by Rick Mofina
“Know what?”
“Right.”
“Welcome to politics and policing. Bowman, this case is likely to attract attention. It is going to be investigated thoroughly from the outset. The brass does not want to risk having a legendary embarrassment, not only for us, but for several other agencies. The clock is ticking on this one.”
John Wayne was pinned under his horse. She watched him reaching for his gun as Ned Pepper neared to finish him off.
“But, sir, a little girl lost in the woods? With all due respect, aren’t we overreacting? I’m sure the rangers can handle this.”
“I am sure you remember the Yellowstone case not too long ago.”
“Right.”
“No one wants a replay of that fiasco. The rangers at Glacier alerted us. There is suspicion that this could be a parental homicide. There are extenuating circumstances.”
“What sort of circumstances?”
“More details and bodies are coming in. You will be updated.”
Kim Darby had fallen into a pit and was eye to eye with an angry rattlesnake.
“Bowman, you will be partnered with Agent Frank Zander from Violent Crimes at NHQ.”
“I’ve heard that name before.”
“I have to warn you. Zander has a reputation for building a case against anybody on anything fast. His work has been critical to some of the big wins in organized crime, terrorism, kidnappings and serials.”
“Is that the warning about him?”
“He’s a lone wolf, not a team player. A first-class prick void of personality. His wife recently left him.”
Bowman tensed, muttering to herself, “Because of the prick part, or the personality part?”
“Anything else I should know about him?”
“He is already in the air. He’ll run the show with Salt Lake and the rangers. You will work with him. Pack for the mountains. Have you been to Glacier recently?”
Bowman swallowed. “A couple of years ago.” She and Carl used to go there with Mark.
“Zander’s flying in to Kalispell. You pick him up there, drive to West Glacier, grab some shut-eye. A chopper will be standing by to deliver you to the command site at daybreak. We expect the small joint task force to be assembled, formalize the game plan and then begin immediately. Understand? We’re pulling people from Great Falls, Helena, Billings, Coeur d’Alene, an army will come up from Seattle and Salt Lake. Lloyd Turner will supervise. We have to move fast; so much is at stake for everyone involved.”
“Yes sir.”
“Good luck, Tracy.”
Bowman hung up and put her face in her hands.
What had just happened?
Her mind was swirling. She had been given the new job she needed for Mark’s health, for her peace of mind. But it was conditional she not drop the ball here on an NHQ file that was a potential career ender. And she was to work with a man who comes with his own warning label. She had wanted to be sprung from her office prison, had wanted Violent Crimes, hadn’t she?
Bowman peeked through her fingers to see Kim Darby bidding farewell to Roster, whose horse reared as he removed his hat and waved good-bye.
“Well, come see a fat old man some time,” Rooster said before his horse jumped a fence and galloped in the snow toward the mountains.
Mark had fallen asleep.
Bowman called her friend Roberta Cara, who had taken Mark in for several weeks when she went to Quantico. Roberta lived with her lawyer husband, J.T., and their seven children in a large ranch house south of Missoula. J.T. had handled Carl’s will and business affairs.
“No problem, Tracy. I’ll send a couple of the girls over to spend the night with him, then bring him here in the morning.”
Gently, she woke Mark and told him that Roberta’s daughters were coming to take care of him because she had an emergency assignment and she would be gone for a few days.
“Don’t forget to call me, Mom, like when you went to Washington?” Mark threw his arms around her.
“Every day. I promise, Marshal.” That was her nickname for him.
Smiling, Mark drifted back to sleep. She carried him to his bedroom, wrote him an I love you and I will miss you note, then began packing. First for him, then for herself, finishing just as the girls arrived. She briefed them on Mark’s medication and schedule, then wrote it down for Roberta, leaving her cell phone and Salt Lake Division numbers. She lugged her bag to her Chevy Blazer SUV and headed for Interstate 93.
The drive to Kalispell would take well over an hour. For some strange reason, as she started out, she suddenly thought about Isaiah Hood, the killer who was going to be executed in a few days in Deer Lodge. Why did he come to mind? His case had been in the Missoulian recently. Hood was awaiting his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was based on the new claim that he was innocent. Why was she suddenly thinking of him? She shrugged it off, concentrating on the case at hand. Was her cell phone plugged in? When she looked to check, it began trilling, startling her for a second before she answered.
“Bowman.”
“Who is this? Who have I got?” A gruff male voice.
“Agent Tracy Bowman, FBI. Who is this please?”
“Frank Zander. You are the local assigned to this case with me?”
Sounded to her like he said “yokel,” but the line hissed with static.
“That’s correct.”
“Where are you?”
“En route to Kalispell to meet you at the airport. Where are you?”
“I’m calling from the plane on an air phone. I stop in Salt Lake for a quick connect to Montana. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Can you get to a secure fax? I have a priority report I want you to have right away.”
Bowman’s brain raced as she drove. “Yes.”
“Well, give me the number.” His tone was condescending.
She recited the fax number.
“I do not know that number as secure for your region.”
“It is secure.”
“Alright, it will be on its way once our conversation ends.”
“Fine.”
“Bowman do you know Pike Thornton, a ranger at Glacier?”
“Not really. I know of him.”
“Do you know Inspector Sydowski with the SFPD?”
“No.”
“Do you know anything about this file, about suspected criminal intent?”
“I have been briefed.”
“You’re with--what is it?--Internet liason? GFP?” sounded like he was reading something alien, “I never heard--and this is your first investigation?”
“Yes.”
“You sure you are on this case? Did they call the right person out there?”
“Yes.”
“Then that fax number you gave me better be secure. There will be no breaches of security. Understood?”
Two minutes and Bowman could not stand Zander. She was nervous and green, but she was not an idiot.
“Agent Zander, is the plane you are on Bureau or commercial?”
“Commercial.”
“You alone on it?”
“No.”
“I am alone in a Chevy Blazer on a Montana highway. The only threat to security is road kill. You’re discussing an active case in a public place. Look around at the other passengers pretending not to hear any of the words you just shouted at me. Is that procedure with you big guns in Washington?”
His line hissed with silence.
Just shot myself in the foot, Bowman thought, her mind reeling with the names of all the major cases Zander had likely worked and how for the last few months her major investigation was how to get a new mouse for her computer. Suddenly, she was painfully self-conscious of her inexperience, her weight, her self-esteem. That does it. I am toast.
“The fax is on its way. I will call you within the hour,” Zander said, ending their conversation.
Bowman immediately punched a number on her phone, glancing at the Chevy’s dash clock. She had twenty minutes
before they closed.
“Turly’s Gas, Don speaking.”
“Don, it’s Tracy. Sweetie, do me a favor please. Put paper in your fax machine and turn it on. I got something coming in right now. Boring stuff about Mark’s medical condition from an FBI friend whose family is going through the same thing. I’ll be there in five minutes to get it and fill up, too.”
“Sure Trace, no problem.”
Bowman scanned the nine-page fax while Don filled her Blazer’s tank and checked her oil. Her stomach knotted. The rangers were right; this one had a very bad aura given what she saw in the notes and the summary of the old SFPD complaint. The father’s wound, the family’s demeanor and evasiveness would warrant serious concern after their daughter vanished. How long has she been missing now? Bowman checked her watch.
Pulling out of Turly’s, driving deeper into the night and the Rocky Mountains, she realized that she was heading into a significant case. One that was going to draw plenty of attention: a mother and father grappling with their fears for their lost daughter while the FBI investigates the suspicion that one, or both of them, killed her.
TEN
FBI Special Agent Frank Zander watched the icon on his laptop computer indicate his fax had gone through. He disconnected the computer line from the plane’s air phone. Repositioning himself in his seat, he subtly inventoried his immediate area. The jet was sprinkled with passengers. Zander was alone in his section, the row of seats to himself to stretch out. Still, that Montana Agent was right. He was guilty of risking security.
Who was she anyway? This Tracy Bowman from, what the hell was it, Internet GFP in Missoula? So she scored high on course work and was near the scene. That was justification for inflicting her on him? He had no time for training a junior agent. Maybe she was good. Maybe she was somebody’s favor. Zander shook his head. Nobody had talked to him that way. He did not need her… or any women in his life, for that matter.
He shut down his computer, set it aside, switched off the overhead reading lights and peered out the window at the night. He had digested everything they had so far on this case and formulated a plan on how he would go at it. Before he landed in Montana, he would go over everything once more and fine-tune his strategy. For now, he should try to get some sleep. Thirty-five thousand feet below, he saw the lights of cities and towns flowing by. He sometimes felt he lived in jet planes. With this Montana case, he will have investigated in all fifty states. What an achievement to go with his broken marriages. Some people get gold watches, a nice pen. What did he have? A collection of court papers calling him the defendant.
His first wife was Denise, the nurse at George Washington. They were young, sexually addicted to each other but incompatible as spouses. After three years, it ended as passionately as it began, with dishes smashed, screaming, tears, door-slamming and a call from her lawyer. Last he had heard, Denise had moved to London, married a doctor, had a baby girl.
Meredith, his second wife, ended things quietly six months ago with an e-mail. Error-free, grammatically correct, as surgically effective as a scalpel to the heart. That was her style. Zander could just imagine her calendar that day, certain it went something like: White House Counsel meet, book, spa, New York trip, Ritz for one hour of illicit sex with D.A. lawyer in Manhattan, alert husband it is over, pick up gown for Lincoln Center gala. They lasted six years until she typed the words, “As of this date, I am seeking a divorce.” Typical of Washington’s cover-your-ass bureaucracy. “As of this date.” Nice one, Meredith. Near the end, when she booked the sessions with the counselor for them, she never made the appointments. Twice, he had sat alone in the waiting room of the counselor’s office in Alexandria, leafing through the same outdated copy of People magazine. Looking out at the Potomac and the capital, realizing her no-shows were intended to humiliate him. A metaphor for her middle finger.
He remembered that day he received her marriage-ending e-mail, he typed back five words.
“I know you’re fucking Pearson.”
She responded, “Good.”
She loved what he loathed: the power, the politics, the parties, the sycophants, the networking. It actually turned her on. He was a federal cop who dreamed about escaping his life inside the Beltway to a place with real people, who looked you in the eye and meant what they said. A place like Montana or Idaho. Lots of antigovernment sentiment there. I’d fit right in, he laughed to himself. But for now, he’d settle for his small rented bungalow on a dead end street shaded by forest in College Park, near the university. Thank God, no kids. Zander then realized he was forty-three, and it saddened him.
For the past twenty years of his life, the only marriage that had worked for him was the one between him and his job. Zander had always been a front-line agent. He had developed a reputation for being a stubborn, thorough, SOB investigator, one of the Bureau’s best. He missed nothing. It was common for him to be assigned to the FBI’s top teams on major files, like Oklahoma City, Lockerbie, the World Trade Center. He joined Bureau teams assisting other police agencies, or helping salvage a messed up case. His expertise grew out of his early successes in crimes against children: parental kidnappings, exploitation, stranger abductions. Zander took those cases personally. He was the champion of the victim and virtually everyone else, living or dead, was a suspect in his eyes until he seized the truth by the throat and presented the file for prosecution.
Whenever his name came up--and it always did whenever agents sat around over a beer--the younger ones would inevitably ask: Anybody work with Frank Zander? What’s his story? I hear that guy is a cold machine, a guilt detector. He does not miss. Was he born that way or constructed in a secret basement lab in the Hoover Building? Case-hardened agents, those who knew, would usually recount a variation of the legend that circulated among the tribal camps of the FBI across the country.
Francis Miller Zander was a rookie working a junior role for the Bureau assisting locals in Georgia. A young mother of two small boys, who lived in a rural trailer park, supporting her family as a hairdresser, reported her older son missing. She told police she suspected her abusive ex-husband, with the help of one of his ex-con friends, took the boy with him to Florida, violating a custody order. The mother’s story held up because the abusive ex had done time and had been seen in the area arguing with her. The locals and supporting lead agent went with it, letting their guard down, concentrating on the information she provided. Soon the locals and the Bureau and Florida police were all over the ex.
But Zander had a bad feeling about the mother from the start. He noticed empty whiskey bottles in her trash, saw a variety of medication in her medicine cabinet. He also noticed, under the seat of the mother’s car, a crumpled toll receipt for the Florida Turnpike dated the day she said her boy vanished. Zander was a rookie; the local old boys knew the ex, a cop-hater who gave off the vibe that he would have done anything “to hurt that bitch who put him in jail.”
They found the little boy’s body in a Florida swamp near the apartment complex where the ex-con lived. Days later, while the full force of the investigation remained focused on the ex, the mother vanished with the younger boy, who was four.
They found the mother and the four-year-old in their van at an I-75 rest stop between Lexington and Cincinnati. She had tied a plastic bag over her son’s head and had overdosed herself on pills from six different prescriptions.
Within fourteen months of that case, every cop connected to it had resigned from police work, unable to deal with the fact a child was murdered right under their noses. The lead FBI agent took his own life. He died in a single-vehicle traffic fatality. Cops knew how guys did it so their families still got the insurance. Zander nearly resigned. He could not forgive himself for also buying the mother’s story, for not speaking up, for not insisting they go harder on the mother.
He vowed from that point on never to fear to get in someone’s face, to never hold back. He would never apologize and would follow every gut instinct no matter whose feelings h
e hurt. He vowed to assume that everyone was hiding something, that no one told the truth at first, and to never, ever lose sight of the reason why he had to be that way. To remind himself, Zander would go to a little cemetery outside a small Georgia town every year or so, and look at the headstone under a peach tree.
Two very good reasons were buried there.
The jet began its descent to Salt Lake City. Zander fired up his laptop and opened his file on the Baker family. This time he reviewed photographs of them, the recent ones Emily Baker had given to the rangers.
He studied the girl’s face. Sun in her eyes. Hugging her Beagle. Smiling in the majestic Rockies against a blue sky. A pretty California kid. Her name was Paige Baker. She had her mother’s eyes.
Emily Baker was thirty-five. Attractive. A photographer. Looked energetic. Zander gently covered her smile with his finger, concentrating on her eyes. They betrayed something unsettled about her. Something sad.
Whatever it is, Emily, you are going to tell me.
Zander’s eyes then met those of Doug Baker. The teacher. The former U.S. Marine sergeant. The high school teacher. Football coach. Positions of authority. Positions of control.
Did you lose control, Doug? How did you hurt your hand? What was going on in the time before your daughter had vanished?
How long had she been gone now? Zander checked the file. Made his best estimate. Thirty-one hours. Zander set a special timer on his Swiss watch, adjusting it to tell him at a glance how many hours had passed since Paige Baker disappeared into the Rocky Mountains. They had to move fast on this one. He was going to have to push it. Smart and hard. He closed his laptop. Soon he would learn the truth about Doug and Emily: every fear, every heartbreak, every secret. If the Bakers were hiding something, he would find out.
He always did.
ELEVEN
The sun was setting when Reed stopped his rented Taurus as instructed by the Montana Highway Patrol officer at the West Gate of Glacier National Park.
“Who you with?”