“You notice the way the guy walks to the car?” Kit said as they sat back in the Armada in the parking lot, watching the footage again and again.
“Yeah, he has like a prison yard hop roll thing going on. You think he’s a gangbanger or something?” Gannon said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think that’s it. I’ve seen that kind of shuffling before on another case. There’s a name for that. I forget what it is but it’s a type of gait that people with prosthetics have.”
“You think he lost a leg or something? Like a soldier maybe?”
“Maybe,” Kit said. “It’s definitely something to keep in mind. And I definitely think she was taken in the car. Just as she sits right there, he’s in the back behind her and he gets a cord around her neck. Then when she’s dead, he moves her over and drives out.”
“Then only nine hours later she’s found up on Grand Teton elaborately carved up and bound?” Gannon said.
“Something doesn’t exactly add up with the time there, does it?” Kit said. “How the hell does he get her up there that quick? It’s a seven-hour drive just to the base of the mountain.”
Gannon put the car into Drive.
“Let’s start driving back and see if we can find her car on any more surveillance cameras,” he said.
They got back on I-25. Five minutes later, Kit pointed ahead at a gas station at the bottom of the first exit ramp.
“Let’s start there. That station looks pretty new,” she said.
The old black woman they found behind the counter inside had to be eighty if she was a day. She was named Jessie, according to the plastic name tag on her vest.
“Glad to help ya, of course,” she said after carefully studying Kit’s credentials through her thick eyeglasses.
The sharp-as-a-tack lady locked the front door before she led them past the chips and drink coolers into the back.
“This is a really great camera system, isn’t it?” Jessie said as she showed them her computer. “These cameras just keep getting better and better. My husband, Bob, was a cop in Colorado Springs and he insisted we get the best system we could when we decided to open a new station.”
“Wait, wait. Hit Pause,” Gannon said two minutes later.
Kit tapped the mouse and the screen froze to show Tracy Sandhurst’s blue Camry on the exit ramp.
“Hot dang! You nailed it, Kit. There’s her car. Press Play. Let’s see where it goes,” Gannon said excitedly.
The Camry pulled down to the red light and its left clicker went on. The light turned green and the car went left.
“Come on,” Gannon said, leading them back out of the closet-sized room. “Let’s go left and see if we can find another camera.”
Gannon pulled the Armada back out of the station onto the exit ramp and quickly made a left under the highway overpass like the Camry had done.
As they got out on the other side of it, he suddenly slowed as he saw there was something unusual in the road ahead.
There was some kind of black-and-white-striped barrier across the road and beyond it some sort of tollbooth and a high fence.
“What in the hell?” Kit said.
There was a large sign in the grass off to the right of the road, and Gannon and Kit both stared up as they pulled alongside it.
It said:
Francis E. Warren Air Force Base
RESTRICTED AREA
PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED
HAVE IDENTIFICATION READY
NO TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS POINT