Her meeting with the captain went well, and after a tour of the training facilities and the campus, she went back to her quarters, packed, consulted her road map for the next leg of her tour, a briefing at a Royal Armored Corps garrison, and left the post.
As she drove through the cathedral city of Winchester, she let her thoughts return to the murder of Riley Burke. Her first impulse after hearing the news from Kerney was to hunt down and shoot the murderer herself, and she’d all but told Kerney to do exactly that.
Sara wondered if Iraq had turned her into one of the walking wounded who’d survived combat but lost their moral compass.
In Iraq, she had been shot at and wounded, and she had killed and wounded the enemy in return. She had watched young soldiers die in firefights, examined strewn bloody body parts of civilians blown up by suicide bombers, witnessed soldiers burned alive in Humvees, and seen women and children gunned down by errant fire in skirmishes, until she no longer reacted to the carnage.
She had finished her tour in a cold rage about war, killing, politicians who sacrificed others at no risk to themselves, and the gutless generals who told the politicians whatever they wanted to hear. She came home emotionally numb, disinterested in most of what happened around her, and feeling estranged from a country that seemed untouched by the war. Only Patrick and Kerney truly mattered, and even with them she occasionally shut down.
Until Iraq, she had always bounced back. Even after her Gulf War One tour, she’d returned home without suffering any long-lasting ill effects. She knew she had post-traumatic stress disorder, and after months of trying and failing to cope with it on her own, she’d finally made an appointment to see a shrink.
Going into therapy put a stopper on any future advancement in the military. But she’d reached 0-6, bird colonel, before anyone else in her West Point class, had a job that rarely led to stars on the collar, and planned to retire at the end of the three-year embassy tour of duty, so it really didn’t matter.
Still a little uneasy driving on the left side of the road, Sara entered the motorway traffic, got up to speed quickly, and zipped along with the insane English motorists who seemed to enjoy playing their own version of Formula 1 and World Rally drivers on public roadways.
She looked down at her hands gripping the steering wheel and realized they were shaking, and that it didn’t have a thing to do with driving on the left side of the road with the crazy Brits on the motorway.
After a long, hard sleep, Craig Larson woke up refreshed, turned on the motel room television, and surfed through the early morning news broadcasts. His photograph and the Crime Stoppers toll-free number were being shown on every channel. One station had a camera crew at Jeannie’s house, another had a team at the rest stop where he’d taken the young family’s SUV and locked them in the Department of Corrections van, and a third was interviewing Lenny Hampson with “Exclusive Breaking News” scrolling across the bottom of the screen. They were all playing up his brutality big-time and repeating a warning that “Escaped fugitive Craig Larson is armed and dangerous.”
Larson found it interesting that Lenny Hampson had walked out of the desert, the young couple and their baby hadn’t died from heat exhaustion, and the Department of Corrections screw had survived, although he was in intensive care. That meant out of seven people, he’d only killed two: Jeannie and the young cowboy at the ranch, whose names hadn’t been released to the press. That didn’t seem an unreasonable number. He could have easily killed them all.
He wondered why TV news wasn’t showing the crime scene at the ranch where he’d shot the cowboy. Probably the rich owner didn’t want the publicity.
With his photograph on the television and probably in every newspaper statewide, his plans to have a big breakfast at a nearby diner, study the paper to find a car to buy from a private party, and use his twin brother’s identity would have to be changed.
He opened the window curtains and scanned the half dozen parked cars within his line of sight for out-of- state license plates. There was a blue Chevrolet from Oklahoma parked on the left, two spaces down from his room.
He tucked the semiautomatic in his waistband, concealed it with his shirttail, and stepped outside. The motel was an L-shaped building with the office close to the street, under a big neon sign. There were no maid carts on the walkway that bordered the rooms and nobody going to or from the vehicles in the lot.
He walked down to the room where the Chevy with the Okie plates was parked, and knocked on the door.
“What is it?” a man’s voice asked.
Larson smiled at the peephole. “Management. We’ve got a report of a gas leak in one of the rooms, so we’re doing a safety check of all the wall heaters. It’s probably nothing.”
“There’s no gas smell in here.”
Larson widened his smile and shrugged his shoulders. “Like I said, it’s probably nothing, but I’ve got to check. Fire marshal rules, you know.”
“Okay. Give me a minute.”
The man who opened the door was in his fifties, with rounded shoulders, a gut that hung over his belt, and a puffy face.
Larson nodded politely as he stepped inside the room. “Hope I’m not disturbing the missus.”
“There is no missus,” the man replied. “Hurry it up, will ya.”
“Sure thing.” Larson walked to the wall heater, took off the vent plate, and pretended to inspect it. “Just passing through?” he asked over his shoulder as he twisted the gas valve a couple of times for effect.
“Heading home to Tulsa,” the man replied as he moved toward Larson.
“Nice town, I hear,” Larson said as he turned and coldcocked the man with the butt of the semiautomatic.
The man hit the floor facedown with a thud.
With his finger on the trigger, Larson stood over the unconscious man debating whether to shoot him in the back of the head or not. If he hadn’t let all those other people live yesterday, maybe the cops wouldn’t be so hot on his trail and his face all over the television.
He decided not to shoot him. The motel walls were paper thin, and even if he used a pillow to muffle the sound, a gunshot could still attract unwanted attention. He straddled the man’s body, bent down, and with both hands, broke his neck. The snap sounded good.
Larson pulled a wallet from the dead man’s pocket and took the credit cards, three hundred and twenty-two dollars in cash, and a driver’s license issued to Bertram Roach. Larson wondered if people had called him Bertie.
In Roach’s luggage, he found five hundred dollars in traveler’s checks in a side pocket, and a loaded, nickel- plated .38-caliber pistol under two sets of clean clothes. He set aside the fresh shirts, dumped the remaining contents on the bed, pawed through them, and didn’t find anything else useful.
The keys to Roach’s blue Chevy were on the nightstand. He scooped them up, got Roach’s toilet kit from the bathroom, put it into the empty suitcase along with the clean shirts and the pistol, hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob, and went back to his room. He packed quickly, paused for a moment at the window to make sure the coast was clear, hurried to the Chevy, and drove away.
Checkout time at the motel was noon, so Larson figured he had a good four hours before anyone would be looking for Bertie Roach from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bertie Roach. Bertie Cockroach.
On the visor was a pair of sunglasses. Larson put them on, feeling pretty good about the start of his day. He now had wheels that would get him out of the city without drawing any attention, and the rest of the morning to head down the road before the cops started looking for the
Larson’s stomach grumbled as he cruised up Central Avenue searching for a fast-food joint with a drive- through window.
