The Shadow Tracer

by Mg Gardiner

“We have no proof of this.”

  “But it would make complete sense, from what I know about these people,” Sarah said. “In the past five years I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Worthe clan.”

  And more. She’d spent an equal amount of time studying how to hide money—so she could track down deadbeats as a skip tracer, and so she could, in theory, hide money of her own, if she ever accumulated enough. Hide-and-seek was her specialty.

  “It would be ingenious,” she said. “In the most sinister way. But hell … drug mules swallow balloons of cocaine every day. Spies used to insert microfilm in suppository capsules. Why shouldn’t the clan use a needle to inject bits of information into their children?”

  She began to pace. “Does the clan send its girls away sometimes?”

  “They send boys away all the time. Threats to the leadership. Excess Y chromosomes. In a polygamous community, only the most powerful or favored men get wives. The others are shunned and exiled. But girls …” He saw where she was going. “You’re suggesting the clan might send a girl somewhere, to someone, so the information can be transmitted.”

  “Yes. And Zoe’s been missing from the clan for five years. I think that chip contains information they want. Enemies lists, bank account information, evidence they’ll kill to destroy. I think it’s why they’re so eager to get hold of her.”

  Teresa said, “If it’s only the chip they’re after, they’ll take her alive or …”

  They all fell quiet. Zoe didn’t have to be breathing for the information on the chip to be valuable to the Worthes. She only had to be in their hands.

  “We need to read the chip,” Sarah said. “Where can we find an RFID scanner?”

  “Most minimarts. If we can get to a 7-Eleven maybe we can pull the information.”

  Teresa said, “And what would you do with it?”

  Sarah turned. “Save her. Save all of us.”

  43

  The flashing lights of the Chaves County Sheriff’s Department car lit up the walls of the house. Harker shut down the nun’s computer. Agent Marichal came from the kitchen, looking so overtly relieved that the warrantless search was going to end, and so abashed, that Harker had doubts about the man’s future in federal law enforcement.

  Marichal said, “Something I found in the bathroom cabinet.” In his gloved hand he held up a disposable syringe sealed in a sterile packet.

  Harker took it. “Interesting.”

  He walked to the door. He opened it casually, as the two deputies hulked from their car and approached under the firework spin of the lights. Their weapons were holstered but their hands rested on the butts of the guns.

  Harker pushed open the screen. “Gentleman. Come in.”

  “May we see some ID?” said one of the deputies.

  Marichal nudged into the doorway and flashed his Bureau credentials.

  The deputies said, “What’s going on here?”

  Harker said, “The woman who lives here has been taken captive by a federal fugitive.”

  “Want to tell us how you figure that?” the deputy said.

  Harker shook his head. “I want you to tell me what resources the Sheriff’s Department has and how it can use them to find her.”

  The sunset was a ruby slice along the horizon and Danisha couldn’t get any answer on Sarah’s burn phone. She paced outside the taquería on Roswell’s main drag, her fingers itching, wishing she had a cigarette. Forcing herself to stay outside, and not even think about the vending machine inside the lobby of the restaurant.

  “Come on, come on, answer,” she said to the ringing phone.

  Voice mail. Again. Her nerves gunned, like an engine stuck in overdrive. Had she made a fool mistake coming here? Was Sarah even anywhere close?

  At the tone she exhaled. “Kid, it’s me. We gotta get you out of whatever’s going on, and I’m here to say I’ll help you do whatever it takes. Call me.” Then, because she had become so paranoid that the sound of a horn honking or a songbird chirping made her want to jump and beat them to a pulp, she added, enigmatically, “I’ve always felt close to you, honey. I still do. Real close. Please consider me close enough to help.”

  She hung up, wondering if she’d sounded like she was speaking in code, or like a sick high school counselor trying to get a schoolgirl to open up. She hoped Sarah would get the point that she was here, nearby, and going off her freaking rocker.

  She shoved the phone in her pocket and stared at the wide street and all its billboards and lighted signs and busy, empty commercial buzz. She took the phone back out and redialed and when the voice-mail announcement asked her to leave a message, she said, “And I’m driving a big-ass four-wheel drive with a 5.7-liter engine. It’s new, it’s fast, and it’ll knock a longhorn twenty feet into the air before the steer knows what hit him. Just so you know.”

  She ended the call and pushed through the door into the taquería, from street noise and the desert evening to the cool hum of air-conditioning. She bought two packs of Marlboros from the vending machine.

  Nearby the cashier punched a sale into the register, talking with two customers at the counter.

  “Crazy, I’m telling you,” said one of the customers, a retiree in a checked shirt with red suspenders.

  The cashier said, “You saw it? Actually, with your own eyes?”

  The man handed over a bill. “Fighting. These two women, in the back of a pickup truck. They drove right past me, close as I’m standing to you. Going ’bout eighty down Main Street.”

  Danisha listened.

  “I swear, the one in the back of the pickup was trying to kick this other gal off, right into the road. Craziest thing I ever saw.”

  His companion, even older, wearing a Caterpillar hat and blue suspenders, shook his head. “I swear I saw a kid in the cab of the pickup, but buster here says I hallucinated that.”

  Danisha said, “Excuse me. What make of pickup truck was it?”

  The gents turned. Red suspenders said, “What make? I’m talking about a catfight on the tailgate, and you want to know what model pickup it was?” He shook his head. “As if this day hasn’t been strange enough.”

  His friend said, “It was a Dodge Ram.”

  Danisha said, “Which way was it headed?”

  “What next?” Sarah said.

  Lawless said, “I need to check in.”

  “How many calls from here are you going to make on that cell phone?”

  He raised a calming hand. “Don’t worry. Cell towers are so far between out here, it’s a wonder I can get a signal. Even if somebody tries to triangulate, at best they’ll discover that this phone has registered with a tower attached to some rancher’s windmill fifteen miles from here.”

  He punched buttons and listened for a while, seemingly to a voice-mail message. By the time he hung up, he looked unhappy.

  “What’s wrong?” Sarah said.

  “Intra-agency sniping. After FBI Special Agent Harker got his rental car towed out of the ditch, he called the Marshals Service in a snit.”

  “Complaining that you didn’t stick around to draw a diagram of the accident for his insurance claim?”

  He smirked. “Harker asked my superiors to track me and provide my whereabouts to the FBI.”

  “What an ass.”

  “I need to respond.”

  She held up a hand. “Wait—you’re going to do it?”

  “I need to deal with it.”

  She nodded at the door, indicating that Lawless should follow her out. Outside in the arid evening, the wind caught her hair. Her skin, and her anger, were heating.

  “I am not stepping foot inside a police station or federal building and you know it,” she said.

  He stuck his hands in his jeans pockets. “You’ll be safer.”

  “I’ll be at the mercy of the government. And so will Zoe.”

  The dark wall of cloud in the north bristled with lightning. Sarah’s nerves itched—it felt as if watchers could be anywhere. In the long gra
ss, or on the rim of the golden horizon, sighting at them down the length of a scope. Or in the black void of cloud, readying to swoop.

  He looked at her starkly. “What do you want from me?”

  She pointed at the Chevy Biscayne. “In there.”

  She trooped to the car and crawled through the empty window into the back seat. He climbed in behind her.

  He said, “You have to make some choices, Sarah. I’m sorry they’re tough ones. But if you let me, I can try to improve your odds.”

  His eyes, dark and searching, seemed to be seeking a connection. She didn’t think it was an act, a cover he had developed to gain trust from people he was coaxing to confess. She thought he was the real deal.

  He’d better be. She was staking her daughter’s life on it.

  “I get it. And you’ve never let me down, Lawless.”

  She meant it as reassurance, but he looked like she’d just punched him in the head. His lips parted.

  “That’s …”

  Perplexed, she said, “I’m trying to express my gratitude, Deputy Marshal. And my trust.”

  He looked away.

  “What?” She shifted on the cracked vinyl seat. “Tell me. Is it Zoe?”

  She glanced out the Chevy’s empty window at the barn. It was a forlorn sight in the dusk, grayed and listing.

  “Of course it’s Zoe,” he said. “Zoe and you and Teresa and all of it.”

  He looked pained. Beyond pained—stung. All of it.

  She said, “It’s about that day. The Marshals Service still doesn’t know what happened, does it?”

  “You want to do this now?” he said.

  “No. I never want to do this. I want it all to go away.” Her throat felt thick. She told herself: Toughen up, cupcake.

  “Why were you there that day?” she said.

  Another flash of lightning scored the horizon. The wind lowered to a chill sweep, flattening the grass outside the car.

  “Michael. Why did the U.S. Marshals send an agent to Beth’s house? For a long time I thought you were in hot pursuit of Grissom and Fell and Reavy. But that wasn’t it. If you’d tracked them there intending to apprehend them, you wouldn’t have been on your own.”

  He leaned on the front bench seat and hung his arms across it. In the distance, where the ranchland dipped into a hollow, birds began to cry. Chittering, squawking, a rude cacophony.

  He took a long moment. “I came to talk to Beth.”

  She exhaled. “Why?”

  He stared out the windshield. The squalling of the birds continued.

  “Because of Nolan.” He turned. “Because the FBI and ATF were determined to use him to bring down the Worthe clan and apprehend the courthouse bombers.”

  Sarah said, “I know the FBI wanted Nolan to snitch on his family.”

  “They convinced him it was the only way he’d ever be left alone.”

  “Left alone by whom? His family, or the Feds?”

  “Both. But one Fed in particular. We need to talk about the guy who’s after you. Curtis Harker. You’ve got a heat-seeking missile on your tail.”

  44

  Fell turned up the volume on the police scanner app. Reavy and Grissom came into the garage from the kitchen. Grissom wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

  “Dispatch, this is Unit 9, at the dwelling on Pony Trail Road. No home invasion. It’s two FBI agents.”

  “Unit 9, Dispatch. Repeat?”

  Grissom grunted. “A-fuckin-men.”

  Fell had a map in her hands. “Pony Trail Road is in the boonies ten miles north of town.”

  “Who do we have within a hundred miles?”

  Reavy took out her phone and scrolled through the contacts. “Jadom Simmons. Wyndham and his boys.”

  “Call them,” Grissom said.

  Fell said, “We need to find out whose house that is, and if Keller’s been there.”

  He nodded at her phone, hissing with police static. “We wait till all them filth leave the place. Then head out there.”

  She glanced past him and through the open door into the kitchen. “What about them?”

  Grissom didn’t bother to look back at the elderly woman slumped in the kitchen chair, half-silvered with duct tape.

  “They won’t say anything,” he said.

  “We gonna leave them?”

  Reavy dialed a number. Under the hanging bulb in the garage, her blond hair shone like a corona. “Isom. It’s the dawn of a new day.”

  Grissom leaned into the SUV, close to Fell’s face. “What’s wrong with you? Those folks mean nothing.” He pointed two fingers at her eyes. “Focus. They got paradise coming. You got a kid to find.”

  Sarah pushed her hair from her face. “I know about Special Agent Harker.”

  “You know he’s the guy who’s trying to apprehend you. You don’t understand how far he’ll go to do that,” Lawless said.

  Lightning forked from the clouds, a pure and relentless white.

  “He was a friend of mine,” Lawless said. “We both worked in Denver. Federal agencies can be insular—you hang out with your own team. But Harker wasn’t like that. He was always an independent operator.”

  “I didn’t think the FBI liked independent types.”

  “They like incisive minds, and Harker has one. He saw connections where others saw only static. He solved cases. And he was reliable. A man who was as good as his word.”

  “You like this guy.”

  He hesitated. “I did.”

  “What did he do?” she said.

  “It isn’t what he did. It’s what happened to him.”

  Thunder rumbled past.

  “He’s like a dog with a bone when he gets his teeth into a case. But tenacity is highly prized in the Bureau.” He shook his head. “He was all about putting bad guys behind bars. I was too.”

  “Was?”

  “I still am. But not all about it.”

  “What happened?”

  He looked pained.

  Sarah said, “Lawless?”

  The county sheriff’s deputies followed Harker and Special Agent Marichal through the nun’s house.

  The deputy said, “Sir? We’re going to have to ask you to step outside until we can verify that Sister Teresa is, in fact, missing.”

  Harker said, “Get over it.”

  The deputy caught up and put a hand on Harker’s arm. “Now, sir.”

  Harker shook him off. Did these men truly not get it? “Aren’t you aware of the clown car parade that raced through Roswell earlier today? Not only was I engaged in the pursuit of the vehicle carrying Sister Teresa, but so was the Roswell PD and at least two other vehicles. Vehicles driven by members of the Worthe family who are federal fugitives. They forced me off the road.”

  The deputies looked at each other. They’d heard.

  “We need backup. SWAT. And we need to move now. Because Keller is mixed up with the Worthe clan—with a trio who are wanted for the murder of a federal agent.”

  Both Marichal and the deputies sobered. One deputy said, “Excuse me, sir?”

  She’s still dead. She’ll stay dead. For a second, Harker felt like he might gag. In his mind he saw Eldrick Worthe’s unblinking eyes and heard his derision.

  He turned to the deputies. “You want to understand the urgency of the situation? Want to know what they’re capable of?”

  He took out his wallet and removed a photo. He jammed it into Marichal’s hand. “When the Worthes set off an improvised bomb outside the U.S. District Court in Denver, they injured twenty-five people and killed two. One was prosecutor Daniel Chavez. The other was FBI Special Agent Campbell Robinson.”

  Marichal eyed the photo. Warily he looked up at Harker. “This is Special Agent Robinson?”

  “They murdered her,” Harker said. “They killed my wife.”

  The air pressure seemed to drop. Sarah said, “His wife? Oh my God.”

  “It destroyed him.” Lawless scanned the horizon outside the wrecked Chevy. “H
e took two days’ bereavement leave to bury Cam. Then came straight back, said work was his therapy. But …” He shook his head. “He could never rationally investigate the bombing.”

  “I can’t believe the Bureau put him on the investigation,” she said.

  “They didn’t. He’s always been assigned to the racketeering investigation against the clan.”

  “But that hasn’t stopped him from hunting for the bombers.”

  “Call it mission creep.”

  She sat back and ran a hand through her hair.

  Lawless rubbed his eyes. “I tried to talk to him. He was in shock, a mess, I get that. But he was feeding on his anger.”

  “It was his link to Cam,” she said. “Believe me, I understand how losing somebody to violence can make you burn up with rage.”

  It heated your life like a forge, until you shone with pain and hatred. For some people, such white fury became the thing that bound them to their lost loved one. It got them up in the morning and fueled their days. Eventually, the thought of relinquishing it became unbearable. Because, if you quenched the fire, how could you hold onto your sister?

  “It nearly killed me—if I hadn’t had Zoe to care for, I might have succumbed to the furnace,” she said. “So Harker didn’t want help or advice. How bad did you blow it?”

  “I told him if he didn’t back off he was going to implode and take the office down with him.”

  “Smooth.”

  “Mama told me my mouth would get me in trouble one day. I never listened.” He leaned back against the seat. “He still looks like a successful agent on the metrics. But he’s not the same man. His vision of the law now brooks no dissent and no mercy. And it leaves collateral damage in its wake.” He shook his head. “Guy also really doesn’t like me anymore.”

  She swallowed. “How did this fit in with Beth and Nolan?”

  “Ends justify the means.” He looked like he was about to say something else, but glanced at the countryside. “Come on. Out of this wreck. We should check the perimeter.”

  They climbed out the window. The wind tugged at Sarah’s clothing. Lawless headed for the barbed-wire fence that marked the edge of the field.