Winslow- The Lost Hunters

by David Francis Curran

  “I don’t either.”

  “But yes, have the deputy meet me just outside the trailer park. And then we can walk in together. That way maybe this guy won’t see us, and we won’t spook him.”

  “Sounds good,” Goldstone said.

  “Just give me the address,” I said as I pulled and turned the Jeep around.

  The trailer park Nate Hanassey lived in was off W. Broadway in Missoula closer to the airport than the heart of town. So I got off the 90 on Airport Road and was just turning left on Highway 10 to backtrack toward it when my phone rang. I pulled over to the side of the road and answered.

  “Doyle, this is Frank Davis. Did you talk to the chief?”

  “Yes, I'm on my way to meet you.”

  “Understood. I wanted you to know I just checked. The truck is in front of the guy’s trailer.”

  “You drove by his house?” I asked, unable to keep the concern out of my voice. “You didn't alert the guy in any way?”

  “That’s a negative on alerting the guy. He’s at the very end of a dead-end street, and I only drove by on the cross street. The Missoula Sheriff's department drives by this area regularly, so it shouldn’t have alerted him. I used field glasses to establish the truck was there.

  “What is your ETA?”

  “I’ll be there in a jiff. I’ll blink my lights twice when I pull up, so you know it’s me.”

  I hung up the phone and soon pulled into the entry road behind the deputy’s patrol car, blinked my headlights twice, and stopped.

  Davis got out as I got out of my Jeep. He walked up to me with his hand out.

  “Frank Davis,” he said.

  “Winslow Doyle,” taking his hand. He had a firm grip and didn’t try to impress me by squeezing the hell out of mine. So far I liked him.

  “Good idea to blink your lights,” he said. “Anybody could have pulled up behind me. How do you want to do this?”

  “Is it too far to walk from here?”

  “It’s doable. And if we move closer someone might notice my cruiser. Here,” he indicated the entrance where we were parked, “we can pretend I’m ticketing you. Missoula knows I'm here, so we are good.”

  He put the bubble gum lights on top of his cruiser on, fetched a flashlight and locked the vehicle. I went back, got my flashlight, locked my Jeep, and we started down the road into the trailer park.

  Since Davis knew where we were headed, I followed him. There was a layer of thin ice on the roadway that crunched beneath out feet. We walked about a city block before Davis turned left. About halfway down this street, there was an alleyway. It was snow-covered and had two tire ruts running down unto the shadows between trailers.

  I had already noticed there were halogen lights on poles about every hundred feet along the roadways. These were put in by the trailer park and not the city, so they had minimal illumination. But still, there was enough light for anyone looking out their window to see us. The alley did not have any lights.

  “Davis?” I said as we crossed the alleyway.

  Frank turned to me.

  I pointed to the lamps along the paved road we were walking. “Are there lights like this on Hanassey’s street?”

  He nodded.

  I gestured with my flashlight toward the alley.

  “Does this run by his trailer?”

  “It should.”

  “Can we get close to his truck?”

  Davis just nodded.

  He turned into the alley placing his feet in the far left rut. I followed in the right rut. About halfway down the alley, he turned his flashlight off. I did the same and walked up, so I was abreast of him. There was light coming from the trailer windows facing the alley. One trailer not far away had a yellow back porch light on.

  “He’s at the very end,” Davis said gesturing toward the shadowy area down the alley. “If we're lucky the truck will be in the trailer’s shadow.”

  I gave him a thumbs up, and we continued on into the deeper shadows. My heart began racing as we neared the last trailer. The trailer next to it had no lights on, and its grass had obviously not been cut over the summer.

  We both slowed our pace and then barely eased ahead at the corner of the trailer so we could peek around it.

  The trailer did indeed block the light from the one halogen bulb near the middle of the dead-end street. Light came from the trailer itself but only from the front window. It cast a yellow rectangle on the snow just past the tail end of the truck. It was so dark it was hard to tell the truck was red, except for the tail end where the window light gave it some illumination. It looked almost black. Luckily it had been parked forward in the space next to the trailer. So the front end was toward us. We were able to walk just a few paces across the snowy yard to reach the truck.

  Davis bent down, and holding his flashlight close to the front end on the passenger side of the truck, turned it on. I could see that the headlight and turn light were intact. They glowed in the flashlight beam. I felt my heart sinking. This wasn’t the truck? Just to make sure that the lab guys didn’t have the wrong lights in the report I stepped close to the driver’s side lights and put my flashlight on them. The lights were intact. For a moment my heart began to sink and then in a flash my spirits rose.

  David came over by me. “Maybe he fixed the broken light?”

  “You bet he did,” I said.

  “How can you tell?”

  I put my light on the driver’s side light bulb. “Notice a difference?” Davis looked for a long moment then nodded his head. Unlike the lights Davis had put his flashlight on, the driver’s side light did not gleam. On this side the glass was dirty. I turned my flashlight off, and David did the same

  “Good call,” Davis whispered. “So what now?”

  I looked at the end of the trailer that faced us. There were no lights in the back rooms. The furthermost room, which I assumed was a bedroom, had storm windows with screens facing outward. There was lattice around the bottom of the trailer. I pointed my flashlight through it. There were piles of firewood and some trash under the trailer but nothing like the entrance to a secret cellar. If the girl was in the trailer, she had to be above ground.

  “We need to know if the girl is in the trailer. How do you feel about breaking the rules a little bit?”

  “Depends on how little a bit.”

  I leaned in close and whispered in his ear.

  Davis nodded, “That works for me.”

  I took my folding knife out of my back pocket and, going to the closest window screen on the suspect's trailer, cut along the right side and then the bottom.

  “Should I just go to the door?” Davis asked.

  I shook my head. I motioned for him to stay put. I walked swiftly toward a fenced area I had seen on the other side of the alley about 100 feet away. As I got to the fence, I rattled it. The air suddenly filled with the sound of dogs barking. I turned and gave Davis a thumbs up and ran to a spot by the next trailer down. Far enough to be out of sight but close enough to back-up Davis if he needed me.

  “Hey, someone fucking around out there?” a gruff voice called from inside the trailer of interest.

  Davis moved out of sight around the trailer. I heard him knock on the door. I could hear the door open but couldn’t' make out what was said. I moved ahead to the rear of the trailer, so I’d be even nearer if needed. The light in the back room came on. A curtain parted. I saw Davis looking out the window and pointing to the cut screen.

  About five minutes later Davis came out. It had begun to snow. I knew it would be snowing much harder in the mountains. I wondered if Cassie Carew was indeed alive and had shelter, or if her body was now being buried even deeper in snow. We walked down the alley together before Davis spoke.

  “He bought the burglar who cut the neighbor’s screen story. And he let me in, and I got a pretty good view of the entire place. There is nowhere he could have a girl hidden.”

  When we reached our cars, I asked Davis to stick around for a few minutes wh
ile I called Goldstone. I reported to the sheriff what we had found. Goldstone didn’t have any questions for Davis so I waved that he could go. Davis walked over to me.

  “Can you hang on a second, sir?” I asked Goldstone.

  Davis put his hand out, and we shook. “I don’t know if we can get someone to watch this guy, but at least we know the girl isn’t here.”

  “Thanks.”

  As Davis drove off, I got back on the line with Goldstone. “There is really nowhere to hide around here for a 24/7 surveillance. Any chance you can get a warrant for a GPS tracking device?”

  Paul said he’d work on it. It was late. I was very tired, and I had animals at home to feed. Still, I was very tempted to stick around and watch the guy. This was the truck that had hit and killed Greg Carew. I was sure of it now. But there really wasn’t a safe place to watch Nate Hanassey from. I got in my Jeep and headed home.

  Grad Students

  October 29: 6 a.m.

  Rylee Blouin woke in the dark to what she thought at first was her alarm clock. A first-year grad student in Communications Studies at the University of Montana, she was slim and petite, and wore her auburn hair so short she was sometimes mistaken for a boy. She did not have classes today. So why was her alarm going off? She sat up and shook her head to clear it.

  Finally, she was able to focus. Her alarm clock sat silently as her smartphone gave off an urgent ring. She made another mental note to change the ringtone—something she’d intended but forgotten to do. The phone sat on the night table next to her bed in her private bedroom in the three-bedroom apartment she shared with two other girls. She picked up the phone and looked at the display, noticing as she did so, the time was 6:02 a.m..

  The display said: YASH.

  She lowered the phone to the bedspread and looked at the streetlight coming through the Venetian blinds on the single window in her room. Why would he call so early? She thought about just not answering the phone which continued to chime like a small bell.

  She had dated Yash Havish three times. He was smart, funny, and gentlemanly. He was not the worst guy she had ever dated.

  At five foot four with rather small breasts she considered herself pretty but not beautiful. Being French-Canadian, she thought of herself as the typical French girl next door even if her mother kept telling her she could be a model.

  Here in Montana Yash had been the only one to ask her out. Being with Yash had just been fun until he had taken her to an expensive restaurant and said, “I think I am falling in love with you."

  And that was that. She liked Yash but only as a friend. She could not encourage love in someone she could not feel a romantic attachment for.

  As to the ringing phone, she finally made her decision. She lifted the phone to her ear and pushed talk.

  They both spoke at the same time.

  “Yash, I like you but…”

  “Rylee, thank God I got you, I need your help.”

  “You need my help?” Rylee asked doubtfully. Her instant thought was that this was some sort of trick to get her to be with him again.

  “Yes,” Yash replied. He had an accent, which she assumed was from Bombay where he had come from, and sometimes she had found it hard to understand him when he spoke fast. He was speaking very fast.

  “We just got a job, Ken and I, and we need a driver for the van right away.” Ken was Ken Sweethorse, a Biology grad who minored in engineering. From her dates with Yash, she knew all about their research project. The van was a large white Econoline. A small satellite dish sat on the top. It housed a large and very expensive quad copter drone and the computer equipment to control both the drone and the cameras and other equipment the drone carried. Across the sides of the van, THE CONDOR had been stenciled with the image of the giant bird after the words, with a small University of Montana logo beneath it.

  Yash was the computer guy and drone pilot and Ken the one who operated the camera and special equipment. In addition to being pilot and camera guy their job was to create new software and engineer new equipment for the drone. They had already come up with a directional microphone that could pick up sounds from three hundred yards away and transmit them to the van.

  On their second date, Yash had shown her footage they'd collected of two grizzly bears mating. That had made Yash seem like every other guy she had ever met, but he had acted embarrassed when she had said she’d seen enough. That night she'd dreamt of a bear that came up to her and hugged her.

  “It pays thirty dollars an hour,” Yash said, filling in the void left while she thought things over.

  “Really?” She said, surprised it paid that well. “Why do you need a driver? Don't you just go and park and then look for animals?”

  “This is not about an animal! This is about that missing girl. They have a suspect. They don’t have a warrant for a tracer bug, so they want surveillance.”

  “Is it going to be dangerous?” Rylee asked. But she had already, mostly, made up her mind.

  “No, we’ll be far from them. But it will be a moving surveillance, so we need a driver. Will you…”

  “I’ll be over in fifteen minutes,” Rylee said, hanging up. Yash lived only a block and a half away and kept the van at the house where he rented a room. She actually got there in fourteen minutes.

  Thirty-five minutes later she sat at the wheel of the parked van. They were backed into a driveway of a sort for a warehouse where a number of abandoned vehicles were parked. From the suspect's trailer, some distance away, their van would look much like the abandoned one they were parked alongside. They had pulled into the spot after driving to the back of the building where Yash and Ken had off-loaded the fully charged Condor out of sight from the trailer.

  “Can I have the binoculars?” Rylee asked.

  Ken, who was sitting in front next to Rylee, was the same age as Yash, taller than both she and Yash at five foot eleven and Native American. He was good-looking with an oval-shaped head, shoulder-length black hair and a smooth, beardless face. Ken was silent for a long moment. “Nothing to see. The truck is just sitting there.” His left arm appeared in front of Rylee holding out binoculars.

  “Thanks,” Rylee said.

  She held the fifty-power set up to her eyes and focused across the open grassy area at the red truck parked alongside the trailer two hundred and thirty yards away.

  “There’s someone coming out of the trailer,” she said. “A guy with a beard.”

  Ken grabbed the binoculars roughly away

  “Hey!” Rylee cried.

  “Sorry,” Ken said, lifting the glasses to his eyes. He watched for a moment then spoke loudly, so his voice carried to the back. “It’s the guy. He is now going around the side of the truck.”

  Rylee didn’t need the binoculars to see the man moving to the driver’s side door of the truck. As she watched, he got in and a moment later began to back out of his parking spot.

  Rylee started the van’s engine. “Are we going to follow?” she asked.

  “Turn the truck off!” a voice Rylee didn’t recognize commanded over a speaker in the console.

  “Will do,” Yash said in back where he sat by the computer, and then said to Rylee. “That was the sheriff. Turn the engine off.”

  Rylee did so and turned to look back at him. “I thought this was a surveillance?”

  “You are not to get anywhere near the suspect,” the voice from the console said loudly. “Is that understood?”

  “Understood,” Ken said.

  “The surveillance is going to be done by the Condor, not by us,” Yash said softly. “We have to stay out of sight.”

  Ken moved to the back of the van and sat down next to Yash. “Condor’s engines are a go,” Ken said. “You want me to lift off?”

  “No, I’ll do it,” Yash said. “You need to man the camera.” He turned back toward Rylee. “As soon as he’s out of sight, you can start the engine. I’ll let you know which way he’s going. And you will drive that way. But like I told you on
the way over, we always want to stay far enough away, so we are completely out of sight.”

  “Understood,” Rylee said, realizing her palms on the steering wheel were sweating. She watched the red truck disappear from sight down the trailer park road. Her heart was beating faster than it had in a long time.

  Wait and Listen

  October 29: 10 a.m.

  At 10 a.m. I found myself parked in the open area on the Bearmouth Chalet side frontage road near the Bearmouth Exit off I-90. Goldstone had thought it was a good spot to wait. One advantage of going the Bearmouth way was that I didn't have to pass by Two Guns’ cabin. Denny's loneliness made stopping to say hello time-consuming. Not stopping would have been rude. So I usually had to allow extra time when I went his way.

  The first words Goldstone spoke to me when I answered my phone were, “Bad news.” He said it matter-of-factly in an unemotional tone. I figured it couldn’t be too bad.

  He had explained that the judge they had gone to had refused to give them a warrant to bug Nate Hanassey’s truck. The judge said they didn’t have evidence that Hanassey had ever replaced his headlight much less that he had been in an accident.

  I had to wonder why he wasn’t more upset at the news.

  “But…” I began.

  The Sheriff interrupted me. “But there is good news,” And I could tell by his tone he was hopeful.

  “Frank Davis recruited some students from the University of Montana doing a drone study…”

  After he explained it and told me how to hook up my iPhone to the surveillance feed, I expressed my concerns about using civilian college students. Goldstone assured me the college kids would not be anywhere near the suspect. All they were doing was operating the 'whirly-gig.'

  Their drone had followed Hanassey to the house of another ex-con, Bobby Wesley, who had been waiting for him outside. In the image on my screen, I looked down from just behind the passenger seat a little off from the side of the truck at Bobby Wesley tapping the fingers of his right hand on his knee.