The Shadow Tracer

by Mg Gardiner

  Marichal rapped, but nobody answered.

  Harker said, “Try the knob.”

  Marichal shot him a look, perturbed. Harker nodded. “Go on.”

  Hesitantly Marichal tried the door. “Locked.”

  Harker drew his service weapon.

  “What are you doing?” Marichal said.

  “I have reason to believe that Sister Teresa Gavilan may be inside the house and in danger. Move aside.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sister Teresa was last seen at the Gatecrasher Festival, fleeing with a suspected murderer pursuing her.”

  “That’s not what …”

  “Sarah Keller is wanted for questioning in the killing of her own sister and the abduction of her sister’s child. She may have targeted Sister Teresa as a vulnerable party who could be tricked into giving her refuge. We’re talking about a nun—a soft touch when it comes to women who look down and out. Keller could have conned her into letting her into her home.”

  “They were seen running together from the medical tent …”

  “When Keller was exposed, she wanted to stop Sister Teresa from calling the authorities. Sister Teresa attempted to get help, but Keller apparently caught up with her. Now the sister has disappeared. Stand back.”

  “We don’t have a warrant,” Marichal said.

  “We don’t have a choice. Cover me.”

  Harker raised his foot and kicked the door open.

  Gun drawn, he swept into the kitchen. Marichal swore, but drew his own weapon and took up a position in the doorway.

  One minute later they cleared the house. Marichal holstered his weapon. He looked like he was going to break out in hives.

  “I told you. Nobody’s home.”

  Harker surveyed the guest bedroom. On the floor was a child’s drawing in colored pencil. He picked it up.

  “But they were here.”

  He returned to the kitchen and rifled through the papers stacked on the counter.

  “Agent Harker, you shouldn’t—”

  “Shouldn’t what? Care about the life of a nun?”

  He lifted the phone from the wall and clicked through the controls. When he got to recent calls, he said, “Write down these numbers.”

  He read them off. Marichal grabbed a pen from his shirt pocket and scribbled them in a little notebook.

  Pursing his lips, Harker pushed Redial. A number rang and went to voice mail.

  “This is Michael Lawless. Leave a message.”

  Harker spun and threw the phone across the kitchen.

  It hit the wall and clattered to the linoleum. Marichal stared at it. He stared at Harker. He didn’t move.

  Until the phone rang. On the floor it buzzed and lit up. As if tiptoeing through a field of rat traps, Marichal crossed the kitchen and picked it up.

  “Hello?” He listened, and his face paled. “This is FBI Special Agent Ruben Marichal.”

  “Who is it?” Harker said.

  Marichal looked at him. “It’s the police. They received a silent alarm call for an intruder at this address. Officers are on their way.” He held out the phone. “So I guess it’s for you.”

  The garage was musty, overheated, and dim. Sitting in the Navigator with the doors open, Fell listened with one ear to the tears and pleading in the house, and with the other to the police scanner.

  “Quiet. Don’t make me tell you again,” Reavy said.

  Through the open door to the kitchen, Fell watched Reavy bind the woman to a chair with duct tape. She almost called out: Start with the gag. But it didn’t matter. The woman was in her eighties and didn’t have the lung power to alert the neighbors.

  Grissom sat at the kitchen table, eating a plate of cold fried chicken from the fridge. The old woman’s husband was in a Barcalounger in the family room, immobilized by Parkinson’s and his oxygen tank.

  Seizing the house had been easy. They simply waited in a supermarket parking lot until the old woman struggled out with her groceries. Fell offered a hand. She learned that the woman and her husband were on their own, that their children lived in Albuquerque and didn’t visit. The old lady was glad for the conversation and for a bit of help from such a polite young woman.

  She never noticed the SUV as it followed her home. The rest was just a matter of closing the garage door and all the curtains in the house.

  Getting inside was always easy.

  Hell, she’d been born inside, that’s how easy—Eldrick’s granddaughter. And his favorite for a time. He called her his little bird because she was quick, dexterous, and bold. She could climb and jump and nearly fly from tree to tree. And because, he said, she had a tender heart.

  That didn’t last. Her father fell afoul of Eldrick over money, and her parents came into disrepute. The shunning started, small at first. One day she was playing in Nolan’s yard when his mother came out, pointed her toward the street, and said, “You get home and don’t come around here no more.” Nolan protested, and his ma gave him a switch across the back of the legs. After that Fell played alone, even at school. Then her dad was exiled from the family. Her mother was sent to a new husband. Fell started sharing a room with Reavy, her new sister.

  That didn’t last either. Not once Eldrick and her new dad decided she was marriageable. Fifteen—so old she was nearly spoiled goods. At least Coffey wasn’t a bad husband. He was eighteen, desperate to believe and to become one of the clan’s soldiers, shy and impulsive. The impulsive part was what got him killed, shot during a drug deal.

  Fell’s baby boy was born two months later. By then the family looked at her as twice cursed. She was put to work on enforcement, and little Creek was taken away for safekeeping.

  Easy getting in. No getting out.

  It had been impossible to refuse the bombing assignment in Denver. Because the clan had taken her child and told her she’d never see him again unless she did it.

  In all honesty, she had a knack for it, and in a way liked it. The power. The thrill. Knowing they had beaten the Man. But afterwards, when she was on the run, the clan did not return Creek to her.

  She still didn’t know where he was. She knew that all the kids had that information embedded in their chips, but she had no access to any of the clan children.

  Until Zoe Keller came into the picture.

  In the kitchen Grissom drank from a carton of milk. Reavy ripped tape from the roll and bound the old woman’s arms and feet to the chair.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  She sounded baffled. They always did. Acceptance of the obvious came so hard to most people. Why were they doing this? Because it was inevitable. They were the Worthes.

  On her smart phone, the police scanner app bleated to life.

  “Unit 9, report of a break-in at a residence on Pony Trail Road. Silent alarm has been triggered.”

  “Dispatch, this is Unit 9. On my way.”

  Fell stretched and turned up the volume. Five dollar app, bought with Sarah Keller’s prepaid card—not too shabby.

  “Unit 9, report that two men are in the residence on Pony Trail Road claiming to be FBI agents. But the homeowner is not there and not answering her cell phone. Proceed to the residence with caution.”

  Fell leaned out of the Navigator. “Grissom. Reavy. We got the Feds.”

  41

  The sun lay low in the west when Zoe fell asleep in the hayloft. The sky was split between glaring red sunset and a black curtain of rain that swallowed all light along the northern horizon. The evening bore the remains of the day’s heat, but a chill came through the slats of the barn with every gust of wind. Sarah built Zoe a nest of coats and tucked her behind a bale of straw to shield her.

  “Like a fort,” she said, and Zoe smiled. Even though the little girl hadn’t had a full meal since breakfast, she had dropped off to sleep quickly, heavily, with Mousie dangling from her hand. Sarah watched her for a minute and slipped across the planks of the loft to the ladder.

  Below, the pickup a
nd Lawless’s rental were parked side by side. The doors at either end of the barn were drawn shut and barred. Lawless sat on a bale of straw, keeping watch through a crack in the wood. He was waiting for a callback from his superiors. Teresa sat opposite him on the floor, leaning back against a post.

  Sarah paused and wiped grit from her eyes. She was exhausted, but feared that if she stopped moving she would collapse in the dirt, as inert as Zoe’s stuffed animals.

  Teresa’s soprano, however, remained round and ringing. “Stop worrying about me. I’ve slept much rougher than this.”

  “El Salvador was twenty-five years ago,” Lawless said.

  “It’s impolite to remind a lady of her age, even if I am supposed to have abandoned vanity when I took my vows.”

  “Sorry. I just want to make sure you don’t need me to take you into town.”

  “I’m not going anywhere yet.” Teresa coughed and settled herself. “You look strangely relieved to be here, Michael.”

  “I’m glad everybody’s all right.”

  “And being in close contact gives you a sense that you can control the situation.”

  “Best I can.”

  Teresa said, “Sarah looks very much like her sister. As does Zoe.”

  The wind gusted. Loose hay swept through the rafters. Across the plains, thunder rumbled.

  Sarah descended the ladder. “I didn’t know you’d seen pictures of Beth.”

  Teresa’s eyes were soft. “When Michael phoned about all this, I looked up your sister online. She was a lovely young woman. Her smile radiated generosity of spirit.”

  A pang went through Sarah. She thought of the family photos she had never shown Zoe. She’d been terrified that if Zoe saw pictures of Beth, she might talk about them to outsiders. Now she felt that she’d erased her sister and cheated her daughter. She stood awkwardly at the bottom of the ladder.

  Lawless nodded her over. “Have a seat.”

  Sarah sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the hay bale. She wondered at the quiet intimacy of the conversation she’d overheard. Lawless seemed to regard Teresa as a nephew would a beloved aunt, with gentle concern and long-standing trust. The wind battered the walls of the barn.

  “There’s something I didn’t want to talk about in front of Zoe,” she said. “The RFID microchip.”

  Lawless glanced at the loft.

  “Zoe knows about it,” Sarah said. “The ER nurse scanned it and read the information aloud in front of her.”

  Teresa said, “It’s so disturbing.”

  “A microchip. Like she’s a dog.” Sarah pinched the bridge of her nose. “The Worthes had to have implanted it when Beth and Nolan visited them after Zoe was born.”

  “Yeah,” Lawless said.

  “You knew about that, didn’t you?” she said. “About Nolan taking Beth to Arizona to meet his family.”

  “I did.”

  “How long had federal authorities been watching Nolan?”

  “Ever since he left the clan and moved to California.”

  She exhaled. “Who watched them, and how?”

  “FBI and ATF, as far as I know. I wasn’t privy to their surveillance.”

  “What were you privy to? What do you know about how the clan chips its children? And what kind of information does that chip contain? ’Cause it’s more than just Zoe’s name and the names of her parents, I’m positive.”

  Lawless glanced at the hayloft again. There was no noise or movement from Zoe’s little sleeping fort.

  Sarah wasn’t asking the one question that loomed beyond all others, like the wall of dark cloud erupting with lightning outside: Why did you let me get away?

  It frightened her. It made her grateful and terrified all at once. He had set her loose that day. And in so doing, he had seized control of her life. He held the secret. At any moment he could reveal it, or threaten her with its revelation. But he had asked nothing of her, had instead retreated into a background so deep that for years she’d wondered if he was still alive.

  And now here he was, and here was her chance, and she kept quiet. Her situation was too tenuous to bring that up right now, as though mentioning it would rip open the door to a furnace and incinerate her.

  Instead, she let her fear and disgust and rage come out in another question. “How do we get that chip out of my daughter?”

  Teresa said, “You should have it removed by a physician in a sterile setting. Injecting a chip with a syringe is simple—the equivalent of an inoculation. Extracting it is minor surgery.”

  Sarah rubbed her eyes. “Anybody with a scanner can send information about her someplace else, right?”

  “Yes,” Lawless said. “Lots of stores, warehouses, transportation networks have RFID readers. Phone apps might be able to read it. The information in the chip can be transmitted to a credit card company or inventory control system for a store, an airline baggage tagging system, anything.”

  “Or to clan operatives,” Sarah said.

  “Yes. Unfortunately.”

  She looked at him. “The Worthes actually chip all their children? Every one from every polygamous liaison?”

  His face was almost sad. “No.”

  Sarah’s eyebrows and pulse both went up.

  “Not all,” Lawless said. “Just some. In a special ritual.”

  “Tell me.”

  He stood and walked to the door. His T-shirt had ruched up around his holster. He stared through the slats in the wood.

  “Nolan wasn’t the first clan member to leave. Others had walked away, and some of them talked to the FBI.”

  “They were arrested and interrogated, you mean,” Sarah said.

  “Some.” He turned. “And some went back. Some thought they could balance their life in the outside world with their blood ties to the Worthes. Nolan did.”

  Sarah nodded sadly.

  “Ever since Eldrick Worthe declared himself a prophet, his family has been developing an obsessive set of religious rituals. They celebrate Revelation Day, when the Holy Spirit descended on Eldrick. And they mark births with more than baptism,” he said. “Baby boys are circumcised. Girls are taken to a ceremonial tent for a blessing ceremony. That’s where they’re chipped.”

  The wind spit through the slats of the barn. The door rattled.

  “Why the girls?” she said.

  “You know very well.”

  She shut her eyes. “Control.”

  “They chip the girls so they can track them and identify them,” Lawless said.

  “Are the girls ever told?” Sarah said.

  “Once they reach puberty and are married off.”

  “What age is that?”

  “Fourteen, fifteen.”

  “Lord save us,” Teresa said.

  Sarah said, “You sure you don’t have a scalpel in your medical kit?”

  Lawless said, “What information does the chip contain?”

  “Names. Worthe names. Bethany Keller Worthe. Zoe Skye Worthe. I think Nolan told his family that he and Beth were married.”

  He thought about it. “That may have helped protect you these last five years.”

  “I realize.”

  “What else? A serial number?” Lawless said.

  Sarah thought back. “I did see a number. A long one. At least one. What about it? Isn’t it a factory-issued number to identify the chip?”

  “Maybe. But it may be something else.”

  “Like what?”

  Lawless turned from the door. “A password.”

  42

  A password. The implications hit her, and hard.

  Lawless said, “The Worthes are expert at hiding information—delivery dates, routes, contact lists …”

  “Offshore bank accounts?”

  He nodded. The sun singed the western horizon and soaked the desert with red light. Through the slats of the barn it fell across his face.

  “Why would they encode that information in a chip implanted in their kids?” She ran a hand through her ha
ir. “That’s … cold. And weird.”

  “Because information like that is more valuable than gold,” he said.

  Even as Lawless speculated, she knew he was right. “It’s the key to the vault that contains the gold. And the silver, and all their untraceable dollars.”

  “Exactly. Because computers can be confiscated. From there, bank accounts can be identified and assets seized.”

  “Beyond that, somebody can take a sledgehammer to your computers or wipe them with a giant magnet and destroy your information and your organization.”

  “Disks, zip drives, thumb drives, even the safe they’re stored in … all those can be lost too. And they’re obvious sources of information,” Lawless said.

  “But a child is just a child.”

  They looked at each other. Sarah felt a deep cold flow into the barn. It had no source in the air, but in her fears. She glanced at the loft where Zoe slept.

  “If you’re right, this would be a perfect way to hide information,” she said.

  “Ruthless,” Teresa added. “Calculated and ruthless.”

  Lawless said, “Eldrick and his council of prophets might call it holy.”

  Sarah shivered. “It also makes their children into currency. Doesn’t it?”

  Lawless grew pensive. Then for a moment his guard slipped. He looked like he’d been whipped across the back. And Sarah saw that his compassion was never more than a millimeter from the surface.

  She stood up. “The Worthes assign their children to marriages as freely as the noble houses in Game of Thrones. Don’t they?”

  “They do. The men of the clan decide who will marry whom.”

  Teresa said, “These arranged marriages—am I correct in assuming they give young girls to older men in the family?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And the favored men in the clan—Eldrick’s thugs and toadies—get assigned the girls they want.”

  He nodded.

  Sarah said, “So, if the girls have bank account information, or whatever, encoded in their microchips, that information goes with them to their …” She couldn’t bring herself to say husband. “To the man they’re handed over to.”