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Pause. Then, “Actually, she paid cash. Twenty-two hundred dollars for the bike, a helmet and gloves.”
Letty had her phone on speaker, and there were a couple of “whoas” and an “oh boy” from the room around her.
“What did she look like? A tall woman? Gray hair?”
“She was sorta tall, I guess…didn’t have any hair—she was a cancer victim, she had one of those pink cancer ribbons. She was wearing a Covid mask, so I really couldn’t tell you what she looked like.”
Letty asked for his email, told him to stay on the phone. “I’m going to send you a photo…it’ll be there in a couple of minutes.” Sheretrieved her iPad, called up the photo of Catton, and sent it. The man on the phone said, “Got it. I really can’t tell, I mean…she was bald, she had a scarf on her head…”
“Put one hand on the top of her head in the photo and cover up the bottom half of her face with your other hand. What do you think?”
The man said, “Yeah. Um, it could be her. It sorta looks like her.”
Lucas blurted, “Ahh! He’s already on the road. If he gets past the checkpoints, he’ll try to grab a car.”
—
Letty got Greetout of bed—it was three forty-five in Washington.
Letty began, “I’m sorry to wake you up…”
“Don’t apologize, just talk to me,” Greet said.
“We think Scott may have slipped out of town. A woman we think is Catton bought a mountain bike at a Taos bike shop.”
“Shit! Let me think about this for a minute or two. Literally a minute or two. I’ll call you right back.”
While they were waiting, they argued about Scott’s next move, if he was on a bike. They were still doing that when Greet called back.
“Here’s my thoughts. Maybe you’ve already covered this territory, but I’ll tell you anyway. Letty, I think you, Hawkins, and Cartwright need to get down to the Albuquerque airport. Like, now. I’ve been looking at maps all day, and he almost has to go south, because that’s where a real road network is, west of the mountains. East through the mountains, north and west we can block: he won’t get through there. To make sure, I’ll plug the very ends of those roads with more state cops. We’ve got more of them on call, they’re ready to move, and I’ll move them in the next hour. But, my feeling is that the logic of thiswill send him south. I also think that he won’t be able to ride a bike the whole way—he’ll have to grab a car, one way or another.”
“We agree with all that,” Letty said.
“Okay. If he grabs a car, and somehow gets away with it, once he gets to Santa Fe he could go in any direction he wants, but the number of roads are still fairly limited and we can block them. What we need to try to do is funnel him down toward Albuquerque. Other than Santa Fe, that’s the closest and fastest airport within reach, that would meet his requirements. We need to ambush him there, as a last resort. I’ll try to use the media to get him there. If we can determine what car he’s using, we’ll be able to stop him before he gets to the airport. But if we can’t determine that, we need you guys to set a trap at the airport itself.”
Lucas: “That could work. What will you tell the media?”
“As I understand it, we don’t have a clue where Catton is, except that she’s probably still in town. She bought that bike yesterday morning, and we’ve not let anybody out of town since then. That means she’s holed up somewhere, and if she’s looking at TV, we’ll have the news people reading reports saying that we believe the two of them are holed up somewhere in town, and that we’ll be starting door-to-door searches, isolating different districts in town, and that we expect to search every house in town in the next two days. We’ll say that we’re putting together a statewide emergency response no later than tomorrow. If Catton calls Scott with the news, or if he hears it on a car radio, that should make him think about his options. His best option would be to move fast and hope for the best, and that would be either Santa Fe or Albuquerque. We’ll block off the approaches to the Santa Fe airport. Discourage him from trying to make Denver, Dallas, Phoenix, or El Paso.”
“That’s a plan,” Rae said. “Lucas and I and the marshals team here can keeping pushing on locating Catton. The biggest problem we see is that she’ll try to infect a whole crowd of people, and we won’t know who they are…”
“You gotta find her,” Greet said. “I trust you people to do that. We’re all counting on you.”
When Greet had rung off, they all looked at each other and then Letty said, “Barb, Alec and I need to get down to Albuquerque, I guess. We’ll try to get some sleep in the airport.”
“If Scott tried to sneak out on a bike, I’ll bet he waited until after dark, when things had quieted down,” Lucas said. “I think you’ve got time.”
Letty: “Wish I had some Dexedrine.”
Lucas: “I might find something like that in my dopp kit…”
Letty: “Really? I’m shocked.”
“Forget about it. I’ve got much better stuff,” Cartwright said. “If we’re gonna go, we gotta go.”
26
The phone woke Lucas. He rolled over in bed, picked it up from the bed stand. The screen said 7:17 a.m. and the call was coming in from Austin.
