The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (41)

She risked another five minutes, hurrying, hunting for anything that might be useful, not finding it. Then she went outside, locked the door, dropped the key in the weeds by the corner of the house where she could find it again if she needed to, sat in the Explorer, and called Kaiser.

“What’s going on over there?”

“Waiting to see what’s happening with Tanner,” Kaiser said.

“Would you ask Casey to either come back for a minute and pick up Sawyer’s gun or call another cop to come over and get it? I’m sitting here doing nothing, but I can’t leave until the gun does.”



* * *





Pugh showed up ten minutes later, Kaiser with her. Kaiser said, “Gonna be a while before Tanner can get around, he got ripped up good. He’s going to need physical therapy and probably more work on that artery by a vascular specialist.”

Pugh took a photo of Sawyer’s gun with her cell phone, then picked it up and put it in a plastic bag. She asked Letty, “Is the house locked up?”

“Yeah. Sawyer asked me to lock it before your cop took him to jail. Sawyer’s got the keys in his pocket.”

“Too bad,” Pugh said. “If it was unlocked we’d have to secure it. Give us a chance to poke around. See what we can see.”

Kaiser looked at Letty, then looked away.

On the way to the cars, stepping around the dead pink-and-white pit bull, Pugh said, “I’ll get the dog taken care of.”



* * *





When she and Kaiser had said good-bye to Pugh and were in the Explorer, Letty asked, “Any point in going to the hospital?”

“Not today—Tanner’s out of it, and he will be for a while. We could run down tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll do that,” she said, as she took the Explorer through a U-turn.

“I assume you ransacked the house,” Kaiser said. “You being a natural-born criminal.”

“And his Jeep,” Letty said. “He’s got a closet full of guns and in that very same closet, a cell phone with four numbers saved. I took a picture of them. His Jeep’s nav system had a long list of the last destinations. Think DHS can track them?”

“If you give them five minutes,” Kaiser said. “They’ve got access to some weird technological shit.”

“Speaking of weird shit . . . I think I’m losing mine,” Letty said. “You know how I grew up; basically, a shitkicker, saved by the Davenports. Anyway, I get out here, talking to these people, I’m falling back into shitkicker talk. I said, ‘free eats’ and ‘right comfortable.’ I thought Stanford had drained all that out of me.”

“Got to consider the bright side,” Kaiser said. “This DHS gig falls apart, you could write country songs.” He looked out at the street and asked, “We going?”

“We’ve got another guy to find, remember? Victor Crain lives on the other side of this block.”

“Ah, man. In all the ruckus, I forgot about him. Think we should get Pugh back?”

“Not right now. Let’s see what we can see.”



* * *





Letty took them around the block, then down a dusty dirt alley that separated the houses on Allen Avenue from the houses on Bruce Avenue. “There’s the house and there’s Victor Crain,” Letty said, two-thirds of the way down the track. Crain was a muscular man with full-sleeve tattoos and was wearing a white T-shirt; he had well-oiled brown hair striped with white.

They were moving slowly, and as they passed Crain and his black Ford pickup, Kaiser looked out the side window and lifted a hand to Crain, who was loading a cardboard box into the pickup. Crain flipped a hand back at them and then they were past.

“I had to wave at him or he would have figured out something was up. He’s going somewhere,” Kaiser said.

“Probably heard the shot when Tanner killed that dog,” Letty said. “Poor goddamn mutt.”

Kaiser said, “Pits can be great dogs, treated right.”

Letty nodded and said, “I’m taking a left up ahead. Let’s get back where he won’t see us but we can see him if he moves.”

They wound up two blocks away, partly concealed by a school bus that had been converted into an RV, looking across three yards to Crain’s pickup. They could see Crain moving back and forth from the house. After one last trip, carrying a rifle case, he was in the truck, driving away.

Letty waited until he’d gotten to the end of the block, then went to the end of the block that she and Kaiser were on, in time to see the pickup turn toward the main drag. They followed, with a half-dozen cars between Crain’s truck and the Explorer, saw him turn south, and Kaiser said, “Headed for I-20.”

“Probably.”

He was. They saw him take the on-ramp to I-20 south, followed, let more cars get between them, and then got up on the highway. A mile later, Kaiser said, “He’s doing about fifty. He’s checking for slow cars behind him. There’s an off-ramp coming up. Get off there.”

Letty got off, followed a couple of signs to the on-ramp, and got back on I-20. Crain was now two or three miles ahead of them, but on the flat highway, they could still see his truck.

“Hang back, don’t close up,” Kaiser said. “He won’t be able to see us this far back.”