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Lucas called Greet:“We have a legal problem involving both the MPs and the local law officers. We’re thinking we might need a house-to-house search. We need somebody high up to tell us that we can do it without warrants. Do we have martial law now?”
“There are arguments about that, the DOJ stuck an oar in. Give me a half hour to get some clarity,” Greet said. She added, “The word from Detrick keeps getting worse and worse. The infectiousness is off the chart. The mortality rate can’t be determined without more work.”
“All right. Well, we think we’ve got all but two of them. The other two are cornered, but I don’t know what we’d do if they decided just to infect the city.”
“Don’t even think about that. I’ll get back to you.”
“Get back to Chief Mellon and Colonel Foley,” Lucas said. “They’ll be organizing the searches and blockades.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’m more useful on the street. We’re figuring it out one inch at a time and I’m going to get a car and look around.”
When he’d finished talking with Greet, Lucas told Mellon that somebody would be calling about authorizing warrantless searches. “I need to borrow a squad car. Something that will get me through checkpoints without having to wait.”
“Not a problem,” Mellon said.
—
The white squadcar reeked of hot dogs and less strongly of urine but had a full tank of gas and a light bar, all Lucas needed. Hecalled Rae, who was up and around, told her that he’d pick her up at the motel.
“Nice ride,” she said, skeptically, when he arrived. She opened the back door of the car, sniffed at the interior.
“It is what it is, as Marcus Aurelius once said,” Lucas said.
“Really? He said that?”
“How the hell would I know? Do I look like a historian?”
“Okay. Well, I’m hungrier than hell,” she said. She put her equipment bag on the back seat. “I brought our U.S. Marshals jackets, so maybe we won’t repeat last night’s little adventure, shooting a civilian.”
“Wish we’d thought of that last night…I saw a McDonald’s on the way down here, not too far from where we’ll be going.”
“Where are we going?”
“Around.”
—
They got sacksof junk food and Diet Cokes at McDonald’s and turned south again. The Levys had been staying on a street called Los Pandos Road, and that’s where they’d seen Foss and Callister. Lucas used his iPhone’s navigation app to get him back there, and they cruised slowly down the length of the street.
Los Pandos was a leafy lane, narrow, tall trees overhanging, some of the homes well kept, others not, open grassy lots from place to place. Most of the homes had fences or walls, with the cars parked in front or the side; few of the houses had garages. There must have been a dozen streets intersecting, leading off to other streets.
“If they were walking down Los Pandos to Smith’s, they probablyhadn’t walked too far. Probably one of these side streets,” Rae said. “We need some door-knockers. We need to ask who saw a man and a woman walking down the street around nine o’clock, and where did they come from?”
“Hard to see into the street from these houses,” Lucas said. “Everybody is walled up inside their own compounds.”
“It’s our best shot, right now,” Rae said. She unzipped the equipment bag and took out her iPad, called up a map of Taos. “We could block off the most likely places with…” She counted. “We’d need nine or ten checkpoints to isolate the neighborhood and start working through it.”
“Lot of guys…”
“That’s just the checkpoints. We’d need a couple of dozen more to walk the streets and knock.”
Lucas shrugged. “No choice. I’ll call the Army guys, get them to send some MPs down here. They should be making paper copies of Scott’s and Catton’s faces. We’ll use them for the checkpoints, get Mellon’s cops down here to walk the street. Maybe…there are a lot of MPs, we put one MP with every walking cop…”
“It’s a plan,” Rae said. “I hope Scott and Catton haven’t taken off.”
—
