Chapter 26
The battering ram hit the door at the top of the stairs and the frame splintered inward on the first strike.
Wood fragments sprayed across the floor of the Strutz Agency as officers poured through the opening in a tight column, vests cinched, weapons up, flashlights cutting through the dim interior.
"State Police! Hands where we can see them!"
Noah came through third. The gallery of headshots blurred past him on both sides as he swept his weapon left, then right, covering the angles while the point man cleared the front room.
Desks overturned. File drawers pulled open.
The makeup station where Marisol had packed her brushes two days ago was empty, the mirror reflecting the tactical lights back at them in sharp white flashes.
"Clear left!"
"Clear right!"
Callie moved through the back office. The bathroom door was open. The storage closet was open. A window at the rear overlooking the alley was shut and locked from the inside. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run. And nobody to hide from.
"Clear," Callie said. She lowered her weapon and turned to Noah. "Son of a bitch. Someone alerted him."
Noah keyed his radio. "SWAT Two, this is Sutherland. What's your status at the residence?"
The radio crackled. A pause that lasted two seconds too long. Then, "No sign of him. House is empty. Vehicle is gone. Looks like he left in a hurry. Clothes on the bed, food on the counter."
"Copy." Noah lowered the radio. Through the broken door frame he could hear the second team reporting from the Three Pillar Community. Officers had hit the deli and the farm simultaneously. Those there were cooperating. There was no sign of David Hughes at any of the three locations.
Callie stood in front of the wall of modeling photos. Row after row of young faces. She reached up and tore one of the photos off the wall. A girl, maybe nineteen, smiling in studio lighting, her whole future in front of her.
"This piece of shit gave us that whole speech about modeling himself.
Looking to protect these girls." She held the photo up.
"All the while he's working under a dead man's name and serving them up on a platter to the Three Pillar Community.
Making money off them." Her voice was tight.
Controlled. The anger underneath it was not.
"And those that argue, those that push back, those that speak out of turn get quieted.
Just like Sue Braxton said about members. "
She tossed the photo. It fluttered to the floor and landed face up, the girl still smiling at the ceiling.
Officers moved through the space behind them, bagging documents, pulling hard drives, photographing everything. The radio chattered with the BOLO being pushed out across the network. Samuel Bridger. David Hughes. Both names. Both descriptions. Every unit in the county.
Another search began, watering down the first. Derek Hollis was still out there. Now David Hughes had joined him in the wind.
"He'll show up," Noah said. "He ran before. He'll do it again. Only so many places you can go."
Callie was staring at the broken door frame. Her jaw was set.
"I'm heading back to the office to see what Rishi can access through CCTV," Noah said. "Maybe we can get a bead on this guy before he gets too far." He paused. "You might want to check in on Ruby. Make sure she didn't go back to the agency."
Callie glanced at him. The implication landed.
If they had seen Ruby enter Strutz that morning, and if her conversation with Bridger had been about Fiona, it was possible she'd said something that spooked him.
Maybe it had tipped him off that people were asking questions.
That the walls were closing in. And he'd bolted.
Anything was possible. That was the problem.
The afternoon settled over High Peaks Police Department like a weight.
Noah came out of the tech room where Rishi had been running license plate recognition through every traffic camera and CCTV feed within a fifty-mile radius.
Samuel Bridger's vehicle, registered under his stolen identity, had not been flagged.
No toll booths. No gas stations. No intersections.
The man had either ditched the vehicle or found roads that didn't have cameras, and in the Adirondacks there were plenty of both.
Noah walked down the corridor and stopped at Ray's office. The door was open. Ray was on the phone, leaning back in his chair with one hand pressing the receiver to his ear and the other pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Yes, we are on top of it, Mayor. I understand. You will be the first to know." He set the phone down and blew out a lungful of air that seemed to carry the last of his patience with it.
Noah took a seat across from him.
"You know," Ray said, "the idea of becoming chief of police is looking less favorable by the day. I honestly don't know how Dad handled being sheriff for so long."
"Benefits and drawbacks," Noah said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"We always think our decisions are giving us some advantage over disadvantage. But the truth is it never does. It only gives us another experience. The same bullshit, the same joys, just wrapped up in a different package." He leaned back. "Why do you think I've never gone after advancement?"
"I just thought that was you being stubborn,” Ray said with a smile.
They sat in the silence for a moment. The building hummed around them. Phones rang in the office. Someone's printer jammed and an officer cursed at it. The ordinary sounds of a department that was running on caffeine and diminishing hope.
"So what was the outcome?" Ray asked.
"No sightings of Samuel so far. His home and the agency are clean. No weapons. No personal items from the girls. If he kept trophies or evidence, he didn't keep them in either location."
Ray nodded slowly.
Noah leaned forward. "If it does come to light that he was behind these murders, we should call the attorney general and see if we can get a stay on that execution."
"Even if he is behind them, Noah," Ray said. "Doesn't mean he didn't kill Kara Ellison."
"No, I get that. But once we match the DNA from the jacket and ID found on Brooke Danvers to the knife, that should give us the connection we need."
"Doesn't matter. The timeline doesn't match."
"What?"
"David Hughes wasn't in business with Strutz five years ago."
"You said..."
"I said he ran another agency in another state six years ago. He didn't open Strutz for another two years after that. Kara Ellison was murdered five years ago."
"It doesn't mean he didn't kill her. We can pin down when he moved from Colorado to High Peaks by checking with the DMV and with Sue Braxton." Noah sat up straighter. "Hell, Jessie Maddox, Seraphine's mother, went missing around the same time. Who's to say he wasn't behind that too?"
"But without hard proof regarding the Kara case, that's all noise to the DA. You know Maddie as well as I do. She'll request concrete evidence and we simply don't have it yet." Ray spread his hands. "We don't even have Samuel."
"So we don't even attempt to stop the execution?" Noah asked. "We have reasonable doubt."
"The attorney general won't do it, Noah. And you know that."
"Carter didn't do it."
Ray sighed and looked at him. Not with anger. Not with the defensive edge he'd carried during their break room confrontation. Something more tired than that. More resigned.
"What did our father always tell us growing up?"
Noah was quiet for a moment. "What we believe doesn't mean anything without facts."
"That's right. And right now all we have is circumstantial evidence at best."
Noah got up and nodded once. He walked out without another word. The conversation had ended the way these conversations always ended with Ray. Reasonable. Measured. Airtight in its logic. And completely, maddeningly insufficient.
No sooner had he stepped into the office than Callie was coming toward him, grabbing her jacket off the back of a chair, phone still pressed to her ear. She hung up.
"An officer found Samuel's vehicle. Parked outside Adirondack Regional Airport."
Six cruisers and two unmarked vehicles converged on the airport within twenty minutes.
The parking lot was small, the way everything about regional airports in the Adirondacks was small, and Samuel's car sat in the third row near the terminal entrance.
A silver sedan, doors locked, engine cold.
It had been there long enough to collect a fine layer of pollen on the windshield.
Noah circled the vehicle while officers fanned out through the lot and into the terminal.
Callie went inside with McKenzie. Noah stayed in the lot, directing patrol units to cover the exits and the access roads.
The airport was a single-terminal building with one main entrance, two gates, and a parking lot that held maybe two hundred cars.
If Hughes was here, there weren't many places to go.
A patrol officer approached from the terminal entrance. Young, out of breath, notebook in hand.
"Clerk inside says he bought a ticket for New York City. Cape Air flight to Albany, connecting to JFK."
"Has it left?"
"Yeah. Forty minutes ago."
"Did he board?"
"That's the thing." The officer checked his notes. "He didn't board. Bought the ticket cash, went through to the gate area, and never got on the plane."
Noah stared at the terminal. "He bought a ticket he never intended to use."
"Looks that way."
"I'll get a warrant for the surveillance cameras.
In the meantime, talk to every driver in this lot.
Taxi, rideshare, anyone. See if he got into another vehicle.
Check the rental counter. Check if he was alone.
" Noah turned and scanned the parking lot, the road beyond it, the tree line that bordered the airport to the north.
"Maybe he's trying to divert attention while he slips into the parks.
He knows we'll chase the flight. He's buying time. "
The officer nodded and headed back inside.
Noah stood in the lot for a moment, thinking.
The ticket was a decoy. Hughes knew how investigations worked.
He knew that the moment they found his car at the airport and a ticket to New York, they'd redirect resources to JFK, to Albany, to the connecting airports.
They'd pull surveillance from terminals five hundred miles away while Hughes walked into the Adirondack backcountry ten minutes from where he was standing.
Through the terminal windows he could see Callie and McKenzie at the check-in counter, talking to staff. Officers were spread across the small concourse. The operation was running the way it was supposed to. Organized. Exactly what Hughes wanted them doing while he did something else.
Noah walked back to his Bronco. He needed to get back to the department and coordinate with Rishi on the CCTV.
If Hughes had left the airport on foot or in another vehicle, there were cameras on the access road that might have caught it.
Time mattered. Every minute they spent chasing the decoy was a minute Hughes used to disappear.
He opened the driver's door and climbed in. Reached for the ignition.
The gun pressed into his ribs from behind. Hard. Angled upward toward his lung.
"Start the vehicle and drive."
Noah's hand froze on the key. His eyes went to the rearview mirror.
David Hughes was crouched in the back seat, low enough that he wouldn't have been visible from outside.
His face was pale and unshaved and his eyes had a frantic clarity.
He'd run out of options and was operating on the last fumes of a plan that wasn't really a plan at all.
He slipped his other hand around and took Noah's gun from his right hip.
"Drive," Hughes said again. "Now."
Noah started the engine.