Die Trying

22

THE ATMOSPHERE IN the Chicago Field Office Wednesday evening was like a funeral, and in a way it was a funeral, because any realistic hope of getting Holly back had died. McGrath knew his best chance had been an early chance. The early chance was gone. If Holly was still alive, she was a prisoner somewhere on the North American continent, and he would not get even the chance to find out where until her kidnappers chose to call. And so far, approaching sixty hours after the snatch, they had not called.

He was at the head of the long table in the third-floor conference room. Smoking. The room was quiet. Milosevic was sitting to one side, back to the windows. The afternoon sun had inched its way around to evening and fallen away into darkness. The temperature in the room had risen and fallen with it, down to a balmy summer dusk. But the two men in there were chilled with anticlimax. They barely looked up as Brogan came in to join them. He was holding a sheaf of computer printouts. He wasn’t smiling, but he looked reasonably close to it.

“You got something?” McGrath asked him.

Brogan nodded purposefully and sat down. Sorted the printouts into four separate handfuls and held them up, each one in turn.

“ Quantico,” he said. “They’ve got something. And the crime database in D.C. They’ve got three somethings. And I had an idea.”

He spread his papers out and looked up.

“Listen to this,” he said. “Graphic granite, interlocking crystals, cherts, gneisses, schists, shale, foliated metamorphics, quartzites, quartz crystals, red-bed sandstones, Triassic red sand, acidic volcanics, pink feldspar, green chlorite, ironstone, grit, sand, and silt. You know what all that stuff is?”

McGrath and Milosevic shrugged and shook their heads.

“Geology,” Brogan said. “The people down in Quantico looked at the pickup. Geologists, from the Materials Analysis Unit. They looked at the shit thrown up under the wheel arches. They figured out what the stuff is, and they figured out where that pickup has been. Little tiny pieces of rock and sediment stuck to the metal. Like a sort of a geological fingerprint.”

“OK, so where has it been?” McGrath asked.

“Started out in California,” Brogan said. “Citrus grower called Dutch Borken bought it, ten years ago, in Mojave. The manufacturer traced that for us. That part is nothing to do with geology. Then the scientists say it was in Montana for a couple of years. Then they drove it over here, northern route, through North Dakota, Mi

“They sure about this?” McGrath said.

“Like a trucker’s logbook,” Brogan said. “Except written with shit on the underneath, not with a pen on paper.”

“So who is this Dutch Borken?” McGrath asked. “Is he involved?”

Brogan shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Dutch Borken is dead.”

“When?” McGrath asked.

“Couple of years ago,” Brogan said. “He borrowed money, farming went all to hell, the bank foreclosed, he stuck a twelve-bore in his mouth and blew the top of his head all over California.”

“So?” McGrath said.

“His son stole the pickup,” Brogan said. “Technically, it was the bank’s property, right? The son took off in it, never been seen again. The bank reported it, and the local cops looked for it, couldn’t find it. It’s not licensed. DMV knows nothing about it. Cops gave up on it, because who cares about a ratty old pickup? But my guess is this Borken boy stole it and moved to Montana. The pickup was definitely in Montana two years, scientists are dead sure about that.”

“We got anything on this Borken boy?” McGrath asked him.

Brogan nodded. Held up another sheaf of paper.

“We got a shitload on him,” he said. “He’s all over our database like ants at a picnic. His name is Beau Borken. Thirty-five years old, six feet in height and four hundred pounds in weight. Big guy, right? Extreme right-winger, paranoid tendencies. Now a militia leader. Balls-out fanatic. Links to other militias all over the damn place. Prime suspect in a robbery up in the north of California. Armored car carrying twenty million in bearer bonds was hit. The driver was killed. They figured militia involvement, because the bad guys were wearing bits and pieces of military uniforms. Borken’s outfit looked good for it. But they couldn’t make it stick. Files are unclear as to why not. And also, what’s good for us is before all that, Beau Borken was one of the alibis Peter Wayne Bell used to get off the rape bust. So he’s a documented associate of somebody we can place on the scene.”

Milosevic looked up.

“And he’s based in Montana?” he said.

Brogan nodded.

“We can pinpoint the exact region, more or less,” he said. “The scientific guys at Quantico are pretty hot for a couple of particular valleys, northwest corner of Montana.”

“They can be that specific?” Milosevic said.

Brogan nodded again.

“I called them,” he said. “They said this sediment in the wheel arches was local to a particular type of a place. Something to do with very old rock getting scraped up by glaciers about a million years ago, lying there nearer the surface than it should be, all mixed up with the regular rock which is still pretty old, but newer than the old rock, you know what I mean? A particular type of a mixture? I asked them, how can you be so sure? They said they just recognize it, like I would recognize my mother fifty feet away on the sidewalk. They said it was from one of a couple of north-south glacial valleys, northwest corner of Montana, where the big old glaciers were rolling down from Canada. And there was some sort of crushed sandstone in there, very different, but it’s what the Forest Service use on the forest tracks up there.”

“OK,” McGrath said. “So our guys were in Montana for a couple of years. But have they necessarily gone back there?”

Brogan held up the third of his four piles of paper. Unfolded a map. And smiled for the first time since Monday.

“You bet your ass they have,” he said. “Look at the map. Direct route between Chicago and the far corner of Montana takes you through North Dakota, right? Some farmer up there was walking around this morning. And guess what he found in a ditch?”

“What?” McGrath asked.

“A dead guy,” Brogan said. “In a ditch, horse country, miles from anywhere. So naturally the farmer calls the cops, the cops print the corpse, the computer comes back with a name.”

“What name?” McGrath asked.

“Peter Wayne Bell,” Brogan said. “The guy who drove away with Holly.”

“He’s dead?” McGrath said. “How?”

“Don’t know how,” Brogan said. “Maybe some kind of a falling out? This guy Bell kept his brains in his jockey shorts. We know that, right? Maybe he went after Holly, maybe Holly aced him. But put a ruler on the map and take a look. They were all on their way back to Montana. That’s for damn sure. Has to be that way.”

“In what?” McGrath said. “Not in a white truck.”

“Yes in a white truck,” Brogan said.

“That Econoline was the only truck missing,” McGrath said.

Brogan shook his head. He held up the fourth set of papers.

“My new idea,” he said. “I checked if Rubin rented a truck.”

“Who?” McGrath said.

“Rubin is the dead dentist,” Brogan said. “I checked if he rented a truck.”

McGrath looked at him.

“Why should the damn dentist rent a truck?” he said.

“He didn’t,” Brogan said. “I figured maybe the guys rented the truck, with the dentist’s credit cards, after they captured him. It made a lot of sense. Why risk stealing a vehicle if you can rent one with a stolen wallet full of credit cards and driver’s licenses and stuff? So I called around. Sure enough, Chicago-You-Drive, some South Side outfit, they rented an Econoline to a Dr. Rubin, Monday morning, nine o’clock. I ask them, did the photo on the license match the guy? They say they never look. As long as the credit card goes through the machine, they don’t care. I ask them, what color was the Econoline? They say all our trucks are white. I ask them, writing on the side? They say sure, Chicago-You-Drive, green letters, head height.”