“One good thing. We got a quick fix on the cell phone, which was in Green Valley, Arizona, about forty-five miles north of the border. It looks like they’re making tracks for Mexico. We were on to the border guys in ten minutes, and they had pictures five minutes after that. I think we got a good shot at them.”
Burch told her that he’d be arriving after four o’clock.
“My plane didn’t have quite the speed or the range that I thought. I kinda got shuffled off to a cheaper machine. We had to stop in Minneapolis to refuel and it took forever.”
“What about your SWAT team?”
“They should be there before me, but not much.”
VIRGIL GOT THE CALL.
The Dickersons, who were really Ned and Jennifer Boniface, last known address Bakersfield, California, had been picked up, without incident just before reaching the border. The kids with them were safe and being identified, each with a story to tell. No word yet on if they were part of a bigger ring, but the feds were checking. He and Johnson set up across the river from Drake’s house at midafternoon. The BMW was still parked in the yard, but the Jeep was missing.
He called Pescoli to tell her.
“We’ve got the plates, we’ll find them. Problem is, about everybody who doesn’t drive a pickup out here drives a Jeep.”
“You exaggerate.”
But then she drove one. Fairly new, with lots of power, fastest model available.
“Maybe so, but not much,” he said.
“I’ll tell you something, Virgil. I saw some of the film that Drake apparently shot, stuff that was filmed for sure in that back cabin. It’s sick. The worst.” She hesitated, felt that same terrible feeling she had when she’d viewed the porn. “I’ve dealt with a lot in my career as a cop, but this is worse than murder. Drake is worse than a killer.”
“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he probably did murder somebody in cold blood.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Pescoli said. “It’s the homicide that will get him the needle.”
“When was the last time someone was executed by the State of Montana?” he said. “I wouldn’t count on that. But we can put him away for life.”
“Not good enough,” she said.
REGAN MET THE SWAT TEAM on the tarmac at Bert Mooney airport. Burch arrived forty-five minutes later. They all shook hands, went to a prearranged conference room where Burch reviewed the action with the SWAT team, which had been briefed before leaving Denver, and then they moved off to three waiting Chevy Tahoes, rented from the local car agencies, loaded the team’s gear, and found the road to Grizzly Falls. She led the way in her own Jeep with Burch in the passenger seat.
He was a slender, tough-looking man who, it turned out, had spent six years with the Navy SEALs before joining the FBI. He skillfully extracted a brief autobiography from her and told her a little about himself. He was smart and engaging, but she got the impression that he badly wanted to be in on the raid for bureaucratic reasons. Taking down the knotty pine filmmaker would be a major coup, a step toward promotion.
Nothing wrong with that, she thought.
Except it annoyed her.
She and the SWAT team would have pulled off the raid in broad daylight, if they’d left without waiting for Burch.
Her cell phone rang.
“Got a break,” Flowers said as she answered and negotiated a curve as they headed west. “Drake just got back. He’s around behind the house where we can’t see him, but I got a good look at him when he came in. He’s there. Where the hell are you guys?”
“We’re still about an hour out,” she said.
“We could take him right now,” Flowers said. “You could get the sheriff to deputize me.”
“Let me check on that,” she said, though it galled her to think Blackwater would be in on the takedown.
She passed Flowers’s suggestion on to Burch, who shook his head. “No way. I spent some more time reading Flowers’s file on the way here, and he has a way of making simple things complicated. Let me talk to him.”
She handed the phone to Burch. “We appreciate what you’re doing, but we mostly need intel. Eyes on the place. You were an army guy, right? So you know what we need.”
She thought she heard a protest from Flowers, but Burch clicked off and she kept driving, her jaw set, her fingers tight on the wheel, the Montana countryside flying past, the sun sinking lower in the sky.
Flowers called back forty minutes later and said, “Drake just went up to Weeks’s place in the Jeep. We could see him turn in, but we can’t see what’s going on.”
“Call us back if anything changes,” she said and Burch nodded.
As the miles had passed he’d grown more silent, his eyes steady on the road, he, like she, getting ready.
Twenty minutes later, another call. “Drake’s gone back to his place. I don’t know, Johnson and I are talking it over, I think he might be packing up or something. We can see him moving around inside the house, but we can’t tell what he’s doing.”
“We’re coming,” she said. “We’re five minutes out. Hold on.” She glanced at Burch, then hit the gas.
“Stay on the line,” she said to Flowers and punched the phone to speaker, so both she and Burch could hear.
Then she drove like hell.
Nothing changed during the last few minutes of the drive. According to Flowers, Drake was still at his house when she, leading the caravan, drove past the dude ranch. The sun was now down below the mountains, but the sky was still bright.
She pulled over when she was certain the vehicles could no longer be seen from the ranch, and the SWAT team armored up and went through a preraid routine, checking weapons, communications, and armor.
Burch, now out of his sport coat and slacks and into jeans, boots, and armor, told her to stay back. “I know you want to go in, but we don’t know you. I don’t mean to be offensive, but we’ve all trained for this and we’ve got communications and lights and there’s lots of firepower out there. We don’t want an accident.”
She was pissed. “No way. That bastard is mine. I’ve been right on top of this.”
Burch put a finger to his lips. “We really need you to wait here. Believe me, you’re going to get a lot of credit in our reports. You wait here, talk to Flowers on your cell phone. If anything critical comes up, we’ll leave a radio. You call me.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about credit,” she said, her lips barely moving, rage burning through her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the porn films again, the scared children, the predatory adults. “I want in.”
But Burch wasn’t having any of it. “We’re doing this military style. You know the area, so you call me. Any communication you get from your office, even from Flowers goes through you. I’m not taking any other calls. Only from you. You got that? Pass it on to Flowers. We have to run this tight. He calls you. You pass on the important information. Same with any calls from your sheriff. We do this my way.”
Five minutes after they pulled over, and five hundred yards down the road from Drake’s house, the SWAT team, with Burch at the point, slouched up the shoulder of the road, looking more like a squad of SEALs in Afghanistan than a bunch of cops in Montana.
And she was stuck back here.
Her teeth ground together and she had trouble reminding herself that being a cop was being a part of a team. Maybe Santana was right, maybe she should quit. She didn’t need this shit.
But she loved it.
Flowers called again. “Where in the fuck are you guys? Something’s going on. You gotta get up here. Drake is ready to move.”
She reined in her frustration and tried to be rational. The important thing was to take down Drake.
“The troops are on the way in, on foot,” she said into the phone. “They’re five hundred yards down the road. They’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Can you call them?”
“I can.”
Virgil said, “Tell them that. Hey, what the
hell is he doing, Johnson? What? Sorry, talking to Johnson. What? Fuck. Look, Drake is up to something. He’s loading up the Jeep, if a Jeep comes down the road, that’ll be him.”
“I’ll pass it on,” Regan said. “Hang tight, they’re coming.”
VIRGIL AND JOHNSON WERE ON the far side of the shallow river, up on the bluff, looking down at Drake’s cabin. They saw him throw what looked like a couple of large duffel bags into the Jeep, along with a rifle. Dusk crept through the trees and crawled across the land.
Drake was moving fast, jogging from the house to the studio cabin, where he spent a minute or two, then back to the house and then to the garage. He was carrying something bulky, but they didn’t have binoculars and couldn’t really tell what it was.
“He’s carrying it like suitcases, but they look too small to be suitcases,” Virgil said to Johnson. “I think we’ve got to work in closer.”
“He could see us. The slope’s mostly rock, not much cover. The feds are just down the road. I kinda like this cop shit, as long as I don’t have to look at bodies. Maybe I oughta get deputized when I get back home.”
“You have no qualifications, except possibly some insight into the criminal mind,” he said.
“Don’t need any qualifications to get deputized,” Johnson said. “I’d say about two hundred dollars ought to get me a badge.”
“Where in the fuck are the feds?” Virgil asked, getting a bad feeling about this.
Drake jogged back to the house from the garage, no longer carrying the suitcases. They could see him through the front windows of the houses, apparently waving another set of the squatty suitcases around.
“Ah, Jesus,” he said squinting. “Those aren’t suitcases. Those are gas cans. He’s getting ready to torch the place.”
“And the feds don’t know it.”
He speed-dialed Pescoli.
She picked up on the first ring.
“He’s gonna torch the place,” he warned. “You got no time, tell the feds, they got no time. He’s gonna torch the place right now.”
“I’m calling them.”
And she was gone.
Down below, Drake hurried out of the house with a handful of what might be paper or rags, ran to the garage, lit whatever it was with a lighter, then threw the flaming ball into the garage. With a whoosh, the building exploded into flames.
“Damn,” Virgil whispered as the building was engulfed.
Drake had apparently doused the BMW, which began burning with enthusiasm. The conflagration crackled to the sky, smoke and flames spiraling upward.
“Where the hell are they?” He searched beyond the inferno, looking for the SWAT team. “Where the fuck are they? I gotta do something.”
“You heard Burch,” Johnson reminded him.
Drake’s next stop was the studio.
Johnson said to Virgil, “Gimme my gun. Maybe I can make him dodge around until the cops get here.”
He didn’t stop to think about it and handed the gun over. The range was ridiculous for Johnson’s concealed-carry, short-nosed nine. But Johnson opened fire, and Drake froze for a moment, then threw a handful of burning whatever into the studio. The building exploded just as the garage had, flames twisting and hissing. Johnson fired fifteen times, but Drake ignored it, ran to the house, threw in the last ball of fire, and the house, obviously doused in gasoline as the other buildings went up quick, flames reaching skyward, lighting the area.
Virgil hit speed dial to Pescoli. “He’s on the move.”
“Where?” she asked, her own voice rising. “What the hell is happening?”
“He did it, he burned the place. Where is the team?”
“It’s there. It should be there.”
“Oh, crap. Drake’s gone for the Jeep,” he said, watching as Drake hopped into the rig and tore out, spraying gravel and speeding away, not toward the main road and into the SWAT team.
“He’s in the Jeep, heading away from the main road. Driving toward the dead end. Where is he going?”
He watched the vehicle stop at the Weekses’ place, though with the coming darkness and trees, his sight line wasn’t clear. He heard shouting and within seconds flames shot skyward.
“He just blew up the Weekses’ mobile home.”
“Where is he? Still there?” she asked, her voice tense.
“I can’t see. Call Burch. Tell him.”
She hung up and Virgil said to Johnson, “Bet we find a body in Weekses’ place.”
“No bet,” Johnson said.
Below them, they spied the headlights of what had to be Drake’s Jeep, heading due west, away from the main road, toward the dead end.
“Where the fuck is he going?”
Virgil had a sinking feeling. He called Pescoli and when she picked up, said, “Is there some kind of timber road at the end of the dead end? A logging or mining road? Something that no one uses?”
He heard the yelling of the SWAT team now.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” There was dread in her voice. “Yes. The Long Mining company had some access road here, been closed for years.”
“Why else take off in the Jeep? Why torch the BMW? The faster vehicle.”
“I’ll call Burch.”
Again she rang off.
“You’re probably right,” Johnson, who’d overheard his part of the conversation, said.
“Here come the feds.”
Below them the SWAT team streamed up the road toward the burning buildings, in good military order.
One minute too late.
REGAN WAS WAITING IN HER Jeep when flowers called again. He gave it to her in a nutshell. The burning buildings, the stranded SWAT team, his belief that there might be a back way out.
“And he’s got a rifle. I think he couldn’t let the rifle burn, because we’d still be able to check it, and he doesn’t know we never found a slug when Cain was shot.”
“I’m going,” she said. “No way is he getting out of here.”
“Careful,” Flowers said. He made no effort to talk her out of it, though she’d be one-on-one with Drake. “Don’t forget the rifle. He’s armed.”
She didn’t know of a back road out but knew if there was one, Drake couldn’t go east because of the river and the bluff on the far side. He’d have to go west, sooner or later, to cut the highway, and it probably wouldn’t be far.
She cranked up the Jeep and wrestled it around onto the road, tromped on the accelerator, and sped off. By the time she burned past the dude ranch she was doing sixty. She hit the highway and turned right, skidding around the corner, not caring, then rolled to the top of the nearest ridge, and waited.
She thought about the implications of all that fire. No fingerprints, no DNA, no knotty pine. Thoughts swirled. Adrenaline pumped.
To hell with the feds.
Again, she thought of the innocent kids, of the pictures she’d seen, the images she could never erase from her mind. Then her own kids, the older two when they were in elementary school, the baby.
Her back teeth ground together and she heard a rushing in her ears, her own blood pumping through her veins. For a second, everything went dark with the insidiousness of it all.
She blinked again. Focused. Amped up.
No way would she let that sick fuck get away.
She had her window down, listening for the sound of an engine. She squinted and smelled smoke. Although the sky was bright, the woods were getting darker, and Drake had to turn on his headlights to plow out of the timber road. She saw him coming when he was still fifty feet back, and then he bounced out of the trees, down through the roadside ditch and up on the highway. He turned right, as she had, and sped away from her. She followed, staying back for