Breaking Point

silver-lined blanket in the grass, Joe said, “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”
    “So you want to talk,” Underwood said with irritation.
    “I’ll keep it low so your guys don’t hear.”
    “What about me?
I’ll
hear.”
    Joe asked, “Do they have a location on Butch?”
    “Yes. His phone is on, and it has a GPS feature inside the circuitry. They know exactly where he is on the map at least.”
    “I knew about that,” Joe said. “Butch is smart enough to know it, too, so it surprises me he kept it on.”
    Underwood shrugged. “Maybe he isn’t so smart. Batista has been trying to contact him for hours, but he must have the phone set to mute or he just doesn’t want to talk. The director wants to tell him the helicopter will be arriving at dawn.”
    “Which way is he headed?” Joe asked.
    “West. It sounds like he doubled back after he talked to us and he’s working his way down the mountain. Batista said his route is pretty erratic, though. They’re guessing at the FOB that Roberson is looking for a nice flat piece of sagebrush for the helicopter to land.”
    “But it won’t happen, will it?”
    “No. There is no helicopter,” Underwood said.
    “What else?”
    “Leave me alone.”
    “Not a chance. The sooner you answer my questions, the sooner you can get some sleep. Or I’ll take that space blanket back. You do look like a baked potato, you know.”
    “Damn you.”
    “Has anything happened in the investigation we should know about?”
    “Like what?”
    “I thought I heard you say something about an autopsy,” Joe said.
    “Oh, yeah. There was a preliminary autopsy on our two special agents. Both were shot multiple times with small-caliber rounds. Tim Singewald was hit four times, and Lenox Baker was hit three times. Didn’t you say Butch Roberson was packing a .223 semiautomatic rifle?”
    “I think so. It looked like a scoped Bushmaster .223 with a thirty-round magazine. They’re common around here.”
    Underwood said, “The rounds that killed the agents were small caliber. Once they run ballistics on them, I’m sure there will be a match.”
    “Lots of folks up here have .223s,” Joe said. “They’re a popular coyote-hunting round.”
    Underwood snorted. “They also found Roberson’s fingerprints all over the car Singewald and Baker drove up from Denver. I suppose you’ll say lots of people up here have the same fingerprints.”
    “No,” Joe said. “I won’t say that.”
    “Good. So can I get some sleep now?”
    “One more question.”
    “Jesus—what?”
    “Back to how your agency operates. How much juice would someone have to have to get a noncompliance action going the same day? Are we talking low level, mid-level, or big-shot level?”
    Underwood covered his face with his hand and moaned.
    “I’m just curious,” Joe said.
    “I told you I wasn’t going there.”
    “But why not at this point? You seem pretty convinced Butch did it, so why does it matter who turned him in in the first place?”
    “I never said anyone turned him in.”
    “You implied it. So which level?”
    Underwood cursed and said, “Big-shot level, of course. The mid-level types might get some kind of investigation opened, but they wouldn’t be able to make agents jump like that. Obviously, somebody with influence knew who to call to get them to react like that.”
    “So Julio Batista was in on it from the beginning, then?”
    “I never said that.”
    “You implied it.”
    “Jesus fuck,” Underwood moaned. “Leave me alone. Yes, I would guess whoever called talked to the director in person. No one else could have made the decision so quickly to send agents directly from Denver. Usually, we’d let the local EPA staff handle it first.”
    “That’s what I thought. Which means Batista knows who got this whole thing going, but he doesn’t want to volunteer that information.”
    Underwood grunted.
    “So if Butch Roberson just goes away, Batista will probably never be asked.”
    Underwood grunted again.
    Joe thought about it, and said, “So what’s our plan?”
    Underwood took a deep breath and slowly expelled it through his nostrils. “We keep moving down the mountain to the west until we pick up his track. You’re a tracker, right?”
    “Not really,” Joe said.
    “I think even I could follow the prints of three guys.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Anyway, Batista said they’ve put together a big interagency task force that will be coming up this direction from the west.