Committed (13 page)

“What about the couple?” Beth asked.

“Not in the RV, as far as the local officer who spotted it stated. The RV is at a shopping center. This information is minutes old, at the most. Local law enforcement is beginning to search the shopping center and neighboring businesses as they arrive to the scene.”

I had my plate clean before our waitress brought our check. I wiped the corners of my mouth with my napkin and stood. Glancing over, I saw Bill shoveling down the remaining bits of his lasagna. We paid our tab, left, and were back on the interstate within minutes.

Scott and Bill, driving ahead of us, called Beth and me with pieces of information as they filtered through. When we were a half hour up the interstate, we got the word that the two hadn’t been found inside the store or neighboring businesses. The local law enforcement were beginning to go through security footage and had dispatched multiple cars to the surrounding areas in search. I called Makara and Gents, following us, and relayed the information. When we were ten minutes out from the scene, we got another update that said they’d found them on the security footage and that the pair had left from the back of the superstore. At a mile away, we received another update that the two had jumped the fence behind the supercenter and appeared to have fled on foot to the southeast.

Beth put on her turn signal and made a right into the store’s parking lot. Her cell phone said we’d arrived at our destination. She clicked the button that shut off the navigation.

“How did we do?” I asked.

“Originally, the nav said an hour and eight minutes. Made it in fifty-four.”

I nodded and immediately spotted the RV at the back of the parking lot, surrounded by police cruisers. Through the parking lot, at the front of the building, I saw another handful of squad cars. Scott pulled up near the police cars at the RV. He lowered his window, and one of the officers went to the driver’s side of his car. The two exchanged a few words, and Scott pulled away toward the front of the building, near the patrol cars parked in front of some outdoor grills. Beth and I followed, with Agents Gents and Makara following us. We parked our cars in the fire lane and stepped out. Beth and I, as well as Gents and Makara, went to the front of Bill and Scott’s car.

“The officer back there said we’re looking for a Lieutenant Hampton inside. He’s who’s leading this up here,” Scott said.

We entered the building and made contact with the first officer we saw. He introduced himself as Officer Chris Pontier and said he would take us back to the security office where the lieutenant was viewing footage. Our group of six followed the officer through the front of the store, catching awkward gazes along the way from the shoppers checking out, and behind the customer-service counter. We headed through a door behind the counter to our left and up a flight of stairs into another hallway.

The first door to our left was open, and Officer Pontier entered. We followed him in, where three officers and a man sitting in a chair all had their backs to us. Their attention seemed focused on three computer monitors on the table in front of them. Another man, who appeared to be a store manager solely because of the fact he was wearing a tie as opposed to a polo shirt, stood next to the seated man and the officers. He turned to look at us and then got the attention from the rest of the group.

“We’re looking for a Lieutenant Hampton,” Scott said.

The widest of the three officers, standing in the center of the group, turned and walked toward us. He held out his baseball-mitt-sized hand for a handshake as he approached. “Lieutenant Mark Hampton. You’re the team from the FBI, I’m assuming.”

“Correct,” Scott said. He gave the guy our names—quickly. “Where are we at?”

“I’ve looked over the footage. The pair fled southeast. I have patrol searching everywhere. We have a subdivision in the area to which the couple ran. I had guys basically shut it down inside of fifteen minutes of getting on scene.”

“What was the window from the time they actually fled to the time you had a car there?” I asked.

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“So they could be in a car and gone by now?” Beth asked.

“The neighborhood is a half mile away through brush and some low-lying areas. You’re looking at a good six minutes or so to even get over there. Then you’d have to secure a car, and at this time of day, the neighborhood is probably going to be fairly quiet. If I had to guess, they’re either hiding out in a house in that neighborhood or still on foot somewhere.

“Did you check the RV?” Bill asked.

“The door was open,” Hampton said. “We cleared it and left it as found.”

“Okay, let’s split up and start getting something going here,” Scott said. “I want to get over to this neighborhood they were headed toward and start pounding the pavement.”

“We’ll take a look at the RV,” Gents said.

Scott nodded, and Gents and Makara left the security office.

“Beth and I will run through the footage and see exactly what we have,” I said. “I’ll call your phone if we see anything of substance, and we’ll meet you over in the neighborhood shortly.”

“Sounds good,” Scott said. He and Bill headed for the door.

Beth and I followed the lieutenant back toward the man still seated.

“Up on the screen now is them fleeing. The footage is from one of the back-lot cameras,” Lieutenant Hampton said.

“Let’s roll that and get a look,” I said.

The man in the chair clicked a few buttons and ran the video. The camera view aimed down the back of the building. Nearer the camera were a row of Dumpsters; beyond them, some miscellaneous pallets; then nothing; and then what looked like cargo containers in the distance.

On screen, a door of the building flew open, and a couple appeared. The woman wore a baseball hat, a long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of shorts. The man had on a hooded sweatshirt, with the hood up, and jeans. The man ripped the hood from his head. It was Nick Frane. He jerked his head right and left, seemingly searching for which way to go. The pair ran away from the camera, down to the cargo containers. Frane boosted McCoy up onto the container. She put herself over the fence. A moment later, he climbed up and did the same. The two disappeared from view for a bit and then reappeared, running in the far-right corner of the screen until they were gone from view.

“You said that is southeast that they headed?” I asked.

“Yes.”

When the footage ended, I looked at Beth, standing next to me. “Feel like taking a walk?” I asked. “We need to try to follow in their footsteps and see where they went. Maybe we can pick up their trail there through the weeds and brush.”

“I’m in,” Beth said.

“I’ll join you,” Lieutenant Hampton said. “I have a number of years under my belt, tracking game. It might help in picking up a trail.”

“Sure,” I said and started for the door.

“You may want to have a change of clothes. Some low-lying areas back there—guessing we’ll hit mud,” the lieutenant said.

“We’ll deal with it later,” I said.

“I’d deal with it now,” Hampton said. “She isn’t going to get very far in those.” He pointed at Beth’s shoes, which were a pair of pumps with small heels. “And those shoes are going to be an issue as well.” He pointed at my square-tipped black leather dress shoes, which had completely flat bottoms without tread.

The manager piped up. “We have shoes, clothes, whatever you need here.”

Beth looked at me. “Sizes, quick,” she said.

“Huh?” I asked.

“Waist size, shoe size.”

“Um, thirty-four and twelve.”

“I’ll be right back.” Beth hustled from the room and returned a few minutes later to toss me a pair of jeans and hiking boots. She held more under her arm.

The manager checked us out at the customer-service counter below, we quickly changed, and Beth took our business clothes out to the car while the lieutenant and I waited for her at the front entrance. She returned, and the manager led us to the back of the building and the door to which Nick and Molly had fled from. We walked out and to the left, toward the shipping container the pair had climbed up in order to scale the fence.

“Keep an eye open for anything that may have been tossed,” I said and got nods from the lieutenant and Beth.

We reached the container, and I boosted Beth up, just as Nick Frane had done for Molly McCoy in the video. She waited at the top of the container for Hampton and me to climb up. After we got up there, the top of the fence separating the back of the superstore from the field on the other side was just about at my knee level.

“Seeing anything up here?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Beth said.

I looked down the other side of the fence—about a ten foot drop—and then brought my line of sight back up. Directly to our right and still extending in front of us was the back parking lot of some kind of commercial business. Trailers littered the lot. Directly past it and to the south was a golf course in the distance. To our left was a tree line about a half mile away across the brush and weeds. I saw some water mixed in with the brush we’d be walking through, a handful of trees scattered about, and some areas that looked like sand or dirt.

The lieutenant pointed off to the southeast. “What we had on video was them heading that direction. That neighborhood we spoke of is behind that tree line there. See the street on our side of that golf course?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“It would run you straight into the backside of that neighborhood if it went through,” Hampton said.

“All right, let’s get a move on,” Beth said. She swung a leg over the top of the fence, held on to the top with an overhand grip, and put her other leg over. Then she lowered herself and dropped to the ground before either the lieutenant or I could assist her.

We both stared down at her, impressed by her agility.

“Are you guys coming or what?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I swung my leg up and transferred myself over the fence in the same fashion Beth had though I was fairly certain I lacked the grace she’d displayed. My feet hit the ground with a thud and sank an inch or two into the earth. I took a few steps back to regain my balance.

The lieutenant came over next in the same wobbly fashion. The gear on his duty belt clanked together as he hit the ground. The three of us pulled our service weapons and headed south. I took a quick look at my watch to get the time. The scrappy weeds and brush were knee high and rose to our midsections within a hundred feet. Beth and I followed Lieutenant Hampton, who appeared to know where he was going. Another twenty feet ahead, he veered a bit to his right around a small berm filled with sand. Hampton pointed down. The sand had been disturbed and looked kicked to the side by a pair of shoe prints—one print was noticeably larger than the other.

“Prints in the sand trap,” he said

“Sand trap?” Beth asked.

“Where the supercenter sits right now used to be another eighteen holes of that golf course there.” Hampton jerked his head to the south. “The golf course sold it off to the developers. They only needed half of the area for the building, so this is the part of the course that got reclaimed by nature. Thus the ponds and sand traps.”

The terrain made a bit more sense then.

Hampton crouched to get a better look at the footprints. Then he rose and said, “This way.”

Beth and I followed. Ahead of Lieutenant Hampton, the brush was bent and a bit spread to the sides—I imagined that was from the couple making their way through. My feet began to slip a bit and sink with each step. I looked down to see our feet sinking into the brown mud. I also saw prints in the mud out in front of Hampton.

He stopped again. “One of them went down here.”

Beth and I hustled to Hampton’s back for a look. A patch of brush was lying flat, bent over at the ground and covered in mud. “It looks like they started straight south from here. They were probably trying to get to the street.” He continued walking.

Beth and I trudged through the mud and brush behind the lieutenant until we hit the street a few minutes later. We stopped at the road’s edge directly across from the golf course, which appeared empty. I glanced at my watch—seven minutes had passed.

“Is that their muddy footprints?” Beth asked. She pointed up the street to the east.

“Looks like it. Yeah. Come on,” Lieutenant Hampton said. He started east down the street.

Beth and I followed him up onto the old road, which bowed up in the center. The concrete had patches of blacktop filling potholes. I stamped my feet to free the wet muck from the soles of my boots. The mud had spattered my new jeans almost to my knees.

I looked off to my right. “Did you have any cars check with the golf course or golfers?” I asked Lieutenant Hampton.

“I sent a car over, yeah. No sightings of them.”

I looked forward, to the east, down the road we were following. The muddy footprints from the couple disappeared. The street turned to gravel, almost as if it became a driveway fifty yards ahead. The gravel ended at the tree line. After another few steps, I spotted the green roof of a big farmhouse and confirmed that the road did in fact turn into a driveway for the home, tucked into the trees.

“Has someone checked this place?” I asked.

“This was the first place we looked as soon as we saw the direction they headed. The homeowners said they’d been home all day but didn’t see or hear anyone back here,” Hampton said. “Just after the end of this gravel driveway here and through that patch of woods is the neighborhood.”

I glanced back over my shoulder, no longer hearing the crunching of Beth’s feet on the gravel behind me. She wasn’t there. I stopped, turned around, and then spotted her half into the bushes along the right side of the gravel driveway.

Beth popped back out with what looked like a gray hooded sweatshirt in her hand. “Well, this is where they went. This looks like the sweatshirt Nick Frane was wearing in the video.” Beth turned the sweatshirt in her hands. “Fresh mud all over the right side of it.” Beth ran her hand through the front pocket of the sweatshirt and then tossed it down. “Nothing in the pocket.” She went back into the bushes and reached down toward the ground. She popped back out with a carton of cigarettes and held them up.