“U.S. Marshal” shirt and a vest. Bob joined her. When they were armored up, Lucas walked to the back of the trailer, where he could see the door, while Rae peeked through the window of the front door, then the window beside it, and then Bob took up a spot at an angle to the door and hid his Glock in his hand behind his hip, ready to go.
Rae knocked and a moment later the door popped open, and Lucas heard Rae say, “We’re U.S. Marshals. Could you step outside, please?”
A dog started barking inside, and then Lucas heard a woman’s voice: “Be quiet, Willa. Shhh.”
* * *
—
NOTHING WAS MOVING at the back door, so Lucas walked back around to the front. A short, stocky brown-haired woman was standing on the stoop. Rae held up her ID and badge and asked her if there was anyone else in the trailer and the woman said, “No,” and Rae asked her if it was okay if they took a look.
“I really have a problem with law people pushing into my house,” the woman said.
“We’re not pushing,” Rae said. “We’re asking permission. If you say no, we won’t. But we will get a warrant, which means we’ll all be standing here for two or three hours, in the heat, until we do. And then if there’s nobody in there, it’ll all have been an annoying waste of time.”
Bob added, “We’re looking for some very dangerous people—the people you are renting from. There’s a murder warrant out for one of them and armed robbery warrants out for all of them.”
The woman: “What!”
Rae: “You see why we can’t take a chance that you’re hiding someone. The last time we went after them, they shot two law enforcement officers.”
“What!”
Bob said, “We don’t want to look at any of your personal papers or other possessions, we want to make sure we don’t get shot in the back. That’s the truth. So . . .”
The woman let them in, said her name was Kerry Black, not Kelly, as the manager had said. Bob and Rae cleared the place. That done, all five of them, plus the black-and-white border collie, Willa, crowded into the kitchen.
Black said she’d rented the trailer from a blond woman after seeing an advertisement on the Las Vegas Craigslist. “She said she wanted somebody reliable who wouldn’t wreck the place and said Willa was okay. They wanted only three hundred a month, which was great for me. I couldn’t even believe it.”
Lucas: “How do you get in touch with them?”
“I don’t. I mail the rent on the first of the month. If there are problems, I’m supposed to talk to the manager.”
“You don’t have a phone number?”
“No. All I’ve got is an address,” she said. “I’ll tell you, though, I watch my checking account and they haven’t cashed my July or August checks yet.”
“Not picking the checks up?” Rae said to Lucas. “Maybe they don’t care about money.”
Lucas asked if the owners had left anything behind, and Black said “Well, the furniture. There’s some junk in a closet and some barbecue stuff and a grill.”
“The junk in the closet—could we see it?”
The closet contained a cardboard box of Blu-ray movie disks and some country music CDs, old venetian blinds, an ancient vacuum cleaner with a frayed electric cord, a bowling ball in a bag that looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, two cases of empty beer bottles, and a litter of dead flies. Black said she’d looked in there when she first rented the place, but then closed the door and hadn’t really looked in since except when she’d played some of the movies.
“Did you put them back in the box?”
“No, they’re sitting on top of the DVD player.”
Lucas told her that they would talk to the FBI about sending a crime scene team around to check all the left behind stuff for fingerprints and asked her not to touch any of it.
“Do you think I’ll get kicked out of here?” she asked. “I’m going to college, but I don’t have any money and I’m waitressing my way through and this place is a super deal for me and Willa . . .”
“I don’t know why you’d get kicked out. But if the owners come back, you gotta call us. Be really, really careful if they do,” Lucas said. He wrote down the address where she sent the rent in his notebook.
* * *
—
OUTSIDE, Bob said, “We’ve gotta have the crime scene guys