“In the meantime, I want you guys to start working the streets. They couldn’t have gotten far in this storm, so start eliminating anywhere that hasn’t been disturbed by tire tracks, try to narrow our search parameters as much as possible.
“Take your time, be careful, be thorough.”
Baker grunted softly as Azbell nodded, neither making any attempt to rise from their seats.
“We’ll all rendezvous back here later to share information.”
Once more there were tacit gestures of agreement, though nobody said anything.
“That okay for you?” Ferris asked, looking up to address me directly. “Anything I’m missing right now?”
There was still far too much I didn’t know about the case, having not even seen the video, much less having talked to anybody, to even begin to answer his question.
Instead, I said the only thing I could.
“Just one thing. Call me Hawk.”
Chapter Twelve
I had wondered earlier how the Sheriff had made it to the motel, but the thought didn’t occur to me until after he’d left. For sure there was some snow on his hat and boots, but nowhere near enough to have made the three-block trek on foot.
The answer was parked out behind the station, a black Dodge Ram with a modified chassis sitting up on 32” tires. Around each one were silver chains, their links locked into place, ready to chew up the wet snow covering the streets.
A low, shrill whistle slid between my lips as I pushed my way through the calf-deep snow and came around on the passenger side, the frozen metal of the door squealing in protest as I wrenched it open. Ferris and I both piled inside, a healthy puddle of snow covering the floorboards beneath our feet.
The interior of the truck was just as spacious as it appeared from the outside, a pair of bucket seats with a console between them up front and a bench seat stretched along the back. The faint warmth of his previous trip still lingered, providing just enough heat to fog the windows.
“Nice cruiser,” I said. “County budget must be better than I thought.”
“Right,” Ferris snorted, picking up on the bit of levity in my voice. “Damn county won’t even reimburse me for gas when I have to use this thing.”
I let the statement pass without comment, not particularly wanting to get into a long-winded discussion about the shortcomings of government agencies. More than once I had been a part of such tirades at nearly every level, the only thing that ever came from them being increased bitterness toward the people we worked for, and that accomplished nothing.
Besides, at this point we had just had our first conversation that was not short and stilted, an attempt at becoming colleagues for the very immediate future.
It was a start, which was why I was willing to bypass asking about my frosty reception inside just yet, focusing instead on the task at hand.
My own viewing of the video had revealed precious little, basically providing a visual for the original story Ferris had told me but adding no additional details. Shortly after midnight Dr. Yvonne Endicott had stepped outside. She wasn’t taking a smoke break, didn’t try to make a phone call, merely stood in the cold air for a few minutes, stretched, and was about to head inside when something caught her attention. She stayed where she was as lights, presumably from a vehicle, grew closer, drawing her off the edge of the front sidewalk.
It was an understandable action given the circumstances. There was no way anybody would be out joyriding, certainly not taking chances coming to the hospital unless they had an extreme emergency on their hands. When she saw headlights, she most likely assumed the latter, stepped out to try and help, and immediately regretted her decision.
By the time she realized something was wrong, it was too late, the pair of abductors on her, dragging her from view.
The cab of the truck was silent as Ferris nudged it out onto Main Street, the big vehicle bouncing around as it dug fresh trenches in the snow. The engine moaned in protest as the RPMs mounted to keep us moving. At no point did our speed exceed 10 miles an hour, the headlights illuminating a world that was blindingly white outside.
As with the start of any investigation, there were so many questions, it was difficult to know even where to begin. This time was worse than most, as at least with the DEA I had a file to work from, a list of transgressions or suspects to serve as a starting point.
In this instance I knew absolutely nothing.
“So how do you want to play this?” I asked. I left the question open-ended, meaning not only our first stop at the hospital but the investigation as a whole.
My showing up at his office had let him know I was willing to help, but beyond that not much more had been said.
Ferris let out a long breath, reaching to turn down the defroster fan.
“Most of the people living around here are lifers, know everybody in town and have long memories of local lore. They’ll almost all know who Jeremiah Tate is and about the incident last month he was involved in. Almost certainly have opinions about it, too.”
I had expected as much, saying nothing, content to let him continue.
“So, for the time being we’ll tell them you’re with the state, just happened to be in town and I asked you to lend a hand.” He glanced over my way and said, “You understand if we avoid saying you’re with the federal government, right?”
This being Montana, I understood perfectly well.
“I doubt anybody will know you as Hawk, so we’ll just use that as a first or last name, depending on the situation, if that works.”
It was flimsy, and wouldn’t take much to punch holes through, but I got where he was coming from. As it should be, his thoughts were most likely on the case. The cover story was something he’d thrown together in a hurry, certainly sufficient for the purposes of covering some interviews of hospital employees who were scared or angry or both.
“That works,” I said. “You want to divide and conquer or for me to fade into the background?”
His answer to this question would tell me a lot about how the next day or two would play out, about whether his coming to me was about help or sheer manpower.
Ferris chewed over the question for a moment, the muscles around his right eyes twitching once as he rolled through an intersection without bothering to stop or even slow down.
“Time,” he finally said. “Right now, that is the most important thing. Let’s divvy folks up and get everything we can. We know the hospital is the one place she isn’t, so let’s shoot to be in and out in less than an hour.”
Chapter Thirteen
The world came back to Yvonne Endicott one painful sense at a time. The first thing she noticed was the hard feel of the concrete beneath her. Splayed flat on the ground, a deep bone-chilling cold radiated up from it, easily passing through her light scrubs, wracking her body with shivers.
A moment later came the taste of blood. Gritty and metallic, it was dried along the roof of her mouth, crusted between her teeth. Time and again she ran her tongue over it, trying to moisten it enough to peel it free before pushing it out in a thin plume of spittle.
Next was the smell, something harsh like ammonia, only much stronger. It filled her nose, passing straight to her brain, intensifying the pain she was in.
The last sense to hit her was when she opened her eyes, bright light pulsating through the slits, sending a searing ache up her body. Just as fast, she pressed them closed before trying again, opening them just a little in an attempt to get her bearings.
A slight groan passed her lips as she raised a hand to her face, feeling the throbbing ache on her cheek, knowing every time her heart beat, sending a new jolt of blood through the area.
Bit by bit the events from earlier returned to her, each coming back in short snippets, like individual scenes spliced together in a rough cut.
Standing outside the hospital. Seeing the lights approach. Trying to help whoever was coming. Seeing the two men come toward her. Attempting to fight them off.
<
br /> The gun.
With each of the memories came a renewed sense of fear, of urgency, as she recalled the events. There was no way to know where she was, what was happening. The truck was not at all familiar to her as it pulled up, just one more in the unending line of oversized vehicles she’d seen since moving to Glasgow.
No details about the men had stood out beyond that they both had beards and hooded sweatshirts, again just two more everyday occurrences in her new town.
Keeping her vision narrowed to just slits, Yvonne fought against the roiling agony in her brain. She knew it was her body’s way of trying to protect her, to fend off whatever had occurred, though at the moment she needed to get past it, to inventory what she knew and how she could act on it.
The last thing she remembered was the taller of the men swinging the gun at her, gripping the barrel. That meant he had probably used it like a hammer to knock her unconscious before they picked her up and took her away. Coupled with the extreme light sensitivity, it was likely she had a concussion, though how much more, she had no way of knowing.
Otherwise her body was stiff, sore, frigid, but didn’t appear to have any real damage. There didn’t seem to be anything indicating she was raped or abused further, but again she wouldn’t know for sure until she could examine herself.
Whenever that might be.
Nearby she could hear the sound of metal scraping against metal. Interspersed was a pair of voices, one deeper, seeming to give orders, the other concerned with little more than compliance.
For a moment Yvonne lay where she was, trying to determine if she knew them, to figure out what they were saying. She pressed her eyelids tight and focused as much as she could before giving up, the effort bringing too much agony, the reward nothing at all.
If she was going to discover anything, whether it be where she was or who had taken her, she was going to have to risk being seen awake.
Drawing in two deep breaths, Yvonne rolled over onto a shoulder, facing the sounds. There she stayed a moment before popping open her eyes as wide as she could, gritting her teeth as the light around her poured in, causing her head to feel like it might explode.
The room she was in was cavernous in its dimensions. Nothing more than one open space, it appeared to be a barn of some sort, the roof above rising almost two stories in height, the walls made of corrugated metal, the brown paper backing of insulation visible. The floor was bare concrete, the light provided by a series of fluorescent tubes hanging in fixtures overhead.
She was on the floor next to a wall, a pair of men working no more than 20 feet away near two long rows of roughhewn wooden tables that covered most of the length of the room.
In unison the men moved with purpose, setting up some sort of contraption on the tables, buckets and coils and pieces of copper piping strewn about.
It took a moment for Yvonne to process what she was seeing, glancing to the white plastic barrels stacked high along the back wall, noticing the canisters of fuel piled nearby.
Only then did the answer she was seeking come to her, causing her stomach to seize.
Drugs.
Methamphetamines, to be more exact.
The men were building a meth lab.
Yvonne had never been in the presence of the substance, though she’d treated enough patients hooked on it to know the effects it could have, had seen enough television shows to have an idea of what the production consisted of.
Staring at the men before her, seeing the vastness of the operation she’d been pulled into, an involuntary gasp slid from Yvonne’s lips.
That tiny mistake was all it took. It drew stares from both men, each standing rigid before the smaller turned to his partner.
“Looks like she’s awake, Cuddy.”
Chapter Fourteen
Without surprise, the graveyard shift was manned as thinly as possible. And because of the storm, all non-essential personnel had been sent home hours earlier, the hospital reduced to a bare bones crew, just enough to keep it running in case somebody could get there.
Judging by the look of things as Ferris and I had walked in that was highly unlikely, the waiting rooms all empty, more than two-thirds of the lights turned off. The resulting effect was a lot of shadows and silence, the things bad horror movies were made from, the place seeming closer to abandoned than the only hospital within more than 100 miles.
That meant there were few people for Ferris and me to talk to, all of them gathered in a small break room deep within the bowels of the facility. Nobody had been waiting for us at the door as we arrived, Ferris needing no direction as he took us straight to them, giving the impression it was not his first time making the trek.
They looked up as we appeared in the doorway, a man in a bad security guard uniform and three women, two of them in scrubs, a fourth in jeans and a double knit sweater. All four had puffy eyes and matted hair, wearing the events of the evening plainly, their faces betraying just the slightest bit of hope as they glanced in our direction.
From the outside looking in, the room was tiny, containing only a sofa and a card table with plastic chairs surrounding it. Along one wall was a small stand with a television on it, the usual assortment of vending machines on the back wall.
“Thank you all for being here,” Ferris said, getting right to it. “Mr. Hawk, from the state, will be assisting me with the interviews.”
The story was close enough to pass, especially with a group like this that was bordering on exhaustion.
“Mr. Breckman,” he said, nodding to the man seated in an orange plastic chair beside the card table, “if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to speak to you first. Mr. Hawk...”
He let his voice fall away, allowing me to choose whomever I wished to open with.
“Who was the last person to speak with Dr. Endicott?” I asked, filling in the gap instantly, not wanting to give the impression that this was a disjointed operation in any way.
Right now the people in the room still bore some semblance of hope. We needed to do everything we could to cultivate that, to use it to our advantage before they became scared or bitter.
After that, they wouldn’t be of much use to anybody.
A moment passed as the three women exchanged glances, none saying much of anything.
“Ladies,” I said, leaning forward and bracing a shoulder against the door frame to stare in at them. “I apologize if I seem brusque, but the clock is ticking. The sooner we get past this, the sooner we can get on the road and find Yvonne.”
The technique was one I had learned years before when speaking with witnesses in the DEA. In the immediate aftermath of a crime, most fell into one of two distinct categories, succumbing either to anger or fear. The only way to deal with it was to push them past it, to jolt their senses, to give them something to focus on instead of the situation at hand.
If that something had to be a dislike for me and my methods, so be it.
The use of her first name was a trick I’d developed on my own, making sure to personalize the victim, to ensure the witnesses understood the gravity of the situation.
Fortunately, most of the time, it worked.
On the far end of the couch a young woman stood, rising to a surprising height. Stopping just a couple inches below my own 6’3”, she was dressed in light green scrubs and had her hair pulled back, her pale complexion splashed with deep red splotches across the cheeks.
“I think that would be me,” she said, glancing to her cohorts before taking a step forward.
“You have somewhere we can speak in private?” Ferris asked, ignoring the girl and focusing on the woman in jeans still seated on the couch.
The woman’s jaw dropped open a fraction of an inch, surprised at being addressed directly. “Down the hall on your left. One of you can use my office, the other our CFO’s right beside it. Both are unlocked.”
Extending a hand to the guard, Ferris motioned down the hall before turning and walking toward the offices. I remained where I was by
the door, allowing the guard and the young woman to pass before bringing up the rear, the makeshift convoy moving in silence through the dim hallway.
Ferris opened a door and flipped on the light switch, motioning for the young lady to step inside. Without being prompted, the guard went into the office next door, Ferris pausing just briefly in the hallway. For a moment it looked as if he might try to give me pointers on how to proceed, before thinking better of it and disappearing into the second office and closing the door behind him.
In another life, I had conducted dozens of interviews, if not more. Some were done as part of a team, others solo. At times they were angry drug lords or frightened mules or any of a number of types in between, but I had never addressed a situation like this.
As terrible as the abduction of Yvonne Endicott was, it just wasn’t the type of thing that landed on the DEA’s plate.
The young girl’s back was turned to me as I entered, having already lowered herself into the lone visitor chair in the office. Her posture appeared rigid as she sat and waited, not bothering to look my way as I circled the desk and pulled out the chair behind it.
“Good evening,” I said, lowering my voice just a little, not wanting to seem too imposing. Earlier I had raised it to get their attention, though now I had to be careful not to push too far, to cause her to recede entirely into herself.
“My name is Hawk. I’m helping out the sheriff on this investigation.”
I paused there, long enough for her to get the hint that it was her turn to speak, wanting to make her an equal participant in the conversation, instead of someone I had to pull information from.
“Meredith Shek,” she whispered after nearly a full minute had passed. “I was the floor nurse with Yvie tonight.”
I nodded, noting her use of a nickname, before asking, “Do you guys normally share the same shift?”
The right side of her face scrunched just slightly. “I guess? This is a pretty small place and we’re usually understaffed, so we all overlap quite a bit.”
Fire and Ice: A Thriller (A Hawk Tate Novel Book 3) Page 5
