The Shadow Tracer

by Mg Gardiner

  For you. He would never let it go.

  With the sun behind her and green fields spreading around the concrete ribbon of the interstate, Sarah hooked up the hands-free phone and called Danisha. She knew the call would show up as an unknown number. She said, “It’s me.”

  The pause on the other end seemed stunned. Danisha said, “Girl.”

  “You okay?”

  “Is my truck okay?”

  Sarah smiled. “It’s rolling like a champ. Who knows I’m driving it?”

  “Nobody has asked, believe it or not. But I don’t expect that piece of luck to last past lunchtime.”

  “No?”

  “I sent one of the process servers to drive by your house. Cops were there. They had the garage door up—and I parked your truck inside. So they’ll be checking registrations for DHL vehicles.”

  Sarah ran a hand through her hair. “Who’s been to see you?”

  “Two OKCPD detectives. You’ve seen your beauty shot on the news?”

  “I hate that photo.”

  Danisha didn’t laugh.

  “None of it’s true, Dani.”

  “You know I believe you.”

  “Thank you.” The truck bottomed over a dip in the road. “You need to take care and watch out.”

  “I’ll be careful, don’t worry.”

  “The Worthes—they don’t always come at people through the front door.”

  “I understand.”

  “Zingasearch, Dani.”

  Danisha was quiet a moment. “Understood.”

  Zingasearch was a skip tracer’s dream. The search engine collated massive public databases—phone books, Department of Motor Vehicles data, property records—and published the results in a tidy package that included people’s names, ages, phone numbers, and current and past addresses going back decades. Pay a fee, and you could get background checks and criminal history reports.

  The site had a creepy habit of finding people in a few seconds—people who took excruciating care to protect their privacy, such as psychiatrists who treated violent psychotics, and judges who presided at mob trials. Their home addresses could be found at the click of a key, with a kicker: Associated with, followed by a list of relatives. Spouses, mothers, children. Zingasearch was a candy store for skip tracers and stalkers and vengeful criminals.

  Sarah loved Zingasearch. She hoped it was outlawed, today.

  A dull weight seemed to press on her back. “This is my fault. Dani, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Keller. I started this business and I knew it would win me no friends. Aside from lawyers, and who wants them for buddies?”

  Brave words, and Sarah knew Danisha meant them. But she also knew she’d brought this down on Danisha like a black wind.

  “I’ll call back tonight.”

  “Watch your six, Keller.”

  “You too.” She signed off.

  Glanced in the rearview mirror. Zoe was coloring and humming to herself. Seated next to her, buckled into a car seat she’d bought at the doll store, was the reborn. Its eyes were closed. Sarah had wrapped a blanket loosely around its head, as though to shade its face from the sun.

  Camouflage.

  In Sarah’s experience, people saw what they expected to see. That’s why, when serving papers on prickly people in ritzy neighborhoods, she sometimes loaded a lawn mower into the cargo bed of the truck and wore a green work shirt. The ruse once got her past a gatehouse to the door of a 10,000-square-foot mansion, taken for a gardener come to tend the azaleas.

  If you were a Finnish sniper who wore white in a winter forest, Russian soldiers mistook you for a snowdrift. And if you showed up with an infant in a Snugli and a kindergartner in hiking boots, people thought you were a mom of two: a baby girl and a five-year-old boy.

  Zoe’s lips moved as she sang to herself, a lullaby about cowboys and horses. The lines she drew on the coloring book were ragged but somehow thoughtful. The little girl’s head was bent forward, eyes on the page. Even with her hair cut short, there was no mark from where the microchip had been implanted.

  Back at the motel, while Zoe slept, Sarah had researched RFID tags. Microchip capsules were biocompatible—nontoxic and nonallergenic. They were implanted easily, with a hypodermic syringe. But surgical removal was difficult. And the chips didn’t expire or wear down. Bragged one veterinary website: They’re good for the life of your pet.

  At least RFID chips didn’t send out a GPS signal. Generally, they simply stored information. They waited, completely inert, to be read. They couldn’t, as far as Sarah knew, be used like a broadcast beacon to send out distress messages or tell the world where you were. You couldn’t log onto some sophisticated computer network and ask it to find the tag and pinpoint its location.

  Tech was a double-edged sword. Any smart skip tracer knew that. Especially any skip tracer who knew how to track missing people through phone records and credit cards. Tech could be used to conceal and to find. The real question was: Who’s better at technology—you or the people hunting you?

  She had to get the chip removed. She rolled west on the highway, counting the miles, watching the rearview mirror.

  23

  In downtown Oklahoma City the morning looked bright and blasted. Fell rode shotgun. Reavy sat in the back, pale and eager. Grissom drove, eyeing other drivers as though they were cockroaches. He rubbed a hand along his thigh. Fell knew his juices were flowing.

  This city had been the scene of the most successful strike at the law in their lifetimes. FBI, ATF, IRS—all of them took body blows the day the Murrah Building went down. But they didn’t have time to explore that battleground. They drove past the memorial, Reavy licking her lips, Grissom almost crackling with energy. They passed by a courthouse and yet another barbecue restaurant and yet another Baptist church, and finally by the simple brick building, shaded by an old sycamore, that housed DHL Attorney Services.

  Grissom circled the block to check for surveillance cameras and neighborhood watch signs. But it was Saturday morning on a holiday weekend and many offices were closed. Satisfied, he parked the rented Navigator a hundred yards from DHL. The blinds were down and the office looked dark.

  “Maybe she left town for the weekend,” Reavy said.

  Fell said, “Office hours are ten to one Saturday.”

  And bang on time, a black Jeep pulled into a parking slot outside the DHL office. A woman got out. From beneath her old cowboy hat, dreadlocks reached halfway down her back. She wore a tight red top and turquoise squash-blossom jewelry that gleamed in the sun, blue and silver against her brown skin. She unlocked the office door and went inside.

  Fell reached for the passenger door handle.

  Grissom stopped her. “Ms. Dreads don’t look like the kind of woman who’s going to roll over. She’ll take some persuading.” He got out. “You and Reavy drive on over to the mother’s house.”

  Fell climbed across the center console into the driver’s seat. “What are you going to do?”

  “Wait till you find Mrs. Helms senior. Then I’ll have a chat with our Danisha.”

  He pounded on the roof of the Navigator and sauntered toward a coffee shop up the street.

  Sarah spotted the Texas state trooper on U.S. 60, forty miles southwest of Amarillo. The countryside was as flat as a meat cleaver, the sky white with heat. She still had almost two hundred miles to the rendezvous with Teresa Gavilan.

  She knew she wouldn’t make it.

  She checked the mirror again. The trooper was still cruising three hundred yards back. Zoe was staring straight at her.

  It had long ago stopped unnerving her. Now it focused her.

  At the next town she pulled off the highway. The trooper drove past the exit. She realized that her temples were pounding.

  “What are we doing?” Zoe said.

  She passed by towering grain silos. The electric poles along the roadside leaned at odd angles. “Need to run an errand.”

  Ten minutes later she s
tood beside a mechanic at Del’s Auto Body, staring at the pickup. She had put on pink lipstick called Coquette, with a matching drawl. Unfortunately, they clashed with her Black Alchemy eye shadow. Still, the mechanic had tucked in his shirt.

  She said, “My dad loves this truck. If he saw what happened to it …”

  “He’d kill you.”

  She smiled sadly. “He’d die a little, trying to keep himself from wanting to kill me. And that would break my heart.”

  The mechanic shook his head at the nasty scratch along the driver’s side. “People these days.”

  “I didn’t think the guy would actually key the truck. Over a parking spot?”

  The mechanic took off his baseball cap. Sarah waited.

  “I’ll have to sand it,” he said.

  She beamed. “Y’all just saved me. Thank you.”

  “And I can’t match the color.”

  Better and better. “It’s the scratch that matters, not the color.”

  “Even a rush job will take a couple hours. You and the kids can watch TV in the waiting room.”

  “We’ll head down the street. Grab lunch and run some errands.”

  She handed him a prepaid card. It was a risk. But doing nothing would be even riskier.

  While the mechanic prepared the paint bay, she got Zoe out of the truck. Then she put on a Snugli and tucked the reborn doll into it. The thing was unnervingly heavy, especially its head. She patted its back as if to soothe it.

  Zoe stared at her like she had gone dog-barking nuts.

  Maybe she had. She took her daughter’s hand. “Come on, firefly.”

  “I thought my name was Skye.”

  Down the street she found a Sonic. Halfway through her hamburger, Zoe eyed the reborn and said, “You should order Sparky some milk.”

  Two hours later, hot from walking around the little downtown and pushing Zoe on swings at the park, she climbed back behind the wheel, four hundred bucks down.

  “Thank you,” she said to the mechanic.

  “Pleasure. Any guy who’d mess up a man’s pickup, well.”

  She smiled. “He ever shows up here, sand his car down to the axles. He drives a red Porsche. His name’s Derek Dryden.”

  She honked as she drove off. A minute later she pulled back onto the highway. Danisha might kill her, but the truck was now a darkly gleaming machine. Black Alchemy.

  In the auto body shop, the mechanic walked past the radio.

  “… seeking the whereabouts of Sarah Keller, who disappeared yesterday with a five-year-old girl …”

  He stopped. Listened to the description.

  “… Keller is presumed to be traveling with the five-year-old. She was last seen driving a red pickup with Oklahoma registration.”

  He glanced toward the painting bay.

  Woman wanting her red pickup painted, right now. Completely new color.

  No, Keller had brown hair. She was traveling with a little girl. She wasn’t a Goth with a boy and a tiny baby.

  He stood there.

  Woman wanting an emergency paint job. How likely was that?

  But the truck—he shook his head. It had Texas plates, he was certain. Wasn’t he? And when she drove away, with a honk and a cute wave, she had gone down to the highway and headed northeast. Toward Oklahoma. He was sure. He’d watched.

  The phone rang. He headed to the office.

  It wasn’t her.

  Was it?

  Sarah turned off the radio. Zoe was settled with earphones and a kids’ album on the iPod, coloring and singing tunelessly to Raffi. She hadn’t heard. The white lines on the highway slurred past. Sarah held the speed steady just under the limit. She was staying within the law. Mostly.

  Except for switching the plates on the truck. It now had Louisiana tags.

  Three months earlier she had pulled a set of plates off an abandoned vehicle. During a skip trace she’d found the car half-buried in weeds beside a burned-out trailer. She checked the tags—the car was registered to the skip. It wasn’t stolen. It was insured. But it had been abandoned when the guy blew town. She unscrewed the plates and added them to her escape kit.

  The prepaid card she’d used at the auto body shop was another matter.

  C. Kaler, the card read. Her handwriting on the application had been atrocious. But if the mechanic checked it carefully enough, it would come back to her.

  She had to hope that after she honked and waved at him, he’d watched her turn onto U.S. 60 heading northeast. Please. She slowed, pulled a U-turn, and accelerated southwest toward the state line.

  The wind rushed against the truck. The land ebbed to brown, as though slashed to the bone. By the time she sped past the sign that said, WELCOME TO NEW MEXICO, LAND OF ENCHANTMENT, the sky was a thin blue. It looked like it could blow away in an instant.

  Grissom was halfway through a piece of hot blueberry pie when his phone buzzed. Fell’s text said, In position.

  He checked out the window of the diner. Down the street, the Jeep was still parked outside DHL. The black woman was inside the office building.

  The sway of her hips as she walked had caused a stirring in him. The familiar feeling of want.

  His anger rose quicker than a flame. Fuck her. The woman’s cool confidence undermined the very pavement beneath her feet. It was insubordinate. Weakening him with want—that was a sin. Women were born not to power, but to obedience.

  Eldrick Worthe had taught him that. Eldrick had revealed many such truths.

  Grissom had not been raised in the family. He had been nothing. Nineteen, a kid with fists searching for something to punch, until he walked into an Arizona minimart and interrupted the Worthe clan conducting a drug deal. Screw off, dogface, they said. Out. Now. So he got out. He waited for them to finish their business. And when they left the minimart he beat them unconscious with a two-by-four.

  Normally, Eldrick would have had Grissom beaten in return, then dragged behind a truck and dumped in a ravine. But he saw potential in the kid. He saw initiative, a divine spark. He brought him onboard. Now Grissom was one of them.

  He wiped his mouth, dropped a five on the table, zipped his jacket and walked out of the diner. He crossed the street and walked through the heavy heat of the afternoon to DHL. He felt a rush in his heart. It was like the beating of wings.

  He approached the redbrick building. At her desk by the front window, head in a file folder, sat Ms. Dreads. He took the ski mask and gloves from his jacket and pulled them on. Then he gripped the military knife. Inside the office, a phone rang. Dreads answered.

  “Mom?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  He shoved through the door and walked toward Danisha Helms.

  24

  Danisha held the phone tight to her ear. “Mom. What’s going on?”

  “Nisha, they broke into the house. Through the kitchen door.”

  Danisha’s blood pressure spiked to the red zone. She pushed back from her desk. “Who? Are you okay?”

  “They told me I had to call you.”

  She heard, behind her mother’s wheezing, the rush of road noise. “Where are you?”

  She felt the way she had in Afghanistan, when the generators went funny and the lights flickered in the tent and the men who came through the flap from the desert heat wore uniforms but weren’t allies beneath the clothing.

  She was halfway to her feet. “Mom, are you safe?”

  The door at the front of the office opened with a swish of air. She looked up.

  The man coming toward her wore a black ski mask and black leather gloves. His right hand gripped a military knife.

  She lowered the phone and raised the SIG Sauer.

  “Drop the knife,” she said. “Get on the floor.”

  The man stopped. Beneath the ski mask his eyes popped with surprise. He backed up a step.

  From the phone her mother’s voice leaked into the room. “Nisha, they grabbed me, oh, my Lord …”

  She steadied her aim on his center of mas
s. He was fifteen feet away.

  She shouted, “I will not miss. Drop your weapon. Get on the floor.”

  This time he didn’t move. “Throw away your gun and you’ll still have time to save her.”

  She inhaled, and he saw it. She set her cell phone on the desk and fumbled for the landline.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  She knocked it from the cradle and speed-dialed 9-1-1. From the cell phone her mother’s voice rose to a sharp cry.

  “Mom!”

  He heard it at the same time she did: the engine of a heavy vehicle, revving, growing louder and higher in pitch. Whatever it was, it was coming in their direction.

  “Hang up the phone,” the man said.

  She didn’t move. “Mom—”

  “Nisha, run.”

  The engine noise grew intense.

  He jumped away from the door. A blue Chrysler New Yorker appeared in the glass, heading toward them, chrome gleaming, bouncing across the road outside and the sidewalk and grass and parking lot, straight for the door.

  Danisha screamed. “No.”

  She stumbled back, turning to flee. It was her mother’s car. It crossed the blacktop parking lot before she could draw breath and rammed straight into the front door of the office and right on through.

  The sun was low on the western horizon, the sky hazed red from sand, when Sarah cruised along a boulevard into downtown Roswell.

  The city was sprawling yet tidy, with lawns struggling to find purchase and trees that crouched against the arid wind. She saw no overt signs of alien infestation.

  At a stoplight, she texted Teresa Gavilan. Here.

  A minute later, her phone pinged. Medical Tent #1.

  Southwest of the city limits the Gatecrasher Festival rose from the desert like a kaleidoscopic outcropping of wild life. The immense parking lot was packed with cars and trucks from across the Southwest. The distant stage looked heavy with lights and Marshall stacks. There were thirty thousand people inside the chain-link fence. It looked like a Renaissance Fair that had been crashed by loggers and cowboys. Nobody was going to notice her.