On his Hotel Juliet Bravo ranch, John Barber had a heavy-duty professional outdoor shooting range fronted by a small field house with a lean-to roof. Inside of the barnlike building were gun lockers and regular lockers and benches and an armor-plated clearing trap beside a card table by a window overlooking the range.
At nine o’clock in the morning on the day after the Denver shoot-out, Gannon was in the gun barn standing by the card table with John Barber, looking out where his son, Declan, was lying prone on the macadam with a Savage Arms .30-06 deer rifle.
Down the desert range were markers and hanging steel targets at various distances of up to 1,200 yards. Through his binoculars, Gannon could see that Declan was consistently hitting the target at the 700 mark. As he calmly let off rounds, John Barber’s daughter, Stephanie, sat cross-legged beside him, wearing earmuffs, also looking downrange with binoculars.
“He’s been up here ever since you left,” John Barber said as Declan cracked off another round. “He’s actually getting pretty good, Mike.”
“You really think so?” Gannon said proudly as he heard the faint clink of a target in the distance.
“Okay, I’m all set up,” Kit Hagen said from where she sat at the card table beside them.
Gannon lowered the binoculars as they both turned.
Kit was wearing a plaid shirt and shorts and some flip-flops she’d borrowed from John Barber’s wife, Lynn. She looked a hell of a lot better after some sleep and a shower and their big pancake breakfast.
The Denver SCIF thumb drive was sticking out the side of the laptop she was typing on. She suddenly stopped typing and turned the screen toward them.
“Okay, first thing I wanted to show you is this, Mike. It’s a surveillance camera still that my friend Amy just sent me from the Denver parking garage.”
The guy he’d had the gunfight with in Denver was lanky and pale and younger than Gannon would have guessed, maybe in his early thirties. Gannon looked at the intensity in his eyes. He had a kind of nose-in-the-air polished viciousness to his expression.
“He even looks look like a Euro weenie, doesn’t he?” he said. “We got a name?”
“No, not yet. He’s not in the system. But it doesn’t matter. That’s only the appetizer. Now for the main course,” Kit said, clicking a button.
It took a moment for Gannon to realize the multiple photographs on the screen were of the first unknown female victim from Grand Teton.
Fully clothed and alive without bite marks, the young Asian woman Owen Barber had videotaped was quite cute. In two of the photos she was wearing khakis in what looked like maybe Africa. In one of them she held hands with a little smiling child on a crowded market street and in another she was hugging and kissing a baby in a dirty hospital. There was something almost elfin about her features, something sweet, a palpable sort of innocence, a childlike caring.
He had pegged her as some kind of charity doctor or something until he saw one shot along the bottom where she was dressed to the nines wearing a metallic Tiffany-blue gown with a glittering diamond choker, standing on a red carpet somewhere.
Gannon suddenly recognized the face of the thin bland man of about thirty-five with salt-and-pepper hair who was wearing a tuxedo beside her. At least vaguely. Was he from a business cable TV channel or something? he thought.
“The man there,” John Barber said sitting up. “Isn’t that...that’s that internet company guy, right? That billionaire. What’s his name?”
“Weber,” Kit said. “Yes, that’s Ethan Weber. He worked at Apple before he started the smartphone behemoth Sonexum. Remember, they did a movie about him on Netflix last year? He’s the eleventh richest man in the world.”
“Holy shit!” Gannon said, grabbing his head as he stood. “One of those internet billionaires from that damn conference in Jackson, right? Only someone with unlimited sway and cash could even dream of attempting all this bloody insanity.”
“So you’re saying our missing victim one is some billionaire Silicon Valley dude’s girlfriend or something?” John Barber said.
“No,” Kit said, looking at him steadily. “Victim one isn’t Weber’s girlfriend. This is Lisa Weber. It’s his wife.”
“No!” Gannon cried. “His wife?”
“Yes. They met in college at MIT. The reason we didn’t recognize her straight off the bat from Owen’s video is because she’s reclusive and notoriously camera-shy. Especially in the States. The only time she does any PR at all is for their philanthropic foundation, which is run out of Italy and based mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Her parents are actually from China.”
“And Weber killed her,” Gannon said. “Or hired someone to do it. Had to be. And all this, the shooting, switching out the victims, all of it was part of a cover-up.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Barber said.
Kit nodded.
“That’s what it’s looking like,” she said.
“Walk me through it,” Barber said.
“Here’s how I think it probably went down,” Kit said, standing. “Like Mike just said, there was a bunch of Silicon Valley computer execs staying in Jackson for a mogul conference. Ethan Weber was the keynote speaker. His speech is actually on his Facebook page. I’m thinking at some point he and his wife are bored at the hotel, so they decide to head up to Grand Teton for some reason. Do a little glamping under the stars or something. Who knows? And he kills her.”
“But come on, he ripped her apart. Why?” John Barber said.
“We don’t know. Why do husbands kill their wives? She was cheating on him? Going to leave him? Or she confronted him about an affair and he snapped? Whatever it was, we can assume Weber doesn’t want to suffer the consequences, so he snaps his globally connected billion-dollar fingers and voilà! His goons and Assistant Attorney General Warner go to work and the cover-up begins.”