Sara (15 page)

Pastor Gary stood and stepped between Mike and Virginia. Holding his hand up to her he cautioned, “Virginia, Mr. Haller is under a lot of stress. He will leave immediately if you put that cannon away.”

Mrs. Winter lowered the shotgun and glared at Mike. “Git!” she said.

Mike recovered the charm bracelet and allowed Pastor Gary to take him by the arm and
lead him from the store. He stood outside for a moment and took deep breaths to calm his nerves.

Pastor Gary opened the trunk of his own car and retriev
ed a Bible. It was bound in white leather, exactly like the one Mike had found on the top shelf of Jordan’s closet. “Take this,” he said, handing the Bible to Mike. “Read it and find comfort in the word of God.”

Mike rubbed his thumb across the cover and remained silent.

“Oh, here,” Pastor Gary said. He opened the door to his car and retrieved something from the dash. “This is a marker with the church’s information on it. Now you can keep your place while you read, and it has my number in case you ever need to reach me.”

Mike took the tasseled book mark and looked at the golden etched print of the church at the top of the hill. “Thank you, sir,” was all he could think to say.

Pastor Gary placed his hand on Mike’s. “I would like you to study
Samuel 12:18
before the search for your daughter tomorrow. You need to read it carefully and gain strength from it. Then you and I will pray for God’s forgiveness.”

Mike opened the bible to
Samuel
and found the passage:

And it came to pass on the seventh day that the child died. And the servants of David feared to tell him that the child was dead: for they said, Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spake unto him, and he would not hearken unto our voice: how will he then vex himself, if we tell him that the child is dead?
But when David saw that his servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead: therefore David said unto his servants, Is the child dead? And they said, He is dead.
Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the LORD, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat.

Pastor Gary placed both hands on the opened Bible and held it with Mike. “We need to find strength in God’s word, Mr. Haller. You need to open your heart and ask Him for a path through your grief.”

Mike looked up, eyes swimming in tears.

Popineau released his grip on the Bible and finished. “You must accept what has obviously happened to your daughter and find comfort in God’s plan.”

Mike broke down and wept openly
. When he finally managed to clear his vision, Pastor Gary had returned to the restaurant.

twenty-four

Darkness falls quickly in the Colorado Rockies. A lurid blanket of chill and silence invading the narrowest crevasse to suffocate all ambition secured under the sun’s generous warmth. Sara had finished blockading the door to the cabin again for security while she slept. She started a fire in the cook stove and opened the last can of Progresso soup to heat for dinner. Her strength was returning and she was preparing herself for a long walk out of these mountains.

             
Her plan was to spend the next day collecting water and supplies to make her hike successful. She would not go back the way she came; the monsters disguised as men were more likely to be there. Instead, she had spent the day scouting an alternate route back to civilization. She had climbed to the top of a nearby mountain and spotted a ravine that led north for several miles. She knew, because she had grown up in a mountain town, that many of the well traveled roads through the Rockies ran east and west through major canyons. If she hiked north for as long as possible, she was sure that she might come across one of these highways. There were lots of unknowns and what-ifs, but Sara knew that with her food supply running out, she had to try, or die here. After all that she had survived, she was determined not to die. She had an appointment with two men in a little town on the road to Laramie, Wyoming.

             
As her soup heated, Sara took a moment to change the dressing under her right breast. The terrible gash had opened up and was draining profusely, but the wound didn’t seem to be infected and the skin was no longer dying. The maggots had done their work and probably saved Sara’s life. She shuttered at the thought.

             
The laceration around her neck was another story. Because it had seemed less life threatening, she had basically ignored it and it had become infected near her left ear where the cut was deepest. She was applying Neosporin from the medical kit every couple of hours to no avail. The wound had scabbed deeply and the infection seemed to be hiding where the antibiotic ointment could not reach it. To treat it properly, she would have to remove the scab that was already tender to the touch.

             
Sara thought of the burn patients she had helped the nurses treat at Valley View Hospital this past summer. The pain they experienced while having their wounds scrubbed daily was more than she thought she could ever bear. Removing this small scab would be nothing compared to that.

             
Sara squeezed some ointment onto her fingertips and worked it under her fingernails to somewhat sterilize her hands. She closed her eyes tightly and used her nails to dig the scab from her neck wound. She couldn’t help but cry out as the scab reluctantly released its grip from the subcutaneous tissue. The blood hesitated for a moment before pouring from the now gaping hole in her neck. Sara sobbed lightly and pressed a clean piece of gauze to the wound, stopping the flow of blood. After a few minutes, the bleeding ceased and Sara was able to apply a generous amount of Neosporin to the cut before covering it with a clean bandage.

Her left wrist ached from the exertion
, but the broken bone seemed to be set properly. She had fashioned a much better splint from two large wooden spoons, and ibuprofen from the medical kit was helping to keep the swelling down.

Sara’s soup began to steam on top of the stove and the cabin was now warming from the fire.
She took the pan from the stovetop and sat at a small table to eat. Opening a book she had found in the cabin, Sara began to read the last few chapters of
Practical Homicide Investigation
. Whoever owned this cabin had a keen interest in solving murder cases. Sara’s interest lay at the other end of that spectrum.

Mike Haller crouched
outside the twelve-foot wide trailer that was the office of Duncan Winter Towing. The sun had set hours earlier and it was his intension to enter the trailer to hopefully view the global positioning records for Jordan’s tow truck. He didn’t know much about GPS and wasn’t sure if he would be looking for a printed document or an electronic document. DW Towing was relatively isolated from the rest of Ranch Springs, so Mike felt that he had plenty of time to search and find what he was looking for.

             
The door latch relented easily with a butter knife Mike borrowed from the
Sightseer Inn
and he was inside, standing in the confined darkness of the dusty trailer. Slowly, his eyes adjusted and the faint glow of a computer’s monitor, protected by fading and changing photographs of vacations and successful hunts and horrific car crashes, cast a muted glow across a desktop full of papers and files and coffee mugs forever stained by cheap blends of store brand java.

             
Mike lowered the shades and turned on a small lamp next to the computer. Sitting in a well worn swivel chair, he shuffled through papers on the desk looking for any mention of GPS; an invoice or instruction manual. All he found were fuel receipts, utility bills, and empty envelopes from insurance companies. He opened drawers and sorted through files and quickly came up empty handed.

             
Turning to the computer, Mike pressed the spacebar to end the screensaver program. The desktop screen was filled with large icons of every sort. It appeared that Duncan Winters had tried to save a shortcut to every task he had ever completed on this computer. Mike shook his head and slowly searched through the icons. One was labeled
SpyviewGPS
. He used the mouse to double-click on the icon and waited patiently for Internet Explorer to boot and find the requested page.

             
“What are you doing out there?”

             
Mike jumped from the swivel chair and knocked over the desk lamp, breaking the bulb and extinguishing all light from the trailer.

             
“We’ve got a pole line down on Highway Fourteen, east of Rustic.”

             
It was the two-way radio that Duncan Winter used to communicate with his tow truck drivers. It was obvious now that others used the same frequency as DW Towing.

             
“I’ll call out Tim’s crew. How many poles are you going to need?”

             
Mike’s heart was racing as he turned the volume down on the radio and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead.

“
Fuck
!” he said to himself, then took a deep breath to calm his nerves. He set the lamp upright on the desk and sat back in the office chair. The
Login
screen for
SpyviewGPS
had appeared on the computer and was requesting a username and password to access records. Mike thought for a moment then used the mouse to double-click on the space for the username. He was hoping that Mr. Winter had figured out how to save a username and password in Windows. He hadn’t. The entry space remained blank.

Mike sat back and rubbed his chin for a moment before typing in;
DWTowing
for username and
1-2-3-4-5-6
for the password. He was hoping that Mr. Winter was a lazy password guy like himself. Mike kept one password for everything. It wasn’t 1-2-3-4-5-6, but Duncan Winter didn’t seem like a man who wanted to remember difficult passwords. Red letters appeared across the screen,
Invalid login information. Please re-enter username and password
.

Mike tried again.
DuncanWinter.
He paused for a moment and thought of the ghastly woman with the twelve-gauge shotgun pointed at his chest, then typed,
Virginia.
The same error message appeared again in red.

Mike shuffled through some papers on the desk and held a utility bill up close to the screen so he could read it. The propane company billed to
DWinter Towing.

Mike typed again.
DWinterTowing---Virginia
.

This time a message appeared;
You have been locked out of this system. Please contact customer support to re-set your credentials
.

“Dammit!” Mike said out
loud. He sat back in the chair, unsure what to do next. Several questions ran through his mind. “
How the hell am I going to get access to these records now? Duncan Winter will probably never talk to me again after my outburst at the restaurant. Sheriff Barnes will never request a warrant to look at the records. I can ask for the Attorney General to review the case and investigate Sara’s disappearance properly, but that will take weeks. Who the hell do I know that could access these records
?”

Mike stood in a flash and slapped the desktop with both hands. “Harry Pennington!” he said
. His mind began to race. He hadn’t seen Harry since the two of them stopped a hired killer from murdering Carol Iverson and her son Taylor, four months earlier. There was a strong rumor that Harry Pennington worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, and he had told Mike that if he ever need anything, “Just call.”

Haller
watched as photos of Duncan and Virginia began fading in and out across the computer’s screen. He thought for a second then turned the volume up on the two-way radio. Not sure what to do about the broken light bulb, he set the lamp back on its side. He hoped this would explain the damage and not raise too many red flags that an unwanted out-of-towner had visited after hours.

Jean was meeting Mike early in the morning to organize the volunteer search for Sara. When that ordeal was over, he would track down Harry Pennington and hopefully get the information he needed to find his daughter’s…what?...body?

“No!” Mike scolded himself. “Sara is still alive. I can feel every breath she takes.”

Mike opened the door to the trailer and stepped out
, making sure it locked behind him.

“I’m coming, sweetheart,” he said to the night air.