He glanced out the tall windows. He could barely see the trees in the park across the street for the snow pelting down. “The chief lets me use my four-by-four if I’m not on traffic duty.” He could see from her expression that mentioning the chief had been a mistake.
“Your chief lets a lot of things slip by that are frankly unprofessional. If you ever hope to get out of this town and move up into serious policing, you need to change your attitude.” At that moment, Mark Durkee sidled through the office door. “Be more like Officer Durkee. No facial hair on him.”
Kevin clutched the seam of his pants to keep from touching his soul patch. “Ma’am,” he said. He brushed past Mark without looking at him. Suckup.
So now he was sliding toward Route 17, the squad car shimmying as its tires tried, and failed, to find traction. An eighteen-wheeler rolled into the intersection. He was headed straight for its rear wheels. “Holy St. Christopher, pray for me,” he blurted out, an incantation his mother always said when she ran into trouble behind the wheel. Amazingly, the light turned green, the truck roared past, and Kevin slid through the intersection unharmed.
“Wow.” He gently accelerated. He’d have to tell his mom. Of course, then she’d get on his case even more about going to Mass.
The Tracey house was set back a ways, and he didn’t even try to get the Crown Vic up the driveway. He parked on the shoulder, flipped on his warning flashers, and hiked up to the front porch.
A middle-school-aged girl answered the door. She looked at him suspiciously when he asked to see her mother. “Hold on,” she said, shutting the door in his face. He took off his hat and beat some of the snow off his shoulders.
A good-looking soccer mom yanked the door open. “Has there been an accident?” she cried.
“An accident? No, ma’am.”
“Oh.” Her shoulders sagged. “Thank heavens.” She stood there, hand pressed to her chest, until she seemed to realize he was still standing on the welcome mat. “I’m so sorry!” She beckoned him to come inside. “I’m afraid Deidre takes ‘Do not let strangers in’ a little too literally.”
“No need to apologize, ma’am.” He tucked his hat under his arm. “Are you Quinn Tracey’s mother?”
The look of alarm fell over her features again. “Yes.”
“I’d like to ask him a few questions, with your permission.”
She looked toward the interior of the house, then back at Kevin. “That’s why I asked you if there was an accident. He went tearing out of here at least a half hour ago and took off in his truck. I don’t know where he is.”
Sergeant Isabel O’Brien of the New York State Police was one of the few members of her troop who actually liked storms. Instead of the mind-numbing tedium of the radar gun, she got to cruise east and west on the Thruway, looking for vehicles in trouble. Instead of being greeted with sour jokes about making the end-of-the- month ticket quota, she was hailed as a hero by drivers who had skidded into the median.
She had just passed the Schenectady exit when her radio squawked. She hit the reception button. “Eight-one- nine here. Go ahead.”
“Eight-one-nine, we have a call from the Roy Rogers manager at the Patter-sonville travel plaza. He’s reporting a suspicious individual, male Caucasian, thirties or forties, hanging around the employee parking area.”
“Dispatch, I am responding.” O’Brien tapped her computer screen to register the time and bring up an incident log. She turned on her lights and pulled into the passing lane. Traffic to her right, already slow due to the storm- imposed speed limit of forty-five miles per hour, decelerated even further as she swept past.
She was a scant five miles from Pattersonville when her radio lit up again. “Eight-one-nine, be advised the suspicious individual has left the Indian Hill rest station and is headed east in a 1992 Volvo station wagon, dark green.”
“Plates?”
There was a pause. “Hold on on the plates.”
Huh. That was odd. “Should I pursue?”
“Eight-one-nine, the manager reports the POI may have switched plates with one of his employees. We’re trying to get a confirmation on that. Please proceed without lights.”
O’Brien turned off the lights but kept her speed at a steady fifty-five, which was as fast as she was going to go, unless this guy turned out to be Osama bin Laden.
“Eight-one-nine, we have a confirmation that one employee’s rear license plate now matches that of the stolen car last seen in possession of Dennis Shambaugh.”
Her computer screen flashed on with the BOLO for Shambaugh. MILLERS KILL POLICE DEPARTMENT glowed over a mug shot.
“Suspect is wanted for assaulting an officer, GTA, questioning in a homicide, questioning in a Class B fraud. Suspect is not known to be armed, but has a prior felony assault conviction. Units eight-two-oh and eight-one-eight are on their way. Proceed with extreme caution.”
Her adrenaline kicked into high gear. She sped up, the powerful engine growling, the windshield wipers slapping hard against the snow that seemed to bullet straight toward her. She passed the Pattersonville travel plaza. She passed car after truck after SUV-what were all these people out for on a day like this? She came up behind a grandpa who didn’t recognize her outline in the swirling, snowy gloom and who continued on his steady forty-mile- an-hour way in the passing lane. She gave him the lights, and eventually he noticed and moved to the right.
She snapped off the red-and-whites and accelerated again. She figured she must be getting close. She divided her attention between the road ahead and the vehicles to her right, a task complicated by the poor visibility. Thank God the perp hadn’t stolen one of those Japanese cars that look like fifty per cent of everything else on the road. She could concentrate on picking out the unique boxy shape of the Volvo.
SUV. SUV. Lincoln. Toyota. Mazda. Toyota. ’Burbmobiles and grampmobiles and generics.
Then, just past her right front corner, the outline of a Volvo station wagon. Dark, although she wouldn’t have laid money it was green. She flicked on her radio. “Dispatch, this is eight-one-nine. I have a possible match in sight. I can’t make out the plate in this muck.”
“Eight-one-nine, proceed. Eight-two-oh is ten miles behind you bearing west.” And so could continue past her after the suspect if she pulled over the wrong guy.
“Dispatch, I am proceeding.” She turned on her video recorder and hit the lights.
The Volvo immediately pulled forward, accelerating into the blowing snow and, as O’Brien stepped on her gas, disappearing.
“Holy crap,” she said. “He’s turned his lights off.” She turned the siren on, gripped her wheel, and hurtled after him, the noise jabbing into her head, drowning out the too-fast beat of her heart. No way he could get away. It was the Thruway, not a country road. No exit up ahead except through the Amsterdam toll, where local police were probably already moving into position.
But what he could do was cause one god-awful accident. How far was her siren going to carry over the howl of the wind and the roar of the blower and the swish of the wipers? “Get off the road,” she muttered beneath her breath.
A shape loomed out of the darkness ahead. O’Brien swore and stood on the brakes, her car’s rear shaking like a bucking bronco. The red taillights loomed larger, and larger, and she gritted her teeth and braced for the impact, and then the traffic in the right lane opened up and the SUV slid across the lane and into the snow piled by the side of the road.
“Dispatch, vehicle off the Thruway at my mark,” she got out, right before a flurry of red brake lights sparked through the gray snow haze. A car in front of her spun into the median. She swerved, clipped a minivan with her rear right quarter, saw the car ahead of it slip sideways
A split-second glance in her rearview showed her nothing following in the six feet of visibility she had. She swung the car into the turnaround, struggling to hold it, skidding wide, the tires churning and clutching, the dim shape of the Volvo almost-maybe there in front of her. Her wheels dug down into the snow, caught on sand and gravel, and she surged forward, the frame shuddering, only to slam on the brakes as she went past the Volvo, went
