96

Staff Sergeant Lynn Cronquist was waiting at the roadside when the Flathead County helicopter touched down at the border checkpoint in Roosville, British Columbia. She’d closed the highway; an RCMP Crown Victoria sat parked across both lanes to the north, its red-and-blues flashing. To the south of the checkpoint, two US Customs and Border Protection Explorers stood guard. Otherwise, the highway—and the tiny town beyond—looked mostly deserted.

Cronquist was a tall, solid woman about Stevens’s age. She hurried across the pavement toward the helicopter, ducking the rotor wash, helped Stevens slide the door open and shook his hand, then Windermere’s, and led them away as the helicopter took flight again. It was five minutes to midnight. The air was bitterly cold.

“We’re mostly set up on the Canadian side,” Cronquist told them, leading them toward a small single-story building, a single guardhouse on one end, a Canadian flag atop the roof. She waved at the customs officer in the guardhouse, hurried them past.

“Probably need all kinds of permits to bring you guys over here,” she told Stevens and Windermere over her shoulder, “but I figured we’d save the paperwork until we get this guy caught, huh?”

Stevens glanced at Windermere, caught her slight nod, approving. Figured he shared her sentiments, had been afraid the Canadians would get hung up on procedure, wouldn’t grasp the importance of timeliness in this chase.

“I guess there’s a whole story about why a couple of Minnesota FBI agents are chasing serial killers in Montana,” Cronquist continued. “But I imagine that’s one more thing we can hash out in the afterglow.”

Then the Mountie’s face grew serious. “They said you were pretty close with the deputy this guy killed,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear it. We’ll do everything we can to catch the scumbag, you can be sure of it.”

Stevens didn’t say anything. He’d been trying to keep Kerry Finley out of his thoughts, trying not to see the Lincoln County deputy how they’d found her, shot all to hell and crammed dead in the back of her truck. He was trying not to feel personally responsible.

Cronquist caught the look on his face. “Well, never mind,” she said, pushing open the door to the customshouse. “Let me show you what we’ve got going on.”

The staff sergeant had taken over the sleepy customshouse—“Nobody coming through here this time of night”—and turned it into a makeshift operations center.

“Our closest detachment’s about forty miles north,” she told them. “So we’re leaning on Canada Customs to help out.”

She’d amassed a team—customs agents from both sides of the border, what RCMP help she could call in from the surrounding region, the Flathead County and Lincoln County sheriff’s departments, and, of course, the FBI.

“We borrowed a Squirrel from the base in Kelowna,” she told them. “That’s our local helicopter; it’s an AS350, European. Kelowna’s a couple hundred miles away if you’re flying, though, so there was a bit of a lag getting the chopper on line. There’s only one for the region, and it’s a pretty big region, so . . .”

“Yeah, we’ve heard all about it,” Windermere said. “Limited resources all over the map.”

“You said it. I called in as many guys as I could muster, sent them out into the woods on Ski-Doos, but again, lot of space to hide, not many people to look. Like I told you on the radio, this isn’t going to be easy.”

“It hasn’t been easy so far,” Stevens said. “Why would it start now?”

He’d been afraid of flying at one point in his life. The concept seemed laughable now. He’d spent most of the last three days in the air, in one law enforcement helicopter or another, too preoccupied by the search to worry about the physics of powered flight. He and Windermere had left Kerry Finley’s body in the care of a team of local deputies, climbed back into the helicopter, and searched the woods along the border well into the night, pausing only for a quick dash back to the airport in Eureka for fuel. They’d scanned untold miles of featureless black forest with the chopper’s infrared camera and saw a couple of elk, but no Leland Hurley. And none of the other helicopters on scene were reporting any different.

“We’re still behind him,” Stevens told Cronquist and Windermere. “He passed through Stryker just after midnight last night. Gives him a full day to make that crossing. He could be miles inside the country by now.”

“And he probably is,” Windermere said. “Given that we’ve been skunked with every pass we’ve made close to the line.”

“So we need to go deeper. Follow him north.”

Cronquist pursed her lips. “You want to bring your helicopters over?” she asked. “I can fudge the script for a couple of agents, but if you’re wanting to bring the air force into our space, I should probably wake somebody up to check in.”

“Do what you have to do,” Windermere replied. “But every minute we hold up those choppers gives Hurley that much more time to scatter.”

Cronquist sucked her teeth. Thought about it. Finally, she seemed to come to a decision. “It’s a dark night,” she said. “Anybody gets ornery, we’ll just tell them your choppers got lost.”