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Nothing happened fastenough. The MPs had yet to arrive, then had to be sorted out, and put on a bus. Mellon marked the points where they’d set up to isolate the Los Pandos neighborhood, and found wooden barricades at the Taos County Fair, which was getting organized, yet still two weeks away. The MPs were told not to let anyone out of the neighborhood without approval from a Taos cop.
Some of the MPs had been issued M4 rifles, and Lucas asked that they be put at the barricades, because the weapons were intimidating. The MPs were told to arrest anyone trying to get out on foot.
A dozen cops came in; the city only had about twenty sworn officers, and most of them had worked the overnight and had been dragged out of bed by Mellon.
It was early afternoon before everything was in place to begin the hunt. Shortly after the search teams began working the web of streets, two formidable-looking Army helicopters churned up the main highway, no more than a hundred feet overhead. Rae said, “We need to talk to those guys, too.”
“Colonel Foley should do it for us. We basically need them circling the edges of the built-up area, looking for people trying to make a run cross-country.”
Lucas called Foley, who said he’d take care of it. Then Lucas and Rae joined a police sergeant who was outlining the search to the Taos cops, and they all went for a walk.
—
They walked forsix hours down Los Pandos and the streets around it. The day turned hot, and everybody was sweating and by late afternoon, everything had slowed down: half the cops were cranky with a lack of sleep, the others discouraged by the lack of results. There were shouting matches with people who were not allowed to leave the neighborhood. One man said he was “going to get my gun” and was arrested and sent to the Taos County Adult Detention Center, which was not far away, while his wife screamed at the arresting officers.
“Drunk or crazy?” Lucas asked a cop.
“I don’t think she’s either one,” the cop said, as they watched her acting out. “She knows what she wants and damn everybody else if she doesn’t get it. Same with her old man.”
“Sad song of the eternally entitled,” Lucas said.
One cop was attacked by a Labrador retriever, the first time that Lucas had seen a Lab attack; the cop was sent to the hospital to get the tooth punctures patched up, the dog’s owner frightened and apologetic, fearful that her dog would be shot. It wasn’t.
Lucas had been attacked by a cocker spaniel early in his career, and late in his career by a rare white cockatoo. The Taos cops thought the cockatoo story was hilarious, those that believed it, and most had their own animal attack stories, all dogs but one. That one was a cop who’d been bitten by a horse.
“You don’t want to get bit by a horse,” he said, shaking his head. “The goddamn things have teeth like steel traps and they can bite your face off.”
“Your face looks all right,” Rae said.
“That’s because the horse bit him on the ass,” another cop said. “That’s not a scar you’d want to see.”
—
Letty showed upearly in the afternoon, trailed by Hawkins and Cartwright. Lucas knew about Cartwright from one of Letty’s previous investigations: CIA sniper, don’t tell anyone.
In the end, they’d knocked on every door in the neighborhood, and nobody knew about Scott or Catton. There’d been no response at twenty-one of the houses, and one man they talked to said there were a number of Airbnbs in the area. Lucas called Greet about getting a list.
“I don’t know,” he told Rae, after they’d gotten off the phone. They were sitting on boulders in the shade of a tall deciduous tree of some kind. Letty was down the street, walking toward them with Hawkins. “The Airbnb thing makes some kind of sense, I guess. Quick way to find an empty house.”
“Gotta wait for the list.”
“I don’t want to wait. The longer we wait, the longer they have to come up with an escape plan.”
“Or decide to let it go here, in Taos,” Rae said. “What do we do if they call us up and say ‘We surrender’ after they’ve turned it loose in some store we’re not watching? I don’t think it’s politically acceptable to blockade the whole town until the incubation period is up. Can’t get away with keeping people here for days. You saw what some of the people were like today—they don’t even like being held up for a few hours.”
“Yeah. But we can’t let it get out.We can’t.The Detrick guys…they’re telling us we’d be way better off nuking the whole town, than letting the virus out.”
“Nuking what?” Letty asked, as she and Hawkins came up.
“Nothing. They’re not going to nuke the town,” Rae said.
“Probably not, but I bet some asshole in Washington is researching the possibility,” Lucas said.
They all thought about that, and Hawkins knocked a fly away from Letty’s head and said, “You got flies.”
“We all got flies,” Lucas said. More silence, and Lucas said, “We’re about done here. Got jack shit. Where do we go next?”
“I can answer that question,” Hawkins said.
