“Shit,” she muttered.
“One good thing. We got a quick fix on the cell phone, which was in Green Valley, Arizona, about forty-five miles north of the border. It looks like they’re making tracks for Mexico. We were on to the border guys in ten minutes, and they had pictures five minutes after that. I think we got a good shot at them.”
Burch told her that he’d be arriving after four o’clock.
“My plane didn’t have quite the speed or the range that I thought. I kinda got shuffled off to a cheaper machine. We had to stop in Minneapolis to refuel and it took forever.”
“What about your SWAT team?”
“They should be there before me, but not much.”
VIRGIL GOT THE CALL.
The Dickersons, who were really Ned and Jennifer Boniface, last known address Bakersfield, California, had been picked up, without incident just before reaching the border. The kids with them were safe and being identified, each with a story to tell. No word yet on if they were part of a bigger ring, but the feds were checking. He and Johnson set up across the river from Drake’s house at midafternoon. The BMW was still parked in the yard, but the Jeep was missing.
He called Pescoli to tell her.
“We’ve got the plates, we’ll find them. Problem is, about everybody who doesn’t drive a pickup out here drives a Jeep.”
“You exaggerate.”
But then she drove one. Fairly new, with lots of power, fastest model available.
“Maybe so, but not much,” he said.
“I’ll tell you something, Virgil. I saw some of the film that Drake apparently shot, stuff that was filmed for sure in that back cabin. It’s sick. The worst.” She hesitated, felt that same terrible feeling she had when she’d viewed the porn. “I’ve dealt with a lot in my career as a cop, but this is worse than murder. Drake is worse than a killer.”
“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he probably did murder somebody in cold blood.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Pescoli said. “It’s the homicide that will get him the needle.”
“When was the last time someone was executed by the State of Montana?” he said. “I wouldn’t count on that. But we can put him away for life.”
“Not good enough,” she said.
REGAN MET THE SWAT TEAM on the tarmac at Bert Mooney airport. Burch arrived forty-five minutes later. They all shook hands, went to a prearranged conference room where Burch reviewed the action with the SWAT team, which had been briefed before leaving Denver, and then they moved off to three waiting Chevy Tahoes, rented from the local car agencies, loaded the team’s gear, and found the road to Grizzly Falls. She led the way in her own Jeep with Burch in the passenger seat.
He was a slender, tough-looking man who, it turned out, had spent six years with the Navy SEALs before joining the FBI. He skillfully extracted a brief autobiography from her and told her a little about himself. He was smart and engaging, but she got the impression that he badly wanted to be in on the raid for bureaucratic reasons. Taking down the knotty pine filmmaker would be a major coup, a step toward promotion.
Nothing wrong with that, she thought.
Except it annoyed her.
She and the SWAT team would have pulled off the raid in broad daylight, if they’d left without waiting for Burch.
Her cell phone rang.
“Got a break,” Flowers said as she answered and negotiated a curve as they headed west. “Drake just got back. He’s around behind the house where we can’t see him, but I got a good look at him when he came in. He’s there. Where the hell are you guys?”
“We’re still about an hour out,” she said.
“We could take him right now,” Flowers said. “You could get the sheriff to deputize me.”
“Let me check on that,” she said, though it galled her to think Blackwater would be in on the takedown.
She passed Flowers’s suggestion on to Burch, who shook his head. “No way. I spent some more time reading Flowers’s file on the way here, and he has a way of making simple things complicated. Let me talk to him.”
She handed the phone to Burch. “We appreciate what you’re doing, but we mostly need intel. Eyes on the place. You were an army guy, right? So you know what we need.”
She thought she heard a protest from Flowers, but Burch clicked off and she kept driving, her jaw set, her fingers tight on the wheel, the Montana countryside flying past, the sun sinking lower in the sky.
Flowers called back forty minutes later and said, “Drake just went up to Weeks’s place in the Jeep. We could see him turn in, but we can’t see what’s going on.”
“Call us back if anything changes,” she said and Burch nodded.
As the miles had passed he’d grown more silent, his eyes steady on the road, he, like she, getting ready.
Twenty minutes later, another call. “Drake’s gone back to his place. I don’t know, Johnson and I are talking it over, I think he might be packing up or something. We can see him moving around inside the house, but we can’t tell what he’s doing.”
“We’re coming,” she said. “We’re five minutes out. Hold on.” She glanced at Burch, then hit the gas.
“Stay on the line,” she said to Flowers and punched the phone to speaker, so both she and Burch could hear.
Then she drove like hell.
Nothing changed during the last few minutes of the drive. According to Flowers, Drake was still at his house when she, leading the caravan, drove past the dude ranch. The sun was now down below the mountains, but the sky was still bright.
She pulled over when she was certain the vehicles could no longer be seen from the ranch, and the SWAT team armored up and went through a preraid routine, checking weapons, communications, and armor.
Burch, now out of his sport coat and slacks and into jeans, boots, and armor, told her to stay back. “I know you want to go in, but we don’t know you. I don’t mean to be offensive, but we’ve all trained for this and we’ve got communications and lights and there’s lots of firepower out there. We don’t want an accident.”
She was pissed. “No way. That bastard is mine. I’ve been right on top of this.”
Burch put a finger to his lips. “We really need you to wait here. Believe me, you’re going to get a lot of credit in our reports. You wait here, talk to Flowers on your cell phone. If anything critical comes up, we’ll leave a radio. You call me.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about credit,” she said, her lips barely moving, rage burning through her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the porn films again, the scared children, the predatory adults. “I want in.”
But Burch wasn’t having any of it. “We’re doing this military style. You know the area, so you call me. Any communication you get from your office, even from Flowers goes through you. I’m not taking any other calls. Only from you. You got that? Pass it on to Flowers. We have to run this tight. He calls you. You pass on the important information. Same with any calls from your sheriff. We do this my way.”
Five minutes after they pulled over, and five hundred yards down the road from Drake’s house, the SWAT team, with Burch at the point, slouched up the shoulder of the road, looking more like a squad of SEALs in Afghanistan than a bunch of cops in Montana.
And she was stuck back here.