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When she was still five cars back, she took a call from Scott: “I don’t know why we didn’t think of this sooner, but you need to get out of New Mexico as quickly as possible. We checked American Airlinesonline, and there’s a 6:24 flight to Dallas from Santa Fe. We made a reservation for you.”
“I’m still not through the checkpoint,” Callister said. “I’m still in Taos.”
“How much longer before you go through?” Scott asked.
“Maybe ten or fifteen minutes? If I make it.”
“You will, we have confidence in that. If you’re through in ten minutes, you’ll make it to Santa Fe in plenty of time for the plane. Wait until you’re through security, then open one vial in Santa Fe, and save the others until you’re in Dallas.”
“All right. I’m moving up now, at the checkpoint. All the cars are getting through, but they’re taking pictures.”
“Call back when you’re through.”
—
When she gotto the checkpoint, formed by two state police cars with a ten-foot angled gap between them, a gruff New Mexico state cop asked for her driver’s license and any other ID she might have. She dug around in her purse, produced her wallet and an Oregon driver’s license and said, “I have a passport in my suitcase…”
“Where did you go with a passport?” the cop asked.
“I live in Portland…I go to Canada to ski, at Whistler.”
“I thought you could get into Canada on your driver’s license,” the cop said.
“You can, but sometimes at the border they get pissy if you don’t have a passport. Like you think they’re some low-rent country,” she said. “They really don’t like us much up there.”
The cop said, “I’d heard that,” gave her a smile and handed her license back. She noticed another cop behind the one talking to her,taking a photo of her face with what looked like a sophisticated camera. “Go on through. Don’t hit my car.”
“Thank you,” she said, politely. She pulled through and in her rearview mirror saw the camera cop taking a picture of her license plate.
But then she was loose and running south.
19
Letty was having an annoying nightmare about going to see her putative boyfriend, Jackson Nyberg, the one she was on hiatus with. In the dream, she’d decided to tell him that their relationship was over.
The problem was, she couldn’t get to the restaurant where they were supposed to meet, and talk. The dream included an insane series of mishaps involving lost office keys with her phone and purse locked inside the office, no-show Ubers, a taxi with a flat tire. During the whole ordeal, time was ticking down before Nyberg was leaving for somewhere else, far away, not specified in the nightmare.
Hawkins reached around her, groped for a breast, and used it as a kind of handle to half-roll her, and said into her nearly sleep-deaf ear, “You’re kicking the life out of this bed.”
“Wha…”
“You’re kicking. You’re having a nightmare.”
“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.”
Hawkins instantly went back to sleep because he could do that.
Letty, fighting off a recurrence of the nightmare, tried to think of something else, but kept coming back to the key question,What was she going to tell Nyberg?She thought about praying that Nyberg had met someone, and that he’d break up with her, but her ego wouldn’t allow her to dream that. Then she imagined that Nyberg was killed in a tragic accident with a UPS truck, but…she didn’t want him dead. Then…
Like an answer to a prayer, her phone rang. It wasn’t Nyberg, it was Lucas and he was shouting at her: “Up! Get up!”
She sat up, poked Hawkins, and Hawkins pushed himself up to listen in.
Lucas’s words were tumbling out, as if he had no time to say them: no time at all. “The woman’s name is Danielle Callister. We have her photos. We’ve confirmed she was in the supermarket at the same time as Foss. When the Taos cops propagated the photos out to the checkpoints, they found out she went through a checkpoint at 4:40 this morning driving a green Subaru SUV. That’s a little more than an hour ago. She was going south, toward Santa Fe. If that’s her destination, she’ll be there in half an hour. She could be headed for the Santa Fe airport, or maybe Albuquerque. If she’s going anywhere other than Santa Fe, we can grab her, because she’ll be on the road for a long time and we’ve got the make of the car and the license plate and time to set up roadblocks. We can’t get anyone to the Santa Fe airport faster than you, because nobody down there has been briefed on the problem yet—to handle the possibility that she’s carrying the virus, and what to do about that.”
“We’re going,” Letty said.
“Take your iPad, I’m sending the photos we’ve got,” Lucas said.
