Nobody Cares, page 14
Joe Bob began the tape. The men watched it silently, even through the death of the woman. It wasn’t until the end when all of the cages were opened, and the women began to exit them, that Joe Bob heard someone grunt.
Bingo, he thought.
“Do we know where they are?” Chief Newsome asked.
“No sir, we don’t,” Thomas Wyckoff said. “Officer Dixon is still working on it. But best guess would be somewhere out of the city, probably a subsistence cabin in the Chugach, don’t you think?”
Newsome nodded.
“We need an hour break,” Peter Dawson said. “I need to take this information back to AMOC, and I’m sure we all need to consult with our relative departments. That gives Officer Dixon time to do more research. Or, you can give me the file and I’ll see what I can do with it, using NSA’s tools. They’re a bit more robust than what a self-taught hacker might have,” Dawson added with a condescending smile. “I’ll need the original file, of course.”
“Perhaps after you check with your department, and we return in an hour,” Wyckoff replied. “You seem to have more leashes on you than he does.”
Everyone blinked, but no one came to Dawson’s assistance, not even his sidekick from the Air Force. Joe Bob smirked, demonstrating exactly why Wyckoff was the presenter.
“In an hour, then,” Captain McGuire said. “Captain Wyckoff? If you and your officer would stay behind, I’d like a word.”
“Perhaps, I can answer your questions, Captain,” Wyckoff said. “And let Joe Bob get back to work on that file?”
McGuire nodded, and Joe Bob escaped before McGuire could decide differently. He stopped outside the door. Flyboy and the spook were arguing about something at the other end of the hall. Joe Bob pulled out his phone and sent his partner a message:
They’ve asked for an hour to report into their departments. Flyboy and spook are arguing in the hallway. Be ready to move out after them.
He got a thumbs up emoji back. Huh, he thought. He would have bet Paul didn’t even know what emojis were.
Paul glanced over at Jason who had just picked up Paul’s phone. Read a text, it appeared. Hit a response. Jason looked up at him, and made a motion for him to wrap it up. “Betsy?” Paul asked. “You got all you need?”
Betsy hesitated, looked at her colleague. “For now,” she said. “Can we embed Carlos with you?” She looked torn as if she really wanted to be the one who went along. Paul would have said no, and she probably knew that. He was already responsible for getting one woman into this mess, he couldn’t face putting another woman at risk.
But Carlos Raines was a different story. Paul considered the young man. Fit enough, he thought. He’d been quiet throughout this interview. Asked a few good questions. “I get control over what gets used,” he countered.
The two reporters looked at each other. “I film and we argue later?” Carlos countered.
“No victims’ faces,” Paul warned. Carlos nodded. “And if I slug the predator, you make me a clip of it, but you can’t run it.”
Carlos grinned. “Is that likely?” he asked, as he followed him out the door.
“He has my fiancé,” Paul said grimly.
Carlos blew out air through pursed lips. “Noted,” he said soberly. “In that case, I may drop the camera and hold him for you.”
Jason had his car brought around, because there was no way three of them were going to fit in Paul’s Corvette, although he did get a promise of a ride in it one day. Jason drove a more practical Ford Explorer. Carlos shoved his gear into the back seat and climbed in next to it. Paul took shotgun and called Joe Bob, and put him on speaker phone.
“How far behind them are we?” Paul asked.
“They were parked on the street,” Joe Bob said. “I ah... I put a tracker on them.”
“Which you just happened to have in your pocket,” Paul said dryly. Jason grinned.
“Just happened to,” Joe Bob said agreeably.
“So what does the tracker tell you?”
“Unfortunately, it tells me they’re headed to the base and the lake there where Air Force flyboys can keep their personal planes. Not sure how close you’re going to get to them.”
“Lanky’s on his way,” Paul told him.
“Cool,” he said. “Let me see if I can patch him in on this call.”
Jason looked at him with a raised eyebrow. Paul shrugged. Hell, if he knew how he’d do it. Calling Lanky from a cell when he was in the air was beyond his tech skills. That’s why he put up with Joe Bob Dixon for God’s sake, because he was confident that if it could be done, Joe Bob would do it.
“Paul?” Lanky’s voice had a lot of static and the noise of the airplane disrupting it. “I’m going to land at the city lake site and pick you up.”
“I’ve got Jason Tremont and Carlos Raines with me,” Paul said. “Got room for all three of us?”
There was static. “Yeah, I’ll drop off a couple of these pilots that wouldn’t stay behind. Joe Bob? Find them a plane to fly, will you? We might need them.”
“On it,” Joe Bob said.
“We’ll be at the lake in 15 minutes,” Jason said, glancing at his GPS.
“Good,” Lanky said. “Be ready to jump. I’m going to back this sucker into the dock; you all climb in, and we’re back out again.”
Joe Bob broke in. “Their car stopped. They must be at the lake.”
Damn it, Paul thought. We’re nearly 30 minutes behind them. That was a lot of air time. He just hunkered down and prayed.
Twenty minutes later, Lanky looked at Paul and shook his head. “We lost him,” he said.
He called his friend at the airport tower, and asked whether they’d be able to track him. He listened. Paul just looked out the window.
“The base called and told them to stand down,” Lanky said.
Jason Tremont and Carlos Raines were silent in the back.
“What does that mean?” Paul asked.
Lanky shook his head. “It means the base is covering for them for some reason,” he said slowly. “I wonder if the national security alert to the task force wasn’t just a ruse?”
Paul frowned. All he could think of was that he had failed Dace. He closed his eyes. Took some deep breaths. Get your head in the game, he thought. He couldn’t chase the two. What could he do? Work the case. That’s what he needed to do.
“So you’re saying what? The predator is being protected because of national security?”
Lanky shrugged. “Something like that,” he said. “Wasn’t one of your suspects an NSA contractor?”
Paul considered that. “Can I call in to Joe Bob or Captain Wyckoff?”
“Want to land?” Lanky asked.
“Not yet,” Paul said. “The video showed the women were loose, right? If Dace pulls a prison break she may need us.”
Lanky snorted. “Just how many planes is she going to go joyriding in?” he asked.
“One more,” Paul said. “Please God, let her steal one more plane.”
Paul reported in to Wyckoff and his partner. Lanky headed toward Talkeetna. “Good a destination as any,” he said. “I’ll loop back toward Anchorage once. But then we have to sit it down and fill up with gas.”
“Maybe fill up in Talkeetna, before we loop,” Paul suggested.
Lanky nodded, and Paul resumed staring out the window. Dace, where are you?
Chapter 18
Sarah Itee figured out how to give everyone their evening meal early, and with generous portions. Still kibble, but some of these women had been on a kibble and water diet for so long she would have been afraid to feed them anything else. Dace found a stash of apples, and they all had one.
“So they know we’re loose,” Dace said. “And they’ll be headed back here. The predator won’t be able to help himself. So, we have about an hour for us to figure this out.”
“The shovel,” Sarah said. “That’s a good weapon.”
“It is,” she agreed. “What else is in his tool shed? And in his house? Scavenger hunt time, ladies. What can we find?”
The woman who had been in her face about Mary Ayek — Naomi — found the rifle. Which made sense, Dace thought. Out here? Of course, he’d have a rifle. And probably a hand gun. She found it in his nightstand.
Naomi was caressing the rifle as if it were precious to her. “Can you shoot it?” Dace asked.
Naomi grinned. “Best hunter in the family,” she said. “He’s just another big game shot for me.”
All right then, Dace thought, and made a mental note to make sure that these women got counseling, because she was pretty sure none of them were sane. With good reason.
“The pistol?” she said looking around at the women. “Who can shoot it?”
“I can,” Sarah said, and held out her hand for it. “Unless you want it?”
Dace hesitated. She’d learned to shoot before coming to Alaska, but no. “I’ve got enough to do to pilot his plane,” she said honestly.
“So what’s the plan? Shoot them as they get out of the plane?” Naomi asked.
“We have to let them get all the way here,” Dace said slowly, picturing it. “And we have to have all the women hidden down by the dock somewhere. The pilot may stay with the plane. So, we need to think about that, too.”
Ruth had an idea about where they could hide. She volunteered to be in charge of the women who were too sick and too beaten to be helpful. “I’ll want the shovel,” she said grimly. Dace gave Sarah a quick glance, and got her nod of approval. Ruth was on Sarah’s OK list, apparently.
So they helped each other go down to the lake and look at the dock. “See?” Ruth said. “There’s more ground under the dock than you’d think, the lake is low this time of year.”
The women looked at each other. “Can you hide there?” Dace asked gently. They nodded.
Ruth helped the four who were in the worst shape get under the dock and get comfortable. She took position on the outside, the shovel beside her. She settled in, and looked like she was almost asleep in minutes.
Dace watched for a bit. Not a problem if they do sleep, she thought. The plane will wake them up fast enough. She’d come back and join them. It was as good a place as she’d find to take over the plane. She took a deep breath at the thought of that. A hammer, she thought. Was there a hammer in the tool room?
Naomi had her spot staked out. “Remember,” Dace warned, “you need to wait until he’s almost up to the kennel. Both of them, I hope.”
“I’ve got it,” she said. “You just do your part, and I’ll do mine.”
Dace nodded. She had no doubt the woman would.
She explored the tool shed and found a mallet, even better, she thought. Heavier than a hammer, but she could still swing it easily. She hoped the pilot would follow the predator up the hill, but she thought it was likely he wouldn’t. And if he stayed? Then she needed to be prepared to take care of that. Well at least this time, if she had to club the pilot of her escape plane, they wouldn’t be in the air at the time.
And she actually knew how to fly the plane this time too. Piece of cake then, she thought, with a laugh tinged with hysterics.
That left three to be the bait. Sarah and two others to be roaming around the front of the house and the kennel as if they were looking for something. They brought things from his kitchen out onto the porch. “I’m tempted to haul out that big screen TV of his,” Sarah said. “Not a man alive who wouldn’t be furious to see his TV tossed onto the ground.”
Dace laughed. “Let’s do it,” she said. And the four of them carried the heavy sucker out of the house and rolled it off the porch.
“Nice,” Dace said. And the women grinned. Fierce, feral grins, she thought, and shuddered a bit. As soon as she got in the air and on the radio, she was calling in the mental health officials.
“What about the computer?” someone asked.
Dace shook her head. “No, that’s evidence,” she said. She went back inside to take a look at it. She wanted to take it with her, to be able to hand over the hard drive — the whole tower CPU — to Joe Bob. Would that violate chain of evidence? She wasn’t sure. She tapped her foot as she thought about it. She could feel the anxiety building.
Please God, don’t let him take too long to come back, she thought. Because if she had to wait on him for too long, she was going to have a melt-down, a full-fledged anxiety attack. She felt herself start to hyperventilate, and she consciously slowed her breathing down. These women were depending on her. If they could hold it together, she could.
By some standards of holding it together, she conceded, as she watched two of the captured women trash his house. “Not the computer,” she warned them. They nodded.
She and Sarah looked at each other. Sarah shrugged.
“Listen up,” Dace said, and the other two women stopped and looked at her. “I’m putting you in charge of this. When the time comes for us to leave, this computer needs to leave with us. Your job is to get it down to the dock and onto the plane — in one piece. Can you do that?”
“You don’t care about anything in here but the computer?” one woman asked, seeking confirmation.
“Have at it,” Dace said, figuring she couldn’t control them anyway. “But we need the computer to document what he’s been doing.”
“For the Lieutenant? For Paul Kitka?” the other woman whispered. Her voice was hoarse with disuse. “We’ll take care of it,” she promised.
Mary Ayek was right, Dace thought. Paul was a rock star, a hero to these women. A name. She doubted they’d ever met him, but they knew his name, and he meant something to them. She didn’t think Paul had a clue about that. It made her laugh.
Dace unhooked everything from the computer, organizing the pieces. The tower, the monitor, and a sack of bits and pieces. She wasn’t sure that Joe Bob would need all of it, but best to take it.
She glanced at the two women who were still destroying the cabin. She hoped they wouldn’t have long to wait for the predator. Right now there was a lot of adrenaline flowing — and insanity, she worried — but the longer they had to wait, the adrenaline would wear off and the insanity would prevail. And she didn’t have a clue what would happen then.
James Tiptree hadn’t written about what happened when the possums turned rabid. Or maybe she had. Were the two women who risked everything to leave with aliens still sane? She needed to reread the story. When she got out of here.
She left the women in the cabin and Sarah on the front porch with the pistol, and she went down to the dock. She knew she needed to be under the dock before the plane showed up. The pilot would be focused on the lake and the dock, and he’d see her before she could duck under. But she dreaded going under there, as much because of those emancipated women as the dark and damp. She avoided thinking about what they’d been through. Instead, just for a bit, she sat on the dock and looked over the lake.
Pretty out here, she thought. Pretty didn’t do it justice, of course. Alaska was magnificent. Out here on a small lake surrounded by Douglas fir and spruce trees? She sighed and let the anxiety go. The lake was still this morning; she could see the reflection of the trees and sky. And she loved the different pine trees. She wanted to go walk among them and smell their scent.
It was a lot like the lake she’d camped by when she first came to Alaska. She’d come up here, intending to die. She’d planned to pick a trail and start hiking. Something would get her eventually: a wild animal, the weather, something. It seemed a good way to go. Then she’d set up camp on a lake near Talkeetna and something inside her changed. She spent one night, then two. After a while she didn’t want to find that trail anymore. She wanted to live. So she went into Talkeetna to see if Lanky Purdue really did need an office manager like Mickey had told her he did. She smiled. She wondered how the truck driver was doing? She hoped she knew that Dace had taken her advice. She should look her up, she decided.
Live. She wanted to live. It had been a surprisingly hard decision to make. She had felt the pull of oblivion during the whole investigation into Stephen’s death. It would have been easy, she thought. But that something inside her that had found reason to live at the lake wouldn’t let go. And so she fought the desire for oblivion.
And here she was. Sitting alongside another lake trying to find the courage and fortitude to fight for the right to live.
To go back to Paul. To go back to the life and friends she had in Talkeetna. To sort out the bookings that Lanky had probably screwed up even in the couple of days she’d been gone.
To fly. That had been a surprise. She loved it. She’d learned to fly! Wasn’t that something? And to shoot a gun.
And to love. She smiled at that. She had never expected to find love. A year ago, she would have said she didn’t believe it existed. And if it did, it was obvious she wasn’t going to be one of those who found it. And here she was. Love had found her. It took a while. She had to learn to trust first. But living with Paul as just housemates had given her time to study him, in much the same way she’d studied Stephen. Trying to predict him. Trying not to anger him. And gradually she realized that Paul accepted her as she was. And he gave her the space to figure that out — who was she exactly? She could breathe in his house. He didn’t rage about a less than perfectly clean house — he cleaned too. He didn’t expect anything of her. Didn’t push her about sex. That had exasperated her since Sitka. She wanted him, and nothing in her previous experience had taught her how to ask. But they were together now, and it was good. She grinned. Better than good.
And I’m going to fight to keep those things, to return to that life, she thought. That’s what I’m fighting for. My life. She took one last look at the lake and its reflections, and the quiet dark pines, and she nodded decisively. And then she took a deep breath, let it out, and slid under the dock to wait.
She wasn’t sure how long they waited. She settled in under the deck next to the woman with the shovel. And in the dark, with only the soft breathing of the other women, it was easy to slide into a light sleep. She hadn’t had any sleep for 24 hours, maybe more. She didn’t know what time it was. It was daylight, and had been for a while. But sunrise was at 5 a.m. this time of year. She still found the change in daylength disconcerting. Sunset last night had been at 11 p.m. so six hours of night — and that included the twilight and the pre-dawn light. Come December, just five months away, it would reverse and they’d be down to six hours of daylight. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to it. She could live in a place with long days just fine. Or maybe, even a place of long nights. But it was the change that got to her. It was like riding on a pendulum, slowly moving from one extreme to the other.
