“Awaiting a warrant. The judge is golfing down in Twin Falls. It’s still warm enough down there to keep the courses open. One of my guys-we’re working on a phoner warrant.”
“Am I coming along?”
“That’s the third reason you’re here and why I asked you to bring your gear.”
“I’m still mad at you, you know?” She said this proudly.
“I know.”
“Roger hasn’t called.”
“I may have been wrong about him,” Walt said. It came out as a confession, which was not the way he meant it.
“Your timing could be better.”
“I’m a work in progress, Fiona. I don’t have any of it figured out. But losing Mark like this… I know it all has to do more with friendship than we think. More than I understand, at least. It’s what’s important at the end of the day. Right? I need to find him. Dead or alive, I need to know. I don’t understand exactly. I screw up a lot of stuff, but I intend to keep working on my friendships. Starting with you. At some point. I don’t want you mad at me.”
She glared. A hostile, unforgiving look that showed Walt just how far he had to go.
“Okay,” he said. “I get it.”
“You know why I really hate you?” she whispered.
“I didn’t even know you did.”
“It’s because I can’t stay mad at you.” She pushed her chair back. “You’d better turn that off because I’m leaving the room.” Standing by the door, she dug around in her purse and came up with a business card. “Sean Lunn,” she said, waving it. “The night he was trying to talk me onto the corporate jet. Said to call if I needed anything. So I’ll call him. The thing about men? They pretty much wear the same thing all the time. What do you want to bet he shows up in those same pants?”
“You’d do that?” Walt asked.
“I thought you said it’s all about friendship?” she questioned.
“I thought you hated me.”
“You’re not a very good detective, Sheriff. I’m sorry to have to tell you.”
54
THE WARRANT WAS CALLED IN FROM THE TENTH GREEN by Judge Dan Alban. Within twenty-five minutes, Walt had six of his eight available deputies in strategic positions surrounding Coats’s house, including a sharpshooter positioned up a hill among the ruins of the defunct mine. This kind of deployment wreaked havoc on his department, as it left only two on-duty deputies to patrol a county roughly the area of Rhode Island.
The house was situated so that its detached one-car garage blocked it from view of the other houses and abandoned RVs scattered around the sterile wasteland of pale gray mine tailings. It stood off on its own, out of sight, surrounded by an abnormally high post-and-rail fence topped with a single strand of taut razor wire. The front gate carried two inauspicious signs: BEWARE OF DOG and NO SOLICITING.
Walt and his deputy, Bill Noland, led the way as they pushed through the gate and approached the house at a run. Noland, who was in his late twenties, carried a four-foot stun stick for use on the dogs, if necessary. Walt carried a “flash and bang,” a white-phosphorus stun grenade. Both men also had their Berettas out and at the ready. Behind them came two more men, one carrying the ram, a three-foot, seventy-pound steel maul capable of disintegrating most doors.
Walt tried the doorknob: locked.
The ram took out the hardware and the door swung open. Walt tossed the grenade inside and his team turned their backs. The flash and bang would momentarily blind, deafen, and typically physically stun anyone within the confined space where it detonated.
His team charged through the door, led by Noland. Walt brought up the rear. The space was small-a living area, a bathroom, and a single bedroom. It all looked familiar to Walt from the webcam video.
“Clear!” his men announced as they inspected the closets and rooms. They moved on to stun-bomb a crawl space, the hatch for which was found cut into the floor in the bedroom closet. It too proved to be empty.
By the time his men reconvened in the central living area, Walt had the two webcams in a pouch on the inside of his windbreaker.
“We’ll get that door closed as best as possible. Bring in Fiona and forensics. We’ll watch the road-both directions-and keep the house under round-the-clock surveillance. Questions?”
“Sheriff?” It was Noland, calling from the galley kitchen.
Walt faced the refrigerator, where a number of postcards, bill reminders, and hand-scrawled notes had been attached with various pieces of a magnetic poetry set.
| energy | and | persistence | conquer | all | things |
“It’s Benjamin Franklin,” Walt said, consumed by the subtext: Roy Coats was a determined man.
“Not that,” Noland said. He pointed to a photocopied collage of snapshots. Handwritten at the bottom, it read: “Thanks for the guiding. Happy hunting!-Ralph.” The center picture showed three men with rifles in their hands, standing in front of a rustic cabin. The cabin was small, with an outbuilding on the right in the photo. Walt picked Coats out immediately, recognizing him both from the driver’s license photo he’d pulled and by the fact he was the biggest among the three: a burly man with a full beard who looked as if he hadn’t showered for weeks. The rifle he held was smaller than those held by the others, a modified.22-a dart rifle, Walt guessed. The small-gauge rifle Walt had heard on two separate occasions, losing a friend both times. The center photograph was surrounded by five other snapshots, three of which featured the cabin or what appeared to be its outbuildings. In each of the three, the landscape rose in the background; and, in two of these, the background was jagged mountains.
“Plain-sight search,” Walt told his deputy. “I want any other photographs of this cabin we can find.” He tapped the collage. “I want property tax records for every county in the state, starting with ours and working out through connecting counties, cross-checked for anything owned by Coats. Get on the horn and get that started. It’s damn good work, Noland.”
“Yes, sir.” Noland hurried off, a slight spring to his step.
Walt studied each of the photos carefully. When combined, they presented about three-quarters of a panorama. But it was the two that showed the distant mountains that most captivated him. His index finger traced the line of the peaks against the cobalt blue sky. There were ranges he knew the look of by heart, though admittedly only from one or two angles, typically from a road or similar perspective. Put him on the opposite side of the same range and he wouldn’t recognize it. It didn’t come as a surprise that he couldn’t identify this particular range, though it was certainly a frustration.
Again, Walt traced the silhouetted line in each of the photos where the mountains met the sky.
“Maps!” Walt called out, a little too loudly for the small space. He stood and addressed his small team. “I want any maps, any photos. We’re abandoning plain-sight search. I want everyone wearing gloves. We toss the place, but neatly, gentlemen. Carefully. And put back everything the way you find it.”
He caught himself holding his breath as he watched his men take to the search, a little too eagerly as always.
Coats stood in the center of the middle photograph.
55
WALT DIDN’T LIKE TO THINK THAT CHANCE PLAYED A ROLE in his work. He’d spent too much time in continuing education seminars, field exercises, and classrooms to put much credence in the flip of a coin or happenstance. But, more than that, it was the issue of control. He’d been trained to control the investigation, not to allow the investigation to control him. So as he entered the women’s side of his decrepit jail-two cells on the northeast corner of the small cellblock-and found Taylor Crabtree engaged in a video game, he fought to accept that a possible solution to this investigation could just materialize out of thin air.