Cold Fear (8 page)

Bowman called her friend Roberta Cara, who had taken
Mark in for several weeks when she went to Quantico. Roberta lived with her
lawyer husband, J.T., and their seven children in a large ranch house south of Missoula. J.T. had handled Carl’s will and business affairs.

“No problem, Tracy. I’ll send a couple of the girls over
to spend the night with him, then bring him here in the morning.”

Gently, she woke Mark and told him that Roberta’s
daughters were coming to take care of him because she had an emergency
assignment and she would be gone for a few days.

“Don’t forget to call me, Mom, like when you went to Washington?” Mark threw his arms around her.

“Every day. I promise, Marshal.” That was her nickname
for him.

Smiling, Mark drifted back to sleep. She carried him to
his bedroom, wrote him an I love you and I will miss you note, then began
packing. First for him, then for herself, finishing just as the girls arrived.
She briefed them on Mark’s medication and schedule, then wrote it down for
Roberta, leaving her cell phone and Salt Lake Division numbers. She lugged her
bag to her Chevy Blazer SUV and headed for Interstate 93.

The drive to Kalispell would take well over an hour. For
some strange reason, as she started out, she suddenly thought about Isaiah
Hood, the killer who was going to be executed in a few days in Deer Lodge. Why
did he come to mind? His case had been in the
Missoulian
recently. Hood
was awaiting his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was based on the new
claim that he was innocent. Why was she suddenly thinking of him? She shrugged
it off, concentrating on the case at hand. Was her cell phone plugged in? When
she looked to check, it began trilling, startling her for a second before she
answered.

“Bowman.”

“Who is this? Who have I got?” A gruff male voice.

“Agent Tracy Bowman, FBI. Who is this please?”

“Frank Zander. You are the local assigned to this case
with me?”

Sounded to her like he said “yokel,” but the line hissed
with static.

“That’s correct.”

“Where are you?”

“En route to Kalispell to meet you at the airport. Where
are you?”

“I’m calling from the plane on an air phone. I stop in Salt
Lake for a quick connect to Montana. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Can
you get to a secure fax? I have a priority report I want you to have right
away.”

Bowman’s brain raced as she drove. “Yes.”

“Well, give me the number.” His tone was condescending.

She recited the fax number.

“I do not know that number as secure for your region.”

“It is secure.”

“Alright, it will be on its way once our conversation
ends.”

“Fine.”

“Bowman do you know Pike Thornton, a ranger at Glacier?”

“Not really. I know of him.”

“Do you know Inspector Sydowski with the SFPD?”

“No.”

“Do you know anything about this file, about suspected
criminal intent?”

“I have been briefed.”

“You’re with--what is it?--Internet liason? GFP?”
sounded like he was reading something alien, “I never heard--and this is your
first investigation?”

“Yes.”

“You sure you are on this case? Did they call the right
person out there?”

“Yes.”

“Then that fax number you gave me better be secure.
There will be no breaches of security. Understood?”

Two minutes and Bowman could not stand Zander. She was
nervous and green, but she was not an idiot.

“Agent Zander, is the plane you are on Bureau or
commercial?”

“Commercial.”

“You alone on it?”

“No.”

“I am alone in a Chevy Blazer on a Montana highway. The
only threat to security is road kill. You’re discussing an active case in a
public place. Look around at the other passengers pretending not to hear any of
the words you just shouted at me. Is that procedure with you big guns in Washington?”

His line hissed with silence.

Just shot myself in the foot,
Bowman thought, her mind reeling with the names of all the major
cases Zander had likely worked and how for the last few months her major
investigation was how to get a new mouse for her computer. Suddenly, she was
painfully self-conscious of her inexperience, her weight, her self-esteem.
That
does it. I am toast.

“The fax is on its way. I will call you within the
hour,” Zander said, ending their conversation.

Bowman immediately punched a number on her phone,
glancing at the Chevy’s dash clock. She had twenty minutes before they closed.

“Turly’s Gas, Don speaking.”

“Don, it’s Tracy. Sweetie, do me a favor please. Put
paper in your fax machine and turn it on. I got something coming in right now.
Boring stuff about Mark’s medical condition from an FBI friend whose family is
going through the same thing. I’ll be there in five minutes to get it and fill
up, too.”

“Sure Trace, no problem.”

Bowman scanned the nine-page fax while Don filled her
Blazer’s tank and checked her oil. Her stomach knotted. The rangers were right;
this one had a very bad aura given what she saw in the notes and the summary of
the old SFPD complaint. The father’s wound, the family’s demeanor and
evasiveness would warrant serious concern after their daughter vanished. How
long has she been missing now? Bowman checked her watch.

Pulling out of Turly’s, driving deeper into the night
and the Rocky Mountains, she realized that she was heading into a significant
case. One that was going to draw plenty of attention: a mother and father
grappling with their fears for their lost daughter while the FBI investigates
the suspicion that one, or both of them, killed her.

TEN

FBI Special Agent
Frank Zander
watched the icon on his laptop computer indicate his fax had gone through. He
disconnected the computer line from the plane’s air phone. Repositioning
himself in his seat, he subtly inventoried his immediate area. The jet was
sprinkled with passengers. Zander was alone in his section, the row of seats to
himself to stretch out. Still, that Montana Agent was right. He was guilty of
risking security.

Who was she anyway? This Tracy Bowman from, what the
hell was it, Internet GFP in Missoula? So she scored high on course work and
was near the scene. That was justification for inflicting her on him? He had no
time for training a junior agent. Maybe she was good. Maybe she was somebody’s
favor. Zander shook his head. Nobody had talked to him that way. He did not
need her… or any women in his life, for that matter.

He shut down his computer, set it aside, switched off
the overhead reading lights and peered out the window at the night. He had
digested everything they had so far on this case and formulated a plan on how
he would go at it. Before he landed in Montana, he would go over everything
once more and fine-tune his strategy. For now, he should try to get some sleep.
Thirty-five thousand feet below, he saw the lights of cities and towns flowing
by. He sometimes felt he lived in jet planes. With this Montana case, he will
have investigated in all fifty states. What an achievement to go with his
broken marriages. Some people get gold watches, a nice pen. What did he have? A
collection of court papers calling him the defendant.

His first wife was Denise, the nurse at George
Washington. They were young, sexually addicted to each other but incompatible
as spouses. After three years, it ended as passionately as it began, with
dishes smashed, screaming, tears, door-slamming and a call from her lawyer.
Last he had heard, Denise had moved to London, married a doctor, had a baby
girl.

Meredith, his second wife, ended things quietly six
months ago with an e-mail. Error-free, grammatically correct, as surgically
effective as a scalpel to the heart. That was her style. Zander could just
imagine her calendar that day, certain it went something like:
White House
Counsel meet, book, spa, New York trip, Ritz for one hour of illicit sex with
D.A. lawyer in Manhattan, alert husband it is over, pick up gown for Lincoln
Center gala.
They lasted six years until she typed the words, “As of this
date, I am seeking a divorce.” Typical of Washington’s cover-your-ass
bureaucracy. “As of this date.”
Nice one, Meredith
. Near the end, when
she booked the sessions with the counselor for them, she never made the
appointments. Twice, he had sat alone in the waiting room of the counselor’s
office in Alexandria, leafing through the same outdated copy of
People
magazine. Looking out at the Potomac and the capital, realizing her no-shows
were intended to humiliate him. A metaphor for her middle finger.

He remembered that day he received her marriage-ending
e-mail, he typed back five words.

“I know you’re fucking Pearson.”

She responded, “Good.”

She loved what he loathed: the power, the politics, the
parties, the sycophants, the networking. It actually turned her on. He was a
federal cop who dreamed about escaping his life inside the Beltway to a place
with real people, who looked you in the eye and meant what they said. A place
like Montana or Idaho. Lots of antigovernment sentiment there.
I’d fit right
in
, he laughed to himself. But for now, he’d settle for his small rented
bungalow on a dead end street shaded by forest in College Park, near the
university. Thank God, no kids. Zander then realized he was forty-three, and it
saddened him.

For the past twenty years of his life, the only marriage
that had worked for him was the one between him and his job. Zander had always
been a front-line agent. He had developed a reputation for being a stubborn,
thorough, SOB investigator, one of the Bureau’s best. He missed nothing. It was
common for him to be assigned to the FBI’s top teams on major files, like Oklahoma City, Lockerbie, the World Trade Center. He joined Bureau teams assisting other
police agencies, or helping salvage a messed up case. His expertise grew out of
his early successes in crimes against children: parental kidnappings,
exploitation, stranger abductions. Zander took those cases personally. He was
the champion of the victim and virtually everyone else, living or dead, was a
suspect in his eyes until he seized the truth by the throat and presented the
file for prosecution.

Whenever his name came up--and it always did whenever
agents sat around over a beer--the younger ones would inevitably ask:
Anybody
work with Frank Zander? What’s his story? I hear that guy is a cold machine, a
guilt detector. He does not miss. Was he born that way or constructed in a
secret basement lab in the Hoover Building?
Case-hardened agents, those who
knew, would usually recount a variation of the legend that circulated among the
tribal camps of the FBI across the country.

Francis Miller Zander was a rookie working a junior role
for the Bureau assisting locals in Georgia. A young mother of two small boys,
who lived in a rural trailer park, supporting her family as a hairdresser,
reported her older son missing. She told police she suspected her abusive
ex-husband, with the help of one of his ex-con friends, took the boy with him
to Florida, violating a custody order. The mother’s story held up because the
abusive ex had done time and had been seen in the area arguing with her. The
locals and supporting lead agent went with it, letting their guard down,
concentrating on the information she provided. Soon the locals and the Bureau
and Florida police were all over the ex.

But Zander had a bad feeling about the mother from the
start. He noticed empty whiskey bottles in her trash, saw a variety of
medication in her medicine cabinet. He also noticed, under the seat of the
mother’s car, a crumpled toll receipt for the Florida Turnpike dated the day
she said her boy vanished. Zander was a rookie; the local old boys knew the ex,
a cop-hater who gave off the vibe that he would have done anything “to hurt
that bitch who put him in jail.”

They found the little boy’s body in a Florida swamp near
the apartment complex where the ex-con lived. Days later, while the full force
of the investigation remained focused on the ex, the mother vanished with the
younger boy, who was four.

They found the mother and the four-year-old in their van
at an I-75 rest stop between Lexington and Cincinnati. She had tied a plastic
bag over her son’s head and had overdosed herself on pills from six different
prescriptions.

Within fourteen months of that case, every cop connected
to it had resigned from police work, unable to deal with the fact a child was
murdered right under their noses. The lead FBI agent took his own life. He died
in a single-vehicle traffic fatality. Cops knew how guys did it so their
families still got the insurance. Zander nearly resigned. He could not forgive
himself for also buying the mother’s story, for not speaking up, for not
insisting they go harder on the mother.

He vowed from that point on never to fear to get in
someone’s face, to never hold back. He would never apologize and would follow
every gut instinct no matter whose feelings he hurt. He vowed to assume that
everyone was hiding something, that no one told the truth at first, and to
never, ever lose sight of the reason why he had to be that way. To remind
himself, Zander would go to a little cemetery outside a small Georgia town every year or so, and look at the headstone under a peach tree.

Two very good reasons were buried there.

The jet began its descent to Salt Lake City. Zander fired
up his laptop and opened his file on the Baker family. This time he reviewed
photographs of them, the recent ones Emily Baker had given to the rangers.

He studied the girl’s face. Sun in her eyes. Hugging her
Beagle. Smiling in the majestic Rockies against a blue sky. A pretty California kid. Her name was Paige Baker. She had her mother’s eyes.

Emily Baker was thirty-five. Attractive. A photographer.
Looked energetic. Zander gently covered her smile with his finger,
concentrating on her eyes. They betrayed something unsettled about her.
Something sad.

Whatever it is, Emily, you are going to tell me.

Zander’s eyes then met those of Doug Baker. The teacher.
The former U.S. Marine sergeant. The high school teacher. Football coach.
Positions of authority. Positions of control.

Did you lose control, Doug? How did you hurt your
hand? What was going on in the time before your daughter had vanished?

How long had she been gone now? Zander checked the file.
Made his best estimate. Thirty-one hours. Zander set a special timer on his
Swiss watch, adjusting it to tell him at a glance how many hours had passed
since Paige Baker disappeared into the Rocky Mountains. They had to move fast
on this one. He was going to have to push it. Smart and hard. He closed his
laptop. Soon he would learn the truth about Doug and Emily: every fear, every
heartbreak, every secret. If the Bakers were hiding something, he would find
out.

He always did.