“Probably.”
He was. They saw him take the on-ramp to I-20 south, followed, let more cars get between them, and then got up on the highway. A mile later, Kaiser said, “He’s doing about fifty. He’s checking for slow cars behind him. There’s an off-ramp coming up. Get off there.”
Letty got off, followed a couple of signs to the on-ramp, and got back on I-20. Crain was now two or three miles ahead of them, but on the flat highway, they could still see his truck.
“Hang back, don’t close up,” Kaiser said. “He won’t be able to see us this far back.”
* * *
They followed him southwest, through Pecos, to the small town of Toyah, where they lost him. They were still more than a mile back when they saw him take the exit. When they got off the highway, there were no moving black Ford pickups in sight.
“Now what?” Letty asked.
“Drive around,” Kaiser said. They did, for fifteen minutes, but Crain had disappeared.
“He could be in a garage,” Letty said.
“Or he could be cutting cross-country,” Kaiser said. He had a map up on his iPad screen. “There are a lot of back highways coming out of here. No way we could track him anyway—we’d be the only two vehicles on some of these roads.”
“Give up, then?”
“When at first you don’t succeed, say ‘Fuck it’ and go home,” Kaiser said. “We’ve got those addresses on Sawyer’s cell and nav system, maybe one of them will point us out here somewhere.”
On the way back to Midland, they stopped at Monahans to check on Tanner, and were told that he’d been moved by ambulance to the hospital at Odessa, where they had a vascular surgeon.
They found the hospital in Odessa as it was getting dark and were told that Tanner had been stabilized. He’d been sedated and was asleep, preparing for a seven-o’clock surgery the next morning.
“We tried to be nice,” Kaiser said, as they rolled out of the parking lot.
TEN
At the hotel, Letty pulled Sawyer’s cell phone data off her iPhone photos, retyped it, and sent it to Billy Greet in Washington, asking for help in determining locations. The information from the Jeep’s navigation system was a different kind of problem—there were eighty addresses, and by entering them into Google Maps, she found that most were commercial buildings like hardware stores, restaurants, and coffee shops.
While it was possible that those sites were used for meetings with friends, it was also possible that Sawyer was simply going out for dinner or to buy hammers. One address in San Antonio went to a western-wear store, one in Midland to a Home Depot.
An address in El Paso went to a residence on Pear Tree Lane and might be a possibility. Another went to an address that Google didn’t know about, off State Highway 132. She called up a map, and found that Highway 132 ran east of Toyah, where they’d lost Crain. She sent both addresses to Greet and went to bed.
* * *
Greet called the next morning as Letty was getting back from her run—Washington was an hour ahead of Midland—and said that the El Paso address went to a woman named Alice Serrano who had been convicted of assault in New Mexico eight years earlier but had served no jail time and had no known connection to Low or to any radical group. Greet hadn’t been able to find the address on Highway 132. “It’s so sparsely populated out there that it’s possible they have some kind of informal numbering system.”
“Why would it be in the Jeep’s nav system if the address isn’t real?” Letty asked.
“Just because it’s in the nav system doesn’t mean that it was found. You know what I’d do? I’d go into this Toyah place, to the post office, and ask about it. Mail carriers know all that stuff.”