Left for Dead

39

1:30 P.M., Monday, April 12

Tucson, Arizona

Al Gutierrez didn’t know when he’d ever had a better day off. At the Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, he and Detective Rush bypassed Sergeant Dobbs’s office and went directly upstairs. That was the location of the massive library where miles of temporary checkpoint security videos were transferred onto permanent DVDs and cataloged by date and location. Within twenty minutes, Al and Detective Rush were in a viewing room with one of the library techs, scanning through the videos recorded the previous Friday afternoon at the Three Points checkpoint.

One vehicle after another passed without eliciting any interest. Most of the drivers and passengers were clearly Tohono O’odham, going and coming from one of the villages on the reservation, or elderly RV-driving snowbirds heading north after wintering in Arizona. Some were clearly ranch vehicles, a few of them pulling livestock trailers with and without livestock.

“Wait,” Ariel Rush said. “Go back. Let’s take a closer look at that white van.”

Al was pretty sure Detective Rush was quite capable of running the video monitor on her own, but Homeland Security rules meant that only a properly qualified technician was allowed to handle the DVDs and the controls.

“Can you freeze those frames and expand them?” she asked the tech once the white van reappeared on the screen. “If possible, I want to get a look at the driver and the passenger as well as the license plates. And what’s the logo on the side?”

Because the resolution was high enough to capture license plate information, the images offered a good deal of other information. The faces of both the driver and passenger were clearly visible. They were ordinary-looking guys who were waved through, traveling westbound, without any question. The logo on the driver’s door was easy to decipher: RUG RUNNERS OF SCOTTSDALE.

A quick Google search on Ariel’s laptop showed lots of sites about runner rugs for hallways and entryways but no firm of that name anywhere in the country. A quick check of the license plate revealed that it had been stolen from a Lincoln Town Car parked in a long-term lot at Sky Harbor Airport sometime during the preceding week.

On Friday afternoon the van with the switched-out plate had driven through the checkpoint westbound at 3:58 and returned eastbound at 5:02. On the second trip, the van was examined by a drug-sniffing dog before it was waved through.

“If you’re driving westbound on Highway 86, how far could you go in half an hour?” Detective Rush asked.

Al shrugged. “Not far,” he said. “You’d have to push it to get from there as far as Sells and back in that amount of time. There are a few ranch houses out that way in between, and some smaller Indian villages, but I can’t think of many places where someone would be buying an upscale rug. Most of the people I’ve met on the reservation are more likely to do their shopping at Home Depot or Target or Wal-Mart than they are in some arty kind of shop in Scottsdale.”

“That sounds like racial profiling to me,” Ariel said.

“It’s more like reality profiling,” Al said. “Those people don’t have buckets of cash hanging around.”

They left the library with the requested images safely stored on Detective Rush’s computer.

“Where to now?” Al asked.

“Physicians Medical Center,” Rush said. “I want to see if we can keep Rose’s family from going public. We’ve got a potential survivor of a serial killer. I want to keep Rose Ventana alive.”

Once outside the building, Detective Rush was back on her phone. “Okay,” she said to one of her cohorts in Phoenix, “I think I may have a line on the vehicle in the Chico Hernández homicide. We need to check security tapes of all businesses in the area where the body was found. We’re looking for a white panel van. There’s a Rug Runner logo on it—at least there was on Friday, but I’m thinking it may be one of those magnetic signs that can be changed out in a minute. So look for a white van with any kind of logo; or no logo, for that matter. The plates that were on it were stolen, so the license number isn’t going to help us much, but I want you to put both the plate number and the sign information out on a BOLO. Right this minute those are the only tentative pieces we have on this puzzle, and we just might get lucky.”

By the time she finished the call, they were back in Detective Rush’s patrol car and headed for the hospital.

“Thanks,” Al said.

“For what?”

“For treating me like I have a brain.”

“You have a brain, all right,” Detective Rush said. “And it’s because of your taking the initiative that we have a chance of solving this case.”

“Sergeant Dobbs isn’t wild about any of his people taking the initiative.”

“That’s his problem,” Detective Rush said. “One of his problems,” she added. “And before we’re finished, he may have several more.”

“Sweet,” Al Gutierrez said as he buckled his seat belt. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”