Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 30

When she could talk, Carmen said, "Here's what I think. I think he's still here. I think he's looking out his window. Nobody has made a move toward him, so he's not in rabbit mode. Maybe he's thinking about running, but he doesn't have to do it right away. It's daylight, there's lots of cops in the area. He now knows they have McKenzie's photo, which is his real photo, so every cop in Imola and Napa knows what he looks like. Maybe some of them even recognize him. Maybe the cashier at the Whole Foods store recognizes him--"

"Trust me, he doesn't shop at Whole Foods," Shane said. They laughed.

"Okay, Safeway and the 7-11," Carmen said.

"You're right," Lauren said. "If he's going to boogie, he's going to do it after dark. My guess is he's packing up and waiting for nightfall." She looked at Carmen. "Oh, no. No. I know what you're thinking. No. Marybeth will kill me. No."

Carmen grinned and looked at Shane. "Let's go get the motherfucker," she said.

"Fucking A," Shane said.

"Shit. No. Goddamit, there goes my career," Lauren sighed. "Just when I was starting to get somewhere."

***

They drove back to Imola.

"Okay, here's the rules," Lauren said, "although I think I'm wasting my breathe with you two. Rule one, you do NOT, repeat not, repeat not, get involved in any way, shape or form in anything remotely touching upon police activity, by me or anyone else. Rule two, you both slouch down and try not to get recognized. If Gabe sees and recognizes either of you, we're cooked. We're half-cooked already, but I don't want to risk anything further. Ordinarily my first priority would be catching and arresting Gabe, but with you two around my first priority has to be keeping you two safe, even if it means letting Gabe get away. You are the ones responsible for compromising this, not me. Are we clear?"

"Yes, mother," Carmen said quietly.

"Yes, mother," Shane said from the back seat of the Mustang.

"Good. It's still daylight, and I want to cruise around the neighborhood while we can still see everything. I don't want you guys with your noses to the window. Try to look asleep, or bored, or stoned. Just don't look like you're looking."

"Yes, mother," Carmen said quietly.

"Yes, mother," Shane said quietly.

Lauren sighed.

They drove down Shurtleff Avenue. "Coming up on the right," Lauren said. "Don't look at it."

They drove past Gabe's apartment building. There were no police cars, and nothing to indicate a raid had taken place that morning.

"Whose car is that in the driveway?" Carmen asked.

"People who live upstairs," Lauren said.

"What's he driving?" Shane asked. She couldn't bring herself to call him "Gabe," or "my father," and god knows, "Dad" was out of the question. He was just going to be "he," now and forever.

"What he drove down to El Centro was the company's delivery truck, a GMC box truck. That's what we have the vehicle BOLO out on. It has the company name and logo on the sides, shouldn't be hard to recognize, but so far nobody's seen it. His personal vehicle is a pickup. It's in the company parking lot, where he always leaves it when he's on the road in the company box truck. It's still there. Locked, no keys in the ignition. We have it wired, and if anybody tries to drive it every alarm in Napa Valley's going to go off. But he'll probably figure that out. My guess is, by now he's ditched the box truck somewhere, and he has some other vehicle. We're looking for reports of stolen vehicles, but so far there's nothing. For all we know, Gabe's using Uber or a bicycle."

"He either has something, or he's getting something," Carmen said.

They turned up the street running behind Gabe's apartment.

"Okay, here's where it gets serious, the next block backs onto Gabe's apartment. This may be one of the streets where he has line of sight. Shane, would you mind just getting down out of sight?"

Shane laid down as best she could on the back seat. The Mustang had very little room in the back to begin with.

Carmen rolled down her window, ran the seat back until she almost crushed Shane, took off her shoe, rolled up her pants leg, and shucked off her polo shirt, leaving her in her black sports bra. She laid back and stuck her leg out the window. She had on a big floppy hat they'd bought at a 7-11 and big sunglasses. She had one of the empty Anchor Steam beer bottles in her hand, easy for anyone to see.

"Wow. La Pica, Mistress of disguise," Lauren said.

"Fucking A," Carmen said, smiling and looking out the window for all the world to see. "I just wish we had a convertible.

"Well, if I'd known you were going undercover as 17-year-old nymphet jailbait I would have gotten us one," Lauren said.

"Am I missing something?" Shane asked, still lying down on the back seat.

"Nothing," Lauren said. "Carmen's naked. Go back to sleep."

They drove down the block behind Gabe's apartment, Carmen happily keeping up a running commentary. "Nope, nothing suspicious ... nothing suspicious ... nope... nope. A van, but nothing suspicious. Nothing... nothing..."

The drove another block, then turned and went two blocks and turned again, now paralleling Shurtleff Avenue on the other side. Carmen gawked shamelessly, noting various and sundry possible places Gabe could be using to watch his apartment. Nothing particular stood out.

They headed back to their motel. "Shane, you can come up now," Lauren said. "Carmen, get dressed." With one hand she picked up her cell phone and hit a speed-dial number. "Mike? Lauren Hancock. Hey, I need to borrow somebody's car. I'm in my rental Mustang, and I just drove around the neighborhood around Gabe McCutcheon's apartment, just scouting the landscape.... no, nothing. I want to go back when it gets dark, but I don't want to show the Mustang image again.... your wife won't mind? Cool. Thanks. Okay, 20 minutes." She thumbed her cell phone off and set it down. "I'm meeting him at the police station, he's bringing his wife's mommy van. I'm going to drop you guys at the motel, swap cars with Mike, then I'll come back to the motel. He doesn't need to know you guys are here. After it gets dark, we'll go back."

"Copy," Carmen said.

"Roger that," Shane said.

***

Carmen sat in the passenger seat of Mike's wife's Kia Sorento SUV, with Shane behind her. They were parked near the end of the block of the street that had houses that possibly overlooked the front of Gabe McCutcheon's house one block over. Carmen had argued that it was better to watch the street the overlooked the the front of Gabe's house, not the street two blocks over that overlooked the back of his house. It was fully dark.

"So this is what a stakeout feels like," Shane said.

"Yep. Having fun?" Lauren asked.

"It's boring," Shane said.

"Yep."

"What do cops do on stakeout?"

"Nothing."

"You talk?"

"Sometimes. But usually you already know your partner pretty well, and neither of you has much to say."

"So, what do you talk about?"

"Not much. Any good stories, if you've heard one. Office gossip. Who's fucking who, if there's something juicy going around. Sports. Movies and TV. I mean, just basically nothing much. There's a few cops like to talk about their families, but most partners get tired of it pretty fast."

"Want to hear about my family?" Shane asked.

"No!" Lauren and Carmen said, simultaneously.

"Good," Shane said. "So, who's fucking who in the LA Sheriff's Department."

"Hell if I know," Lauren said. "Nobody in the Missing Persons Unit, I can tell you that. Wanna know why?"

"I'll bite. Why?" Carmen asked. "Because everybody's missing?"

"You heard that one before," Lauren said. She picked up the pair of night vision binoculars Mike had loaned her. She looked down the block. "Nothing," she said. She sat the glasses back down on the seat beside her.

Nineteen minutes went by.

Suddenly Carmen and Lauren both sat up. Lauren grabbed the night vision glasses. "Second house from the far end," Carmen whispered.

"I know," Lauren said. "I saw it, too."

"Shane?" Carmen asked from the back seat.

"A light, just for a second," Carmen said.

"SUV in the driveway," Lauren said. "I noted it because it was parked facing out."

"Like for a fast getaway?" Carmen asked.

Lauren said nothing. She studied the street through the glasses. "Stay here. I'm going for a walk," she said. She reached up, pulled the cover off the overhead light in the SUV, and pulled the bulb out. When she opened the car door, no interior light came on. She closed the door so slowly and so quietly no one could have heard it, taking the night glasses with her. She walked down the block, crossed the street to the other side, and halfway down the block she walked between two houses, and disappeared from Shane's view through the night vision glasses.

The twenty-five minutes she was gone seemed like forever.

Finally they saw her emerge from between two houses on their own side of the street and only two houses away. Apparently Lauren had gone all the way behind the apartment, crossed the street far down the block, and come back up the street behind the houses on this side. She opened the driver's door, got in, closed it quietly.

"Somebody's there," she said. "I saw a man come out of the house and put something in the SUV in the driveway. No lights came on, in the SUV or at the house."

"Could you tell if it was Gabe?" Carmen asked.

"No."

"You gonna call in a SWAT team?"

"Can't. We don't have a warrant, like we did this morning."

"Can you get one?"

"Nope. What do we tell the judge? I saw a man put something in his car, four or five houses down and across from this morning's suspect? Officer, why were you even watching this house? Judge, it was because of one of the two unauthorized, possibly illegal, definitely-against-protocol, non-badged, ride-along wannabes with me suggested it? Oh, and by the way, we think the suspected murderer is the daddy of my other unauthorized, possibly illegal, definitely-against-protocol, non-badged, ride-along wannabe. So could we pretty please have a warrant to raid somebody's house in which we saw nothing illegal, have no idea who lives there, and have no earthly reason whatsoever to call in SWAT? Pretty please?"

"So you're saying a warrant is iffy," Carmen said.

Lauren snorted.

"So what do we do?" Shane asked quietly.

"We watch," Lauren said. "That's what we do on a stakeout. Stake it out."

Shane hunkered down in the back seat. "Can I use my cell phone?" She asked.

"No," Lauren said. "No lights, not even a glow from your cell. Gabe has to be on high, high alert after this morning. If he's watching, I don't want to take the slightest risk he'd see a glow. Maybe it's one in a million, but I'd just as soon not risk it," Lauren said.

"'Kay," Shane said.

They watched for half an hour, Lauren and Carmen occasionally looking through the night-vision glasses.

"There he goes," Lauren said quietly. Down at the far end of the block, in the darkness, the SUV pulled out of the driveway and turned away from them. The SUV's headlights were off. They didn't come on until the SUV was half a block away.

Lauren tapped on the face of her cellphone and an app came up that looked like Google Maps. Carmen could see a slowly pulsing dot.

"You put a tracker on his car?" Carmen asked. "Way to go!"

"Watch and learn, Grasshopper," Lauren said. "He just turned left." She started the Mustang, turned on its headlights, and started down the road. She handed her cell to Carmen. "You navigate."

It took Carmen a moment to get oriented. "He turned right," she said.

"Shurtleff turns to the left up here, then you go right and then left on Saratoga to get out to the 121," Lauren said.

"You've been studying," Carmen said. "Yes, he just turned left." A moment later she said, "He just turned right onto the 121."

They followed Gabe north on the 121 on the east side of the Napa River, opposite most of the town of Napa. Just north of the town, at Sarco Creek, the 121 branched to the right, heading northeast toward Vichy Springs and became Monticello Road. But just after the turn it dead-ended, and Gabe turned left, then an immediate right, heading north on the Silverado Trail, a secondary artery that paralleled Route 29, the main north-south highway, for some miles, linking the towns of Napa and Calistoga. They began passing by vineyards and wineries, closed now since it was after 10 p.m.

"Where the hell's he going?" Carmen asked, mostly to herself.

In a minute or two they found out.

"I think he stopped," Carmen said. "Blip's not moving."

"Okay," Lauren said, but she kept up her speed. In a minute they passed by a small cluster of Butler buildings, something that looked like a small industrial compound. Their headlights picked up the sign at the driveway entrance, Yountville Specialty Trucking. "That's the company Gabe drives the truck for," Lauren said. "See anything?"

"No, it's all dark," Carmen said. But he could be on the other side of the building.

"The question is, why is he here?" Lauren said. They drove half a mile, over a small rise, and did a U-turn. Coming back southbound, Lauren slowed to a crawl, turned off the headlights, and crept down the shoulder. When they came over the rise the landscape was dark. The trucking company compound was on the other side of the road several hundred yards away, nothing more than a dark blot in a dark landscape, for all intents and purposes invisible. There was almost no moonlight. Lauren stopped on the shoulder, and picked up the night vision glasses.

"Can't see anything," she finally said. "The side of the building toward the road seems to be the front, and what looks like the parking area for trucks is around on the far side. I can see two or three trucks, and there's probably more. I'd see the heat signature from his SUV, but it must be behind the building someplace. Otherwise I can't see a damn thing. The blip still stationary?" she asked.

"Yes," Carmen said. "It's a bit off the road. But that's all I can tell."

"Can I see?" Shane asked. She was perched between them, leaning on the backs of their seats. Lauren handed her the night vision glasses. When she was done, Shane handed them to Carmen, who looked, too.

Nobody said anything.

Lauren lowered her window and turned off the ignition. She picked up the night vision glasses, and quietly opened her car door. "Stay in the car," she whispered. "No taking a pee, catching a smoke, no moonlight strolls. Stay. Fucking. In. This. Car. No lights, no sound." She closed the door so slowly and so quietly they barely heard it click. She left the key in the ignition.

Lauren was wearing dark slacks and a navy blue hoody. As she crossed the road she pulled the hood up over her head, and became nearly invisible herself. The last thing Carmen saw as Lauren crossed the road and slipped down the embankment on the far side was Lauren unsnapping her holster.

"I don't like this," Carmen whispered.

"Tell me about it," Shane whispered back.

Carmen held the cellphone down between her knees so its glow wouldn't be seen outside the car, and tapped the screen to read the time. "Ten forty-seven," she whispered.

Twenty-seven minutes went by. Four cars and a truck went past.

They heard something. Maybe a gunshot, far away. Maybe a backfire. But there were no vehicles anywhere around.

"What was that?" Shane asked.

"Sounded like a gunshot to me," Carmen whispered.

"Me, too."

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck," Carmen said.