The interstate is straight as an arrow, uphill heading north. Walter found it barren and sad. Occasional Indian casinos, their satellite motels and restaurants, were clustered along the sides. He noticed with wry surprise that the sun was setting, suddenly, behind ragged mountains. The Caribbean sun takes forever to disappear out past Puerto Rico. Here it drops like a rolling stone; daylight one minute, dark the next. “Not my cup of tea,” Walter thought.
He didn’t like the landscape, either. It was mostly scruffy sand, much of it overrun by alarmingly hearty, ugly weeds. It wasn’t graceful desert like Arizona, Nevada, or even Aruba. Whatever it was, he’d not seen it before and would not miss it when he left. An hour later he stopped at a roadside restaurant, felt the chill stepping out of the car, and understood how cold it would be when he’d driven another few thousand feet up. The restaurant was not even much of a diner. Walter ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. It came on the thickest bread he’d ever seen.
He reached Santa Fe at eight, followed directions to the Plaza, and found his hotel. The whole town looked like a theme park. From what he’d heard, it wasn’t. The city restricted construction to adobe old-west designs, but people did live in the houses. The Inn sat smack on the well-lit Plaza, a wide space filled with people moving swiftly in the cold. It was, Walter reminded himself, the Christmas season, which probably explained the seven hundred dollars he paid for the room. A bellhop led the way and started the fire. Walter found a Diet Coke in the mini-bar, set it next to the telephone, and fell asleep with the light on.
In the morning, after an early breakfast, he drove north for about an hour and a half to Las Vegas, New Mexico. The journey to Las Vegas led to a shopping center mail and package store. Walter expected as much. He already knew the address and PO Box number. The packages had been sent to Evangelical Missions Inc. Carter left a trail a mile wide. When Walter first encountered that name, he wondered whether he would again, or whether Leonard would use it just once. Walter was relieved to discover that Leonard was not quite that wise. Why should he be? This was his maiden serial rampage.
Had he been the kind of guy to offer advice to others in his field-if indeed there were others in his field-Walter would have told them first and foremost: respect the obvious. The easiest thing to discover is always the most obvious. Start at the beginning. As he had done countless times in the last three decades, Walter once more began at the beginning.
Evangelical Missions Inc. in New Mexico was the same as EM Inc., which owned the empty lot in Raleigh. Corporate records in North Carolina showed that the company had been incorporated just before Leonard Martin left Atlanta for the Bahamas. Further checking turned up an SUV registered in North Carolina to the same EM Inc. It didn’t take Walter long to find a transfer to a New Mexico registration for the same vehicle. The plate location indicated a Las Vegas address, but Walter knew he wouldn’t find Leonard anywhere near there. Not anymore.
Leonard could not have shown his rifles at any conventional range. Weapons that unique would have been noticed. He had to have practiced someplace else, free from observation. That meant he almost certainly bought land for that purpose, probably when he purchased the lot in Raleigh. Working backward from Las Vegas, Walter saw Leonard planning it out in Georgia and selecting a suitable parcel from the raw, empty stretches of west Texas and out-of-the-way New Mexico. Walter did his own search for Evangelical Missions Inc. or EM Inc. Coming up empty, he reached out.
Before leaving St. John, he had called a nationally known, flamboyant attorney from Reno, Nevada who had once sought him out, and for whom Walter found and returned a wayward young son. As with so many others, the attorney was forever eager to show her gratitude. Many times she told Walter that she was at his service for any legal work, anything at all. Discretion was the ironclad bond between them, and no questions were ever asked. Walter’s infrequent requests were sometimes difficult but never impossible. What he needed now was a land search. From the attorney he requested data on land sales of parcels within a day’s drive of Las Vegas. This time it wasn’t easy. After turning up nothing for Leonard Martin, Evangelical Missions Inc., or EM Inc., Walter was sure Leonard had bought the land using another name, one totally unfamiliar to him. A dead end. His Reno client told him she’d look for quit claims filed between two and three years ago. She explained that property is often purchased by one party, and then transferred, or quit claimed, to another. This tends to obscure the transaction, but it cannot be entirely cloaked, because every quit claim deed must be filed with an appropriate state or county agency. You had to know how and where to look. Forty-eight hours later, Walter had a map showing 270 acres adjacent to the Kiowa National Grasslands, north of a speck on the map; a place called Albert, New Mexico. The property had been purchased by a North Dakota company (he should have known), quit claimed to EM Inc. of Raleigh, North Carolina, and then quit claimed again to Evangelical Missions Inc. of New Mexico.
In Las Vegas he showed Leonard’s picture around-the same one that had been pasted across the front page of the New York Times and just about every other newspaper in America. But nobody had seen him and nobody cared. Walter was disappointed, although not entirely surprised. He doubted that Leonard had been to Las Vegas since his meeting with Isobel plastered his face on the nation’s screens and front pages. Walter did not expect to find Leonard waiting for him here. He had hoped a Pac-Mail employee might remember a very fat man with pudgy cheeks on a fleshy face, and a belly bulging deep and wide. None did. “What about a guy who looked like this,” he asked everyone. Cut his hair? Grew it longer? Changed its color? Even lost some weight? Still nothing.
“Never seen this fellow,” the clerk at the mail store said.
Walter asked, “How about a man who picked up packages, big ones. Do you get many of those?”
“How big? Do you mean like refrigerators?”
“Not quite that big. Long, perhaps, but not bulky.” He held his hands as far apart as he could.
“I wish I could help you, mister. I do. But we get so many deliveries like that. This is ski country, you know.”
“So you don’t remember anyone in particular who might have picked up packages looking like skis-maybe that long, maybe a little shorter, the size of a shotgun or something? About two years ago?”