The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (42)

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They followed him southwest, through Pecos, to the small town of Toyah, where they lost him. They were still more than a mile back when they saw him take the exit. When they got off the highway, there were no moving black Ford pickups in sight.

“Now what?” Letty asked.

“Drive around,” Kaiser said. They did, for fifteen minutes, but Crain had disappeared.

“He could be in a garage,” Letty said.

“Or he could be cutting cross-country,” Kaiser said. He had a map up on his iPad screen. “There are a lot of back highways coming out of here. No way we could track him anyway—we’d be the only two vehicles on some of these roads.”

“Give up, then?”

“When at first you don’t succeed, say ‘Fuck it’ and go home,” Kaiser said. “We’ve got those addresses on Sawyer’s cell and nav system, maybe one of them will point us out here somewhere.”

On the way back to Midland, they stopped at Monahans to check on Tanner, and were told that he’d been moved by ambulance to the hospital at Odessa, where they had a vascular surgeon.

They found the hospital in Odessa as it was getting dark and were told that Tanner had been stabilized. He’d been sedated and was asleep, preparing for a seven-o’clock surgery the next morning.

“We tried to be nice,” Kaiser said, as they rolled out of the parking lot.





TEN




At the hotel, Letty pulled Sawyer’s cell phone data off her iPhone photos, retyped it, and sent it to Billy Greet in Washington, asking for help in determining locations. The information from the Jeep’s navigation system was a different kind of problem—there were eighty addresses, and by entering them into Google Maps, she found that most were commercial buildings like hardware stores, restaurants, and coffee shops.

While it was possible that those sites were used for meetings with friends, it was also possible that Sawyer was simply going out for dinner or to buy hammers. One address in San Antonio went to a western-wear store, one in Midland to a Home Depot.

An address in El Paso went to a residence on Pear Tree Lane and might be a possibility. Another went to an address that Google didn’t know about, off State Highway 132. She called up a map, and found that Highway 132 ran east of Toyah, where they’d lost Crain. She sent both addresses to Greet and went to bed.



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Greet called the next morning as Letty was getting back from her run—Washington was an hour ahead of Midland—and said that the El Paso address went to a woman named Alice Serrano who had been convicted of assault in New Mexico eight years earlier but had served no jail time and had no known connection to Low or to any radical group. Greet hadn’t been able to find the address on Highway 132. “It’s so sparsely populated out there that it’s possible they have some kind of informal numbering system.”

“Why would it be in the Jeep’s nav system if the address isn’t real?” Letty asked.

“Just because it’s in the nav system doesn’t mean that it was found. You know what I’d do? I’d go into this Toyah place, to the post office, and ask about it. Mail carriers know all that stuff.”

“Maybe we’ll do that. We’ve got another guy to look at before we go running out there, though. Vermilion Wright thinks he knows who’s buying the oil.”

“You’re moving, Letty,” Greet said. “But take care. I grew up in Oklahoma oil country, and it can be rough out there.”

“We’ve already figured that out,” Letty said. She told Greet about the dog attack.

“I gotta say, the cop was an idiot for busting through a gate with a bad dog sign on it.”

Kaiser called, and they went back to IHOP for pancakes and to plot out the day. They decided to go out to Seminole to talk to Vermilion Wright’s friend, Lowell Harp, and to check out Roscoe Winks’s oil operation. Letty called Harp during a second cup of coffee, and they arranged to meet at one of Harp’s convenience stores.

Seminole was as easy to get to from Odessa as it was from Midland, so they swung by the Odessa hospital to check on Tanner. There, they were told that Tanner was still in the operating room. When they asked about his condition, a nurse asked if they were relatives. Letty showed the nurse her DHS identification and he grudgingly conceded that Tanner was listed in fair condition, which was the second-highest level, below “good” and above “serious,” “critical,” and “unresponsive.”

“Does ‘unresponsive’ mean the same as dead?” Kaiser asked.

“Yeah, pretty much, except we could still get in there and harvest some organs,” the nurse said.

“I didn’t need to hear that,” Kaiser said. Out in the car, he muttered, “Harvest some organs,” a couple of times, until Letty told him to shut up, and then he said, “I got your organ right here.”



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Seminole was an hour out of Odessa, through a forest of pumpjacks and the small city of Andrews. They met Harp at a wind-scoured Elko gas station and convenience store. He was a tall man with a deeply lined face and a gray mustache, wearing a straw cowboy hat and boots as though he’d done that all his life, which he probably had; Letty pegged him at somewhere between seventy and eighty, but, given the obvious wear and tear, couldn’t make a closer estimate.