The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  He tried to fill his eyes with the desert. The desert was impassive, her face beautiful. He remembered the one time he had ridden this road on a bicycle, a vintage Trek he had lovingly restored, part of a winter tour in what seemed like another life. That had to be seven, eight years ago? Sarah was only a baby then.

  Sarah. The idea that he would never see her again—

  Someone cleared his throat. Mark looked up, trying not to betray the fear he felt.

  “All done,” the inspector said, handing Dell the clipboard. “Have a safe trip.”

  When Mark stood up, his knees nearly buckled with relief. Dell gave him a funny look as they walked to the truck.

  Pussy.

  Mark didn’t care what Dell thought. He had come through. He had passed the test.

  And Glenn Traywick had not let them down.

  33

  It was still early when Jon Service’s take-home car, a navy Taurus, negotiated the curves along Oak Creek, flickering in and out of the shadow cast by the Mogollon Rim. The few stretches of road where the sun reached the pavement dappled with the shade of oak, walnut, wild grape, and sycamore. The sycamore turning rusty, the walnut trees and cottonwoods tinged yellow-gold.

  Glimpses of Oak Creek, at turns brown and hammered gold, rushing over the rocks below.

  But Laura was preoccupied by the idea of transuranic waste casks and crazy people like Bobby Burdette and the creeping fear that maybe those casks weren’t as indestructible as they had been made out to be.

  At least the bling-bling was gone. She’d ridden it out, and as usual it had gone away. Whatever it was, the lights didn’t stick around much longer than twenty minutes, and then her vision returned to normal.

  Jon Service’s car smelled of pine air freshener. If Laura hadn’t already known that Jon was a devout Catholic, it would have been clearly evident from the inside of the car: rosary beads hanging from the rearview, a stick-on rendering of Christ in the garden on the dashboard. He took the curves capably and fast as he talked into his headset.

  Laura thinking: Jack Taylor.

  Jack Taylor, John Traywick.

  Jack was a nickname for John, wasn’t it?

  All the way down 89A along Oak Creek Canyon, she thought about how easily she’d been taken in by Jack Taylor. Who wouldn’t be? There was no way she could have seen it coming. He was a grieving father of a murdered girl; that was the context she’d seen him in. But apparently, Kellee’s father was the head of the Earth Warriors.

  “Keep trying,” Service said into the headset, then looked at Laura. “We’ve got a task force, but we’re still working on the warrant.”

  “This is terrorism. How hard can it be?”

  “You want the happy-crappy version or the awful truth?”

  Laura shielded her eyes as the sun hit the back window of the VW microbus ahead of them—the damn thing had appeared out of nowhere and was going approximately twenty-five miles an hour. The Taurus put on the afterburners and swooped by the minibus to catcalling hippies and middle fingers.

  Laura said, “He’ll know the minute he sees all of us what’s going on. Is there a place down the road we can park? I’d rather not tell the world about it.”

  “There are a few places.”

  Laura tried Richie again, on his way up to Williams from Tucson. He was having his own problems. He’d been playing phone tag with a judge in Williams, trying to get a search warrant for Bobby Burdette’s house.

  Sometimes it seemed they had to do their job hog-tied and blindfolded.

  Jon turned into a clearing at the entrance to a private cabin, which was hidden behind a tall fence with posts carved into totem poles. A Coconino County sheriff’s car was already there. “Taylor’s Creekside Cabins is just around that curve,” Jon said.

  They gathered there for a short parlay, then started down the road.

  The cabins appeared around a blind corner, drowsing in a patch of sunlight. Megumi Taylor was out front, tending the flowers that aproned the office. She wore a floppy straw hat, pink blouse, old jeans, and gardening gloves. When she saw them she smiled, waved her trowel.

  Laura glanced at the sheriff’s deputies, nodded for them to stay back. She approached Megumi. “Mrs. Taylor?” She asked. “I need to talk to your husband.”

  Megumi’s sunny smile turned to confusion. She knew immediately that something was wrong. Laura wondered what she knew.

  Megumi glanced from Laura to Jon in his navy suit and tie, to the deputies standing behind them on the road. “Is this about Kellee?” she asked.

  “Is Mr. Taylor here?”

  Megumi stood. “He’s at cabin eight. I can call him.” She reached for her walkie-talkie.

  “That’s okay,” Laura said. “In fact, I’d prefer it if you wouldn’t call him. Where is cabin eight?”

  “Up the hill on the right—the far cabin. The guests who stayed there last night left early. They came in late last night and they left even before we opened up the common room for our continental breakfast. That doesn’t make sense, does it? Somebody spending all that money and coming to a beautiful place like this and not bothering to see—”

  She stopped suddenly, realizing she was babbling. “Nothing’s wrong, is there?”

  “We just need to talk to Mr. Taylor.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Laura nodded to one of the deputies. “Why don’t you stay with Mrs. Taylor?”

  They walked up the winding road to cabin eight, Laura thinking about Megumi’s reaction. Shana swore that Megumi and Kellee didn’t know about the Earth Warriors; Jack had purposely kept them in the dark to protect them. But it was clear Megumi suspected something. Either that or she had a really good antenna for trouble.

  An electric cart was parked down below the rustic cabin, the short bed behind the seats piled with sheets stuffed into pillowcases. The cabin door was open and a vacuum droned inside, vying with the blare of a TV set.

  Laura kept her hand close to the paddle holster riding on the waistband of her jeans. She noticed that Jon and the deputy were also ready.

  All of them hyperalert.

  They went in under cover of the vacuum. The television was turned up loud, so it could be heard over the noise—an old gangster movie starring Jimmy Cagney.

  Wearing one of those button-down, long-sleeved shirts they sold in L.L. Bean catalogs, Jack Taylor vacuumed around the other side of the bed, his back to them. Unaware, even though he should have noticed the change of light in the doorway. In his own world or just pretending not to notice? Laura couldn’t take a chance, so she moved fast. Cuffs ready, she caught up to him in a couple of strides, reached around his left side and grabbed his free hand, snapping the cuff in place, just as Jon Service’s voice cut through the vacuum noise and the movie: “FBI. Don’t move.”

  Jack Taylor stiffened, his back still to her. Turned his head slightly and saw Special Agent Service, gun at the ready.

  Laura reached around and shut off the vacuum.

  Taylor stared at Jon in bewilderment as Laura took his other hand and cuffed it to the first one behind his back. She steered him around the bed and marched him outdoors.

  “What’s going on?” He sounded puzzled, scared, and innocent.

  Special Agent Service read him the Miranda rights. Inside the cabin, there were shouts and gunfire. Laura recognized the dialogue; it was from the movie White Heat. The police commissioner yelling into a megaphone, exhorting Jimmy Cagney to give up.

  Laura leaning Taylor or Traywick or whatever-his-true-name-was against the side of the cabin, asking him if there was anything sharp in his pockets, anything she should know about.

  Inside cabin eight, Jimmy Cagney shooting back at his tormentors and the chemical tanks around him.

  Laura knew how it ended. Pretty soon he would yell, “I made it, Ma! Top of the World!”

  And go up like a Roman candle.

  34

  “I’m willing to talk,” Jack Taylor said.

  His shoulde
rs had slumped, and his hands had gone slack.

  Laura had never heard a suspect say that before. She’d heard people come in and confess to things they had not done, but this complete capitulation took her off guard. So much so, in fact, that she almost suggested he get himself a lawyer. She stopped herself, however. She glanced at Jon, who raised his eyebrows and smiled.

  Taylor added. “I want to talk.”

  “Why is that?” Jon asked.

  His voice was resigned. “I’m glad you caught me. I was thinking about turning myself in anyway.”

  That left Laura nonplussed.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the last few weeks, after—” He swallowed. “After what happened to Kellee.” He turned his face to Laura’s, and she saw the agony in his eyes. “This was my thing. I kept my wife and daughter out of it. I did my best to protect them both. You can ask my wife. She didn’t know anything about it.” He looked up at the sky, and Laura saw his eyes shine with tears. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know. It’s the least I can do.”

  They walked him down to the sheriff’s car and put him in the back.

  Laura said to Jon, “He seems sincere. While we’re waiting for the warrant, we should question him here. We have no idea what kind of timeline they’re going on.”

  Jon produced a digital recorder from his suit pocket.

  “You get everything?”

  Jon played it back. I want to talk. I’m glad you caught me.

  “That takes care of one headache.”

  They took him to the small room off the office where the continental breakfast was served. The room was paneled in pine with gingham curtains and homey plaques on the walls, at odds with the dark slashes on two canvases in the hallway. Big scrawled signatures on the right-hand side—Janet Weir.

  The long table by the wall had been cleared away except for the coffee, for which Laura was grateful.

  Laura and Jon sat him down at one of the little, round, oak tables near the communal TV.

  Jon turned on the digital recorder and gave his name, date, the name of the suspect, read him his rights again. “Do you agree to waive these rights?”

  “Yes, yes!” he said impatiently. “I already told you that. Where’s my wife?”

  “She’s been asked to stay in your place. A deputy’s with her.”

  “She had nothing to do with this. Nothing. I never told her what I—what we were doing. Never. Kellee and Dan didn’t know either. I would never put my wife or child in jeopardy in any way; I would never do that. I love them.”

  And so he told them about the Earth Warriors in fits and starts. Laura noticed he would give them a piece of information, almost off-handedly, and then work his way back to the rationalization that he was not a bad guy because he would never expose his family to this kind of thing.

  He told them he had headed up the original Earth Warriors from 1968 to 1972. They’d been on the run since their biggest coup—the torching of a ski resort under construction in the Sierra Nevada. In Jack Taylor’s parlance, he had “just walked away. I decided that it wasn’t worth it. No matter what we did, it was only a drop in the bucket compared to the destruction that was happening all over the country. I wanted to settle down and have a family, and I knew they’d chase me to the ends of the earth, so I changed my name and left California.”

  A little melodramatic, Laura thought, considering she had not been able to find anything on the old Earth Warriors except for one blog. Then he launched into an impassioned diatribe on the Kyoto Accord, the Gulf spill disaster, the Endangered Species Act, ANWR, SUVs, a dozen other acronyms.

  It was hard not to roll her eyes. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree with him on some things, but it seemed as if he was using them as a justification for his own behavior. She noticed that for all his willingness to come clean, he had told them precious little about the actual plot to steal a truck from Nevada Test Site. Interviewing Jack Taylor was like wading through quicksand.

  “Kellee was such a good little girl. Her mom died when she was five. I raised her by myself for five years—she was a real daddy’s girl. When Megumi and I started seeing each other, she didn’t sulk. We became a perfect little family. And now I’ve ruined it all.” His voice broke.

  When Jon patiently brought him back to the subject at hand, Jack managed to slip away yet again. His first wife dying of breast cancer, his little girl getting the brain tumor, what it was like to watch your daughter get sick and nearly die …

  “It was fate,” he said. “She was meant to be taken from us, and she was.” More tears. His hands, now cuffed in front, dangling uselessly between his legs. “My sweet little girl. She was ill-fated from the very beginning.”

  Jon asked, “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill her?”

  “Why would I know?” He looked horrified. “It can’t have anything to do with this. I kept her out of this. She didn’t know—”

  Jon Service leaned across the table and looked him in the eye. “Dan Yates knew about the arson at Jimmy Davis Ford. If you think there could be a link, I need to know.”

  Taylor leaned away, confused. Shook his head. “No way. I would never expose either of my two girls to this.” He shrugged, added—almost serenely—“It was fate. She was meant to be taken from me.”

  Laura wanted to hit him.

  Carefully bringing him back from each evasion, Jon Service took him through the plot with skill and patience. Eliciting from Jack Taylor how Bobby Burdette had been hired to help fix up some of the older cabins on the property, how they’d have a few beers together afterwards. How Jack told Bobby about his past as the head of the Earth Warriors in the sixties, under his real name, Jack Traywick. It was on those beery nights they hatched the plot to take a truck carrying nuclear waste from the NTS facility, but only to expose the real dangers—a government run amok.

  “Homeland Security,” Jack Taylor said contemptuously. “What a joke. If you knew half of what I know …”

  Warming to his subject.

  The plan was to take the truck to Lake Mohave on the Colorado River and leave it in the parking lot at Cottonwood Cove. “That would throw a scare into anybody. You know the Colorado provides water for three states? Imagine if something happened to that truck and it got into the water, think about that.” Smug.

  Laura had heard that with plutonium, the real danger was if it were released into the air. At least that was what she’d heard on the TV show Modern Marvels.

  Laura could see he was starting to enjoy himself, elaborating on his story, throwing around words like “Trilateral Commission” and an older one, “the military-industrial complex.”

  “Laughlin’s just down river. Can you imagine the panic that would cause? Maybe the Stepford Americans will finally catch on, see what their government is doing to them.”

  A couple of anonymous calls to the media, and the truth would be known.

  Jon said, “Is Glenn Traywick your brother?”

  Jack Taylor didn’t answer.

  “Is Glenn Traywick involved?”

  But on this issue, Jack Taylor would not be moved. “I want my lawyer now,” he said serenely.

  What Laura wanted was to wipe that supercilious smile off his face. She regretted there were laws against police brutality.

  They walked him back to the car. Behind them, Megumi stood in the parking lot, still in her floppy hat. Her whole world crumbling around her.

  But Laura noticed she did not come up to talk to her husband. Instead, Jack Taylor’s wife gave them a small wave and walked straight-backed up the steps into the general store. Holding the hurt to herself.

  As they approached the sheriff’s vehicle, Jack Taylor stopped and stared at the deep blue sky above them, inhaling the fresh mountain air. “There’s more you should know.”

  “Yes, sir?” Laura asked.

  “If I were you, I’d move fast.”

  Glenn Traywick was almost to the North Las Vegas airport when he punched in the
number for Michelle’s work phone. He’d already tried her home and her cell with no luck.

  “Trecor Business Equipment, may I help you?” It was Michelle, her voice crisp and professional.

  “I thought you’d be home by now.”

  “Don’t worry, be happy. I’m all packed. Everything I need is in the back of the car.”

  “What about the moving van?”

  “Been and gone”

  He checked his watch. “I should be in Flag by eleven thirty. You know where to go?”

  “Like, you never took me flying before,” she said in her best imitation of a Valley girl.

  He ignored that. Sometimes Michelle could be maddening. “I want you to be ready to go. Just in case things go south.”

  “I’ll be there, love-pucky. Don’t you worry about that.”

  “You were careful not to pack too much? You put it on the scale, didn’t you? It can’t be over a hundred pounds.”

  “Been there, done that.”

  “I want to be in Calgary by the time this shit hits the fan.”

  “Next stop, the Loon Lake Lodge. Just you, me, and the loons.”

  “We’re gonna be famous.”

  “Unknown, but famous.”

  “That’s the plan.” He saw the sign for the airport up ahead. “I’m at VGT. I’ll see you soon.”

  As he walked out to the red-white-and-blue Cessna C-175 tied down closest to the fence, Glenn decided that the pre-flight would have to be minimal—check the oil, drain the sumps, and go. He didn’t have to file a flight plan for his trip to Flagstaff, but at some point between Flag and Calgary he’d have to, by law, if he was going to get into Canadian airspace. He’d debated flying in under the radar—literally—but that meant taking a lot chances he was not ready for, flying through tight valleys at low altitudes.

  He was too old for that.

  He’d decided to file his flight plan at the last place he stopped for gas, hop over the border, and ditch the plane the minute he got there.

  If everything went according to plan, he would be in Canada before they found the truck. Jack had promised him some lead time. Still, he knew he was cutting it close. If any one of his co-conspirators got caught and implicated him, he could be looking at Canadian Mounted Police along with Customs in Calgary.