by Dudley Lynch
Angie continued to stare at the map. Her gaze settled on the silo site closest to Flagler.
It was a few miles south and a little east of the U.S. highway that ran through town. On Sawyers’s map, the filled-in circle that marked its location had an asterisk beside it. A large one. Angie pointed to it. “I agree. We need to find Professor Rawls.”
I’d already reached for my portable radio. “First, I want to see if my dispatcher knows where the chief deputy is.”
Jeff Brailsford was his usual all-business self. “The chief dep’s taken a vacation day. But —”
But this was one of those occasions when brevity wasn’t enough. “Where’s SpyTrackers showing his car?”
“Eden Junction ‘Y.’ I’d guess his car is parked in the bar and grill lot.”
I instructed my dispatcher to try to raise Sawyers on the radio. And check to see if any of our other personnel knew his whereabouts.
Next, I deputized Drasher. A simple thing to do. He didn’t have to raise his right hand or swear to anything. All that the law required was for him to acknowledge that I’d asked for his help and that he’d agreed to do so.
I asked him if he had a gun. He raised his arms as if he was about to be frisked. “Not on me, obviously. But I’ve got one in the car.”
He said it was a Walther P22 pistol he used for target shooting and kept in his glove compartment. Said he had one of the new Texas Licenses to Carry, but he’d never carried a handgun on his person. I told him to try not to need his pistol for self-defense because it was a peashooter. But to stick the weapon in his belt and head for Flagler General Hospital. My dispatcher would tell hospital security he was coming. And have deputies join him as soon as possible. If Professor Rawls was target number one, Professor Huntgardner and any — or all — of the Mayes family may be next in the line of fire.
Angie was on her cell phone. My guess was that she was updating her bosses in D.C. I laid a hand on her arm. She moved the phone away from her head. I told her I was requesting the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
She indicated her phone. “They heard that. It’s official.”
“See if you can find Professor Rawls. As soon as you get a location, join him. And give me a call so I know where the two of you are.”
She asked where I was going.
I told her to the Eden Junction Bar and Grill. Since my chief deputy’s car was in the parking lot, I was hoping that I knew where he’d spent half the afternoon. At the restaurant’s bar emptying bottles of Strothers Brothers Dry Stout, his favorite brew.
I’d not gotten more than a block from the courthouse before my dispatcher reported in. He’d phoned the restaurant. Sawyers was nowhere to be found. The bartender could find no one who had seen him at the establishment since shortly after lunch.
I still wanted to check out the location myself.
So I continued to the Eden Junction turnoff. Parked next to Sawyers’s patrol car. Glanced inside it. Saw nothing out of place. Went inside to talk to the bartender.
He said my chief deputy had sat alone at a booth eating a burger around noon. He’d been in his street clothes. No sign of his badge, duty belt, gun, or anything else official. Before leaving the establishment, he’d asked to have his thermos filled with hot coffee. Then walked out the front door.
Now, a couple of hours later, I was walking out the same door. Each step toward my car seemed to remind me of how little I’d known about the man who had been serving all these years as my second in command.
As the minutes passed, Sawyers Tanner was becoming more and more a stranger. The sheriff part of me served notice, not that it was needed, that it was going to be essential to penetrate those mysteries as quickly as possible. But the theologian-trained part of me couldn’t resist pointing out how dependably the human soul can be counted on to reveal its true nature. Hard as we might try to avoid it, sooner or later, our inner self seems to be destined to show its cards.
Chapter 68
My dispatcher and I were interrupted from time to time, but for the most part, I had Jeff Brailsford to myself. He’d responded to my staccato barrage of instructions with his usual equipoise and quick grasp. A request made, a request delivered. A question asked, an answer forthcoming. An opportunity provided, an opportunity fulfilled. He had a rhythm to his thought processes that reached out to the person on the other side of the broadcast tower and engaged you. A kind of entrancement. Or maybe it was an entrapment. But no matter the chaos in the field, a few exchanges with Jeff seemed to help you sort out what needed to happen next.
I asked him to issue a BOLO. That was law enforcement speak for a “be on the outlook” announcement.
I also asked that he send a deputy to each of the county’s abandoned missile silos. There were four of them — the other eight that had been located in West Central Texas were in other counties. He was to tell our deputies not to enter. Not the silos themselves and not even the outside fence gates. They didn’t need to get out of their cars at all. All I wanted to know was if there were any vehicles parked close by. If they spotted any, they were to run the license plate numbers past the motor vehicle people in Austin. If one of them belonged to Chief Deputy Tanner, they were to notify me right away. If they saw a vehicle but it wasn’t registered to the chief deputy, they were to run the license plate number in case we needed it later. I sensed that I was overexplaining my expectations, but Jeff didn’t complain. He wouldn’t. Wasn’t his style. But he did need to know where all the county’s abandoned silos were. I gave him a crash course in local missile silo geography, and left him alone for several minutes to carry out my order.
I wanted to talk to TxDMV myself.
I knew Sawyers’s main personal conveyance was a spiffy new chocolate-colored Chevrolet Tahoe SUV. He kept it immaculate. Spent more time at the car wash than he spent in the shower himself. Always parked it in the farthest available corner of any parking lot. Any observant person would realize that leaving a mark on it would be a fearful act if my chief deputy found out who’d committed the crime.
I could issue a BOLO for the Tahoe. But I wanted to be sure of something else first. I wanted to see if my chief deputy was listed as the owner of any other kind of vehicle.
I called the motor vehicle office and identified myself. The clerk said Sawyers Frank Tanner was listed as the owner of a white 1999 Ford F-150 pickup. Said I could run the pickup’s VIN through the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System. Tell if the vehicle had been salvaged, rebuilt, or damaged in a flood.
On most occasions, I had people who took care of these kinds of matters for me. But I was in a hurry.
I took down the website link she recommended. Decided it would be safer if I steered my car to the side of the road before I started punching in the data. Pulled over on the shoulder. Entered the link on my car’s computer console. Punched in the information it requested. Waited for it to be processed. And tried to steel myself for another punch in the solar plexus.
It arrived on schedule.
Sawyers had filed an insurance claim for collision damage to the front end of his pickup a week ago Monday. He’d claimed to have crashed into a tree while trying to avoid a deer.
Maybe that was true. But my stomach had wrapped itself in an instant around the suspicion that he’d hit something else first. Our tenth Huntgardner house victim.
I had one more crucial stop to make before I put my dispatcher into action again.
Sawyers’s house.
He had good taste. Lived in the same neighborhood I did. I’d passed the entrance to our subdivision on the way to the Eden Junction “Y” and was approaching it again now that I was returning to town. Ninety seconds more and I’d know for sure.
“For sure” meant that I’d either find my chief deputy’s new Chevrolet Tahoe SUV parked in his circular driveway, or I wouldn’t.
I did.
Ringing his doorbell twice brought no response. A peek through the windows across the top of his garage door told me that the garage contained no vehicles. In particular, I wasn’t seeing a Ford F-150 pickup getting more ancient with every passing day.
I returned to my car. Reached for my radio. Noted that my dispatcher’s response was as crisp and proper as a starched shirt collar.
I could have clued him in on what I’d learned since we’d last talked. But going straight to the bottom line accomplished the same end. “Jeff, we need to get a BOLO out for Chief Deputy Tanner.”
That brought a pause in our exchange that surprised me. It shouldn’t have. I was asking that an all-points bulletin that shined a dead-serious law enforcement spotlight be issued on one of our own. Jeff wanted to be sure he understood. “BOLO? Or just a request that they keep an eye out for him?”
I’d already considered this. We didn’t need a friendly tip that Sawyers had been sighted or his pickup spotted somewhere. We needed to apprehend him. So an all-points bulletin was what I wanted. “BOLO, Jeff.”
“Should it say he’s armed and dangerous?”
“Yes, say he’s armed and dangerous.”
“Should we say what he’s been charged with?”
My dispatcher had me stumped on that one. I was charging full speed ahead in pursuit of a person I’d have been willing to turn control of my department over to. And I was doing so without having, to this point, charged him with a crime. “Let’s say we consider him a person of extreme interest in multiple deaths in Abbot County, Texas, Jeff.”
That was true.
The language in our BOLO stayed that way for about forty-five minutes. The next time I heard it, Jeff had taken it on his own to interject a new sense of urgency.
It warned anyone listening to be on the lookout for an extremely dangerous individual. A veteran West Central Texas law officer believed to be driving a 1999 white F-150 pickup with a damaged front fender and turn signal light. Also believed to be heavily armed.
But it wasn’t Jeff’s upgraded BOLO that froze my blood. It was what I heard next. The snippet of an over-the-air exchange between him and one of my deputies. The reception wasn’t that good, so I’d caught only the tail end of the deputy’s comments — something about a campus shooting. But Jeff’s reply thundered out of my car radio speaker and vibrated in my brain like a hard-plucked guitar string.
“We need to find out what happened to our FBI agent.”
Chapter 69
I wasn’t that far from the entrance to the University of the Hills. By the time I sped by the Whosoever Rock, I had a bare-bones idea of what I was going to see next.
Two campus security officers were blocking the entrance to the Bible Building parking lot. One of them came to my window. There was no mistaking the urgent look on his face. “Thank God you’re here, Sheriff Luke. There’s been a couple of fatalities.”
He said the gunman had fled the scene.
As I drove into the grounds, it was clear the campus was in turmoil. And there were far more uncertainties than sureties about what had gone down.
I braked to a stop near a half dozen other cop cars. They lined the curb bordering the building entrance’s concrete forecourt. In the intense afternoon sunlight, the circling red and blue beams of their emergency lights were bouncing off the building’s dazzling plate glass exterior. Each time they did so, they doubled themselves in the windows.
I met the paramedics already leaving the building, carrying their emergency trauma bags looking like they’d not been unzipped. Their tomato-red spine board was empty.
Detective Salazar was stringing crime scene tape at the foot of the stairs to the second floor. Detective Coltrane and several other officers were clustered at the top of the stairs.
He and three others were holding up blue plastic sheeting. They were shielding whatever was lying on the wide hallway’s second-floor landing. Onlookers — young people and shaken-looking faculty — jammed office doors, craning for a better look. Two more officers were in deep conversation that involved frequent pointing at places that were not visible to me.
My CSI team was not there yet. But Jeff would have summoned them. Given them directions. Shared the bare facts of what he knew.
I needed to stay a professional. People were expecting that. I could tell — or I thought I could — that I was being monitored by a hundred eyes.
One of the deputies consulting with the others at the head of the stairs was Detective Moody. I took the stairs two steps at a time. Grasped her forearm. Tugged her to follow me with more vigor than was needed.
But she understood the reason behind my brusqueness. My near-panic. I released her arm, and she followed me down the hall and around the nearest corner.
This time, she was the one who laid her hand on my forearm. She left it there for a moment. The brisk shaking of her head sideways had started when we rounded the corner, and it hadn’t stopped. “It’s not her.”
“So where is she?”
“She’s gone.”
“Where’s Professor Rawls?”
“Dead.”
“Who’s the other one?”
“Not sure, but they’re saying it’s one of his faculty colleagues.”
“But what happened to Angie?”
“He took her.”
“Sawyers, you mean?”
“Yes, Sawyers.”
Now I was the one holding her arm, hard, as if I could squeeze the information out of her. “Took her how?”
“Witnesses said he dragged her to his pickup with her hands cuffed behind her.”
Chapter 70
A number of deputies began rushing to their cars, and on my walkie, I could hear Jeff reassigning them. It was clear what he was trying to do. Establish a perimeter at Flagler’s city limits.
That made sense. At least until someone could confirm that Chief Deputy Tanner and his hostage had moved past it.
But he knew what I knew. What all the people in our department knew. Like most towns and cities in Texas, Flagler mostly reached out, not up. Our out-in-the-boonies community covered more than a hundred square miles in its relentless reaching out.
We had only two main highways that ran in and out of all this real estate. We could put roadblocks on those and were doing so, but there were a dozen other ways to sneak out of town, and I was sure Sawyers Tanner knew all of them.
If my chief deputy . . .
Whoa.
Should I still be thinking of him like that? As chief deputy?
Probably so, until someone in authority managed to get their hands on his badge and gun. Or incapacitated him. Or killed him.
But my chief deputy?
In that instant, I realized I had another reason to keep thinking about him that way. It kept me from closing any useful doors to all those years of close observation of the man, his habits, his manner, his obsessions, his needs.
Closing the door to that would have been easy to do. A lot of those memories felt under siege. But there would be a time for second-guessing, for being judgmental.
This wasn’t it.
I needed everything I knew about Sawyers Tanner to help fathom what was happening in his mind. What his endgame was now that he had claimed two more victims. Dragged an FBI special agent to his pickup with her hands cuffed behind her. And had a whole cityful of folks locking their doors and sitting glued to their radios, TVs, or computer screens. Those who weren’t out hunting for him.
If I didn’t figure that endgame out, then I might not ever get a chance to decide whether to offer Angie a ring.
So did I need to hurry?
I did.
Did I need to make a decision in haste?
I mustn’t.
I needed to do what I’d had a reputation for doing at Yale in a seminar room filled with bright youn
g theological minds. Provide a twist that nobody else, including my professors, saw coming.
And where did these twists come from?
My hunches. From deep in my brain. Maybe all the way from my cerebellum. Sometimes, it seemed, all the way from China.
I had a hunch that Sawyers’s murderous behavior was a kind of tidying up. One that made perfect sense to him, no matter how unnecessary it seemed to others. Or how much it cost them. My first thought was of Professor Huntgardner. Now that Sawyers had put a fatal bullet in Professor Rawls, even with Angie in tow, I thought he might go after Huntgardner, even though the professor was already at death’s door.
In normal circumstances, I’d have aimed my patrol cruiser toward the hospital in east Flagler at high speed. And asked for backup.
But that wasn’t what my hunch was telling me to do.
It had me in the firm grip of another idea, wild as it was. I had a hunch that my chief deputy’s next act of tidying up was going to happen on the opposite side of town. At a location made for tidying things up.
Flagler Memorial Cemetery.
Chapter 71
I’d have spotted the pickup quicker if not for a prim little decorative tree. You could see under it only for a short distance. The groundskeepers at Flagler Memorial Cemetary had shaped its branches like the bangs that Moe of the Three Stooges wore. Once I’d eased past the tree, the pickup was in clear view on one of the cemetery’s winding dirt roads. The passenger side door was open. The vehicle appeared to be empty.
Driving right up behind it would have taken only seconds. Or I could have walked the distance in less than a minute. Instead, I killed my engine. Radioed Jeff. Told him to have backup deputies approach the cemetery without lights and sirens and remain out of sight. One of them needed to be a sniper. He should take up a discreet position with a clear line of sight to where I was at all times but do nothing unless I called for help or he saw circumstances turning dire.
