper to high five with Garreth. “They forgot the fucking back of the mirror!” He thumbed the mike of his portable radio. “Sue Ann, tell the Chief and Toews we’re hitting pay dirt over at Sterling!” He dragged on the cigar. “So you’ve gotten a piece of the action after all, Frisco. Happy?”
Garreth thought again about aggravated battery, but left without comment.
When he let himself into the PD through the rear entrance, Sue Ann’s eyes widened. Nancy glanced around from the computer, then down at his watch.
Garreth sighed. “None, if you’re wondering about speeding citations.” He set down his laptop case, laid the bags holding the denim tote and glass shard on a desk, and pulled evidence forms and tags from the forms shelves. “Is the evidence kit back?”
“Sorry.” Sue Ann shook her head. “I expect it’s either in Nat’s truck or Sterling’s garage.”
Nancy said. “What’ve you got?”
Garreth spread the Polaroid’s on the desk. “The albino and juvies hid up in Dell Gehrt’s hay barn Monday afternoon. They left these behind. There’s a matchbook to check for prints.”
“I’ll call Nat,” Sue Ann said.
She must have notified Danzig, too, because almost before Garreth finished the evidence forms and tags both the chief and Nat blew into the office. Garreth found himself explaining once more how and where he found the items, reassuring Danzig he had permission from Dell Gehrt to search the barn.
Which Danzig still confirmed by calling Gehrt. “Not that I don’t trust you, understand; I just want to make damn sure all our ducks are in a row when we finally haul this scumbag’s ass to court. Nat, since that ET’s gone back to Bellamy, take Nancy to help you go over that barn again while we still have daylight. Serk should be able to handle the watch alone for a while. When you get back, see what you can do with the matchbook.”
Nat nodded and started for the rear entrance with Nancy. Then just short of the hallway he turned back. “Garreth, I almost forgot. We got a call from the Bismarck PD The female half of the couple who bought Thone’s house told them Thone mentioned taking a job in Canada. Now we’re waiting for Canada to track him through his passport and social security number.” The door closed behind Nancy and him.
“Give me a mini evidence kit and I can process the matchbook,” Garreth told Danzig.
Danzig shook his head. “It’ll be simpler if we have just Nat and Melanie Hayes testifying on the physical evidence. Tell me about Cheyenne.”
Garreth did, finishing with: “I’ll make copies of my report for both you and Reichert.”
He turned on the computer and started that report. As soon as Danzig left, however, he opened his laptop, and with Sue Ann eyeing him curiously, logged on to the Internet.
“What are you up to now?”
“Not waiting for the Canadian government.” Using the people finder programs, he worked at locating Thone. Most of the search engines had US listings but using tricks Irena showed him connected to Canadian listings. Toggling back and forth to his maps for province names, he started with the southern tier and worked west one province at a time. No Thone, no Thone, no Thone. But in British Columbia, Vancouver had a listing for a Travis Thone. It could be his man.
He punched the listed phone number into his cell phone. Vancouver ran two hours earlier than Baumen but with luck the man ought was home from work by this time.
On the fifth ring, a man answered.
“Mr. Travis Thone?” Garreth introduced himself. “Do you still own the ‘95 Dodge van you bought at Boggus Dodge in Bismarck?”
Total silence greeted the question.
“Mr. Thone?”
Slowly, Thone said, “No, I don’t.”
“Who did you sell it to?”
“No one.” His voice went sardonic. “You might say I lost it in the Twilight Zone.”
Garreth blinked. “Excuse me?”
“In a poker game with dead men in a hotel suite that doesn’t exist.”
Garreth scrambled to digest that. “Ah...care to tell me about it?”
“Not really. It’s too weird. But...” Tho
ne sighed. “What the hell. Two years ago I drove down to Spokane to give a presentation. My company does CGI for commercials.”
Spokane. Garreth’s neck prickled. Two years ago in Spokane a male of the albino’s description had stolen credit cards.
Thone said, “After the presentation four of us went to the hotel bar. These girls came in and started joking around with us. Staci and Tracy, Jeri and Geri, they called themselves...something rhyming, but the way they giggled, I’m betting those weren’t their real names.” He spoke in the tone of someone who has endlessly gone over everything in his mind.
“Can you describe them?”
“Hell yes. One was a big busty redhead pushing her cleavage at everyone and the other was little and dark-haired. She looked part Hispanic or Indian or something.”
The redhead sounded like no one they heard of, but could the other one be the Billings victim?
“After a while this clown walks in and the redhead says he’s her brother Daniel Kerrigan. I can describe him, too: twenties, skinny, tall but stoop-shouldered, stringy longish reddish hair, Coke bottle glasses. Talked like an encyclopedia.”
The albino in disguise? The so-called uncle in Billings with the dead girl could have been the albino in an elaborate disguise, too.
“He bought a round of drinks and we all sat talking, then I ended up alone at the table with him while the girls dragged everyone else out to dance. Kerrigan started playing with gold coins and rambling on in this monotone about them. God knows why I didn’t just get up and leave, he was so boring. He invited me up to his room to see some coins too valuable to carry around. I don’t know why I went--too numbed to resist, I guess--but as we reached his room a guy taking ice into the suite across the hall hailed him like a long lost brother and invited us to join a poker game. I don’t know what made me accept that, either, because I was tired. I just sort of got sucked in.” He paused. “Or suckered in. I kept winning and winning and when I drew a straight flush, I threw my car keys into the pot. I didn’t count on one of the other players having a royal flush.”