"Perhaps something will show up in your mailbox from an anonymous source," Kerney said as he stood up.
"I'll keep my eye out for it, Chief Kerney." *** Until Kerney and Sara Brannon left Santa Fe, Applewhite had worried about finding the right killing field. Since the hit had to be staged, icing Kerney at home wouldn't do. No matter how well orchestrated, neighbors might see things, remember little details, especially on a weekend, when people were at home.
Applewhite went high-speed mobile down the Interstate in Charlie Perry's car, putting the details into play on the radio. She had Charlie airborne. The pilot had instructions to maintain a holding pattern once he was in range. The men tailing Kerney were in Ramah, ten kilometers away from Proctor Straley's ranch, ready to follow Kerney as soon as he moved. She punched up images on her onboard laptop that gave her satellite visuals of the terrain, roads, vehicles, and structures along Kerney's route.
The area was bracketed by National Forest, Indian land, and the malpais, and had few permanent residents. A winter storm in the mountains had brought local traffic to a standstill.
Storm clouds masked a portion of the satellite visuals. Apple white switched to a Global Positioning System that highlighted topography of the area. Defined by a prominent ridgeline, the uplift ran for a good sixty miles. A state road cut through it at the Continental Divide, dropped out of the mountains, and ran straight west for about fifteen miles through canyons, mesas, and frontage pasture land. The stretch of road would do nicely for a killing field.
Charlie's luggage was in the trunk, along with a wad of greenbacks and a bank confirmation of a six-figure deposit in an offshore account. The money could easily be traced back to Enrique De Leon The fast-moving storm slammed into her east of Grants. She fought her way through it, breaking into sunshine and a slushy pavement. The chopper pilot radioed a diversion around the storm. She caught the turnoff to Ramah through the badlands just as the helicopter reported a twenty-minute ETA.
Past the village of San Rafael the highway was snow packed with no traffic. As she entered the Zuni Mountains the road turned to snow-covered ice.
The chopper came into view out of the southwest. Applewhite asked for an LZ location. The pilot radioed he could off load at a clearing near the road to Paxton Springs.
"Give me a visual on traffic," Applewhite said.
"There's one four-by-four behind you, eight clicks back," the pilot replied.
"Nothing's coming at you for a good twelve clicks, and it's slow moving all the way. The LZ is behind tree cover and out of sight from the highway."
"Copy that," Applewhite said.
She plowed off the pavement at the Paxton Springs turnoff through eight inches of snow, and bumped her way to the waiting chopper. The wash of the slow-moving propeller blades dusted snow off the tall pine trees, creating eddies that puffed and then disappeared in the wind.
Applewhite gave the pilot orders while two men in fatigues loaded a drugged, rubbery Charlie Perry into the backseat of the car.
The pilot nodded, put a hand to his headset, and said, "The target is moving."
"Let's do it," Applewhite replied.
Bobby Sloan lost sight of Applewhite on the curves through the mountains. When she'd switched to Perry's car in the APT Performa parking lot, he'd been forced to maintain visual contact. He put the Bronco into low four-wheel drive and pushed it to the max to make up ground. Wheels spun snow and tires whined as he hit ice. He pointed the Bronco down the middle of the road, fishtailing through curves, downshifting on short straightaways, until he made it through the pass and had a clean line of sight down the empty road. Nothing.
Where the hell was she? She couldn't have been moving that fast. With no homing devices on Charlie Perry's car, he had no way to track her.
A helicopter came out of the mountains, flying low, gaining altitude, moving toward Ramah. It changed course, came straight back at him, and flew overhead.
He watched in the rearview mirror as it cleared the mountain and disappeared from view.
He slowed, made a cautious U-turn, and went looking for Applewhite.
She had to be somewhere behind him. But where? He crawled along at ten miles an hour looking for car tracks off the road. At the Paxton Springs turnoff Applewhite's car almost sideswiped the Bronco as she slid onto the highway.
She careened by, steering into a slight spin before straightening the wheels.
Bobby took a quick look, ducked his head, and kept moving in the opposite direction. When she was out of sight he pulled to the side of the road.
Applewhite had left Santa Fe alone, of that Sloan was certain. But he was just as certain he'd seen a head bob up in the backseat when she passed him.
He swung the Bronco around, hoping he hadn't been made, wondering what in the hell was going on.
The tape across his mouth didn't keep Charlie Perry from giggling.
Although the blindfold kept him from seeing things, the helicopter ride had been exciting.
For a while they'd gone up and down like a bumpy roller coaster with the blades thud, thud, thudding, and the wind swoosh, swoosh, swooshing outside. It had been lots of fun.
Now he was swishing along in a car. This was better than Disneyland, where his father had taken a picture of him pulling Donald Duck's tail.
Charlie tried to grin. The tape across his mouth made it impossible, his ankles and wrists were hurting a little bit, and he wished someone would take the blindfold off. He wondered if he'd done something bad, and what was going to happen next.
Muddy slush from the ranch road splat ted the truck windshield. Kerney turned on the wipers while Sara weighed in with her take on the Straley interview. Hamilton Terrell had been the point man for the operation since day one. He'd married Phyllis Terrell to position himself favorably with Proctor Straley, and then used Straley to wangle his way onto the Trade Source board. After that it had been just a matter of swaying the board with the promise of a lot of easy money from the public coffers.
Kerney agreed it had all been a setup to mask SWAMI and set the stage for Terrell's secret trade mission. Both had to be tied together, otherwise all the killing made no sense. But proving anything still remained highly remote, getting to Terrell wouldn't be easy, and time was running out.
Most of the tire tracks on the snow-covered road gave out when they reached the Pine Hill Navajo Reservation cutoff. They passed the snow-tinged butte of El Moro National Monument. The powerful, beautiful presence of it made Sara want to stop and play tourist. She wistfully thought about asking Kerney to bring her down on a weekend jaunt, and quickly nixed the idea. There might be no weekend jaunts with Kerney if she didn't stay alert and focused.
The vehicle tracking Kerney reported in. He had a five-minute ETA to Applewhite's location. She asked about road traffic. No vehicles other than Kerney's were traveling east. She told the surveillance driver to keep it that way.
Applewhite had spotted Detective Sloan when she'd passed him at the Paxton Springs cutoff. She got confirmation from the chopper pilot that she was still being followed.
"Keep him out of my zone."
"Affirmative," the pilot said.
"Are you authorizing deadly force?"
"Do whatever it takes," Applewhite said, as she eased to a stop along a straight stretch of road.
"Is anything else moving toward me?"
"Negative," the pilot said.
"Close the road behind me," she said.
Applewhite staged a one-car accident. She drove the car at an angle off the road, turning the wheels to put it into a skid. She backed up and adjusted the car's position so that a raised front hood would keep Kerney from seeing in as he approached. She pulled Perry out of the backseat, put him behind the steering wheel, took off the blindfold, ripped the tape from his mouth, locked him inside the vehicle, and popped the hood.