Page 97 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“He see you?” Sampson asked.

“Negative.”

Headlights slashed back near the entrance to the new development. The pickup truck made the corner and barely slowed passing the conduits and water pipes.

We were tucked in the parking lot of a landscape company. There was a sign out front set perpendicular to the road so it could be seen from either direction. When the truck headlights hit the sign, some of the light bounced back, giving me a quick but fairly decent look at the driver. He was older, Caucasian, glasses, hunched over the wheel and wearing a coat and dark ball cap.

He never looked our way and accelerated past us.

“You get a plate on him?” I said into the radio.

“Partial. You?”

“He went by kind of quick and the light on his license plate was dim.”

“Convenient,” Hanson said. “If he comes back.”

But the pickup truck did not return. Indeed, for close to forty minutes, we did not see another vehicle on Melford Road.

Finally, at three twenty, a white Ford pickup truck came pastus, heading toward the new development. I did not get as good a look at him as I’d gotten at the other driver, and I couldn’t say much about this driver as the vehicle passed us.

The brake lights went on almost immediately. Then the headlights dimmed and the truck turned into the development under construction.

“You see him?” I said into the radio.

“I do,” Hanson said. “How do we handle this?”

“We wait for whoever the second party is,” I said.

“He tries to leave, I’m pulling him over.”

“One hundred percent.”

Sampson said, “That going to hold up? Just hate to see someone get cut free for lack of probable cause for a traffic stop.”

I looked at him. “When we’re dealing with people selling children, I think we’re justified pulling this guy over every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

“I hear you,” he said.

For fifteen minutes we waited. Hanson could still see the Ford, which had gone deep into the development and now sat there, lights off, engine idling.

At four a.m., Hanson said, “He’s moving. Turning around.”

“If you’re going to stop him, do it before he gets out of that development,” Sampson said. “We’ll be right along for backup.”

“Got that,” the detective said.

We saw her headlights come on. She drove her squad car and stopped it so it was fully blocking the entrance to the construction site.

Sampson started our vehicle and drove up beside her, and we climbed out, hands on the butts of our service weapons. The Ford bounced along at a fair clip until the high beams caughtus standing there. Hanson slapped a flashing blue bubble on the roof of her car and climbed out. The pickup kept coming.

Hanson and John both held up their badges. The truck slowed. A window rolled down, and a Hispanic male in his late forties looked at us with a puzzled expression.

“What’s going on here, man?” he asked.

Hanson identified herself, walked to the pickup. “You are?”

“Enrique Morales,” he said.

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