A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  Her large cup of coffee was in the cup holder on the console by her right hand. She thought about the six murders she had committed so far. She had been forced to take Weiss when she had, even though it was not the best time for her. It had taken her some days afterward to realize that it probably had been the best time for her. Weiss was an electronics wizard. Before he would kidnap a girl in a small, open parking lot, he had neutralized the surveillance cameras above the parking lot. She had left his body in the trunk of his own car in his garage, and it might be months, or even years, before he was found. Nobody had been looking anymore except her.

  The mess in Buffalo had been terrible. She had gotten Stella Wizshinski, a good woman and a sister cop, murdered in the search for Panko. Nothing could make up for that. She had killed the two men who had killed Stella, but that didn’t buy anything for Stella. And now Leah was being protected from apprehension by the arson fire in the print shop. There could be no trace of her prints, DNA, or even any image on any hidden camera that hadn’t been burned, and the gun she’d used was the numberless Glock that couldn’t be traced.

  The murder of Alan Becker had brought a lot of risk, but she’d made sure there wouldn’t be recordings from the surveillance cameras in the building. She had covered all the protective domes over the cameras without letting her face be seen by any of them. She had been dressed like a man, and the vest and hooded sweatshirt had covered all the parts of her that might suggest she wasn’t one. She’d worn gloves, met nobody coming in or out, and had disguised the number on the license plate on the rear of the van she’d used. Leaving the body in the stairway meant there wouldn’t be much contact with it. When the authorities realized that Michael Miller was Alan Becker, they would still not imagine she was the one who had killed him. It was a man who had looked like a workman.

  Her biggest form of protection would be her past life. Nobody would see her as a possible suspect unless she got caught in the act. She had been a popular and successful officer in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and still had people there who had been sorry to see her go. A couple of them were now high-ranking commanders.

  A background investigation would reveal that her salary, expenditures, and savings were all in balance. She’d always made more than she spent, but the surplus would not raise any eyebrows. She had an excellent record of arrests and convictions in Weldonville, having solved and brought to conviction all four homicides that had happened during her time, and done a good job on cases of all kinds. She had always found that a homicide investigator could learn plenty about people by examining credit reports and public records of births, marriages, divorces, inheritances, and name changes. A background report on Leah would have yielded nothing.

  When she investigated a suspect, she searched for gossips and detractors. It wouldn’t work on her because she didn’t attract that kind of attention. When she was young, there had been a certain amount of interest in her. She had been a minor local celebrity since she had gotten tall enough to dunk a basketball in high school games. For a while people had assumed she’d meet some male player at the University of Colorado, marry him, and raise a few very tall children. When that didn’t happen, some people just assumed that she was a lesbian who wasn’t interested in making any announcements about it. When she became a state cop, hours away from Weldonville in Denver, people forgot about her personal life.

  There was some revival of interest later, when Leah returned to Weldonville as a homicide detective. She came back to Weldonville a short time after the new city manager, Mark Ballard, did. People who hung around city hall and the police station learned that Leah had known Ballard and his wife during the time when they’d all lived in Denver. But as far as Leah could tell, the local gossips never took up the story from there.

  They could have. Leah’s record as a police officer was impeccable. Her personal life was not. She was the girlfriend of the city manager, but the way they had gone about their adultery had never been exciting enough to interest anyone else. She and Ballard slept together at her house about twice a week, nearly always on Monday and Thursday, but the rest of the time they were apart. A few times a year they went off for a couple of weekend days together to some resort where nobody knew them to attend a convention related to Mark Ballard’s work. Their cell phone records would have indicated that they didn’t even talk to each other every day. There had never been any scandal, and none of the three had said anything to anyone about the others. They were all nice people.

  She reached Los Angeles on August 24 and checked into a hotel. There was no question in her mind which man she was going after first. It would have to be the most dangerous one. Matt Bysantski was a violent man, and Paul Duquesne was the one the FBI believed had organized the others and called for a prison break. But they were not charismatic figures who inspired other men. They were people who hired other men.

  Martin Ortega was the scary one. He had been one of the leaders—“shot callers” was the common term—for the largest of the Mexican prison gangs. He was a genuine leader. He exhibited all the traits. He had shown physical bravery and ruthlessness many times in fights, shootouts, and killings inside and outside prison, so he was a role model for others. He was cunning and wily in his planning and execution of criminal activities. And he seemed to have spent a lifetime showing loyalty to his superiors and respect to his inferiors, and they returned both. If she didn’t get him first, he would have a chance to raise a little army.

  She rented a black Mustang and drove to the address in Pacoima that was on the driver’s license that said Juan Javier Martinez but carried Ortega’s photograph. On the first pass she used her cell phone to make a video of her progress through his neighborhood. Her recording showed which houses had dogs tied in the yard or dog bowls in back, which had toys or bicycles, which had too many cars parked on their lawns or around them to be single-family dwellings, which routes were clear at night and which might be blocked by cars cruising or groups of young men congregating. She searched for police units and police activity. She drove far away and parked, then came back through an hour later, and an hour after that, each time filling in or modifying her earlier observations. She made six trips, stopping only at dawn, when people were getting up to go to work.

  She performed reconnaissance runs during the next three days, observing the lives people were living around Ortega’s house. After the third day, she had made enough observations. During the time she’d been watching the house, she hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave. No curtain was moved. No mail was delivered to the mailbox on the front of the house. And on Wednesday, when all the houses nearby had their black, green, and blue trash bins out at the curb for the trucks to pick up, there were no bins at Ortega’s. The house was empty. She would have to go in and see what she could find inside.

  She drove to the airport and returned the Mustang she had rented because of the chance that it had become too familiar, and exchanged it for a black Chevrolet Traverse 1LT with a 310-horsepower engine. She had a strong feeling that she might have to leave Ortega’s house in a hurry. She used black electrical tape to change some of the numbers on the plates.

  She reached the house at 2:30 a.m., parked the car around the corner, and walked the perimeter of the building. It was a small house painted light yellow with a small porch at the front and a broad, dusty yard in the back with one large tree, surrounded by a chain-link fence. She moved from window to window.

  When she reached the side window, she stopped. She pushed her small flashlight against the glass, shielded it with her hand, and turned it on.

  What she saw inside was a shotgun. He had it rigged as a spring gun. It was an insidious device, but even worse, it could mean that he had left his house because he knew someone was coming for him. The thought hit her so powerfully that she put her back to the wall and stood still, looking outward at the road, the other houses nearby, and the street while she reconsidered this visit.

  She saw no sign of anyone, so she began
to move again, first around the house, looking in each window as she came to it. There was no sign of electronic wiring or equipment that might be part of an alarm system. That was no surprise to Leah, because summoning patrols and police didn’t often appeal to fugitives. Leah selected a small windowpane set into the side door, lifted a loose brick on the walkway, wrapped her jacket around it, and broke the pane. She reached inside and disengaged the deadbolt, slowly turned the knob, then knelt down to the hinge side of the door and pushed it open from the lower corner, where a second spring gun wouldn’t be aimed.

  She stepped inside with pistol drawn and flashlight sweeping the kitchen. She advanced from room to room quickly, taking one moment to pause at the doorway prepared to fire, and then opening closets, looking under beds, and finally moving to the next room, careful never to leave an unsearched space behind her. She had been right. Nobody was there.

  She moved to the living room and examined the spring gun. It was a modern replica of a coach gun—double-barreled and short, with gaudy scrollwork on the steel parts to make it look antique. The shotgun was held fast to a small table by a pair of screw-down woodworking clamps and propped on a bag of sand. The two triggers had monofilament fishing line tied to them and then running to the back wall, where there were eye bolts, and then forward to more eyebolts in the door and the front wall. The way the gun was rigged, one barrel would go off if the front door opened, but the other would go off if someone walked across the dark living room between the door and the gun.

  Leah spent the next hour searching the house. She was most interested in finding caches of paper—financial records, mail, bills, or anything else that would reveal a second residence, a car description or license number, the identities and addresses of friends, the numbers of credit accounts. Her search found nothing. Then Leah found a cardboard box pushed to the back of a high shelf in a closet, as though Ortega had forgotten it was there. It occurred to Leah that she probably had found it only because she was taller than Ortega.

  In the cardboard box were several oversize paperback books, one of which contained parts breakdowns, model number lists, and schematics for a two-year-old Harley-Davidson motorcycle; the others were catalogs for camping and wilderness equipment and for construction tools and machinery. She picked the catalogs up one by one to shake loose any papers, and then found two manila envelopes lying flat at the bottom of the box.

  She shone her flashlight inside them. They held a cache of thumb drives.

  She used her phone to photograph the covers of the catalogs, then put the thumb drives from the two envelopes into her jacket pockets and zipped them shut.

  She headed for the kitchen, where she had entered the house and could expect to leave it safely. As she stepped into the kitchen, she glanced at the refrigerator. She should take a look at the food in there to see how long Martin Ortega had been gone.

  Leah opened the refrigerator, and as she did, two things happened. The bulb above the top shelf of the refrigerator turned the dark room into a lighted one, and a fearsome shape she’d seen and touched only in training sessions, egg-shaped with incised sections that had earned it the nickname “pineapple,” tumbled from the spot where it had been propped against the refrigerator door into the empty air in front of her.

  Leah saw the grenade fall and hit the kitchen floor, and saw the safety lever that was usually held in place by a pin fly off as the grenade bounced. She knew that when the lever came off, the striker inside hit the cap, and she had three to five seconds before the fuse burned down to the explosive charge.

  Leah went to one knee on the floor and snatched the grenade up with one hand while she opened the door of the dishwasher beside her with the other. She tossed the grenade into the lower basket, slammed the door shut so it locked, and then sprang forward and scrambled across the floor toward the dining room like a crab. She made one last effort and launched herself through the doorway just as the fire in the fuse reached the explosive.

  The grenade detonated, and the shock hit Leah like a moving wall. The dining room floor seemed to rise to meet her, and in the kitchen, the door of the stainless-steel dishwasher, dented and pierced by shrapnel, flew across the room and stuck in the wallboard. The tiled counter was heaved upward, separating tiles and sloughing them off onto the floor. The cabinets surrounding the dishwasher were blown to splinters, and a spout of water erupted from one of the broken pipes under the sink.

  In the dining room, Leah was lying on the wooden floor gasping for breath with her hands still pressed to her ears. Either the belly flop or the concussion had knocked the wind out of her.

  The noise had been deafening. She managed to push herself up off the floor and stagger across the kitchen to the back door. She went down the steps as quickly as she could manage, walked with determination until she could balance well enough to run, and made it to her parked car.

  Lights were coming on far down the street as people came out to see what had caused the explosion. She got into the car and started it. As she drove the black SUV away from the area, she hoped that whatever was on the thumb drives was worth almost dying for. Then she realized that was too much to ask. Most people died for nothing.

  22

  For the rest of the night and part of the morning, Leah stayed in bed in her hotel room, sleeping off the effects of her first meeting with a live hand grenade. After the rattling of carts in the hallway woke her a third time, she got up, showered, dressed, and ate, and then returned to her room to see what was on the thumb drives she had taken from Ortega’s house.

  She plugged one into her laptop and saw a picture gallery of miniatures, six to a row. There were hundreds of them. The drives seemed to be where Ortega kept his personal photographs.

  Many of the pictures had been taken at the small single-story yellow house where she had found them. There were pictures of families, both parents heavily tattooed, lovingly holding babies and toddlers. There were about a hundred shots of boys about ten years old engaged in Little League baseball games. The pictures were always a team with blue uniforms against a variety of opponents, most of the games played on a field with fences painted green and then plastered with the ads of sponsors, like in the professional stadiums. In the distant background there was a high earthwork that looked like some ancient monument but was probably related to railroads.

  She scanned each of the drives methodically, using a pen to mark each for contents—“LL Baseball,” “Friends and Neighbors,” etc. As she went on, she began to see things she had not been expecting. There was a picture of Ortega that had to be recent.

  In his prison pictures, Martin Ortega had a shaved head with the number 13, representing the letter “M,” tattooed on his skull. This picture showed a man with graying hair about three inches long that covered the spot where Ortega’s tattoo would have been. He was sitting on a motorcycle in front of his house in Pacoima, with four other men standing around. They all looked Latino, and they had many tattoos, including a couple of full sleeves, but if there was any gang symbolism, it was too difficult for Leah to read.

  Leah took a few seconds of staring for her impression to grow from a resemblance to Martin Ortega to an assurance that this was Ortega. She realized she could have walked right up to him and not recognized him in time. Maybe the thumb drive had saved her life.

  One photograph showed Ortega in back of his house lying on an oversize hammock in a pair of jeans with a bare chest. Lying on both sides of him were two women with long, silky black hair. One of them was as thin as a model, and the other was curvy and buxom. Both were wearing only bikini bottoms, and had their chests pressed tightly against Ortega’s sides to hide from the camera.

  She thought maybe these women were the ones who had been staying in the other two bedrooms of Ortega’s house. She studied their faces, because if she ever saw one of them, it would mean he was probably nearby. She tapped on another picture to enlarge it. It was Ortega and the women, but this time they were all fully dressed, riding four-whe
el off-road vehicles, looking over their shoulders at the camera. They were on a dirt and gravel road and had just gone through an open gate. It was possible to see past the three, up the road. The road veered a bit to the left, and then straightened and ran along a barbed-wire fence up a gradual rise toward the crest of a hill. The hill had a mound on top with what looked like a house. There were three trees around it that looked as though they had probably been planted for shade some decades ago.

  She inserted another thumb drive and saw several rows of pictures that looked like photographs of the same place. She selected one with the same configuration of people. This one was taken from farther outside the property. In this shot it was possible to see a big rural mailbox mounted on a post outside the gate. There was no name on it, but there was the number 24900 stenciled on the box. Standing on the road were four men carrying hunting rifles.

  There were five men on motorcycles in one picture. The motorcycles were all facing the camera, so no license plates were visible.

  Leah noticed that the shadows of the people on the dirt road always fell to one side, never in front of or behind the people. That meant the dirt road ran north and south, which meant that the highway it joined outside the gate ran east and west.

  There was a photograph of Ortega’s two girlfriends in the parking lot of a large supermarket. The two women were lifting bags and boxes from two loaded shopping carts and putting them in the back of a pickup truck. She could see big letters along the upper part of the supermarket that said, “SAFEWAY.”

  But which Safeway store? There were at least a couple thousand of them. There could be a thousand in California alone.

  Leah looked at the cars parked around the women’s pickup, using her fingers on the screen to expand the photograph. She could see license plates. She began to get excited. Hotel lots were full of cars from other places. Cars parked at supermarkets were mostly local.