Chris straightened up, coming eye level with the license plate, then he did a double-take. The license plate read RET-7819, but that wasn’t Evan’s license plate, unless Chris remembered it wrong. He slid out his phone, thumbed to the text function, and scanned through the photos. He found the one of Evan’s BMW that he’d just sent to the Rabbi. The license plate was PZR-4720.
Chris pressed redial to call the Rabbi, who picked up after one ring. “Rabbi, I got good news and bad news.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“Don’t you want the good news first? Everybody wants the good news first.”
“Not Jews. We’re tough. Give it to me straight.”
“I found Courtney Wheeler’s husband, Doug Wheeler, murdered in the house, three gunshot wounds to the chest. I tried to revive him but I couldn’t.”
The Rabbi groaned. “Okay, that’s bad news. What’s the good news?”
“I’m looking at Evan’s black BMW, but it doesn’t have the right tag. Evan’s tag is PZR-4720, as in the picture, but now it’s RET-7819.”
“So they switched the plates.”
“Exactly. You need to find the vehicle with Evan’s old tag. My bet is it’s on a van, and you know what I’m thinking.” Chris didn’t elaborate because a local cop was within earshot, unrolling crime-scene tape.
“The van is a bomb on wheels,” the Rabbi answered, finishing the thought.
“Bingo. If you run the plate I’m looking at, it’ll tell you the make and model of the van.”
“And it’ll turn out to be a stolen vehicle.”
“Agree. I think I’m done here. Where’s my ride?”
“In the air, ten minutes away. Where do you want him?”
“The baseball field at the high school, southeast of the main building. That will jerk Alek’s chain.”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Only a little bit. And tell the pilot not to mess up the clay on the baselines. My boys just raked it.”
The Rabbi chuckled. “Don’t push it.”
“Did you learn anything new? Or do I have to do all the work around here?”
“We’re on our way to the farmstead now. Evidently the Shank family is well-known to the locals. Everybody knows everybody up here.”
“Tell me what you got.”
“The mother died a long time ago, and father about six months ago, heart attack. Two older sons, David and Jim, both barroom brawlers. The Shank brothers, everybody calls them. No neo-Nazi, biker, Christian Identity, or alt-right affiliations. No college degree, no criminal record. Anti-frackers. Write letters to the editor of the local paper. Go to the rallies. Courtney is the only one who graduated college, the youngest of three. She’s the one who got away.”
“Good to know.” Chris noticed Officer Dunleavy returning with a crowbar. “I’m about to break into the BMW to make sure there’s nothing in the trunk.”
“Attaboy. Stay in touch.”
“Will do. Good-bye.” Chris hung up, and Officer Dunleavy reached him, extending the crowbar.
“Special Agent, you want to do the honors?”
“No, have at it. The anti-theft system is going to give you a headache.”
“All in a day’s work.” Officer Dunleavy wedged the crowbar under the lid of the trunk, pressed down, and popped the lid. The car alarm went off instantly, beeping in a night already abuzz with activity. Neighbors lined the sidewalk, watching, talking, and smoking cigarettes.
Officer Dunleavy pulled a flashlight from his utility belt and shined it inside the trunk, and Chris looked. There was nothing inside but a baseball glove and a blue Musketeers ball cap.
Chris swallowed hard at the sight. “Thanks, I gotta go,” he said, jogging toward his Jeep.
Chapter Fifty
Chris flew northward in the helo, an older Black Hawk UH-60 on loan from DEA, which was being piloted by a Tony Arroyo, an African-American subcontractor who’d served two tours in Iraq. A dizzying array of dials, levers, and controls filled the dashboard in the all-glass cockpit, glowing an array of colors in the darkness, and though the big rotors whirred noisily over head, the helo barely shuddered in Tony’s experienced hands.
Chris kept his head to the window, his thoughts racing. The bomb plot was being rushed and that was when criminals started taking bigger risks—which made them even more dangerous. If the Shanks had killed Doug, they hadn’t bothered to disguise the murder as a suicide or a home invasion. They could be setting Evan up as the fall guy. They had left Evan’s car in the driveway, and the switching of the license plates would point to Evan’s guilt. Maybe the scenario they were trying to sell was that Evan had killed Courtney’s husband in a jealous rage.
Chris tried the theory on for size, and it worked. Reasoning backwards, that meant that the stolen vehicle, presumably a van, had probably come from the Central Valley area, because it would be a location to which Evan had access, not the Shanks.
Chris mulled it over as he looked at the land below. They were flying roughly along Route 81 to 476. The sky was dark, and they passed Allentown and were coming up on Hazleton, due north. The terrain below turned wooded, then rural, signified by vast dark spaces with only intermittent houses, towns, or signs of civilization. The moon shone brightly on the left side of the sky, and Chris found himself checking it as they flew farther north, knowing that its incremental sinking meant it was getting later. Soon the sun would rise, and it would be Monday morning.
Chris shuddered to imagine people going to work with their cups of coffee, phones, and newspapers, boarding trains and buses to get themselves to a city, to a building, and finally to a desk to start the workday. They wouldn’t know that their lives and the lives of everyone around them were about to end in a violent death.
Chris thought back to the Oklahoma City bombing, the WTC bombing on 9/11, and a string of other deadly bombings that made him want justice for the victims and their families. It was his job to never let it happen again.
He clenched his jaw as the helo zoomed north, heading toward the Shank farmstead in Susquehanna County, and ten minutes later, he could see the change in the terrain. Bright white lights twinkled below in a regular grid pattern, like a box of connect-the-dots in the dark night.
“What’s that, over there?” Chris asked Tony, speaking into the microphone in his headset.
“Drilling wells for natural gas. We’re coming up on the Marcellus Shale.”
“Tell me about it, would you?” Chris should know, but didn’t.
“The Marcellus Shale runs under the Appalachian basin and includes seven states, like Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey.” Tony pointed left. “Over there, that’s the fairway, where the shale’s deep enough to extract.”
“What’s shale exactly?”
“Sedimentary rock that traps oil and gas in the layers. In the old days, they tried to locate where the gas was and drill for it, but now they frack for it.” Tony pointed again. “I fly over this all the time, doing VIP pickups. It changes every year. More well pads and more drills.”
Chris absorbed the information without judgment. He knew fracking was a political hot button, but he’d always been apolitical. His job was to save lives, and he couldn’t be distracted or people died.