Run for Cover Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL LEDWIDGE

  Stop at Nothing

  The Narrowback

  Bad Connection

  Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

  COWRITTEN WITH JAMES PATTERSON

  The Quickie

  Now You See Her

  Zoo

  Step on a Crack

  Run for Your Life

  Worst Case

  Tick Tock

  I, Michael Bennett

  Gone

  Burn

  Alert

  Bullseye

  Chase

  The Dangerous Days of Daniel X

  Praise for Run for Cover

  “I’m not sure how he did it—it seems to defy science—but Michael Ledwidge figured out a way to write a book using pure, distilled adrenaline. Michael Gannon is a fantastic protagonist, destined for the pantheon of characters we love to follow through countless adventures. Here’s hoping for many more.”

  —Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse

  “In Stop at Nothing, Michael Ledwidge gives us sharply drawn characters in a tense, fast-paced adventure that keeps the reader entertained from the intriguing start to the wild finish.”

  —Thomas Perry, author of The Burglar

  “Stop at Nothing is a smart, brawny thriller that moves fast and surprises often. The action is tense, the characters are surely drawn, and a wonderful sense of authenticity drives the story. Best of all, the writing is assured and stylish. Stop at Nothing is a high-speed roller coaster that will carry you away.”

  —T. Jefferson Parker, author of The Last Good Guy

  “I literally could not put down this book. I loved it. Stop at Nothing is a timely, perfectly-paced, character-driven thriller with fun twists and intense action. Michael Gannon is the next great hero in popular fiction.”

  —Allison Brennan, author of The Third to Die

  “Stop at Nothing is my kind of book. Shades of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. Great characters, lots of action, and a razor-sharp plot. Good stuff. Really good.”

  —Marc Cameron, author of Tom Clancy: Oath of Office

  RUN FOR COVER

  A NOVEL

  MICHAEL LEDWIDGE

  Michael Ledwidge is the writer of seventeen novels, the last dozen being New York Times bestsellers cowritten with one of the world’s bestselling authors, James Patterson. With twenty million copies in print, their Michael Bennett series is the highest-selling New York City detective series of all time. One of their novels, Zoo, became a three-season CBS television series. He lives in Connecticut.

  For the Lawtons and the Luceys

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part One

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part Two

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Part Three

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Part Four

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  PROLOGUE

  MOUNTAIN RETREAT

  1

  When they turned the vehicle in off the blacktop at the trailhead, all the land still lay in shadow, and the coming sun was just a faint ribbon of paleness in the dark of the open sky.

  With its big all-terrain tires, the Tahoe made steady progress at first. But as the grade of the slope increased, even at a crawl, it began to buck and spin and bottom out off the deep pits in the trail-like dirt road.

  Two thousand feet up the mountain wall, National Park Service ranger Owen Barber stood beside his jacked-up pickup, watching the headlights of the Tahoe as it climbed up slowly through the dry prairie grass and lodgepole pine. After another minute, he lowered his binoculars, laid them on the hood of the truck with a clunk and turned.

  On the other side of the ridge saddle he was parked upon was a descending hollow of exposed rock that looked almost lunar in nature. Beyond the hollow in the northwestern distance stood a line of immense mountains, high and jagged against the paling sky like the graph of some volatile company stock.

  Barber rapped on the side of the pickup with a knuckle as he gazed out at the sublime landscape.

  He’d been to Iraq and Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne, but west Wyoming was beyond anything he’d ever seen.

  It was coming on fifteen minutes later when the Tahoe finally arrived. The first one out of it was small and bald. Teton County sheriff Jim Kirkwood.

  “Morning,
Owen,” Kirkwood said, handing Barber the warm steel thermos he held in his hand.

  “Morning, Jim. Thanks,” Barber said, turning and looking over at the FBI agents Kirkwood had just chauffeured up the off-road slope.

  There were two of them, a man and woman, sitting in the sheriff’s vehicle talking to each other. Through the windshield, Barber could see they were wearing navy blue windbreakers just like on TV.

  Barber was pouring out his second coffee when they finally emerged.

  The man was a burly individual in his early forties with some muscle on him. The female agent was younger, Barber saw, about thirty-five. She was a little on the short side but quite pretty. Even with her brown hair pulled back tight.

  They were both wearing fleece under their raid jackets as well as hiking boots.

  So maybe they weren’t completely stupid, Barber thought as he tipped the camp cup to his lips.

  “Hi, I’m Dennis,” the male agent said. “Dennis Braddock.”

  “Owen Barber,” the ranger said, raising the cup lid at him.

  “Thanks for standing post until we could get here, Owen. It really means a lot,” Braddock said, looking him square in the eye.

  Barber nodded again then sipped some more coffee.

  Former military, he decided. Man had some grit. Or at least a passable appearance thereof.

  “Which one is Grand Teton?” Braddock said, looking to the northwest above the hollow at the slightly off-kilter peaks.

  “It’s that one there,” the FBI woman said, suddenly standing beside them, pointing.

  “Right?” she said, turning to Ranger Barber with a radiant smile.

  Barber looked down at her in the waft of the wind. At her light brown eyes. The spark there.

  “You’re right,” he finally said with his own smile back. “That is it.”

  “This is Agent Hagen,” Braddock said.

  “You can call me Kit,” she said to Barber with another smile.

  A man could get used to those, Barber thought.

  “How far down are we looking?” Braddock said, gazing over the ridge saddle down into the blue-shadowed hollow.

  “A little less than a mile, but it’s slow going. Trail’s pretty steep,” Barber said.

  “You were the one to find the body?” Sheriff Kirkwood said.

  Barber nodded as he finished the coffee and screwed the cap back on tight.

  “Yesterday at sunset,” he said as he handed back the thermos to the sheriff. “We had a call from a camper about a light they saw from a trail off on that hill on the left there, so we were looking around. They had a screw-loose arsonist two summers ago over in Idaho who burned down a hundred square miles so they’re always quick to send us out for violators.”

  “Violators?” Agent Braddock said, squinting down into the shadowed landscape below them.

  Barber nodded.

  “Yep,” Braddock finally said. “They send us out on those calls, too.”

  2

  Down the hollow’s steep and tricky zigzagging trail, Kit Hagen was sweating in less than three minutes.

  She had never seen so much rock. Rock in ridges and in slopes and slides and in crevices. All of it as gray as ashes. Born and raised outside of LA, she took in the bowl-like indentation and was reminded weirdly of Dodger Stadium of all things. It was as if God had chiseled an immense baseball stadium of rock into the side of a mountain, and they were now heading down from the nosebleeds for the field.

  A sudden crunching sound of falling rocks just below on the trail made Kit stop in her tracks. As she watched, Braddock lunged forward and caught Sheriff Kirkwood by his jacket’s back collar just before he could fall.

  “Thanks,” the sheriff said as he stepped to his right and peeked over the trail edge.

  Kit Hagen looked down with the both of them to where the land fell off sharply. Four or five stories below there was a stream, green and bubbling as it wound its way down the mountain through a serrated ravine.

  “Pretty steep indeed,” Agent Braddock said, looking back at her with a wide-eyed nod.

  They continued their descent. Six feet even and broad-shouldered with close-cropped hair, Section Chief Dennis Braddock looked more like an ironworker foreman or a professional rugby player than an FBI agent. For his homicide course at the FBI Academy, his wife, Anna, had valiantly attempted to soften the former marine’s bulk and blunt-edged features with professorial khakis, tweed blazers and dad ties. But it didn’t work.

  “Watch your step,” Ranger Barber called back from farther down the trail.

  Hagen smiled as she watched the lanky ranger duck under the trunk of a huge dead branchless pine sticking out over the trail at a rudely phallic angle.

  She was still smiling to herself at the weenie tree when the trail finally leveled off another fifty feet below it. As she stood in the base of the hollow, its high rock walls didn’t remind her of Dodger Stadium anymore.

  Then her smile evaporated as she looked over a tumble of rocks a few car lengths away, and finally found what they had come here to see.

  3

  Sticking straight up in the gap between two exercise-ball-sized rocks, thirty feet to the right of the trail, was a foot.

  The pale bare foot of what seemed to be a young woman.

  Obscured by the rock, the rest of the body wasn’t visible.

  Thank God for small mercies, Kit Hagen thought.

  She and Braddock glanced at each other grimly in the hollow’s half-light.

  “What time yesterday evening did you arrive here?” Braddock said to the ranger as he unslung his pack.

  “It was a little after eight,” Barber said. “Eight oh seven, I think. It’s in my report up in the truck.”

  “And no one else has been here? No supervisors or coworkers? No one?” Braddock said.

  “No one,” Barber said. “Not unless they snuck in under my truck last night. A hundred feet down the trail is covered with a rockslide. That trail we came down is the only way in or out.”

  “Give us a break already,” Sheriff Kirkwood said to the agent. “We weren’t down here taking selfies if that’s what you’re worried about. I wanted to bring in county homicide from the second the call came in, but Park Service said you guys said to hold off. I know this isn’t DC, but even hick hayseeds like us like to think we’re at least a little professional.”

  “So you’ve been here all night?” Kit Hagen said to Barber.

  Barber nodded.

  “It’s okay. I got no problem with overtime.”

  “And I take it you’re wearing the same boots,” Braddock said as he sat on a rock and pulled a pair of blue surgical booties over his own.

  “Yep,” the lanky ranger said, looking down at his Red Wings. “These ones aren’t even hardly broken in.”

  “Okay, gentlemen. You can wait right here,” Braddock said, tossing Hagen a pair of latex gloves. “This won’t take long. We’re just going to go over and look and take some pictures, and we’ll head back up. The other members of our team will be by later for the full scene processing.”

  “Actually, do either of you have a phone?” Kit Hagen said. “I left mine back in the Tahoe.”

  “No, sorry,” Barber said, patting his pockets. “Mine’s in my truck, too.”

  “I have one, but good luck getting service,” Sheriff Kirkwood said, taking a smartphone out of his jacket pocket.

  “He’s right,” Barber said. “Nearest cell site is thirty miles away. If you need to call someone, only the radio back in my truck is powerful enough to reach the station.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Hagen said as she started unzipping her camera bag. “We need video. Could you tape us working from over here? We usually forget where we step or what have you so it’s helpful to have everything documented when we look back later.”

&n
bsp; “Okay, sure,” Sheriff Kirkwood said as he stood up from the rock he’d been sitting on.

  He took out a pair of reading glasses and began tapping and flicking at the phone screen with a forefinger.

  “Say cheese,” Kirkwood said and had just begun to lift the phone upward when the first crack of a rifle sounded out from somewhere above them, and the killing began.

  4

  Three hundred yards to the northwest up the curving wall of the hollow, Westergaard watched the head-shot sheriff teeter and fall away off the scope’s reticle as he jacked the glass-smooth bolt back and forth.

  Then he pivoted the rifle very, very slightly left to the male FBI agent, huge in the precision German optics, and took him through the back of his neck just below his brain stem with another .338 Lapua Magnum round.

  The long crashes of the rifle were still whining and reverberating off the bare rock as he jacked the bolt again. He pivoted back where the other two were, but they were wisely sucking ground now behind the clearing’s low trail rocks.

  Westergaard watched patiently. He had put a tiny pebble in his mouth as he had tracked them all down the rock trail, and now he rolled the smooth little bit of basalt back and forth behind his teeth with his tongue as he calmly assessed.

  The ranger and the woman were pinned behind half a dozen close-together squarish boulders. The rocks were actually quite small, each about the size of a mini-fridge.

  No matter, he decided as he blinked through the Schmidt & Bender scope.

  He flexed his jaw against the soft chamois that padded the Accuracy International AW sniper rifle’s cheekpiece.

  He just needed to wait but a second or two.

  It actually didn’t take that long. Just between two of the squarish rocks, there was movement, and then the heel of Ranger Rick’s boot was on the pin of the reticle.

  Westergaard lay breathing calmly, looking at it. The boot had a high serrated heel and nice reddish-brown leather and looked expensive.

  The ranger probably oiled them every night before bedtime with some special hiking boot leather maintenance oil he learned about in the Eagle Scouts, the killer thought.

  He wondered about the FBI woman down there with him. She was quite the little number. He wondered if she had the hots for the ranger there in the close confines. He was older but a flat-bellied rugged stud. For some, it was all about older, wasn’t it? He knew all about that.