“Yes, she was,” Angela said. “She had all these theories, about how the illegals keep the working people down. But she was friendly to us who work here in the store. Not so much anti-Mexican, oranti-Hispanic, just anti-immigrant. Lots of Mexican people even agree with her.”
“She had a problem with me,” Rojas said. “I jumped over her to the manager’s job. And, you know, I’m Hispanic, though my family’s been in Texas for two hundred years. So there’s that.”
Out in the parking lot,Letty said, “We have to do it, John. She’s Jael. We have to either talk to her or go into her house. We walk up to the door and if nobody answers, you use your picks. I’ll body-block for you.”
“That’s a watchful neighborhood,” Kaiser said. “I think it’s fifty percent that somebody calls the El Paso cops.”
Letty said, “C’mon, man. She came into that supposed inheritance and bought that Jeep about the time the oil thefts started.”
“I got that,” Kaiser said. They were leaving the parking lot and stopped to let a tumbleweed blow by. “Okay. All right, you got me. Let’s go.”
Nobody answered their knock.Letty used her body to block sight lines from one side, and Kaiser used his to block from the other direction as he worked his picks into a lock that he said was a piece of junk. Still, he took three minutes to get it open and they were both sweating by the time he did. Literally sweating, the backs of their shirts soaking wet with perspiration. When the lock popped, Letty pushed on the door with her knuckles, and when it was open called, “Hello? Hey, anybody here? Hello?”
“Quick, now,” Kaiser said, as they went inside and he pushed the door closed. “The cops could still be coming.”
One minute in the house, and Letty said, “She’s gone. She was here, there’s stuff in the garbage can that probably was dumpedyesterday. There’s a milk carton that doesn’t smell spoiled yet. No clothes, no bedding, no towels, no bathroom stuff... nothing but junky furniture and an old TV.”
Kaiser agreed. “She’s moved on.”
“They’re close to whatever they’re planning to do, she’s already running,” Letty said. “We need to talk to Greet. We need to see her bank accounts and credit cards...”
They called Greetas they were driving out of Pear Tree Lane, and told her that they’d looked through the windows of Hawkes’s house and it appeared that she’d vacated the place. “Not like a standard move-out,” Letty said. “She took clothes and personal stuff, dishes and bedding, cleaned out the refrigerator, but she left behind her bed and chest of drawers and other furniture, a microwave and TV.”
“You saw all that through the windows? The inside of a fridge?”
“Try to focus, here, Billy,” Letty said.
“You think she’s on the run?” Greet asked.
“That’s what we think.”
“Okay, I admit that’s scary. Unless they just wanted the C-4 because, you know, theywantedit. Like those goofs running around with ARs.”
“Blowing up an I-beam seems like a very specificwant,” Letty said.
“We can put out a request for her Jeep—if she owned it, I can get the tag number and put the Texas highway patrol on it and the El Paso police. I can probably get her credit card purchases; the bank accounts might take longer.”
“You gotta do it fast as you can; if she cleaned out her bank account...”
“Okay. I’ll get all of that today. You guys be careful.”
“I don’t knowwhat we do next,” Letty admitted. “Guess we wait for Greet to call.”
They hadn’t gotten to the hotel before Greet called.
“First thing I tried was tracking Hawkes’s Jeep. Guess what? She sold it yesterday morning. Went down with the buyer and registered the transfer with the Texas DMV. She got almost thirty thousand dollars for it—twenty-nine, nine.”
“Billy...”
“I know, I know, that’s bad. Real bad,” Greet said.
“I just thought of something,” Letty said. “Damn it, I should have thought of it when I was talking to the general. You need to call him back, or talk to the sergeant major who sits outside his office. They’ve got a captain there, I don’t know his full name, but his last name is Colin. I need to talk to him. Immediately.”
“I’ll call,” Greet promised. “And hewillcall you back, because I will be screaming at them.”
Colin did call back, as they drove into the hotel parking lot. “I’m in enough trouble, with the general asking why you’re calling me.”
“I don’t care about how much trouble you’re in,” Letty said. “Listen to me. When this unknown guy was showing our suspects... the people we know about... how to use the C-4, I took some photographs with my iPhone. We were too far away from them, for the photos to be much good, but I took them on the telephoto setting. Maybe you can do something with them. If he was the guy supplying the C-4, and he probably was...”
