Back of Beyond (39 page)

“Why was he suspended?”

“Guess, Cody.” And she hung up.

He called Larry’s house. He lived outside of Helena near Marysville on U.S. Highway 279.

“Larry,” Cody said.

There was a beat. Then, “It’s you, you son of a bitch. Where
are
you? Did you get my messages?”

“I got ’em.”

“Then why in the hell didn’t you call me back?”

Cody said, “I don’t have time to explain, but in a nutshell I got paranoid. I didn’t want you to know where I was because of that fire in Bozeman.”

“What are you saying?” Larry sounded hurt. “You thought I had something to do with that? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Cody lied. “Blame it on the DTs. I’m fucking miserable, but we got the bad guy. Or at least one of them.”

“Who is it? And who the hell is ‘we’?”

Cody outlined hiring Mitchell, and the trail of bodies leading them to Gannon. “He’s here now,” Cody said. “We hung him up in a tree so the bears and wolves won’t eat him. The Park Service can cut him down and take him to a clinic. Not that I really care about that, but we’ll need his testimony to nail his partner, who is also on the pack trip.”

“His partner?” Larry sounded genuinely baffled. That made Cody feel better toward him.

“A woman.”

“Ah, Rachel Mina,” Larry said. Cody leaned into the phone, shocked Larry knew the name. “Although that’s not her married name, which is Rachel Chavez.”

“How do you know that?” Cody asked.

“You dumb shit, it was what I was trying to tell you when I called. I didn’t know about Gannon, but I did know about Rachel Mina Chavez. It’s called police work, and I think I connected all the dots. Of course, that’s before they suspended me for withholding what I knew about
you.
”

Cody felt his head begin to spin. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

Larry sighed. Cody could anticipate from that sound Larry was going to roll it out in the only way he could. He glanced up to see if Mitchell was still taking care of the horses and saw he was. And Jim Gannon swung slowly in a circle over his head, passed out. The late evening sun made a long shadow across the meadow of Gannon’s figure, and in silhouette it looked like the outfitter was hanging from the tree by the neck.

“We were looking at the wrong angle with those murders,” Larry said. “At least I was. All I could think of was alcoholics. So how do we get a connection between all these alkies in four different parts of the country? The thing I was trying to figure out was if it were possible they were all in the same place at the same time, like we talked about. Like an ex-alcoholic convention or something. And if not that, something to do with their jobs. But their professions didn’t lend that any hope. They might all travel from time to time, but not to the same places or for the same reasons. I couldn’t figure out how to put them in the same place at the same time, or to have something in common to link them besides drinking. To all be exposed somehow to whatever would later cause them to be murdered.”

Cody said, “You’ve got to get to it, Larry. We need to get going.”

“I know, I know. But do you remember when you told me Winters said no matter what, you can find a meeting?”

“Yeah.”

“So I got together with the brains at ViCAP and they were able to access his travel records. Winters flew exclusively on Delta out of Helena, so it wasn’t difficult. Man, that guy was all over the west but nothing jumped out at us. But one of the FBI boys thought to pull the records from Shulze as well, thinking if we could cross-reference just one flight or destination between them—put the two of them in the same place at the same time—we’d have something to go on.”

Cody started to pace back and forth through the grass. Adrenaline rushed through him.

Larry said, “October 27 of last year, both Winters and Shulze were on the same flight bound for L.A. They probably didn’t even know the other was on the plane. Shulze was going to some academic conference at UCLA and Winters was connecting through LAX to Sacramento. But here’s where it gets interesting: the flight didn’t make it to LAX for two days because it got diverted to San Diego.”

“Diverted?” Cody asked. “Why?”

“Wild fires,” Larry said. “October 27 last year was the worst of the fires out there. They closed LAX for two days because of the smoke, and all the inbound flights were diverted to other airports. Winters and Shulze found themselves in San Diego October 27 and 28 with nothing to do.

“So we kept digging. William Geraghty was diverted to San Diego on a United flight for the same two days, and Karen Anthony was there visiting her sister.”

Larry said, “So imagine the situation. Four alkies away from home. Three killing time at the airport hanging out, just waiting for an announcement so they could get back on their schedules, surrounded by airport lounges and bars and high tension all around. Karen Anthony is there with family, but keeps getting those old urges. So in that circumstance, where would they go?”

Cody said, “To an AA meeting.”

“Bingo,” Larry said. “So I find a detective in San Diego and run this theory by him and he buys it. So he starts doing the research and calls me back within an hour. An hour! And he tells me the specific AA meeting they all went to at a church. He even says he has photos of them going into and coming out of the meeting. He sends them to me and goddamn it if he isn’t exactly right. I’ve got entrance and exit photos of Hank Winters, William Garaghty, Gary Shulze, and Karen Anthony.”

“Hold it,” Cody said. “Since when do the police run surveillance on who goes to AA?”

“Never,” Larry said. “Unless they’ve got heavy surveillance going on somebody else who happened to go to the meeting. Like Luis Chavez, the now deceased head of the Chavez drug cartel based out of Tijuana. Seems he saw the light like all of these folks and would cross the border once a week to attend the AA meeting.”

“Chavez,” Cody repeated.

“Rachel Mina’s ex-husband.”

“I’m getting lost,” Cody said, pacing faster.

Larry said, “It’s no secret the cartels are at war. We know that. But what this San Diego cop tells me suddenly clears things up. Seems Chavez had a daughter named Gabriella who was a junior at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Gabriella was apparently the apple of his eye. She was from his first marriage, before he married Rachel Mina. The cartel fighting Chavez sent some guys north to kidnap Gabriella from the house Chavez had bought for her, and held her for ransom. They wanted Chavez to give them Tijuana and pay them millions in exchange for her. They knew he’d do anything—
anything
—to get her back. Apparently there was bad blood between Rachel and this girl, but that didn’t matter to Chavez. So Chavez literally cashed out. We’re talking
tens of millions
of dollars here, Cody. They agreed on a drop location in our country on neutral ground. The speculation was they took Gabriella to Jackson Hole, but nobody can confirm it. But that’s where Chavez’s plane was headed when it apparently had engine trouble and never made it. So the bad guys assumed they’d been stiffed. They didn’t believe Chavez’s claims that the plane went down with their money inside, and it was beside the point because whatever happened they wouldn’t get the loot. So those bastards took Gabriella with them to Laredo, Texas.”

Cody felt his scalp crawl. He said, “Now I remember what happened to her.”

“That’s right,” Larry said. “They murdered her and beheaded the body. After that, from what my San Diego guy said, it took just days for the bad guys to move in on Chavez’s territory and take over. There was a bloodbath involving his holdouts, and Rachel wanted to fight, but Chavez was a broken man and let it all happen. When he started showing up at the meetings in San Diego the cops thought he was planning his comeback or something, but they didn’t know at the time he’d lost his will to live or fight. But that’s why they were watching the meetings. And shortly after that meeting,” Larry said, “Chavez was found with a bullet in his brain down in Mexico.”

Cody’s head was spinning with all the information when suddenly it clicked. “Chavez told the story in the AA meeting,” Cody said. “He told it to Geraghty, Shulze, Anthony, and Hank. He was confessing his sins, preparing to kill himself or be killed. But because everything that’s said in those meetings is confidential and a lot of the time it’s pure bullshit, nobody told.”

Larry said, “But Rachel never knew that, and she wanted her money back and didn’t want anyone else getting bright ideas. The San Diego detective said the Chavez cartel owned enough Mexican cops who were privy to what the San Diego cops were doing that they probably had copies of the photos. So Rachel knew who was in the meeting and who she had to shut up. By the way, Rachel was suspected of being involved in her husband’s death, but the Mexican police never arrested her before she vanished. Now we know what she’s been doing.”

“Jesus,” Cody said, glancing up at Gannon, slowly turning in the rope harness. “So she traveled across the country to find everyone who’d been at that meeting. She wanted them all out of the picture before she came here. She must have contacted Gannon thinking: he’s an outfitter from Montana, he’d know his way around the park, where the plane with the money crashed.”

Larry said, “Gannon probably came pretty cheap.”

Cody said, “But how could an airplane crash in a national park and nobody know about it?”

“It’s simpler than you think,” Larry said. “You know about all the reports we get about aircraft taking off and landing on private strips. Those drug guys disable the tracking beacons and they don’t exactly file flight plans. The plane might not even have been registered. If it was flying north to south to Jackson Hole instead of the other way, it wouldn’t have attracted any undue attention. And the big thing is no one reported it missing. Our task force was assembled because a couple old folks thought they saw a plane that didn’t look healthy flying toward Yellowstone. If it crashed somewhere close to where you are there sure as hell wasn’t anyone around to see it come down.”

Cody nodded. “So the only people who knew what was in the plane or where it likely crashed were Chavez’s inside guys. Not even the bad guys knew where the plane was coming from. Rachel got her info from her husband’s inner circle, but she had no way of getting here on her own. Except for Jed McCarthy’s pack trip.”

Bull Mitchell mounted his horse and signaled to Cody. He was ready to go. Cody waved a
just a second
wave.

“This Rachel,” Cody said. “She must be a hell of a looker or a hell of a charmer.”

“Both,” Larry said. “A stone-cold manipulator with an ice cube for a heart.”

Cody said, “She managed to get acquainted with all the victims. I wonder if she played her Rachel Chavez card on them? Maybe she called Hank and said, ‘You met my husband in San Diego. He thought you were a wonderful man and he wanted me to give something to you for maintaining his confidence.’ Knowing Hank and the importance he placed in mentoring and trust, he’d buy it. Especially coming from a woman.”

“That’s what I figured, too,” Larry said. “She used their bond of confidentiality against them. Shulze and Garaghty, for example, never even told their wives who they were meeting. And she cleaned up her tracks by burning down the homes she killed them in and took things like AA coins—anything that would prevent us from connecting the dots.”

Cody paused. Gannon’s shadow now stretched all the way across the meadow into the bank of trees. He said, “You said you called the Feds. So they’re on their way?”

“Should be. I haven’t talked to them since this morning, when I got suspended. I didn’t tell them about you because I didn’t know where the hell you were. I kind of thought you might be in a drunk tank in Ennis, so they don’t know you’re there.”

“I’ll watch for helicopters,” Cody said. “I haven’t seen anyone but killers and dead bodies all day.”

“I’d be surprised if they show up tonight,” Larry said. “I can’t see them trying to find you guys or the pack trip in the dark.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to kill her, Larry.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“She’s dead,” Cody said. “She just doesn’t know it yet. For what she did to Hank and the others, for putting Justin in this situation, she’s going to die.”

“Ah, man…”

He glanced up. “We’ve got Gannon for testimony. We don’t need her to make the case.”

“Cuff her,” Larry said. “Bring her in. Hell, I want to meet this dame and look into her eyes. I want to see for myself what’s there.”

Cody walked toward his horse. Mitchell was clearly getting impatient. Cody said, “Larry, one more thing. I called that cell number you gave me earlier today. Somebody picked up but wouldn’t say anything. What was that about?”

A long pause. “Shit, Cody, I don’t know. When did you call?”

“Around ten.”

“That’s when I was in Tubman’s office getting my skin peeled off for not telling him you’d left Helena.”

“Where was the phone?”

“In my briefcase. Next to my desk. Oh shit,” Larry said.

“Somebody answered your phone,” Cody said. “Somebody listened to me. Somehow they know I’m here.”

“I can’t imagine who…,” Larry said. Then: “Hold on a second. Somebody’s banging on my door. I’ll be right back.”

Cody said, “Somebody’s been tracking me, Larry. Someone tried to burn me alive on the way here.”

He realized Larry had stepped away.

Cody heard the receiver thunk on Larry’s kitchen table. He heard a greeting, a shout, and a gunshot. Then someone picked up the phone. Cody heard breathing. Like before.

“Larry?” Cody asked.

The connection ended.

39

Gracie asked Rachel, “How did you
and my dad meet?” She couldn’t get him, or what Rachel had told them, out of her mind.

They were riding down the trail Jed had taken, following his hoofprints. Rachel, Gracie, Danielle, and Justin. They’d left the camp under Rachel’s direction, and they’d moved quickly and quietly. Rachel made a quick trip to her tent to retrieve a backpack that was now lashed to the skirt of her saddle and hung low like there was something heavy in it.