WITH THE TARGETS IN THE WIND, THE EMERGENCY RESPONSE TEAM switched out of arrest mode and focused instead on crime-scene investigation. Now they would proceed with executing the search warrants, but because of the need to document and preserve evidence that part of the operation had to be conducted under the direct supervision of Dave Hollicker and Casey Ledford.
After hours of tension, the guys on the team were glad to push the Pause button. While everybody else was letting off steam and waiting for the CSIs, a bummed Tom walked away from the group, sat down in the chair under the cottonwood tree, and pulled out the satphone. The Ardmores had given them the slip. As near as he could tell, Deputy Raymond Garth had been shot right around 5:00 A.M. It was now 10:30—more than five hours later. The brothers Ardmore could be in Texas by now, or almost to California. Maybe Deb was right and someone spotting them at an inspection station or weigh station offered the best chance of catching them.
In the meantime the next piece of the investigation was obviously in Road Forks. In New Mexico. If it had been a hot-pursuit situation, Tom could have hopped into the Yukon, lit up his lights, and gone barreling across the state line. Only problem was, it wasn’t a hot pursuit at all. Instead of calling Joanna to tell her they’d blown it, he got on the horn to Randy Trotter’s office in Lordsburg.
It turned out that the woman who answered the phone was also the sheriff’s secretary. “He’s not in,” she said when Tom identified himself. “I’m Connie, his secretary. I might be able to reach him by radio, though. Does this have anything to do with the situation out at Road Forks?”
“You know about that?”
“Sure do. We’ve got a deputy over there right now, talking to Arlene.”
“Who’s Arlene?”
“A waitress at the truck stop. She said Jimmy Ardmore turned up there for breakfast long about eight o’clock this morning. According to their security footage, he drove out headed westbound shortly after nine.”
Tom swore under his breath. That was less than two hours ago. A two-hour head start was a big improvement over a five-hour head start, but it could still put the westbound Peterbilt well into Arizona.
“We were going to post an APB, but somebody from your office beat us to the punch. All the same, Sheriff Trotter and Donnie are in the helicopter right now, having a little look-see.”
“Who’s Donnie?”
“That would be Donald Dunkerson, our pilot. Can I have Sheriff Trotter call you at the number I’ve got on the screen?”
“That’ll work.”
“I don’t believe I caught your name.”
“Thomas Hadlock—Tom. I’m acting sheriff here in Cochise County.”
“That’s right, your sheriff just had her baby, didn’t she? Okay, I’ll let him know.”
Dave and Casey showed up and went to work. While Casey made plaster casts of the tire tracks next to the garage, Tom and the Double C’s trailed behind Dave to observe as he processed the scene.
In the interest of preserving evidence and wanting to be able to secure the property again after the search, Dave used a heavy-duty bolt cutter to slice through Arthur Ardmore’s collection of padlocks. The three smaller houses showed no sign of human habitation and merited little attention. The one with the picket fence was a different story.
“Hold up, guys,” he said, pausing in the doorway. “There’s dust everywhere, and I can see two distinct sets of footprints, one coming and one going. When whoever it was went in, he was barefoot. Coming out, he was wearing shoes. I’ll be right back.”
Donning booties, Tom and the two detectives waited outside. “Here’s the deal,” Dave said when he returned. “The guy who came in the front door went straight to the closet, grabbed a pair of shoes, and went right back out. He knew what he wanted and where to go to get it.”
Stepping inside, Tom, carefully avoiding the tracks in the dust, was struck by the utter emptiness of the place. It was like walking into a haunted house. If Arthur Ardmore had ever lived here, he didn’t live here anymore.
“Come take a look at this,” Dave said, snapping photos over by an old-fashioned Formica-topped kitchen table.
An old copy of an Arizona Highways magazine, dating from May two years earlier, lay on the gritty tabletop. Barely visible through a thick layer of grayish dust was an address label bearing the name Arthur Ardmore. Beside the magazine was an empty coffee mug with a stain in the bottom suggesting that the cup had been dirty but empty when it was abandoned. Nearby sat a French-press coffeemaker with moldy coffee grounds inside, but so much time had passed in the dry heat of the abandoned house that even the mold had died.
Ernie looked at the table and shook his head. “If Arthur gets up from the breakfast table, walks away, and never comes back, what does that tell us?”
“That he didn’t know he was leaving,” Jaime offered. “And since we’ve got no blood in here and no sign of a struggle, if something happened to him, it didn’t happen here.”
“But it did happen,” Tom said, uttering aloud what everyone else was already thinking. “And I believe that means we’re a whole lot closer to identifying the human skull Jack Carver dragged home—the one with a bullet hole in it. Instead of being on the lookout for two suspects, I say we’re down to only one—James Ardmore.”
When Dave was done with the house for the time being, they trooped over to the garage, where Casey was just finishing up making the plaster casts of the tire tracks. The side entrance to the garage was the only door in the place without a padlock, and it was the only one where they had to deploy Deputy Creighton and his battering ram.
Pushing past the shattered door, Dave stopped cold. “What the hell? Come take a look at what we’ve got here.”
Inside the garage a dozen red gas cans were lined up against the side walls. “Full or empty?” Tom asked.
They were all wearing gloves, but Ernie was the one who walked over to the line of cans and hefted them one after another. “Full,” he said. “They’re all full—every last one of them. This much gas means we’re dealing with a firebug who was probably planning on burning the joint down.”
“So why didn’t he?” Jaime asked.
“Ran out of time, maybe?” Ernie asked.
“Maybe,” Tom said. “Let’s go tackle that jail.”
They’d known from what Garth had reported to them earlier that the brick building would be the crux of the matter and require the most attention, and that was why Dave had suggested they leave that one for last.
Because of the blackout curtains, the room was pitch-dark when Dave entered. Groping for a light switch, he tripped and fell. Tom, following behind, managed to locate the switch. When the light came on, they discovered that Dave had fallen over an unopened twenty-five-pound bag of dog food lying on the floor next to the door. Garth had reported that the girls imprisoned in the basement had survived on kibble. That unopened bag of dog food sent its own chilling message. Latisha, the last of the four, had somehow managed to escape, but the presence of that fresh dog-food bag suggested that James Ardmore had been planning to invite more guests into his private version of hell.
As Dave focused his camera on the horrifically stained mattress, Tom Hadlock stopped at the top of the wooden stairs that led to the stark dungeon. When he flipped the light switch, a single barren bulb lit up the bleak space below. Everything he saw testified to suffering and deprivation, from the four bare mattresses lying on the earthen floor to the various lengths of chain attached to the walls with eye bolts. And then there was the freezer, an old-fashioned chest-style freezer with an open padlock still dangling from a hasp on the lid. That one spoke of death.
Nowhere did he see any signs of faucets with running water. Instead there was a macerating toilet at the far end of the room. Walking up to that, he discovered that the lid to the flushing tank had been pried off and left on the floor. Inside the tank a single drowned rat floated in the water.
Tom Hadlock had spent years running the Cochise County Jail. He knew the realities of keeping people incarcerated, but seeing that dead rat and realizing the flushing tank must have been the prisoners’ only source of water was it for him—as much as he could stand. He fled the basement.
The others were still upstairs. “Sorry, guys,” he said on his way past. “That’s it for me. I’m going to give Sheriff Brady a call. She needs to know what’s going on here.”
Wanting to put as much distance as possible between himself and the dungeon, Tom returned to the residential area and the house on the end, the one with the picket fence. Back in the chair where he’d sat earlier, he was about to dial Joanna’s number when Deputy Bill Creighton showed up. “Hey, Tom,” Bill said, “I think you’re gonna wanna take a look at this.”
The rest of the team had returned to Skeleton Canyon Road and retrieved the spike strips, as well as all the parked vehicles. Now they were waiting around to help pack and load whatever evidence Dave deemed necessary to take back to the lab.
Around the department Bill Creighton had the dubious honor of being labeled clown-in-chief, so the seriousness of his expression right then gave Tom pause. “Why?” he asked, putting the phone away. “What have you got?”
“Over here,” Bill said. “Come with me.”
Wearily and feeling his age, Tom rose to follow. Deputy Creighton led him from the clearing surrounding the house into a stand of mesquite, stopping only after the house had disappeared from view.
“I needed to take a leak,” Creighton said, “but Dave had given us strict orders to stay outside, so I went around back and came here. That’s what I found.” He pointed at what appeared to be a shallow grave.
“And that’s not all,” Creighton told him. “There are two more right over there.”
Without bothering to go see for himself, Tom pulled out the phone and dialed Joanna. “Would you mind giving the Paxtons a call?” he asked when she answered. “We’ll need to see if they can hang around a day or two longer. Looks like we’ve got another location that we’ll need them to check.”