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As Scott pedaled down the High Road toward his meeting with the old man, and the old man’s murder, Cartwright yawned and said, “I’m going to bed. If you get a sniff of anything—anything—call me.”
Letty said she would.
Hawkins: “Where’s Scott?”
“You already asked that,” Letty said.
“Yes, but…where the fuck is he?”
—
Scott was drivingcarefully through the darkness; the road had few straight stretches, and even some radical curves, and the lights on the old truck were yellow and weak. The last news report he’d seen on the old man’s television had the U.S. Marshals Service, the Army, and the state police still terrorizing Taos, working through blocks of the town, searching it house by house, yard by yard, almost literally inch by inch. KOAT had a video of MPs probing a dumpster with ten-foot-long metal poles.
The more convinced they were that he was still in Taos, the more likely he could make it to Albuquerque. He’d been in and out of the Albuquerque airport a half-dozen times and knew it fairly well—it had occurred to him early in the work that he might use the Albuquerque airport as one of the starting points for the pandemic, so he’d spent some time looking at it.
As he drove south, he occasionally passed oncoming cars, which hinted at open roads farther south. Now, as the High Road curved down to the main highway, and as the dawn began showing on the crest of the Rockies, he diverted onto side roads, sliding completely around the city of Española. He had to take the main highway for several miles before getting off again, and then into Santa Fe through a back door. On the way, he noticed that the gas gauge, which had showed the truck had a quarter tank of gas, hadn’t moved. Was it broken? How much gas did he have? Another worry.
Once in the city, he pulled into an empty parking lot to study the maps again. The main route to the Albuquerque airport would be straight down I-25—too direct, he thought, and probably well-patrolled. Once on it, he couldn’t get off, at least not onto any roads that went anywhere he wanted to go.
But just as there was a back door into Santa Fe, there was a back door into Albuquerque. He’d done an early viral efficacy study on a man in the town of Lamy, and he knew how to get to Lamy, which was southeast of Santa Fe itself.
The road to Lamy would also take him to I-40, which entered Albuquerque from the east, rather than the north. Even better, from the eastern edge of Albuquerque, he could divert onto backstreets to the airport. Also: as far as he knew, nobody knew that his Lamy experimental subject had died, because he’d buried the man himself. Andthe man had a Jeep and lived alone. It was possible that the Jeep was still there, and he could trade the old man’s beat-up truck for the Jeep and not have to worry about the gas.
He thought as he drove, and made the decision: he’d go to Lamy, then in the back door to the airport.
A half hour later he was at the intersection of I-25 and Old Pecos Trail. He turned left onto Old Pecos Trail, drove a couple of hundred yards, and pulled into an informal parking area to look at the old man’s iPhone map again. Old Pecos Trail was a narrow two-lane that apparently predated I-25 but would take him to where he needed to go. He got back on the road, and thirty-five minutes later, bumped into Joe Cross’s driveway; he’d seen nobody on the narrow road in but an old lady working in her garden, looked like she was pulling onions for a breakfast omelet.
And in the driveway, found himself facing a state police car, with a cop inside. “Shit, Shit, Shit!”
—
He couldn’t goback; he groped for the pistol on the passenger seat. The cop got out of his car and ambled over, thumbs hooked over his duty belt, and Scott kept his face lowered, so the cop could see the beard but not much of his face, and rolled the side window down. The cop put his hand on the A-pillar and leaned toward the window. Scott brought the pistol up and the cop had just a hundredth of a second to flinch and Scott shot him in the face and the cop went down in the dirt.
“Now I’m a serial killer,” Scott muttered to himself. There were no nearby houses, he’d learned that from his earlier visits. Still, the shot might bring some kind of investigation. He had to hurry. He got outof the car, checked the cop to make sure that he was dead; and he was. He picked the man up—he was a load—and half-staggered, half-trotted toward the house, and then behind it. He hid the body in a tight circle of piñons, then jogged back to the house. The Jeep was still in the garage. He walked around to the back of the house, opened the latch on the electrical service box, and pulled down the main switch to cut power to the house. From his work there earlier, he knew there was a cheap alarm system that went out on Cross’s Internet, and that it didn’t work when the power was out.
Inside, he went to the kitchen, to a conch shell on the counter, and found the keys to the Jeep. He backed the Jeep out of the garage; as he turned it, he happened to look at the spot where he’d buried Cross. The area had been excavated, which explained the cop. Whether Cross was still down there, he didn’t know. He drove around the cop car to the entrance to the driveway, then hesitated…left the Jeep running, and trotted back around the house.
He needed one more thing from the cop.
—
Letty looked ather watch: Seven o’clock in the morning. Another hour and she’d wake up Cartwright. She agreed with Cartwright that if Scott didn’t show up in the next twenty-four hours or so, he’d probably gone somewhere else.
She was sitting in a chair in a doorway of the terminal, while Hawkins had gone out to patrol around the back of the parking area. People were walking past her to catch their flights, and they checked her and then the cops who were spread across the corridor behind her, looking at faces; and they hurried on. None of them, she hoped, were carrying vials of viral media. All of them, to their probable greatannoyance, would be patted down at the security, and would have their baggage taken apart, to make sure that they weren’t.
Letty was looking at her iPad maps, trying to figure out where Scott might have gone on his mountain bike and a stolen car. She was looking at satellite photos of all the ways out of Taos, and had talked to a state police commander about the likely targets for a car theft—an isolated house, they agreed, with not many people around.
There were a lot of those in rural New Mexico…
A minute after seven o’clock, she took a call from an unknown number.
“Yes?”
“Miss Davenport?”
A woman’s voice, older, she thought, and almost recognized. “This is she.”
“This is Carol-Ann Oaks. You stopped and talked to me about Joe Cross and then you went to look for him. There’s a rumor that you and the police found that he was…dead.”
