Chapter 11
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Flint drove the rental toward the edge of Langford. A bank of clouds darkened the western horizon, growing by the minute. The cells were thirty miles out and building, Drake had texted.
“We’ve got maybe an hour before that front keeps us on the ground,” Flint said. “We don’t get out ahead of it, we might be stuck here overnight.”
Scarlett was scrolling her phone in the passenger seat. “Drake’s topped off the fuel and ready to go. He’s waiting on the pad.”
“Then let’s not waste the hour we’ve got.”
She looked up at the western sky through the windshield. “We need to check two things. Quickly. And then we can go.”
Flint took the first right and then a left onto the road toward the old frontier fort on the edge of town. There were fewer houses here and the yards were larger. Sidewalks disappeared and a man in khakis walked a terrier along the shoulder.
“The Keane house had already been tossed when we got there.” Flint glanced across the cabin as he slowed to pass a stopped garbage truck picking up the weekly trash.
“Yeah. Drawers not lined up. Dust on the desk didn’t match the rest of the surfaces,” Scarlett replied. “Things were moved and only some were put back. Definitely searched.”
“What was he looking for?”
“Dunno. A photo frame was missing from the mantel, too. The one that had been next to the wedding picture,” Scarlett said.
“You caught the clean line of the cord in the dust.”
“Yeah,” she said again. “I didn’t notice anything else missing. It’s not likely he found anything important. He didn’t have that much time.”
“So Patterson left my house around two a.m. give or take,” Flint said, working through the timeline. “Langford is a three-hour drive, if he pushed it. He could have let himself inside before sunrise.”
“You think it was him?” Scarlett asked.
Flint shrugged. “It’s a solid guess. If the search happened weeks ago, the missing dust patterns would have been less obvious.”
“Okay. Say it was Patterson. He’s a retired cop looking for his missing brother. He’d know how to get in and look around without being too obvious,” Scarlett said. “And the Keane address was not a secret. I looked it up online. Patterson could have done the same.”
“Which puts him inside the house before we got there with enough time to spare to do a thorough job.”
“Agreed.”
“I don’t love Patterson as our only candidate.” Flint checked the western sky through the windshield. The cloud bank had swallowed another five degrees of horizon since they’d left the house.
Scarlett lowered the phone. “Who else could it be?”
“Who knows? Maybe it’s the dude who called me from that old Lazy M number.” A paper cup skittered across the asphalt in front of the rental and disappeared into the weeds on the far shoulder. “I’m sure there’s more options, though.”
“So the house got tossed. We don’t know who did it,” Scarlett replied. “Which means don’t get sloppy and overconfident.”
“And we don’t know whether Patterson found what he was looking for,” Flint said.
Scarlett tapped through a news site on her phone.
The road bent south and the sparse homes were replaced by pasture. Three horses stood with their tails to the wind in a fenced field on the right.
“He’s also not going to quit,” Flint said. “Which means he’ll turn up again.”
Scarlett watched as they passed the horses and offered no response.
Flint slowed for a four-way stop. A pickup with a bed full of fencing wire rolled through from the left. The driver raised two fingers off the wheel. Flint returned the friendly wave and moved on.
“Tell me what you’re finding about the neighbor,” he said.
“The one we talked to? Linda Hartwell.” Scarlett thumbed the screen, scanning the reports in the local paper at the time.
“She’s lived two houses down since the neighborhood was built.
Longer than the Keanes. She’s watered her plants every morning at eight o’clock for years.
Nancy Keane had coffee with her twice a week, she said. ”
“And Theresa Moreno?”
“The dead woman? Forty-one years old. Worked at the real estate office with Craig. Friends with Nancy.” Scarlett held up her phone so Flint could see it at a stoplight.
“According to the paper, she was struck by a vehicle on Fuller Road around three in the afternoon. Driver left the scene. Police asking for witnesses. No update posted anywhere I can find since then.”
“Where’s Fuller Road?”
“About a mile and a half from here. Runs along the back of the old fairgrounds,” Scarlett read, pulling up the map. “Looks like it’s a two-lane with open country on one side and a line of oaks on the other.”
Flint watched the horizon. The bank of clouds had thickened and darkened. A fine grit blew across the road ahead of them and settled again.
“How much time does a look cost us?”
“Ten minutes if we don’t get out,” Scarlett said. “Fifteen minutes if we walk around quickly.”
“It’s fifteen extra minutes we don’t have,” Flint reminded her.
“Or it could be fifteen minutes that makes all the difference,” Scarlett replied. “We won’t know until we do it.”
He gave her a frown as he turned at the next corner instead of going straight for the airport. “If we get caught in that storm, you get to tell Drake the delay was your fault.”
“You always were irrationally afraid of storms,” Scarlett replied with a grin.
“Tell that to Dorothy Gale,” he said.
She rewarded him with a laugh as she teased, “You’re worried about flying monkeys now, too?”
Fuller Road came up two turns later. A stretch of relatively new asphalt laid across open country, straight to the horizon, one yellow line down the middle and two white ones at the edges.
The oaks on the north side cast long bars of shade across the road.
The fairgrounds fence on the south side was plain chain-link sagging between steel posts.
Scarlett said, “The accident site is half a mile from here. There’s a white cross on the side of the road to mark the spot.”
Flint eased off the accelerator.
The freshly painted cross was placed at the edge of the south shoulder, set into the weeds where the fence line curved. A bouquet of plastic sunflowers had been placed at its base.
Flint pulled the rental onto the gravel apron across the road and killed the engine.
Scarlett stepped out, crossed the road, and stopped ten feet short of the cross. She stood there with her hands at her sides, scanning the scene. Flint walked up behind her.
“The story claimed she was meeting a walk-in client here at three in the afternoon,” Scarlett said. “The guy wanted to look at a raw tract four miles farther west. The land wasn’t listed for sale, and the broker didn’t get the client’s name.”
Flint looked west along the road. The asphalt ran straight to a vanishing point somewhere past the next rise. No houses. No driveways. No reason anyone would stop here.
“If she was headed four miles west, how did she end up here?”
“Good question,” Scarlett said. “There’s no obvious reason to stop. Maybe an injured animal in the road?”
Scarlett examined the gravel shoulder. It was narrow and flat and not wide enough for a car to pull over without leaving half of it on the asphalt.
“Where did she park?” Flint said.
“The story doesn’t say.” Scarlett turned a slow half circle.
The sightlines ran a thousand yards in both directions. The oaks on the north side cast shade but didn’t block the road. The fairgrounds fence on the south side was chain-link and see-through.
“No visual obstructions of any kind out here. A driver going either direction would have seen her from a quarter mile out,” Scarlett said.
“Several weeks and no witnesses have come forward. The case remains open but it’s not likely to be solved,” Flint said. “It doesn’t add up.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Scarlett wasn’t ready to give up. She walked another ten feet and crouched at the edge of the shoulder. She looked at the road surface, the fence, and the gravel before she came back.
“A car comes along the road and hits a woman hard enough to kill her, you get something. Skid marks from the panic brake. A scrape on the pavement where the bumper dragged. Gouges on the shoulder where the wheels went into the dirt. Paint chips. Glass. Something,” Scarlett said.
“And here, the cops say, they got nothing.”
“Hard to believe.” Flint saw the cloud bank in the west was closer now and the wind had picked up, peppering him with grit. “We’ve got to go if we want to fly out of here. Drake is a daredevil, but he’s not foolish.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” Scarlett turned away from the cross and they walked to the rental and climbed in.
Flint slid the transmission into gear and rolled onto the pavement.
Scarlett watched the oaks flicker past her window. He didn’t interrupt.
“You’re thinking it’s a setup,” she said.
“I’m thinking it could be a setup. The USB hooks you.
The Polaroid makes you want it to be Nora.
The anonymous call names a place only you would recognize.
The two-day timer gives her people room to prepare ground,” Flint said, listing the elements of what could turn out to be a massive scam.
“Meanwhile, last night somebody put a killer in my alley and a weapon on my gate. This could all be one operation.”
“A setup to get us out to the Lazy M? Yeah. Could be. Both of us have pissed off plenty of people who have the wherewithal,” Scarlett said. “Or it could be a woman in real trouble who’s scared and sent me a picture of that tree carving because she knew I’d come.”
Flint didn’t respond. He pushed the accelerator closer to the floor while he could still make up some time.
The frontier fort came up a mile past the fairgrounds, off the shoulder on a rise.
The stone walls had turned the color of old bread by a hundred and seventy years of sun.
A brown-and-white sign at the entrance read Langford Historic Site.
A yellow school bus sat in the paved lot beside three tour vehicles.
Children in matching red T-shirts were filing through the gate under the watchful eye of a woman wearing a pioneer style cotton bonnet.
“That’s definitely not it,” Scarlett said. “Whether the woman is Nora or not, she wouldn’t set up a meeting in such a busy place.”
“Agreed.” He kept his speed up.
The municipal airfield was four miles south on a county road that ran beside an irrigation canal.
The field had one asphalt runway, a hangar with a tin roof, and a fuel truck parked beside the fuel island.
A second helo, a smaller Bell with Austin tail numbers, sat on the far pad with its rotors tied down.
Drake had the Sikorsky on the pad at the east end of the apron.
The rotors were slack. Drake was walking a circle around the aircraft with his hand on the tail boom.
Flint parked beside the hangar.
Drake came over as they got out. He didn’t waste words.
“The line’s moving faster than the forecast predicted,” Drake said. “It’s twenty miles out. It’ll be rough, but still flyable if we leave right now. It’s clear enough on the other side.”
“How rough?” Flint asked.
“Bumpy on the edges. We skirt the worst of it to the south and we’re fine,” Drake said. “Or we can go get a couple of beers, a burger, and some sleep. Try again in the morning.”
Scarlett was already pulling her go-bag from the trunk. “Let’s go.”
“I want it on the record I warned you,” Drake said with a smirk that Scarlett ignored.
They climbed into the Sikorsky, Drake seated with the rotors turning before Flint had his harness cinched in the back. Scarlett took the co-pilot’s seat and pulled on the headset.
Drake’s voice came through the intercom. “Winds at field are gusting to twenty. We’ll get a rougher ride climbing out. Hold onto your breakfast.”
The Sikorsky lifted off the pad and rotated into the wind.
The nose came around to the west and Drake pushed through translational lift.
The airframe shuddered once and then settled into forward flight.
The municipal field dropped away below them.
From above, the hangar roof looked like a sheet of tin pressed into the ground and the fuel truck looked like a toy.
The cloud bank that had been twenty miles out when they lifted was closer now.
A wall of cloud covered the western sky, dark at the base, the leading edge rolling east toward Langford.
Drake wasn’t flying into it. He was cutting south of it on a heading that would keep the line well off their right side.
“Coming left twenty degrees,” Drake said. “We’ll keep the line in sight but we’re giving it plenty of room.”
“Copy,” Flint said.
The Sikorsky banked and settled on a southwest heading.
The turbulence picked up as they crossed under the outflow reaching ahead of the cells.
The airframe shook and dropped twenty feet and caught again.
Drake adjusted the cyclic without comment.
Rain started spattering the windshield in fat drops blown sideways by the gust front.
Scarlett had a hand on the grab bar above her seat. She didn’t say anything.
“Gust front’s running out miles ahead of the storm cells,” Drake said. “We’ll feel it for a few minutes. Should smooth out once we’re past the bulge.”
The rain thickened and then thinned. The Sikorsky bucked twice on a roll of turbulence that pushed Flint against his harness.
Drake climbed three hundred feet to get above the worst of the low-level shear and leveled off.
The cloud wall was off their right side, miles away, dark and heavy against the sky.
Rain fell from the underside in gray sheets.
Lightning forked somewhere deep in the mass and lit the cloud from within.
He held the heading for another four minutes, riding the edge of the outflow but keeping the main line well clear on the right side of the aircraft.
The rain eased to a fine drizzle and then stopped.
The turbulence dropped from rough to moderate and then to merely noticeable.
Drake brought the nose back around to the west.
“Coming right to two-seven-zero,” he said. “We’re past it.”
Flint looked out the side window. The cloud wall was behind them now, a dark mass rolling east toward Langford. Ahead, the sky was dotted with patches of blue and clouds. Shafts of sun beamed down in columns where the light found gaps.
The country below had changed. The green around Langford was gone. What was under them now was brown and red and flat, with long fences running out to the horizon and the occasional windmill turning slow against the wind that was chasing them east.
“Lazy M in three hours, give or take,” Drake said into his headset.