Page 38 of Not Our Daughter

Burns glanced around the station. When he’d first heard about Cole using the clerk’s laptop, he figured his fugitive was just checking the news to try to stay a step ahead of their pursuit. But that didn’t appear to be the case at all. So what could Cole have stored on a secured server that he felt he had to access right now in the middle of being hunted? Hopefully Myers would have the answer to that question shortly.

They caught a ride in the back of a police cruiser over to the Alamosa County Sheriff’s Office, where they tried desperately to findsomethingthat would help aid them in their pursuit of Cole and Lisa. After an hour or so, they finally got their first major break. But it didn’t come from their stop in Alamosa; it came from Winter Park. Burns was standing in a small conference room with Myers sitting at a table and working on a laptop in front of him when Davis rushed into the room holding up his phone.

“Boss, got a Deputy Richards here on the phone. He was working the checkpoint for the Berthoud Pass last night.” Davis spoke into the phone. “I got you on speaker now, Deputy. Can you tell Agent Burns what you just told me?”

“Yes, sir. So, like I said, I was manning the checkpoint for the pass last night, turning everyone back. An old white van came up with a guy sitting in front. Probably in his forties. But he didn’t look anything like the fugitive we’d been searching for. He said he was a plumber. I recognized the name of the plumbing company printed on the van.Anyway, I didn’t think anything of it until this morning, when I more closely examined the new mock-up of Cole Shipley you guys sent out late last night. I’m certain it was the same guy.”

“How certain?” Burns asked.

“Ninety percent. Shaved head, no beard, same facial features and eyes.”

“Did you search the van?” Burns asked.

“No, sir. I mean, I should have in hindsight. But like I said, I recognized the plumbing company. The old man who started it was a friend of my dad’s. So I just stupidly assumed. Not my best police work. But there werea lotof cars in that line.”

Burns growled in frustration, shook his head.

“What can you tell us about the van?” Davis asked.

“White Ford. Probably twenty years old. Looked a little run-down.Gunderson Family Plumberswas on the side in blue. It was faded but legible. I called Teddy Gunderson a few minutes ago. He said he sold off his vans a decade ago, when he shut down his company. You can still find photos of the vehicles online.”

“And you saw no one else in the van?” Davis asked.

“No, sir.”

Burns asked, “Anything else you can tell us about the guy that might help?”

“Not much. But I’ll give him credit. He was smooth. Never flinched. Seemed totally relaxed sitting there and talking to me. Made up a helluva story on the spot about how disgusting the back of the van was from a job he’d just come from. It was smart.”

“All right,” Davis said. “You think of anything else, you call us.”

“Will do.”

Davis hung up, held up his phone to show Burns. He’d already been searching for Gunderson Family Plumbers vans online. “Matches the description of some sort of white van one of the neighbors at the storage facility mentioned.”

“Yeah, it does,” Burns said, still shaking his head. “But, dammit, we had him. This should all be over right now. Ask the sheriff to help get that photo out to every police department from here on down to El Paso. And then call our pilot and tell him to get the chopper up and running. If they’re headed that way, we’re headed that way.”

“I’m in,” Myers suddenly announced.

They circled in behind him to examine his laptop screen.

“Not much to it,” Myers said. “One short video. Nothing else.”

“Play it,” Burns instructed.

The agent pressed play, and Burns leaned in close. It was a home security video taken at night showing a front sidewalk and street. He immediately recognized it. It was thirteen-year-old footage from the night Cole Shipley had killed Candace McGee. The video showed the woman arriving at his home in the middle of the night, followed by a mystery man several minutes later. It was the only known security footage from the night in question. Everything else had been deleted from the home’s security server.

“What is this?” Davis asked.

“A video Cole Shipley’s lawyer sent to us the day after they disappeared back in Austin claiming his innocence. We investigated the man in the video but found nothing. We could never identify him and had no clue why he was also at the Shipley home that night. We thought maybe he somehow helped Cole. An accomplice. It’s always bothered me. But because we had a murder weapon with Cole’s fingerprints, and they ran, we continued to pursue them as the primary suspects.”

“Interesting. Why would Cole stop here at this gas station, borrow this clerk’s laptop, and pull up this video? Kind of random, don’t you think?”

Burns pondered that a moment. “If I’ve learned anything about Cole Shipley, nothing he does is random. Everything is calculated. Maybe this guy is still helping him. We need to figure out who he is.”

Twenty-Six

Cole pulled the van into the parking lot of the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso around eleven the next morning. It was a gray day, and sprinkling. A thunderstorm hung in the distance. The remainder of the drive from Colorado, through New Mexico, and then into Texas, had been thankfully uneventful. No unexpected police traps. No car chases. No anxiety-fueled moments. Both Lisa and Jade had slept most of the way in the back of the van. Like him, they were physically and emotionally exhausted. While driving through the night, Cole had begun fantasizing about lying in a hammock on a warm Mexican beach and sleeping all day while the ocean breeze blew over him. They had endured some harsh winters while living in Colorado, and he looked forward to the dramatic change in weather. At least, that’s what he kept telling himself in order to spin things positively in his own mind.

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