The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (79)

“Quick, now,” Kaiser said, as they went inside and he pushed the door closed. “The cops could still be coming.”

One minute in the house, and Letty said, “She’s gone. She was here, there’s stuff in the garbage can that probably was dumped yesterday. There’s a milk carton that doesn’t smell spoiled yet. No clothes, no bedding, no towels, no bathroom stuff . . . nothing but junky furniture and an old TV.”

Kaiser agreed. “She’s moved on.”

“They’re close to whatever they’re planning to do, she’s already running,” Letty said. “We need to talk to Greet. We need to see her bank accounts and credit cards . . .”



* * *





They called Greet as they were driving out of Pear Tree Lane, and told her that they’d looked through the windows of Hawkes’s house and it appeared that she’d vacated the place. “Not like a standard move-out,” Letty said. “She took clothes and personal stuff, dishes and bedding, cleaned out the refrigerator, but she left behind her bed and chest of drawers and other furniture, a microwave and TV.”

“You saw all that through the windows? The inside of a fridge?”

“Try to focus, here, Billy,” Letty said.

“You think she’s on the run?” Greet asked.

“That’s what we think.”

“Okay, I admit that’s scary. Unless they just wanted the C-4 because, you know, they wanted it. Like those goofs running around with ARs.”

“Blowing up an I-beam seems like a very specific want,” Letty said.

“We can put out a request for her Jeep—if she owned it, I can get the tag number and put the Texas highway patrol on it and the El Paso police. I can probably get her credit card purchases; the bank accounts might take longer.”

“You gotta do it fast as you can; if she cleaned out her bank account . . .”

“Okay. I’ll get all of that today. You guys be careful.”



* * *





“I don’t know what we do next,” Letty admitted. “Guess we wait for Greet to call.”

They hadn’t gotten to the hotel before Greet called.

“First thing I tried was tracking Hawkes’s Jeep. Guess what? She sold it yesterday morning. Went down with the buyer and registered the transfer with the Texas DMV. She got almost thirty thousand dollars for it—twenty-nine, nine.”

“Billy . . .”

“I know, I know, that’s bad. Real bad,” Greet said.

“I just thought of something,” Letty said. “Damn it, I should have thought of it when I was talking to the general. You need to call him back, or talk to the sergeant major who sits outside his office. They’ve got a captain there, I don’t know his full name, but his last name is Colin. I need to talk to him. Immediately.”

“I’ll call,” Greet promised. “And he will call you back, because I will be screaming at them.”



* * *





Colin did call back, as they drove into the hotel parking lot. “I’m in enough trouble, with the general asking why you’re calling me.”

“I don’t care about how much trouble you’re in,” Letty said. “Listen to me. When this unknown guy was showing our suspects . . . the people we know about . . . how to use the C-4, I took some photographs with my iPhone. We were too far away from them, for the photos to be much good, but I took them on the telephoto setting. Maybe you can do something with them. If he was the guy supplying the C-4, and he probably was . . .”

Colin: “Send it to me! Now!”

Letty sent the best of the photos, and Colin said, “I got a guy who can work with this.”

“If you get anything, call us back,” Letty said.

“Maybe,” Colin said, and he clicked off.



* * *





“Fuck that guy,” Letty said.

“Fuck the whole Army. It’s CYA, every day.”

“Covering your ass won’t cut it, if they blow up El Paso,” Letty said, as they walked across the parking lot to the hotel. “What if they’re planning to blow up the Army headquarters?”

“From what I’ve read, the militias are usually full of ex-military,” Kaiser said. “I don’t think they’d do that.”

“Can’t see them blowing up a government building, they’re all pretty well guarded.”

“No, they’re not . . . not if it’s done like Oklahoma City, where a truck pulls up in the street and boom,” Kaiser said. “But the Oklahoma bomb was huge. A lot bigger than a hundred pounds of C-4.”

“If they were learning how to cut an I-beam, they must be inside some place . . . must be able to get inside with explosives and detonators and all that.”

“Whatever it is, I believe they’re going to do it soon, since Hawkes just evacuated the war zone,” Kaiser said. He held the door for her, and said, “Let’s find a place to sit and talk. I wonder where Low is? We haven’t heard from Low. Or even seen him.”

“Now, that’s a thought,” Letty said. She cupped her hands over her nose and mouth, thinking, then said, “Probably doesn’t have a driver’s license, at least, not a current one, or his parole officer could find him. Same goes for truck registration.”