by Thomas Perry
The next morning, when the sky was just light enough to begin imparting color to the world and the first chirping of birds in the trees began, two engines turned over and started, and two vehicles advanced out of the flat compound and moved onto the narrow dirt road through the woods. The highway was just over three miles away, and following its winding, slow descent out of the hills would take time, but it was serviceable, and the destination was set and clear. They had all been there before.
26
Leah Hawkins woke as the sunlight began finding its way into her room through the very narrow spaces between the slats of her shutters. The stimuli that had broken through into her sleep were the sounds of the familiar birds in the city of Weldonville—first the cooing of the mourning doves and then the warbling of mockingbirds. When the squawking of the jays and magpies began, a person had to admit it was morning.
When she moved, she felt the smooth, firm surface of the California king mattress she had bought five years ago for a sale price that was still too high, but which had been a good investment. She and Mark Ballard had both been tall and long-limbed, so the extra space had been good. And Leah had never spent much money on anything, so she could afford the luxury.
She stretched on the bed to limber up her back, and then swung her legs off the bed to the floor and walked to the adjoining bathroom. As her eyes got used to the light, she stared hard at everything. She had hired Mrs. Creeden from across the street to keep an eye on the house while she was gone, to clean it once a week, water the indoor plants, and change a few things arbitrarily when she did—pull a shade up or down, move a plant to a different window.
It had given Mrs. Creeden a bit of extra cash, and kept Leah from worrying. As she looked around, she realized there was no dust. When Leah had lived here, there were places where dust accumulated, but no more. Things had undoubtedly been very clean after the first week’s visit. Since then they had been polished. Before she left again, she would have to tell Mrs. Creeden that she could relax her standards a bit.
Leah showered. She had brought a couple of detective suits on the hunt for the killers. She had worn them only a couple of times, but they had been packed and unpacked a lot, so they were going to the dry cleaner. She looked at the supply in her closet. There were black suits, dark gray, navy blue, and light gray, all pressed and in cleaners’ bags. She picked black this time, because it looked enough like a Weldonville police uniform to fool the eye from a distance, and she wanted her time here to look professional. Two people knew what she had been doing while she was away. Most didn’t, and there was also a chance that strangers might visit who expected things to be the same.
She put her badge and cuffs on her belt, and her Glock in its holster, where it would be hidden by her coat. She stepped into the closet so she could see herself from two sides in the full-length mirrors.
She put on her polished black cop shoes and went into the kitchen, made instant coffee, and heated a frozen egg-and-bagel object in the microwave. She had not yet turned in the rental car, so she drove it to the police lot at the Public Safety Building. She would have somebody follow her to surrender it at the lot in Denver later.
Because she was over an hour early for the day shift, she got out and walked around the building to the front entrance. There was a new sight, a plaque in bronze and black about the size of a door.
The sense of familiarity that had been like a gentle current moving her along went away. The plaque had been delivered at least a year after it had been ordered and was installed while she was gone. The top of the metal surface had big letters and numbers that said only “JULY 19” and the year.
Below it in smaller letters were a few lines about the mass escape from the federal penitentiary at Weldonville. Under that was a heading that said, “FEDERAL CORRECTIONS OFFICERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES.” There were forty-two of them, some of them familiar—the warden, Gene Humphry, Paul Scott, Will McGovern, Bill Halvorsen’s brother Nick. She noticed Ciccio, Decker, Yashinsky, Tiedemann, Polk, Pelletier, Costa.
There was a column headed “WELDONVILLE OFFICERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES.” It was led by Joseph Roberts, the chief of police, and then, curiously, Mark Ballard, city manager, and then the sergeant and seven patrolmen killed in the battle of Main Street. The cops had been like members of her family. Willenz and Gutierrez, the two she’d driven to the fight; Diane Krantz and Kylee Fortin, the two women cops she had helped train; Dan Kazmerdjian, Dick Turner, Tom Bond. Then came a much longer list titled “CITIZENS OF WELDONVILLE.” Leah’s eyes ran down the columns, as though weighted by gravity. She knew the names so well that she wasn’t reading, just scanning for familiar people in a crowd.
She saw Katherine Long, Katy Long, and James Long, the family of that man from New York who had volunteered to go after the killers. She found Marjorie Clay’s parents, and Kristen Green’s father and her sister Stephanie, a McClellan who was Ray’s cousin that he’d barely known. Leah’s best school friend Kathy Harris was there, the other tall girl in her class. She saw the names of people she’d known who had been as old as in their eighties and ones younger than ten. There were some she had deeply admired and others she had arrested. She looked away.
She was at the top of the steps, and kept walking, relieved to get past the long list of names. She stepped into the building through the double glass doors and saw Fred Burmeyer, one of the cops who had survived the fight on Main.
“Hello, Chief,” he said.
Leah said, “The chief’s out there on the plaque.”
“Yep, and we miss him, but somebody’s got to do it, and we’re glad we had you to step in.”
“Thanks, Fred. How have you been?”
“Not too bad. We’re mostly writing tickets, keeping people friendly and the drunks out of the road.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s what the town hired us for. Be safe.”
She walked into the front entrance to the police station, past the counter where the general public was served, and into the office bay. Art Sprague, the top sergeant, sat at his desk outside the glass wall of her office. She unlocked the office door and said, “Morning, Art. Come on in.”
When he came in, she said, “You could have used the chief’s office while I was gone.”
Art shrugged. “Thanks, Leah. But moving into somebody else’s space while they’re gone is just an extra job. In fact it’s two. You have to move out again too. And now and then we’ll get a visit from a state cop or one of the feds from the prison. If they see you’re not in your office, you’re just out. If they see somebody else in your office, then you’re gone.”
“Got it. Thanks, Art. Men sure are devious and manipulative.” She sat down behind the desk. “Now, is there anything I can do to take some of the weight of the work off while I’m here?”
“Not much. We’re breaking up domestic squabbles and confiscating illegal fireworks. The few regular reports that go to the state or the court are sitting in your in-box waiting for your signature. That’s about it.”
She glanced at the stack of folders in the basket at the corner of her desk. “I can take care of those this morning. If you have time, can you collect everything about July 19 that has come in from the FBI or the state police since I left?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s all together. I’ll bring it in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, Art,” she said. She lifted the stack of forms and reports and set them in the center of the desk, selected a pen from the center drawer, and went to work.
She read reports and signed them, read the forms and initialed them, and gradually worked her way down to the empty blotter. When she looked up, it was already one-thirty. She collected the papers that had to be filed and put them in their proper places; prepared the reports for mailing to government offices and put them in envelopes, stamped them with the city’s postage meter, and set them on the counter for the mailman’s three o’clock pickup.
When she finished, it was two, and Art returned from lunc
h. When he did, he found Leah’s note: “Good work, Art.” Leah was out walking toward Bremmer’s restaurant.
The summer was more than half over, and the trees were thick with big green leaves. She had spent so many of her seasons here that she was already thinking about how broad and colorful they would be in October. But summer was at its best, and it reminded her of the summers when she was a girl, the hot afternoons stretching on so there was time to play nine innings of baseball and then go swimming and then play chase, her neighborhood’s version of hide-and-seek, until after dark.
The chase games often had more than twenty kids playing. The ones captured had to become members of the mob of chasers, so the odds against the runner grew worse and worse. Leah’s disadvantage had been her height, so hiding places were not the answer for her. She had to keep moving, anticipating the patrol routes of the chasers and the spots where they would look for her. Leah’s time would come later in the game, when most people were already caught, and the light was becoming dim. She would lure as many of the chasers as far away as she could from the tall tree they used for home base, and then use her long, rapid strides to outdistance them and beat them to the tree. She remembered slapping the bark and yelling, “Home free!” It had seemed natural, but as she thought about it now, she wondered where that expression had come from.
She walked to the front of Bremmer’s and then inside. Annie Bremmer’s eyes widened and then recovered, and she hugged Leah. “You’re back,” she whispered.
“Just for a while,” Leah whispered back.
Annie led her to the booth where they had sat together sometimes with their middle school friends, while Annie’s father brought them identical dinners with cola and ginger ale in wineglasses.
This afternoon Leah had a tuna salad and a cup of coffee. Annie sat with her for a few minutes, which Leah spent asking about the rare vacation Annie had taken with her husband, Dave, and the two children. It sounded nice to Leah. At three o’clock, Leah walked back to her office in the Public Safety Building. This time she went in the back way.
She spent the rest of the afternoon reading the information that had been shared by law enforcement agencies during her absence. As she had feared, the bulk of the information was about what Leah had done. She was pleased to see that the FBI and the local cops thought of each of the killings as a local crime, unrelated to the deaths of other former prisoners from Weldonville who had died in other parts of the country that summer. A high percentage of the men who died violent deaths each year had been in prison at some point, and federal prisons alone held about 184,000 prisoners at a time. The average federal inmate was white, about thirty-six years old—roughly what the twelve had been—so the reports of their deaths hadn’t stood out at first.
She noticed a disappointing trend too. The FBI information had dwindled. As soon as the shooting had stopped on July 20 two years ago and order had been restored, the FBI had begun to assert its jurisdiction. Weldonville Penitentiary was a federal facility. The murdered guards and support staff had been federal employees. Escape was a federal crime. Anyone who had not been caught in the first twenty-four hours had probably crossed a state line or two.
Leah had asked for the favor of exceptional information sharing. She had pointed out that the crimes committed in the city limits of Weldonville—murder, rape, arson, grand larceny, auto theft, weapons charges—were also violations of Colorado laws. At the time of this discussion Leah had been standing on Main Street, where there had been a decisive and ferocious battle that no federal officer had even arrived in time to witness. Bodies were still being removed from the corner of Main and Constitution because there were too few ambulances to reinforce the single coroner’s van, and bodies had to be transported to other towns to await autopsies.
The agreement had been largely unspoken. The terms had seemed to be that Leah and city officials would not point out on national television that if a federal prison failed, the local citizens and their police were on their own. In return, the FBI would be uncharacteristically open and cooperative with the Weldonville officials. They would provide prompt updates on whatever they learned about the escaped inmates. At the time, nobody had known that there would be a federal grant to Weldonville to rebuild its public safety program. The FBI may not have suggested it, but they certainly hadn’t blocked it either.
The first year had brought a flood of information that had come from criminal investigations, trials, prisoner records, and the crime scene reports from the Weldonville prison break. They were massive and detailed, including DNA profiles, fingerprints, and photographs. But now that the second year had passed, there was very little new information about any of the men. What Leah was reading was mainly about the six men she had killed, and most of the information was misinterpreted.
Weiss’s body might not be found for years. His mother’s garage was now a kind of family tomb he shared with her. Victor Panko had been only one of five victims who had died violently in Buffalo in one night, four of them relatives. Their workshop had been burned in an arson fire, and contained barely identifiable machines for making IDs and credit cards, so the local police suspected that some crew involved in immigration fraud or human trafficking had turned on the family. Alan Becker’s death in New York City looked a lot like an organized crime hit, but nobody had found any evidence, or even rumor, that he’d had any dealings with organized criminals. The three men killed in California had died on a ranch owned by Martin Ortega under a false name, and they had died with two other members of Ortega’s prison gang. What Bysantski and Duquesne had been doing at the stronghold of a Mexican gang at the time was unknown. A hoard of weapons had been in the house, and the huge supply of ammunition that had cooked off in the fire had made it impossible for firefighters to enter until everything combustible had been consumed. Nobody had any theories about foul play, and most thought it might have been an accident caused by misuse of propane intended for cooking and heating.
The findings on the deaths led nowhere and implicated no suspects, which made Leah feel relieved. She reread the information that was included on the remaining six fugitives, but she found little that she hadn’t known already. Lee Wolf, Timothy McKinney, Edison Leonard, Joseph Lambert, James Holliman, and Lonny Mann were assumed to be alive, simply because there was no information to the contrary.
Lee Wolf’s group, the Swift Sword of the Savior, had apparently disbanded after Wolf and a few others had been convicted of, among other crimes, bombing and burning a predominantly African American church, a synagogue, and a school in Oklahoma. But recently there had been some posts and recordings on the dark web by people hinting that they were members. There had been no mention of Wolf.
Timothy McKinney might have been seen in Idaho the previous summer. A hiker backpacking in the mountains had taken a few photographs of people at a rest spot near a spring. One man objected, snatched the camera, and opened it to expose the film before throwing it on the ground. He didn’t notice that the man’s girlfriend was recording the event with her cell phone. A woman in the park police office thought he looked a bit like Timothy McKinney. So did the FBI and its facial-recognition software, but he had not been seen again.
There were similar tips on Mann and Holliman, but none of them struck Leah as promising, and the FBI was apparently waiting for further leads.
That afternoon, Leah called the mayor to tell him she was in town. He said, “That’s great, Leah. Do you think you could come to a closed-door session of the city council on Wednesday night? It would help keep the council happy if you could tell them something soothing about your sabbatical. Phil and I would also like to hear anything you can tell us about how things are actually going.”
“I’ll be there,” she said.
“What time?”
“Whatever time you hold it.”
“We like to do these things at eight. That way everybody has time to get something to eat before we start. I’ve found it makes them less peckish. More business gets done
with fewer questions and arguments.”
“I’m for that,” she said. “I’ll see you at eight on Wednesday.”
“Good.”
Leah went to bed early that night. It was because she wanted to get used to the mountain standard time, since she might be in Weldonville for a while. She had also spent some of the previous night thinking about revenge and the taking of lives.
Leah Hawkins was not a religious person. Among the big old buildings surrounding the city park were Weldonville’s half dozen churches. The church she had walked out of one Sunday morning and seldom visited again was the Presbyterian one. It had happened the summer when she was about to turn thirteen. As she had gone down the sidewalk that Sunday morning, she had suddenly understood that if there was a God, He would look down on her next Sunday with the same love if she was in her family’s pew or swimming at the lake.
Lately she had noticed a subtle and unwelcome change. She had begun to feel a memory of her buried religious life. If childhood piety was like having chicken pox, its resurgence was like shingles—the itching had come back decades later as pain. She caught herself many nights silently mouthing the words “Thank you,” leaving out what she was thankful for, which was “today,” the one she’d just had. Sometimes she would catch herself asking, “Please take care of” somebody.
Lately she had caught herself forming the words “Please forgive.” She would stop in the middle if she could do it in time. The rule for forgiveness between man and God, as she had grown up understanding it, was that you couldn’t be forgiven if you didn’t sincerely regret what you’d done and intend to quit doing it. She was not interested in repenting. She wouldn’t have begun killing people if she hadn’t considered it carefully and decided she should go out and get them. Her crimes were not accidents or mistakes. Anyway, the version of Christianity she knew was not the kind in which anybody was willing to waste his time listening to your regrets, least of all God. And innocence wasn’t something that could be restored.
