Chapter 11

 

Beau walked into the squad room and found Rico filling out evidence logs. Piles of cloth, each bagged in official red-banded plastic, sat on the deputy’s desk.

“Hey, boss,” Rico said, looking up.

“These are the bank bags?”

“Yeah. Five of ’em.”

Beau picked up one. It was exactly as described by Phil Carlisle at the armored car company. Heavy canvas stamped with the name and logo of the First Bank of Springer, hefty steel grommets around the top with a coated metal cable and padlock. He turned the bag in his hands. Although the fabric appeared to be reinforced, the robbers had managed to cut a long slit—no doubt the way they had removed the money.

“They’re all cut the same way,” Rico said.

Beau went over the sequence of events with Rico. Things moved fast at the back of the armored truck. Tansy was shot, Rudy Vasquez stepped out the back door and was disarmed, the bags were thrown out to the masked gunman. Rudy stated the armed man tossed them, one by one, to a second perpetrator who threw them into the back of a black pickup truck. A driver had the truck in gear and roared off down the road the moment the other two jumped inside.

The two lawmen stepped over to a wall map and Beau showed Rico where the incident took place.

“They probably cruised slowly through Eagle Nest, careful not to attract attention. Putting some distance between the crime scene and where they planned to stop next. In the lower canyon approaching Taos they pulled off at a picnic area. It wouldn’t be hard to find a spot unoccupied early on an October morning, right?”

Rico made another note on his form. “The people who found the bags showed up around noon today. A family of four. The dad’s only day off this week and they’d brought some KFC for lunch. He said the kids noticed the bags in some bushes when they walked down a little path toward the stream. The little boy brought one up, asking his dad if he could get the padlock off it, but the father knew this was something official. He called us right away. It took a real sharp knife to cut through this material.”

“Once the bags were abandoned, the suspects would have transferred the money to other bags, generic, like the one found at Charlotte’s Place. Rudy, the guard, told us the pickup truck had no plates, but I’m guessing the thieves probably used their little pit stop to put them back on, keep themselves inconspicuous. For all we know, the truck could be driving around town right now.”

“I did as you asked, Sheriff, put out an alert for the serial numbers. If these guys start spending the money, we’ll have a way to trace it back to them.”

“It’d be nice if they went on a spending spree right away, but I have a feeling even the dumbest of dumb criminals these days know better.”

“At least we got a hundred grand of it out of their hands.”

“Yeah. It wasn’t an easy sell for me to tell Mr. Carlisle at A-1 they couldn’t immediately have it back.” Beau set the bagged canvas on the table. “I’ll let you get to your report.”

He went to his office and placed a quick call to his crime scene technician, Lisa, who verified that she’d run the prints from the banded cash and the black bag from Charlotte’s Place.

“I’m hoping you have good news for me, results from national databases?”

“Probably not,” she replied. “The roadblock barricades had no prints, but that probably just means the men wore gloves when they set them up. Mornings are chilly these days. It wouldn’t be unusual. The only identifiable prints on the cash are from the bank employee who is on record as the one who loaded the bank bags. The black bag from the restaurant had only one decent print. Couldn’t lift anything from the cloth, and the one print from the vinyl handle doesn’t match anyone, locally or nationally.”

Which meant the perp had never been arrested, served in the military or applied for a government job. It left only, say, seventy-five percent of the population as possible suspects. He told Lisa that Rico would be bringing her the armored car transfer bags. With luck, the men had handled the metal padlock, and with even better luck at least one of those guys had prints on file. All they needed was one small lead at this point, something to give the two county departments a direction to follow.

He thanked Lisa and turned his attention to the next thing on his to-do list. It had been an early morning and he felt eager to get home but there was time to follow one other possibility.

The jammed hospital parking lot told Beau the place was bustling this time of day. Right before the dinner hour was that perfect time for people leaving work to pop in and visit, while having a ready excuse not to stay long. He took advantage of his cruiser’s official status and parked at the curb near the ambulance entrance. No one would question his presence unless it sat there a long time, and he anticipated this visit would require no more than a few minutes.

He went directly to the ICU where, again, his uniform got him behind the lines at the nurse’s station without question.

“Her vital signs improved only marginally,” the head nurse said, referring to the patient chart in her hands. “We still can’t say she’s out of danger.”

Beau nodded and stared at the glass wall of the cubicle which served as Tansy Montoya’s room. Monitors beeped gently and rhythmically, flashing blue, yellow and red numbers that meant nothing to him. The diminutive figure on the bed had three-quarters of her face wrapped in white gauze, and wires snaked out from beneath the blanket.

“You can stand beside the bed, if you’d like,” the nurse, whose badge identified her as Beth Baughn, offered. “She won’t know you’re there. Her mother came by earlier. So sad. She became distraught, seeing her daughter like this. Good thing a neighbor had driven her over.”

“She’s got two kids,” Beau said with a nod toward the window.

“Yeah, I heard. They can’t visit, of course. Even if they were allowed, it would be way too upsetting to see their mom this way.”

Beau watched the colored lines on the monitors jiggle a little more.

“I’ll need to speak with her as soon as she’s able,” he said. “She’s the only witness who can help us catch the guys who did this to her.”

“I understand,” Ms. Baughn said. “As long as you realize she may not have any memory of the minutes leading up to the gunshot. Patients often blank out traumatic events. She may eventually recover those memories, or she may not.”

He knew. He could only hope for the best. He left instructions, including his personal cell number, which Baughn wrote on a brilliant pink sticky note and attached to the top page of the chart. It was the best she could do to help his case, he realized.

Retrieving his cruiser, he drove through town with an eye toward every black pickup truck on the street. A nervous driver, an extra glance his direction … you never knew what clue could be the right one.

The image of Tansy Montoya in that bed, covered in bandages and fighting for her life, stuck with him. Surely she’d seen the gunman’s face. She would have never lowered her window to someone in a mask. Now if she could only recall that face when she became conscious again. If she did. Nothing was certain at this point.