Not that Larson planned to give them the chance. The Weatherby and the Remington would provide plenty of range and give him time enough to disappear, just like Malvo and Muhammad. The more he thought about killing cops, the more it appealed to him. After all, cops gave him the most grief, not Pettibone, Tami, Ugly Nancy, Cuddy the KO’d Kid, or most of the other folks he’d wasted. Those poor suckers had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the Lincoln County sheriff, the cop at the roadblock, and the horde of cops looking for him were all trying to bring him down.
Maybe it was time to stop the cops.
Larson liked the sound of that. Stop the cops. He said it over and over. If he really went through with it, he would be bigger than Malvo and Muhammad. Way bigger.
In Raton, along the motel strip, Larson made up his mind to do it. All the cop cars parked outside a budget franchise motel sealed the deal. He passed by slowly, watching a small group of uniformed officers talking as they stood next to a patrol vehicle.
Larson felt invisible. He was no more than twenty-five feet away from them, driving slowly as he passed by, and the cops ignored him completely. And why shouldn’t they? He was in Tami’s Yukon nobody was looking for, and with his shaved head and new beard he now had a completely different look.
He was invisible, maybe even invincible.
Larson grinned as he wheeled into the motel entrance where Porky Pettibone, now lying dead on top of cold and frigid Tami in the back of Ugly’s Subaru, had booked a room.
He’d seen a television show where the cops found a body carefully arranged on a bed and called it staging. He mulled over a way to kill a whole bunch of cops and stage their bodies in a circle jerk. He laughed out loud at the idea of it.
He parked next to the Buick with Nebraska plates and let himself into Porky’s room. The bedside telephone message light was blinking. Larson followed the instructions on the placard next to the phone and dialed to retrieve the message. It was from Pettibone’s wife, reporting that a man named Ted Landry had called for him, and asking if he liked the ranch he’d gone to see with the Realtor.
Larson closed the window curtains and checked the time. It was a good two hours before nightfall, when it would be safe to move his gear to Porky’s car. Until then, he would stay put and do some serious cogitating about ways to kill cops.
After attending an early morning state police task force meeting, Kerney and Clayton talked privately over coffee in the motel restaurant with Major Frank Vanmeter, the task force commander. Barely in his forties, Vanmeter was a twenty-year veteran of the department. He’d been a lieutenant during Kerney’s brief stint as a deputy chief of the state police.
Kerney asked him how the psychologist, Dr. John Casados, had made out talking to Larson’s twin brother.
Vanmeter pursed his thin lips and shook his bald head. “Kerry Larson clammed up. But Casados thinks it likely that he could be deliberately withholding information about his brother’s whereabouts.”
“What makes Casados think that?” Clayton asked as he spooned some sugar into his coffee cup.
“Hero worship,” Vanmeter replied. “Kerry Larson idolizes his brother, who in his mind can do no wrong. He’s an identical twin and the spitting image of his brother, Craig, but slow in the head.”
“Other than the psychologist’s theory, is there any reason to believe that Kerry is protecting or harboring Larson?” Kerney asked.
“No, but Everett Dorsey, the Springer police chief, thinks Kerry would have a pretty good idea where his brother might go to hide out if he’s still in the area.”
“That makes sense,” Kerney said.
“Casados is going to take another crack at Kerry today,” Vanmeter added.
“We know Larson has no other blood relatives in the area,” Clayton said, “but what about old friends and acquaintances? Would they have any ideas about Larson’s whereabouts?”
“Dorsey is working a list of locals who knew the Larson brothers before Craig left town. Former friends and folks they went to school with, people they once worked for, old school teachers and coaches. It’s a long shot.”
Kerney pushed back his chair and dropped some bills on the table to cover the coffees and tip. “But worth pursuing, given the fact that the Lazy Z once belonged to the family of Craig Larson’s teenage girlfriend. His familiarity with the ranch is probably one of the factors that drew him there.”
He glanced at Clayton. “We need to visit with Chief Dorsey and take a look at the Lazy Z crime scene.”
“Except for the vermin-infested hunting lodge on top of the mesa, there’s not much left to see,” Vanmeter said as he nodded at a file folder in Kerney’s hand. “The briefing packet I passed out this morning brings you up to speed on what happened there.”
Kerney stood. “And it does so very nicely, Frank. But I want to take a gander for myself.”
Vanmeter smiled and shrugged. “According to Chief Baca, you both have carte blanche.”
“We won’t step on any toes unless we have to,” Clayton said as he got to his feet.
Vanmeter’s smiled widened. “That’s not the back-channel traffic I heard about what you did when you departed the Lincoln County S.O., Agent Istee.”
Clayton smiled back at Vanmeter. “Those were bruised egos I left behind, Major, not sore toes.”
Vanmeter laughed as he followed Kerney and Clayton to the parking lot.
After dark, Larson had transferred his stuff to Pettibone’s Buick, driven Tami’s SUV to her office, left it in the reserved space at the back of the building, and put the magnetic signs on the doors. He’d forgotten to bring along Tami’s vanity license plate, so he left the Subaru plate on the Yukon and walked back to the motel, where he spent the night in Pettibone’s room. In the morning, he’d risen early, got breakfast at a fast-food drive-through window, and parked the Buick back in the lot at the motel so he could watch what was happening at the nearby budget lodge where all the cops were staying.
Things were quiet at first, but soon officers started coming out the front entrance and driving away in their patrol vehicles. Along with cops in civvies, there were cops in at least five or six different kinds of uniforms.
Between bites of his breakfast egg-and-bacon sandwich, Larson used his finger as a handgun and pretended he was blowing them away as they hurried to their patrol cars. He figured with a real gun, he could’ve taken down three, maybe four of them, before drawing any fire.
Overnight, his plan to assassinate cops had changed from an absolute thing he was going to do to a definite maybe. The plan hadn’t lost its appeal; he just needed to do more head work before taking that first shot.
A bald-headed cop in a state police uniform and two men in blue jeans and cowboy boots with semiautomatics strapped to their belts came out the sliding glass motel doors just as Larson was about to drive away. There was something familiar about the taller of the two men wearing civvies. Larson checked him out carefully as he walked toward an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria. Damned if it wasn’t the cop who’d been the police chief in Santa Fe when he had first been busted. What was his name?
He’d never seen the other plainclothes cop who was getting into his own unmarked car. He was younger, a few inches shorter, and definitely Indian looking, with dark hair that covered his ears. Larson didn’t recognize him.
He watched the two unmarked cars enter traffic and turn toward the interstate on-ramps. Just for the hell of it, he decided to follow them for a while to see where they were going. Watching how they operated might give him some good ideas on how he should kill them.