Committed

by E. H. Reinhard

  A woman and two kids came and took a place behind him in line. He glanced down at the little boy holding his mother’s leg and staring at him. The boy waved, and Nick flashed him a bit of a smile back and placed the newspaper he held back on the shelf, in front of the one with his face on it. He turned forward in line. The man buying beer in front of him checked out, and he was next.

  Nick approached the register, got a carton of cigarettes without looking at the woman behind the counter, and immediately exited the building—the hood never left his head, and his eyes never rose to meet the cashier’s as he paid.

  Nick continued around the gas pumps and began crossing the parking lot back to the RV, but then he glanced up and froze. A cop car was parked next to the RV. An officer was standing directly in front of the vehicle and appeared to be talking on his shoulder radio.

  Nick quickly turned left and walked along the back of the parked vehicles toward the superstore’s entrance. He jammed the carton of smokes into the front pocket of his sweatshirt.

  “Shit,” Nick muttered under his breath.

  He glanced back to the right, toward the cop and the RV—the officer appeared to be the only one there. Nick picked up his pace toward the store. He stared over at the right entrance, making sure Molly wasn’t walking out as he entered the store through the Home and Living entrance. He passed the area where the shopping carts were parked and looked left to right. To his left was a pharmacy and, spreading out behind that, rows and rows of home goods. He looked to his right at the twenty-some rows of registers for checking out the shoppers. He couldn’t see Molly in line.

  Nick turned left and passed the pharmacy area, looking down the aisles in the health-and-beauty section—he didn’t see her. He made a right at the next corner and followed the building toward the back, where the outdoor supplies were held—again, Nick stared down the aisles where the shovels and outdoor equipment were located but never spotted Molly.

  At the back of the store, Nick hit the main aisle heading right, which eventually led to the grocery section. He briskly walked past the children’s toy department on his left and the small offerings of piece-together furniture on his right. Next, he passed the back of the clothing section to his right and electronics to his left—Molly had no reason to be in either. He glanced up at the exit sign and the small hall directly past electronics to his left. Nick continued, keeping his head down as he walked. After the shoes and baby clothes to his left and women’s clothing to his right, Nick hit the grocery section. He glanced right, toward the front of the store but didn’t spot her. Nick made a left into the refrigerated-goods area and walked past the yogurt and milk to the far corner of the building. He made a right and looked toward the front of the store, past the meats and all the way down to the bakery—still no sign of her. He started up the aisle, looking right down every adjacent isle as he passed. Finally, he spotted Molly five or six rows up, looking at a box of cereal. Nick quickly walked the aisle to where she stood in front of a full cart of groceries. He looked down the aisle to see a number of shoppers rummaging about.

  Nick stopped at Molly’s shoulder. “We have trouble. Take the cart, leave the aisle, and meet me by the rear exit between the shoes and electronics. Do it now.”

  He continued walking.

  Nick found his way back to where he’d instructed Molly to go and stood at the edge of the shoe department, looking at a pair of flip flops. He waited for Molly to appear, and a moment later, she did.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “There’s a cop at the RV. Leave the cart here, we’re leaving out the back. Let’s go. Come a few seconds after me and keep it casual.”

  Nick rounded the corner and walked down the short hall toward the metal door in the wall at the back. A pair of restrooms sat to his right. He glanced left at a counter with a banner reading Electronics Clearance on the wall behind it. A couple of tables behind the counter held miscellaneous televisions and electronics. A single woman stood with her back to the counter, apparently watching whatever was playing on the televisions. Nick pushed the center horizontal bar across the white metal door under the exit sign. He entered a long white hall free of people, with a single door at the back below another exit sign. Nick quickly walked the hall and heard the door open behind him when he was halfway down. He glanced over his shoulder to see Molly.

  “Come on, run,” Nick said.

  Molly ran the hall toward him as Nick picked up a jog for the back door. She reached him right as he slammed against the horizontal metal bar of the exit. Sunlight hit them in the face as the pair quickly stopped outside the back door. Nick ripped the hood from over his head. Directly across from them, past blacktop the width of a two-lane street, was a wooden fence roughly ten feet high. Nick glanced to the right—a row of Dumpsters and some miscellaneous pallets with bound cardboard. He looked to the left and saw a handful of shipping containers against the fence. The tire center stood beyond the containers.

  “This way,” Nick said. He picked up a full run toward the shipping containers, holding Molly’s hand and dragging her along. “We’re going over that fence.”

  Nick and Molly ran along the fence line until they reached a large faded-red shipping container.

  “Come on,” he said.

  He interlocked his fingers and crouched, waiting for Molly to step into his hands for a boost. Molly stepped up, grabbed the top of the container and pulled herself up as Nick pushed up on the soles of her feet. She swung one leg over the fence, followed by the other, and held on to the top before she disappeared to the other side. Nick grabbed the corner of the container and lifted his foot onto the metal bar for securing the rear door. He pulled himself up, grabbed the top of the container, and got to the top. He stayed low and looked toward the tire center and then checked the area at the back of the building behind him—he saw no one. Nick put a leg over the fence. Molly was standing in the grass and weeds, staring up at him.

  “Are we good?” she asked.

  Nick hung himself over the fence and dropped down beside her. “Yeah, we’re going to need to act fast, though. That pig will have friends in a second. Within a half hour or so, this whole area will be locked down.”

  “Which way?” she asked.

  Nick looked toward the street they’d originally entered from. He spotted the back of a commercial building and the semitrailers behind it. His head snapped left—nothing but grass and a tree line a quarter of a mile away. Directly in front of them was a golf course in the distance, beyond what looked like another street.

  “To the golf course, and we’ll follow the road that way.” Nick grabbed her hand and stayed low, and the pair ran through the brush.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We’d left the campground twenty minutes prior and found ourselves an Italian restaurant chain just off of the interstate. Agents Makara and Gents elected to get lunch with us and sat with us at a long table. We’d just ordered, and I was looking forward to devouring my order of chicken fettuccine alfredo after having missed breakfast. I reached out, grabbed another breadstick from the basket, took a bite, and washed it down with a bit of soda. Then I glanced over at Scott, who was checking his phone for the fifth time in the last few minutes.

  Scott lay his phone down next to his plate of salad and picked up his fork. He filled the fork’s tines with a few pieces of lettuce and an olive then looked over at us. “Montana local sheriff’s department did some digging and found the man she rented from. I guess it was a private little trailer park this guy owned. The guy says he hasn’t seen or heard from her in months. He hasn’t received a rent check in that time, either.”

  “We don’t have anything as far as employment on her, correct?” I asked.

  “Nothing recent, within years actually.”

  “If she was renting and it was paid directly to an owner, you’d think she’d have to give the guy something as far as where she received her income,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s a good point. Let
me send off a message,” Scott said. “Maybe we can have whoever talked to the guy see what employment information she gave her landlord.” Scott clicked away on his phone.

  “Still nothing as far as sightings?” Agent Gents asked from the end of the table.

  “No.” Scott said. “Each spot on the map that we wanted men stationed at is currently stationed—nothing yet.”

  “Helicopters?” I asked.

  “In position.” Scott scratched at the side of his dark but graying hair and took a drink of his soda. “I just hope they weren’t already outside the window we put together.”

  “Nah, I think we were pretty good with that,” I said. “The main thing would be if they took some random back roads out of the area and slipped out of our net.”

  “A couple of the local departments I spoke with said they would put cars at a number of roads,” Scott said. “They’d have to get fairly lucky to choose a route that isn’t monitored.”

  “What about the tip line?” Beth asked.

  “Something that needed to be looked into by us would have hit one of our phones, I’d think,” Bill said. “Hell, they could have already ditched that RV.”

  “I don’t think so,” Scott said. “You’re not taking an RV unless you’re planning on spending some time in it. I only think they ditched the first one because of the house fire, and they knew that we’d connect the dots there. I’m guessing they think they have a day or two until we find the white Toyota belonging to the late Lindsay Dunbar and connect the dots to the new RV. They could be wherever they plan to travel to by then.”

  “Yeah, why the house fire again?” Beth asked. “I don’t think we ever heard if they found anything else on the scene there or not.”

  Makara shook his head. “They found nothing. Same goes for that RV that we took back to the Omaha office. It doesn’t look like these two are leaving any evidence behind, other than their used and discarded vehicles.”

  Our waitress and another man, probably somebody from the kitchen staff, set a few standing trays next to our table and began setting down our dishes. The pair handed them out to everyone, asked if we needed anything else, and left our table. I spun some pasta around the fork’s tines, poked the fork through a piece of grilled chicken, and loaded the forkful into my mouth. I’d been at the chain countless times in the past, and the fettuccine alfredo was always top notch—that time was no different. I grabbed another breadstick, sopped up some of the alfredo sauce, jammed it into my mouth, and ripped it off.

  Beth looked over at me out of the corner of her eye as she was laying a napkin over her lap. “Hungry?” she asked.

  “A little,” I said over a mouthful of breadstick.

  I felt the table vibrate and heard a buzz coming from Scott’s phone. He snatched it from the white tablecloth, slid his finger across the screen, and placed it to his ear. His head jerked back, and he appeared to perk up. I began shoveling noodles, chicken, and sauce into my mouth at a rapid pace as I watched Scott on the call.

  He said, “When? Where? We’ll be on scene as soon as possible. Shut the area down.”

  I jammed another forkful of pasta into my mouth as Scott clicked off from the call.

  “We have the RV,” he said.

  I was about to ask where, but Beth beat me to it, so I loaded my fork again and jammed more noodles and chicken into my mouth. Scott called for our waitress.

  “About an hour north of here, a few exits south of Sioux City,” he said. “Take your food to go if you want. We’re leaving.”

  “What about the couple?” Beth asked.

  “Not in the RV, as far as the local officer who spotted it stated. The RV is at a shopping center. This information is minutes old, at the most. Local law enforcement is beginning to search the shopping center and neighboring businesses as they arrive to the scene.”

  I had my plate clean before our waitress brought our check. I wiped the corners of my mouth with my napkin and stood. Glancing over, I saw Bill shoveling down the remaining bits of his lasagna. We paid our tab, left, and were back on the interstate within minutes.

  Scott and Bill, driving ahead of us, called Beth and me with pieces of information as they filtered through. When we were a half hour up the interstate, we got the word that the two hadn’t been found inside the store or neighboring businesses. The local law enforcement were beginning to go through security footage and had dispatched multiple cars to the surrounding areas in search. I called Makara and Gents, following us, and relayed the information. When we were ten minutes out from the scene, we got another update that said they’d found them on the security footage and that the pair had left from the back of the superstore. At a mile away, we received another update that the two had jumped the fence behind the supercenter and appeared to have fled on foot to the southeast.

  Beth put on her turn signal and made a right into the store’s parking lot. Her cell phone said we’d arrived at our destination. She clicked the button that shut off the navigation.

  “How did we do?” I asked.

  “Originally, the nav said an hour and eight minutes. Made it in fifty-four.”

  I nodded and immediately spotted the RV at the back of the parking lot, surrounded by police cruisers. Through the parking lot, at the front of the building, I saw another handful of squad cars. Scott pulled up near the police cars at the RV. He lowered his window, and one of the officers went to the driver’s side of his car. The two exchanged a few words, and Scott pulled away toward the front of the building, near the patrol cars parked in front of some outdoor grills. Beth and I followed, with Agents Gents and Makara following us. We parked our cars in the fire lane and stepped out. Beth and I, as well as Gents and Makara, went to the front of Bill and Scott’s car.

  “The officer back there said we’re looking for a Lieutenant Hampton inside. He’s who’s leading this up here,” Scott said.

  We entered the building and made contact with the first officer we saw. He introduced himself as Officer Chris Pontier and said he would take us back to the security office where the lieutenant was viewing footage. Our group of six followed the officer through the front of the store, catching awkward gazes along the way from the shoppers checking out, and behind the customer-service counter. We headed through a door behind the counter to our left and up a flight of stairs into another hallway.

  The first door to our left was open, and Officer Pontier entered. We followed him in, where three officers and a man sitting in a chair all had their backs to us. Their attention seemed focused on three computer monitors on the table in front of them. Another man, who appeared to be a store manager solely because of the fact he was wearing a tie as opposed to a polo shirt, stood next to the seated man and the officers. He turned to look at us and then got the attention from the rest of the group.

  “We’re looking for a Lieutenant Hampton,” Scott said.

  The widest of the three officers, standing in the center of the group, turned and walked toward us. He held out his baseball-mitt-sized hand for a handshake as he approached. “Lieutenant Mark Hampton. You’re the team from the FBI, I’m assuming.”

  “Correct,” Scott said. He gave the guy our names—quickly. “Where are we at?”

  “I’ve looked over the footage. The pair fled southeast. I have patrol searching everywhere. We have a subdivision in the area to which the couple ran. I had guys basically shut it down inside of fifteen minutes of getting on scene.”

  “What was the window from the time they actually fled to the time you had a car there?” I asked.

  “Twenty-five minutes.”

  “So they could be in a car and gone by now?” Beth asked.

  “The neighborhood is a half mile away through brush and some low-lying areas. You’re looking at a good six minutes or so to even get over there. Then you’d have to secure a car, and at this time of day, the neighborhood is probably going to be fairly quiet. If I had to guess, they’re either hiding out in a house in that neighborhood or still on foot som
ewhere.

  “Did you check the RV?” Bill asked.

  “The door was open,” Hampton said. “We cleared it and left it as found.”

  “Okay, let’s split up and start getting something going here,” Scott said. “I want to get over to this neighborhood they were headed toward and start pounding the pavement.”

  “We’ll take a look at the RV,” Gents said.

  Scott nodded, and Gents and Makara left the security office.

  “Beth and I will run through the footage and see exactly what we have,” I said. “I’ll call your phone if we see anything of substance, and we’ll meet you over in the neighborhood shortly.”

  “Sounds good,” Scott said. He and Bill headed for the door.

  Beth and I followed the lieutenant back toward the man still seated.

  “Up on the screen now is them fleeing. The footage is from one of the back-lot cameras,” Lieutenant Hampton said.

  “Let’s roll that and get a look,” I said.

  The man in the chair clicked a few buttons and ran the video. The camera view aimed down the back of the building. Nearer the camera were a row of Dumpsters; beyond them, some miscellaneous pallets; then nothing; and then what looked like cargo containers in the distance.

  On screen, a door of the building flew open, and a couple appeared. The woman wore a baseball hat, a long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of shorts. The man had on a hooded sweatshirt, with the hood up, and jeans. The man ripped the hood from his head. It was Nick Frane. He jerked his head right and left, seemingly searching for which way to go. The pair ran away from the camera, down to the cargo containers. Frane boosted McCoy up onto the container. She put herself over the fence. A moment later, he climbed up and did the same. The two disappeared from view for a bit and then reappeared, running in the far-right corner of the screen until they were gone from view.

  “You said that is southeast that they headed?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN