Killer Summer

by Ridley Pearson

  Fiona, sitting in the front row, met eyes with Walt, hers showing concern. He motioned her over, and she produced the OneDOJ sheets.

  “We believe three individuals-a Christopher Cantell, Roger McGuiness, and Matthew Salvo-stole your Learjet after creating a diversion at the auction and by blocking the bridge with logs.”

  Slack-jawed, Teddy Sumner stepped back. “You’ve already identified them?” He sounded far more surprised than impressed. “How’s that possible? Are these positive IDs?”

  “Confirmed. Ms. Kenshaw can walk you through the evidence later.”

  “My daughter…?”

  “Was seen leaving the lodge with my nephew. That’s also confirmed. My nephew’s phone has a tracking feature called SPOT. Are you familiar with it?”

  “No, never heard of it.”

  “It uses the phone’s GPS, and, through a subscription service, allows parents to keep track of their children. My nephew’s mother is a bit overprotective, and his phone is equipped with a similar device. He’s not aware that it’s been activated. The point here is, we were able to map a number of locations for him over the window of time provided and have confirmed he left the lodge at a rate of travel consistent with a car and arrived at the airport. He then leaves Hailey at 9:07 P.M. and heads north at an accelerated rate that can only be a fast plane like a jet… your jet.”

  That bit of information knocked the wind out of Sumner. “And where is he now?” he finally asked.

  “That’s the thing: there’s no cell coverage north of Galena Summit. The tracking locator, although it’s called GPS, it actually works off cell-tower triangulation. A portable cell transmitter, being flown up here from Salt Lake City as we speak, may light up Kevin’s phone if we can get the transmitter airborne. We’re working every angle we can think of.”

  Sumner looked around the room.

  “I’d like to put our guys in touch with your pilot,” Walt said, “to see if there’s any equipment aboard the Lear we might be able to use to locate the jet.”

  “Summer’s on the plane?” Sumner asked, still winded.

  “We think so, yes.”

  He looked around, found a chair, sat down. He rolled the chair closer to Walt, looking somewhat pitiful in the effort.

  “Something you could help us with. First, we need you to keep your phone turned on and ready. We’d like your permission to monitor and record any calls you receive. Same with the landline to your hotel room. I’d rather you hadn’t come down here, frankly. We need you in that room when that call comes.”

  “Well, I’m here, reroute the call. Insurance? You’re thinking extortion?”

  “Extortion would be welcome news, Mr. Sumner.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  “Kidnapping?” Sumner coughed up a laugh. “This is not a kidnapping!”

  “At first glance, I’d agree. There’s nothing on any of these sheets to suggest anything more than robbery… large-scale robbery. But given your daughter and my nephew being on that plane, we can no longer make that assumption. Our chief suspect, Christopher Cantell, is no dummy. If he has your daughter, whether by design or not, he knows he’s facing kidnapping. And that changes everything.”

  Sumner stared at him blankly. “No, no, you’re wrong.” He said it with a father’s certitude. “It’s not a kidnapping. A heist, maybe-I can see that. But, as you’ve said, their records… nothing suggests kidnapping. It’s not possible.”

  “First thing is, locate the jet and determine its condition and the condition of those aboard.”

  Sumner looked at the map on the screen overhead. A line drawn on it terminated in a T with a fairly large circle drawn around it.

  “I know you made an effort to get down here,” Walt said. “But, honestly, you’re of more value to us, and to your daughter, waiting for that call back in your hotel room.”

  “Forget that. Like I said, reroute the call. Do what you have to do, but I’m not going anywhere. Who’s in on this, Sheriff, besides you? Who’s on this investigation?”

  “It’s a big operation, at this point. Prior to this, we had issued a BOLO for the suspects. Law enforcement for the five-state region are on alert-the FAA, the Air Force, Homeland Security, the FBI. Given recent events, this country doesn’t take lightly the commandeering of jets.”

  “The FBI, Homeland? I don’t want them on this. They’ll screw it up, shoot it down without regard to who’s on board.”

  “Everyone’s apprised of our suspicions… it’s a fluid situation.”

  “Fuck that, she’s my daughter! Do you have kids, Sheriff?” Sumner asked.

  “I do. Two daughters, a little younger than yours.”

  “And if they were your daugh-” He caught himself.

  “My nephew,” Walt reminded. “Believe me, I don’t want anyone else on this case any more than you do. But the only way to keep that from happening is to find that jet tonight before the Bureau or other agencies get their act together. It’s all about timing. Nothing much is going to happen on their end tonight. It’ll take them a while to even get here.”

  Reminded of arrivals, Walt checked the wall clock.

  His father’s plane was due.

  58

  Summer zipped and buttoned her pants, releasing a pent-up breath of relief. She peered around the tree trunk, having chosen a spot in the woods with a decent view of the lodge, partway down the hill and well away from the stairs. A tendril of gray smoke rose from the lodge’s chimney.

  Her mother had been an expert problem solver, getting from A to Z in as straight a line as possible. Priding herself on being like her mother, Summer had resolved long ago to show her father that she need not depend on him for her every thought and deed. Pushing away her panic, she would think her way out of this on her own.

  Kevin had yet to appear. He was either hiding inside the lodge or had been caught. Not only was he of no use to her, he probably needed her help. He’d made a big deal out of her being the prize these men were after. Could she use that to her advantage? Offer a trade she then wouldn’t honor? She owed him, there was no doubt about that. He’d saved her from that creep with the wandering hands, had messed up his face pretty badly. He’d gotten her out of the plane and into the woods when she was, like, a zombie. She now saw how hard it must have been for him to stay with her rather than just taking off and leaving her.

  Was she supposed to leave him in that lodge, or what? She needed to think clearly.

  It was growing colder by the minute. Dressed as she was, in jeans and a T-shirt, Summer wondered how long she could last. She certainly couldn’t make it through the night. If she could get up the nerve to hide under the tarp again, she’d be relatively warm. But going back inside the lodge felt all wrong. It had eaten Kevin up. She wasn’t about to let that happen to her. That left… the plane…

  Would they be watching the plane?

  Kevin had suggested they intended to steal the jet… that seemed possible. They’d picked the right target: her father loved that Lear more than he loved her. He’d have paid anything to get it back, if he’d had two nickels to rub together. But now that it was out of the picture, was she their target as Kevin had suggested? If so, why weren’t they looking for her out here?

  Or are they?

  She began to fall apart. Her sole focus for the past fifteen minutes had been to pee, but with that taken care of she was faced with too many unknowns and not enough choices, and no one to help her figure it out. That brought her back to Kevin and whether she should or even could actually abandon him.

  And then she saw the woodpile to the right of the shed and heard a voice as plain as day. It was her mother’s voice.

  Make a signal, the voice said.

  If anyone was searching for the jet, it was from the air. There was far too much wilderness to cover on the ground. She needed to make something big so they could see her.

  Smoke from the chimney… Fire!

  If fire drew the attention of the three men a
nd the cowboy, it might buy her time to get to the jet, where she’d find food, water, blankets, her father’s emergency kit, its radio and GPS. She even could picture his sacred Airphone next to his seat. “I can call anywhere in the world with this thing!” he had told her proudly so many times. The best thing she could do for Kevin was to get both of them rescued.

  She reached into her pocket, found the key to the jet alongside the chisel. It warmed in her hand.

  No longer cold, suddenly she was burning with anticipation.

  59

  The whirring of an electric drill, followed by the crunch and crack of a screw biting into wood, prompted Kevin to call out.

  “No!” he shouted, banging on the closet door.

  They were sealing him inside.

  As the drill cried out, screws splintered the doorjambs, first one, then the other.

  Kevin pounded.

  “LET ME OUT!”

  Nothing, not a word. Just the grinding whir of the drill, now affixing the doors to the floor.

  Kevin had the knife from the Learjet, something they didn’t know about, as well as the flashlight. If only he could get them to open the door, he could fight his way out. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  The minutes passed, and there was even more drilling nearby, the window perhaps, or the door to the room, or both. They were sealing him up in a tomb.

  “Listen to me, kid,” now came a man’s voice from the other side. The copilot spoke in a hushed, confiding tone.

  Kevin took a step back, hit the wall, and sank into a squat, his heart racing. The man’s voice also had an unmistakable note of finality about it.

  “We’re doing you a favor here,” the man said. “This doesn’t involve you or Sam Elliott here, and let’s keep it that way. By morning, you’re out of here, alive and well, got that? So give it a rest. Don’t be stupid, don’t fight it, you’re safe. Stupid will get you hurt, hurt bad. Be smart, sleep it off. By tomorrow, this’ll be just a nightmare you had.”

  Why hadn’t the man mentioned Summer?

  Kevin thought this through from several angles.

  Because they already have her.

  Footfalls receding.

  “This doesn’t involve you and Sam Elliott here…”

  For Kevin, the operating word was here. Did here mean that the cowboy was tied up in the study? That gave him some sense of hope. Isolation scared him more than claustrophobia.

  His eyes lighted on the closet’s old-fashioned plank ceiling. The rough lumber probably had been taken from the property. The ceiling, casement, and walls were all constructed of one-by-six pine boards. None of the joints fit together perfectly, having withstood decades of deep winter snow and the unforgiving climate. The gaps between the boards were about the thickness of… a steak-knife blade.

  Kevin stood, slipped the flashlight out of his pocket, and switched it on. A pair of metal filing boxes were stacked in the corner. He gingerly climbed atop them to inspect the ceiling. He slipped the tip of his knife into a gap between the boards and gently began to pry them apart.

  60

  Roger McGuiness, lathered in sweat from having spent the past hour cutting pine boughs to disguise the Learjet, delivered Cantell’s satellite phone to the lodge’s living room.

  “It rang, but I didn’t answer it,” McGuiness said.

  Cantell stared at the bulky phone. He’d left it behind on the jet, having seen lights on in the lodge while landing and wanting to have an excuse, if necessary, to get inside the lodge. He’d been expecting a call from Lorraine to tell him she’d arrived at the remote Nevada strip, but to his surprise the caller ID showed a different number.

  He knew who it was and was thinking about when to call back as the phone rang in his hand. With McGuiness and Salvo watching, he hit the POWER button and shut the phone off.

  “I’ll deal with that later,” he said.

  “What now?” McGuiness asked, mopping his face with his shirt sleeve. “FYI, we’re maybe eighty or ninety miles from Hailey. We flew damn-near directly over Stanley, so we’ve got to assume we were spotted. A jet flaming out is a pretty spectacular sight, so we’re made.”

  “What’s the plan?” Salvo said anxiously. “We’re out of here, right? You said the idea was to get away from the plane. ‘Radioactive’: isn’t that what you called it? All we need are the GPS coordinates to find it, right? Let’s not forget we were going to be a hundred miles away from here before we even made our demands, right?”

  McGuiness feigned disinterest by flipping through a pamphlet.

  “And we will be,” Cantell said. “The schedule is changed but not the plan.”

  He lifted a framed topographical map from the wall and laid it on the coffee table in front of the oversized stone fireplace. The map covered an area of roughly fifty square miles, a red star stuck on the lower half of the glass next to a light blue line designating a river.

  “We’re not flying,” Cantell said. “And the cowboy told me that if we float the river, it’s four days minimum”-he pointed to the map and shook his head-“mostly in a very long canyon through very steep terrain. After the first day, there are a few dry tributaries, but if you hike any of them you’re looking at thirty to fifty miles of total wilderness without trails, which would take longer than floating out on the river. And if we do that, we’re sitting ducks: they’ll be waiting for us.”

  “So we’re screwed…” Salvo said.

  “No, we need to be resourceful,” Cantell said. “Behind this cabin is Shady Mountain, part of the river canyon’s walls. It surrounds this part of the ranch, sealing it off from unwanted hikers, the Grape-Nuts crowd. Now, there’s rock-climbing gear in the garage, and my guess is, there’s a route set in the face of the mountain. If it’s there, it should be easy to see in daylight. But first things first: we need the girl. We need to find her fast. Then we put Sam Elliott and Shia LaBeouf in one of the rafts and send them downstream.”

  “But-”

  “They’re the biggest threat to us, Matt. We eliminate the threat by getting rid of them. We have to close the deal. We’re going to need time to do it. Once they’re on the river, we’ve got four days-”

  “Unless,” Salvo interrupted, “they run into somebody on the river who has a phone-”

  “Trips on this river are strictly controlled,” McGuiness broke in, holding up a dog-eared Forest Service pamphlet from the coffee table. “They’re not to spoil, and I’m quoting here, ‘the natural sights and sounds that campers deserve in a remote-wilderness experience. ’ In other words, this is no Disneyland.” He pointed to sites on the map. “We’re just about halfway between these two camps, a full day’s journey. If we put those two on the river about sunrise, they’re not running into anybody. The only way they would would be to stop and wait for the next group floating downriver, and then they might not have a phone. If they have a radio, it’s a day and a half before the terrain allows it to transmit. There’s a big warning in here about that. The cowboy knows about it. He won’t sit around waiting for other campers to show up. That gives us at least a couple days.”

  “Screw that, it’s too risky. We should just lock them up here.”

  “Good plan, Matt. Just let them dehydrate and die. Or maybe we should give them the run of the kitchen. The cowboy is our number one threat. He knows this place, the woods. He knows what our options are. We need him gone. But, last I checked, we’re not in the business of killing people.”

  “Tell that to the wine currier,” Salvo protested.

  “All the more reason to get out of here. Think about it, Matt: who turned on the gas valve?”

  That silenced Salvo.

  “The girl?” McGuiness said, usually the silent one. Cantell noted this change.

  “We tell the insurance company they have to pay up. We tell them that without payment in full, the jet will blow with the girl in it.”

  “No way!” McGuiness shouted.

  “Hang on, relax. She’s with us the whole time, no
t on the jet. But we need to give them an incentive to speed things up because we don’t know how long we’ve got.”

  “But if the two somehow manage to make that call…” Salvo protested.

  “We have the girl,” Cantell repeated. “Let them find the jet.”

  That silenced Salvo and McGuiness both.

  “Once we’ve rendezvoused with Lorraine at a new location we’re free and clear. We leave the girl behind. No harm, no foul.”

  “But the beauty of the original plan,” McGuiness said, “was that we weren’t going to call the company until we were long gone. If they didn’t pay up, then we wouldn’t give them the coordinates and there’d be no way for them to find the plane. We could then go back four months later and fly the thing out of there, sell it in South America. That was our backup. All of that’s gone now. We’re not exactly in the Nevada desert, and no one’s flying that jet anywhere, probably ever. So if we’re going to play the girl card, why not start there?”

  “I’m open for suggestions,” Cantell said, throwing his arms out.

  He searched the faces of the other two. Salvo appeared to be brooding. McGuiness reeked of impatience.

  McGuiness said, “What if we can’t find the girl?”

  “We’ll find her. If necessary, we use the boy in her place.”

  “We don’t take hostages,” McGuiness said. “We don’t kill people.”

  “We broke one of those rules already,” Cantell said. He looked directly at Salvo. He wanted the man motivated. “It’s a work in progress.”

  “We could put all three of them in the raft,” McGuiness suggested.

  “We could,” Cantell said. “But I’m voting to bring her along as insurance, and, given her age and looks, how do you think Matt’s going to vote?”

  Salvo grinned. “Give her to me for an hour and I promise you she’ll do whatever we ask.”

  “You disgust me,” McGuiness said.

  “Like I should care,” Salvo fired back.

  Cantell stepped in. “Girls!” He could ill afford such dissension. “We’ll make a lot of noise like we’re going off to look for her, then one of us stays here while the other two keep an eye on the jet. Temperature’s dropping fast out there,” he added. “She’s not ready for that. She won’t last an hour.”