Far Gone (26 page)

She held her breath.

“Where?” He glanced at her. “Okay, tell Whitfield. I’m on my way.” He hung up. “CBP thinks they saw him earlier this morning headed southbound on three-eighty-five.”

Southbound? Her heart sank. God, was he driving down to Mexico?

“This agent was northbound, but he noticed a small blue sedan suddenly veering west from the highway, going off-road. Here, get out.”

“Why?”

“I’ll drive. Torres gave me directions.” He got out and walked around the front. She scooted over the console, just in case he had any ideas about taking off without her.

“You said CBP?” she asked, trying to visualize the scenario as Jon jumped behind the wheel and adjusted the seat.

“He couldn’t pursue because he had two men in custody already, but he called it in.” Jon thrust the Jeep into gear and swung back onto the highway. “Looks like no one followed up.”

“So you’re saying—”

“A blue car, possibly a Focus, went into the desert an hour ago. Torres is out there now trying to pick up the trail.”

chapter twenty-one

HE FLOORED IT SOUTH,
making good time as he cut through the swath of desert between Fort Stockton and Big Bend National Park, just north of Mexico. Signs marked the distance to the park, but Andrea knew that wasn’t Gavin’s final destination.

She spied a pair of white SUVs pulled over on the side of the highway. A roadrunner raced across the pavement as Jon pulled onto the shoulder and rolled to a stop.

Torres was standing beside his ICE truck, talking to a man in a border-patrol uniform.

“Is he real CBP or undercover?” Andrea asked.

“Real CBP.”

They climbed out, and Torres looked up from the map spread out over the hood.

“We just got here,” Torres said. “A small blue car was spotted leaving the roadway near this location about ninety minutes ago. Agent thinks it could have been a Focus.”

Everyone turned to scan the sprawling landscape to their west—just rocky plains dotted with scrub brush, as far as the eye could see. The opposite side of the highway looked the same.

“This private land?” Andrea asked, noting the lack of fencing.

“State-owned nature reserve,” the CBP agent piped up. “About twenty thousand acres.”

Jon tromped over to peer down at the map. “Let’s not waste time. We’ll divide into three groups. You take this wedge. Torres, you take this one. Andrea and I will search this piece. It’s fairly flat through here?” Jon looked at the border agent.

“More or less. Couple dried-up creek beds, that’s about it. Our chopper’s tied up right now, but I’ve got another truck on the way.”

“We’ll make do with vehicles for now.” Jon looked at Andrea. “Anything distinctive you can tell us about the car?”

She tried to shift into cop mode. Tried not to think about how they were embarking on a search for her brother, the fugitive.

“A Ford Focus,” she recited. “Cobalt blue, gray interior, missing hubcaps.”

“Everyone got that?” Jon looked around. “All right, let’s saddle up.”

Andrea slid inside her Jeep, content to let Jon do the driving. She felt numb. Cold inside.

She pulled out her phone as Jon fired up the engine and rolled forward, dipping down off the highway and onto the desert floor. No missed calls. No e-mails. No plausible explanation for why he’d failed to keep his promise.

“You need to help me look, Andrea.”

She glanced up at him. His gaze was trained on the rugged landscape in front of them.

“He probably cut west to get away from the highway, then turned south. That means this section.”

She stared out the window, suddenly getting his meaning. He’d divided up the sections so that
they
would have the greatest likelihood of finding Gavin, not some hotshot who couldn’t wait to whip out his gun.

He drove silently as she scanned the bone-dry landscape dotted with boulders and cacti and skeletal-looking plants. She searched all of it without seeing her brother’s car—without seeing anything, really, but desolation.

Jon’s handheld radio crackled, and he picked it up. “Yeah?”

Andrea couldn’t make out the garbled words, but Jon seemed to catch them.

“Roger that. We’re on our way.”

“What is it?”

Jon swung into a turn, throwing a spray of rocks up behind them. “Our CBP friend spotted the car.” He looked at her. “It’s empty.”

♦

He floored the gas, and they bumped and lurched over the rocky earth as Andrea’s mind reeled. He cut a straight line north, pushing the speedometer to fifty.

“There.” She pointed at the two white vehicles near a clump of mesquite bushes. A patch of blue flashed in the mid-morning sun. She saw the glimmer of a windshield peeking out from beneath the foliage.

Jon jammed to a stop. Andrea jumped out and rushed up to the car. The driver’s-side door stood open.

“We’re running the plates now,” Torres said.

“It’s his.”

Everyone looked at her.

“You sure?” Jon asked.

She ignored his question as she ducked under the branches to peer inside. It was Gavin’s, no doubt about it. Two oversize fast-food cups were stuffed in the cup holders. Wrappers littered the floor. In the backseat was a wadded T-shirt.

She stood up and whirled around. “No sign of him?”

Torres traded looks with Jon. They weren’t telling her something. She turned back to examine the car again, looking for what she’d missed.

Blood.

On the steering wheel, two dark smears. Andrea’s heart lurched.

She glanced up at Torres, then darted a look at the CBP guy who was inside his vehicle on the radio, presumably running the plate. “Is this how it was, with the door open? He found it this way?”

“That’s right.”

Her pulse spiked. Maybe they had it all wrong. Maybe Gavin wasn’t speeding
toward
Mexico but
away
from something else. Maybe someone was pursuing him.

And now his car was abandoned in the desert, with the door hanging open. She glanced at the blood on the steering wheel and looked at Jon, who was crouched beside the back tires, searching for something on the ground. Spent cartridges? Blood trails?

“No shells,” Torres said. “We already checked.”

Andrea knelt down to see for herself. She leaned into the front seat, careful not to touch anything as she searched for further signs of violence. Her chest tightened as all the possibilities flooded her brain.

“Footprints?” She looked at Jon, who knelt nearby, examining the ground.

“Too rocky.” He glanced east toward the highway. “Same for tire marks. We can backtrack, see if there’s a patch of sand between here and the road, maybe get something.”

“I’ve got another unit on the way,” the CBP agent said, climbing out of his truck.

Jon stood up and looked at him. “We’re going to need at least two more. And a helicopter, ASAP.”

“You think your suspect’s still out here?”

Suspect.

Andrea looked at Jon, who was watching her.

“If he is,” he said, “we’ll find him.”

♦

The sun inched high in the sky as they trudged over the arid land. Jon cut a path through the thorny brush, pushing forward while trying to dodge the worst of it. He could hear Andrea behind him, quietly keeping up with his long strides. The few times he’d suggested a break, she’d simply ignored him and kept going.

“How much have we covered?” she asked tersely.

“About five square miles.”

They’d divided up the search area, and once again, Jon had chosen the highest-probability section for him and Andrea, figuring they had a better chance of picking him up without resistance. Now Jon regretted the strategy. They’d been out here more than three hours, and the odds of finding Gavin were rapidly fading.

Jon pictured the car again, with the blood-smeared steering wheel and the door hanging open. When he’d first seen it, he’d immediately imagined the driver being chased down, dragged from the car, and shot, then either left for dead or hauled away. Andrea had probably imagined that, too, which was why she’d had that bleak look on her face when they set out on the search.

Sweat trickled down Jon’s back as he picked his way over the uneven ground, trying to find firm footing so they wouldn’t turn an ankle. He listened to Andrea’s footfalls behind him and wished she would say something to break the silence. She was strong and resilient, and somehow he knew that she was too proud to talk to him about what was really hurting her right now.

The sound of her phone made him stop and turn.

“Hello?”

Hope filled her voice, but then her face fell.

“Oh, hi.” She looked at him and gave a slight shake of her head. “No, I’m actually . . . pretty tied up at the moment. I can’t really talk.” She went still. Her gaze dropped to the ground, and she turned away. “Okay, thanks for the info . . . Yeah, I know . . . Say again? You’re breaking up.”

Jon glanced around, surprised she was even getting a connection out here. Cell-phone coverage was spotty throughout the area. If they got much farther away from the highway corridor, it would probably disappear completely.

She stood with her back to him, shoulders tense, and he could hear the tinny sound of someone on the other end yelling at her. He studied the back of her neck, pink with sunburn, as she talked on the phone.

“Nathan . . .” Her tone was defensive. “I don’t expect you to tell them anything.”

Jon eased closer.

“Yeah, well, I never asked you to. I can take care of myself.”

A moment later, she huffed out a breath and stuffed the phone into her pocket as she turned around.

“Who was that?”

“Friend from work.” She brushed past him and plunged ahead through the thicket of mesquite. Jon followed.

“He sounded upset.”

“I’m supposed to be in today. I have a hearing at four.”

Jon halted. She kept going. “
The
hearing? That’s today?”

“I’ll reschedule.”

“You could lose your job.”

“I’ll handle it.”

He checked his watch. She had four hours, which was still doable if she caught a flight out of Midland. “Andrea, we can cover this here. If you go back now, you could still make it—”

“Drop it!” She whirled around. “I’m not going!”

She strode ahead, and he watched her for a moment, a bundle of nerves and determination plowing through the bushes. She was intent on seeing this through, no matter what the outcome.

He caught up to her and cut ahead, taking the lead. He’d had a lot more practice tromping around the desert than she had. He picked his way over debris and around rock piles, shifting his gaze from the rocky ground to the distant horizon, trying to keep them on track while scouring the area in front of them. The desert was littered with all sorts of clues, both human and non-human, and Jon mentally cataloged everything. They passed deer and jackrabbit droppings, cigarette butts, food wrappers, empty water bottles discarded by people on the move. They passed spiny canes of ocotillo and spiky agave bushes and bony animal carcasses picked clean by scavengers. Jon trudged past all of it, keeping his mental map fixed firmly in his head.

And with every step deeper into the parched wilderness, he became more and more pissed off.

Andrea’s boots clomped over the ground behind him. He heard her heavy breathing as she strained to keep up. She was intensely worried and intensely focused, and he knew she wouldn’t stop until she had tracked down her selfish, no-good brother, no matter how much it cost her.

Her worry was justified. However this played out, the kid was in deep shit, and despite her determination, Andrea wasn’t going to be able to dig him out.

Jon’s gut tightened as he thought of Jennifer McVeigh, who’d been put on the witness stand at her brother’s trial. The woman had idolized her older sibling. It was her obvious reluctance to testify that had made her such a compelling witness.

Jon pictured Andrea in the witness chair, with twelve jurors riveted by her words.

Gavin Finch hadn’t masterminded anything. Jon knew that. But he
had
provided technical support, as Jon had suspected since the day he learned the identity of Lost Creek Ranch’s newest arrival. It was going to be difficult, if not impossible, for Gavin to make anyone believe he’d set up Shay Hardin’s communications and yet knew nothing about his schemes. Jon didn’t believe it, and he wasn’t even sure Andrea did. He doubted a jury would, either.

And a trial by jury was the
good
scenario.

Jon’s gaze scanned the desert floor as he focused on a more likely one: Gavin Finch slumped under a mesquite bush, gut-shot and bleeding. Or dragged from his car, murdered, and tossed into a trunk to be disposed of somewhere no one would ever find him.

Was Hardin capable of executing a man who’d once been his friend? Absolutely. Andrea knew it, too. Since the moment she’d burst into the trailer with the news about Carmen Pena and her child, Jon had seen the shift in her. She’d suddenly realized they were dealing with a sociopath.

A faint buzzing noise made Jon stop in his tracks and squint at the sky. A chopper appeared like a gnat on the horizon and hovered over the site of the abandoned car.

“Who’s that?” Andrea looked at him.

“Reinforcements.”

♦

Andrea trekked over the rocky terrain. She skimmed her gaze over the bushes and boulders and cacti. The very
sameness
of it all was unnerving, and she’d stopped a few times to ask Jon to confirm that they weren’t going in circles. But he assured her that they were moving in a steady crisscross pattern over their designated search area.

The now-familiar thrumming overhead made her shoulders tense. It was the ninth pass. She’d been counting. If a helicopter didn’t spot him, what were the odds Gavin was actually out here? She’d been holding out hope because she couldn’t stand the alternative. But with every passing hour, that hope diminished, and the stark realization of what had likely happened began to take its place.