J Jance - Queen of the Night

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

The gunman shrugged and didn’t answer.

“If you’ll let Pepe and me out somewhere, you can have the car,” she said. “We won’t tell anybody. Just let us go. Please.”

She knew even as she said the words that this was a futile hope. He would never let them go. She understood full well there was only one way this nightmare would end, and it would be with Ginny and Pepe dead. She would never see Felix again. Never have a chance to tell him good-bye. And she wouldn’t live long enough to see Pepe go off to kindergarten, or graduate from high school, either. Her eyes filled with hot tears, but she blinked them back.

“Don’t talk,” he said. “Just drive.”

Since there was nothing else to do, Ginny drove. She forced herself not to look in the rearview mirror. If that woman in the parking lot had noticed something amiss and had summoned help-if by some miracle someone was following them-she didn’t want to risk doing anything that might warn the guy that help was on the way. And if there wasn’t anybody back there coming to help? Then it didn’t matter anyway.

“What happened to your arm?” she asked.

He glanced down at his injured hand. Ginny looked, too.

“Dog bit me,” he said.

That was all he said. He didn’t explain which dog had bitten him or why, and Ginny decided not to ask for any further clarification on that score.

“Why did you choose me?” she asked finally.

“I drove around until I found a car with a car seat in it,” he said. “I figured while you were dealing with the baby it would be easy for me to get in your car. And it was.”

Crap, Ginny Torres thought. They told you that you should always put your baby in a car seat. That was supposed to make it safer. Not this time.

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:48 p.m.

88º Fahrenheit

N ow that Annie and Amy were six, they were old enough that Kath Fellows was willing to risk leaving them alone for an hour or so at a time. On this particular Sunday afternoon she knew she’d be in and out of the neighborhood grocery store in far less time than that. So after giving the girls a pep talk and promising to bring them both Twinkies if they were very good, she left them in the living room with orders to stay there watching a video until she came back.

Kath was at the checkout line and just signing the credit-card authorization screen when one of the carryout boys came charging into the store yelling, “Call nine-one-one.”

“Why?” the manager called back. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s an old lady outside who said she thinks a woman and her baby were just abducted at gunpoint, from right here in the parking lot.”

As people hurried out the door, Kath followed, pushing her cart of groceries. A crowd was gathering around the supposedly “old” woman, someone who looked to be in her sixties, who was pacing back and forth, yelling excitedly, and pointing back toward the parking lot.

“He had a gun,” she said. “I saw it. He got in the car while she was putting the grocery cart away. When she came back to her car, he made her get something out of this one.”

The woman pointed toward a dust-covered silver Dodge Caravan. “She put whatever it was in the backseat of her little car and then they drove out of here in that. But her purse is still here-right there on the ground-and so are some of her groceries.”

Kath listened to the chorus of excited voices as she loaded groceries into the back of her own Odyssey on the far side of the parking aisle. By the time she finished, she knew that Tucson PD was responding to the manager’s 911 call because she could hear the siren of an approaching patrol car wailing in the distance.

“What kind of vehicle were they in when they left here?” the store manager was asking the distressed woman. He was still holding his cell phone and still talking into it.

“Tan,” she said. “Light tan. One of those foreign cars. A Honda, I think, but I don’t know for sure.”

“Which way did they go?”

“South on Campbell.”

“And what about the guy? Did you see him? What did he look like?”

“Middle-aged, bald, and heavyset,” the woman said. “One arm was in a sling.”

That last comment hit Kath Fellows like a sledgehammer. She had spoken to Brian several times in the course of the day. She knew the man her husband was looking for-the killer he was looking for-was a middle-aged bald man with one arm in a sling. Slamming her car door shut, Kath raced across the aisle and pushed her way through the cluster of people until she was able to get a clear view of the tags on the back of the dusty silver minivan. California.

Long before the patrol car arrived, Kath Fellows was on the horn with her husband. Brian sounded groggy, as though he might have been caught napping at his desk when she called.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I meant to call earlier. I’m tracking auto dealers, and I still don’t know when I’ll be home.”

“It’s about your killer,” Kath told him. “Do you have a vehicle tag number for him?”

“Just a sec,” Brian said, shuffling papers. “I have it right here. Why?”

“I’m looking at a very dusty silver minivan, a Dodge Caravan with California plates.”

Brian read off the license information.

“That’s the one,” Kath said.

“What’s going on?”

“I think your guy just carjacked a woman and her baby.”

“Which way did they go?” Brian asked.

Kath heard the urgency in his voice. “South on Campbell in a tan sedan. Maybe a Honda. Is it possible they’re headed for the airport?”

“No,” Brian said at once. “Not that. Southard already tried the airport option this morning. It didn’t work. Besides, we’ve got that covered. He’s headed somewhere else. The smart money is on Mexico. Can you give me any more information on either the vehicle or on the victim, anything at all?”

Kath looked up in time to see that the arriving patrol car was still half a block away, wading through the intersection. The cops weren’t on the scene yet, but the woman’s purse was. It was still sitting where she had dropped it, on the ground next to the spot where her vehicle had been parked.

Before anyone could stop her, Kath had scooped up the abandoned purse. She had the wallet out and open by the time the cop car rolled to a stop in the midst of the milling crowd of excited onlookers.

“Stop her,” someone shouted, pointing at Kath. “That woman is trying to steal her purse.”

A burly young cop hurried up to Kath. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Is that your property?”

“Her name is Torres,” Kath said into the phone to her husband without answering the officer’s question. “Virginia Torres. Her address is 231 South Fourth.”

“Ma’am, I asked you once,” the cop insisted. “You need to answer me. Is that your purse or not?”

“Hope this helps,” Kath said. “I’ve gotta go.”

She closed her phone, handed the purse to the police officer, and reached for her own ID. “No, it’s not mine,” she said. “My name is Kath Fellows. I’m with the Border Patrol. According to her ID, the purse belongs to a woman named Virginia Torres. I believe she and her baby have just been carjacked. I think the man who did it is the shooter who killed those four people out on the reservation last night.”

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:50 p.m.

88º Fahrenheit

Brian Fellows was on the phone to Records as he raced out of the building. If the carjacked Honda was still on Campbell or Kino, it was probably headed for either I-10 or I-19. Depending on traffic and lights, the trip to the freeway from Broadway could take as little as seven minutes or as long as ten.