Twisted Prey Page 13

  Lucas called up a satellite view of the area and made some notes on likely roads back toward I-66 into Washington. Avoiding towns and traffic . . .

  He spent an hour at it, then did a search for the sheriff’s contact emails in the three counties. He made up three emails, explaining what he wanted to do, asking for help, and telling them that he’d arrive with two other marshals by noon. He finally put away his electronics, read the Hiaasen book for a while, and went to bed at one o’clock.

  Wasn’t much of a plan, he thought, before the lights went out, but it was something.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY they did the pancakes and waffles, sausage links and bacon, at a greasy but otherwise decent diner off in the general direction of Capitol Hill, recommended by the hotel’s concierge.

  Lucas told Bob and Rae about the emails he’d sent to the sheriffs the night before and the follow-up calls he’d made that morning. He’d gotten some grumbling, but they agreed to meet at a country store at noon and supply a few cars to methodically cruise the ditches and side roads specified by Lucas and to search turnoffs or other likely dump spots.

  “And what are we going to do?” Bob asked.

  “Same thing. I’ve marked some places that I think would be good prospects—close to major roads, heavy cover, and so on,” Lucas said. “I didn’t have time before we left, but I saved the stuff on a thumb drive and I’ll run down to the business center and print out maps before we leave.”

  “You are a paragon of efficiency,” Bob said, “but it sounds really, really boring.”

  “Probably, but I’ve also figured out a small variation on the whole plan.”

  “What’s that?” Rae asked.

  “I’m going to tell these sheriffs and their deputies that the reason this is so important is, we believe somebody tried to assassinate Senator Smalls, and actually did murder his friend,” Lucas said. “That this isn’t some fishing expedition looking for a minnow. And it might be something they’d like to get credit for.”

  Rae stopped chewing on her strip of bacon. “Lucas, that’ll wind up in the newspapers, sooner or later. Or on TV.”

  Lucas nodded. “For sure. Because if one of the sheriffs doesn’t leak it, I will.”

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT THE HOTEL, Bob and Rae hauled their equipment bags down to their rented Tahoe, Lucas rolled out his Evoque, and at ten o’clock, dressed in jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and boots, on a day that was already sweating heavily, with thunderheads building to the southwest, they took off for West Virginia.

  Included in the equipment that the two marshals had brought were radios with headsets so they wouldn’t have to talk on cell phones. Lucas set the pace, and they rolled west on I-66 and, at ten minutes to twelve, arrived in the small town of Strasburg, Virginia. Since everyone involved was a cop, they’d agreed to rendezvous at a convenience store that also sold Dunkin’ Donuts; when they arrived, the parking lot looked like a police convention, with seven sheriff’s cars scattered around the blacktop. The store wasn’t big enough to hold all the cops, so they got ice-cream cones and donuts and sacks of potato chips and gathered in the shade of an ash tree to talk.

  Lucas introduced himself, Bob, and Rae. The sheriffs said that they already had deputies out looking, but without any luck at that point.

  Lucas said, “Look, we appreciate your help. This is important: we have developed some evidence, which I’m not allowed to talk about, that this so-called accident was an assassination attempt aimed at Senator Smalls. The killers wound up murdering an innocent woman, but we believe she was what you call collateral damage.”

  They seemed skeptical. One deputy said, “You know how many trees we have in West Virginia? If somebody said a billion, I’d say that’s probably low. Might be that many downed tree trunks, too.”

  Bob jumped in. “I know what you’re thinking, that this sounds like some kind of federal horseshit, but I promise you it’s not. We’re not fancy federal cops. We’re street guys; we make our living kicking down doors and kinda, you know, looking for trees. This might be the most important case we’ll ever work on—and that you’ll ever work on. Even if you have your doubts, I hope you’ll work it hard.”

  Rae: “Lucas and Bob and I will all be out there, combing through the woods, right along with y’all. If we find what we’re looking for, we’ll have hard proof that this was murder.”

  After some more back-and-forth, and the purchase of massive numbers of additional donuts, Cokes, Diet Cokes, a couple of Pepsis, and water, the crowd broke up, still with some grumbling.

  Lucas, Bob, and Rae caucused before they left, Lucas asking, “What do you think?”

  “They’ll look,” Bob said. “At least for today. Maybe tomorrow. Not much longer, though. It’s too goddamn hot out there.”

  Rae touched Lucas’s arm, and said, “Don’t get your hopes up, big guy. This is a needle in a haystack.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS EFFUSIVELY THANKED all three sheriffs before they left, including the two from Virginia, but believed that the tree trunks, if they were to be found, would be in West Virginia. “They wouldn’t have gone far before they got rid of them. All they needed to do was get caught in somebody’s headlights and they’d be dealing with witnesses.”

  Bob said, “They could have pulled over one minute after the accident, taken the trees, the lattice, whatever, taken it apart, thrown the trees in the bed of the truck, and taken them to a landfill somewhere.”

  Lucas was shaking his head. “No. When they made the lattice, they would have wanted to protect the entire length of the truck. I looked up the F-250, their model: it’s almost twenty-one feet long. But they’ve got a short bed, and the cargo box is only like six feet nine inches long. If they put twenty-one-foot logs in a six-foot box, they’d have a fifteen-foot overhang. That’d be as noticeable as hanging them off the side.”

  “Then let’s go find the needle,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY STARTED where the accident took place, looking down the steep slope at the river below. Rae said, “Think about it: the accident happens, do they watch to make sure they go over the cliff or do they keep going?”

  “For one reason or another, they apparently kept going,” Lucas said. “Porter told me that he was afraid they’d come down the hill and finish them off, so he got a gun out of the back and hid out . . . nobody came down, and he never saw the truck again or even its lights.”

  Rae: “How far would they drive before they pulled over? They’d have to be thinking that there might be a witness, so it wouldn’t be in the first two minutes they’d actually want to, you know, get away. Get out of sight.”

  “Look for places they could do that,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  BOB AND RAE LED, with the Tahoe’s wheels edging the road, Rae hanging out the window as Bob drove. Lucas edged the wheels of the Evoque off the other side of the road, looking in the ditches for any changes in the foliage. The ditch on his side was shallow, and there were occasional ripples in the weeds, but he saw nothing that looked suspicious. The going was brutally slow and hot, and Lucas had one arm hung out the window, the better to get his head out where he could see; by the end of the day, he thought, he’d be bruised from his armpit to his elbow.

  When they got to the main intersection leading out, they saw a sheriff’s car crawling toward them. They stopped to talk, and the deputy said he’d followed the road four miles out, both sides of it, and had seen nothing. “There were some woodlots back there, right along the road. I got out and looked, but there were only a couple of spurs back into the trees. I didn’t see anything fresh.”

  “Nothing behind us,” Lucas said. “So we go east? You’re welcome to track along with us.”

  “More trees that way,�
�� the deputy said. “We’ll be taking it slow.”

  They again took it slowly, four or five miles an hour, getting out to walk in some spots. They had two false alarms but never did find anything good.

  But another deputy did.

  Her name was Marlys Weaver, and she found the logs fifty feet up a remote forest road, a place called South Branch Hills Drive, which crossed the mountains toward Virginia.

  Lucas took the call from the sheriff on his cell phone. “Ol’ Marlys says she’s found them. I personally didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in hell, but Marlys always knows what she’s talking about.”

  “How do we get there?” Lucas asked.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS AND BOB AND RAE, in their two trucks, followed the sheriff’s deputy cross-country, the deputy playing with his lights and siren though they rarely saw another car. Running hard on poor roads, they got to Marlys Weaver in twenty minutes.

  When they came up to Weaver’s patrol car—and saw the sheriff’s car coming in from the other direction—Lucas piled out of the Evoque and joined Bob and Rae, and Bob said, “Man, we should have looked here first. If I was going to find a spot . . .”

  They were fifteen miles from the accident scene, on a lightly used road that ran east up a shallow valley toward the top of the mountain ridge, and down the other side. On the right side of the road, a track cut off to the south, up the wall of the valley. The deputy, Weaver, was standing a hundred feet up the track and twenty or thirty feet above them. She shouted, “Don’t let anybody drive up. We have some tire tracks.”

  Rae said, “No fuckin’ way,” and the sheriff came up, and Lucas, Bob, Rae, the sheriff, and the deputy who’d been working with them all walked up the middle of the track to Weaver. She was a stout young woman with short hair and glasses, dark patches of sweat at the armpits of her black-and-green uniform. As they left the road, she shouted again, “Watch your ankles. I might’ve kicked a copperhead out of there.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” the sheriff muttered. He was a broad, anxious-looking man with a red face and redder nose. “Somebody else walk ahead of me.”

  “The first walker only scares them,” Rae said. “They strike at the second one in line.”

  “Good to know, young lady,” the sheriff said. “Two of you walk in front of me.”

  * * *

  —

  THE TRACK had no apparent reason for its existence. It ran a hundred yards up the hill and then simply petered out. “There’s an illegal dump back there, doesn’t get used too much,” Weaver explained, pointing on up the hill. “I didn’t see the logs when I walked up, spotted them on the way back down. Right over here.”

  The track itself ran up a sloping spine, which rolled off to each side. To the west of the road, a patch of raspberries spread across the hillside. Weaver led them down a foot-wide track, and there, fifteen feet into the berry patch, were four logs, each at least twenty feet long and five or six inches in diameter.

  “Got silver car paint on them.” She looked at Lucas. “You said that Caddy was silver, sir . . .”

  “That’s right,” Lucas said. He knelt by the logs, found scrapes of silver paint, and Bob, working beside him, said, “Look here.”

  Lucas looked, and Bob pointed at cuts that went horizontally around the logs. “That’s where they put the chains, or the ropes, to tie them together.”

  Lucas looked at Weaver. “Great job. Great job. You said there were tracks?”

  “Yes, sir. Only fresh ones up here and only about a foot long, but somebody ran right up into some softer dirt here.”

  She pointed, and all of them crawled out of the raspberry patch to look. The track wasn’t entirely clean: weeds grew up out of the tread marks, but they were clear enough if you looked closely. The sheriff said, “Might have some more over here . . .” and they found another six inches of similar track. “Need to check the whole road out,” the sheriff said.

  Lucas: “I’ve got to make a phone call. Let’s stay away from the logs completely, and out of that raspberry patch, in case they left behind some DNA. And let’s try to stay away from snakes but work that track, see if we find more treads, coming or going. They must have turned around up here somewhere.”

  * * *

  —

  BOB, RAE, AND THE SHERIFF got everybody organized as more deputies rolled in, while Lucas got on his phone and called Carl Armstrong.

  “Guess where I’m at,” he said, when Armstrong got on the phone.

  “Minnesota? You went home?”

  “I’m on a mountain road here in West Virginia. We found the logs, with silver paint. We’ve got treads. We need an accident investigator.” He looked up at a growing thunderhead to the southwest. “We need him quick in case it rains.”

  “I’m running out the door,” Armstrong said after Lucas told them where they were. “But it’ll be a couple of hours anyway.”

  Armstrong told Lucas to get to the nearest store and buy plastic sheets—“garbage bags, anything, the bigger, the better”—to cover the tread marks and as much of the logs as possible.

  Lucas told the sheriff what was needed, and one of the deputies’ cars went screaming away, lights and sirens running. “Back in twenty minutes if he doesn’t kill hisself,” the sheriff said. “Don’t think that cloud’ll hit us. Looks to me like it’ll slide off to the east.”

  The deputy got back in half an hour with painter’s plastic drop cloths. They wrapped the logs and covered the tread marks they’d found. One of the deputies trenched around the treads to drain water away. With an extra sheet of plastic, and the smell of rain in their noses, they tented the wrapped logs and anchored the plastic with sticks from the surrounding timber.

  Then the rain hit, a downpour that would have given Noah a hard time. They sat in their cars, running the air-conditioning and listening to music, flinching at the nearby thunder and the lightning that flickered through the woods. The rain lasted twenty minutes and rolled off to the northeast. The sheriff, getting out of his car into the last bit of drizzle, said, “Like I told you, it was sliding off to the east.”

  “Too bad it wasn’t a direct hit,” Rae said. “Might of drowned the fuckin’ snakes.”

  * * *

  —

  ARMSTRONG TOOK a bit longer than two hours to arrive. Lucas impatiently paced the road, calling him twice to make sure he hadn’t killed himself. Eventually, Lucas, Rae, Bob, and the sheriff went out to a country store that sold microwave bean burritos, the same store where the deputy had bought the drop cloths, and had a nasty lunch.

  “You still gonna talk to the newspapers?” Rae asked.

  She kept her voice down, and Bob had moved in to block the sheriff out of the quiet conversation; he was having a noisy campaign chat with the store owners anyway.

  “I’ve got to talk to Porter’s top aide—she’s in on this and she probably has a link to somebody I could call. I’m thinking we should drop a hint, anonymously, at one of the major news stations, and maybe the Washington Post, and give them the sheriff’s name. He’s a talkative sort,” Lucas said, glancing over at him. “I don’t want it out there before we’ve got an eye on that truck, though.”

  “Day after tomorrow would be soon enough,” Bob said.

  Lucas nodded. “I’ll work it out this evening, after Armstrong shows up.”

  * * *

  —

  ARMSTRONG ARRIVED in a pickup with two crime scene investigators. The sky had cleared, and the three men carefully peeled the plastic off the logs. Armstrong looked at the paint scrapings, comparing them to a piece of metal taken from Smalls’s Cadillac. After a moment, he muttered something to himself, stood up, and walked over to Lucas, Bob, and Rae.

  “If that paint didn’t come off the Caddy, I’ll eat the logs. We need to take paint samples and transport the logs. You said there wer
e some tracks that might be associated?”

  They showed him the tracks, and the two CSI guys went to work with lights, cameras, and tape measures, eventually clipping the vegetation in the tread marks and making casts with a beige-colored liquid that quickly solidified.

  As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the logs were wrapped in plastic padding and loaded one by one onto the pickup and tied down, with red flags hanging from the exposed ends sticking out of the back of the truck. Armstrong asked Lucas, “What about the truck? When can I look at it?”

  “Day after tomorrow, probably,” Lucas said. “We’ve got some prep work to do.”

  “So do I,” Armstrong said. “I need to measure the logs and see what kind of impact marks they’d leave on an F-250 if they were used the way we think they were . . . although they were probably well padded. The formal lab results on the paint will take a while. And we need to go over the logs inch by inch to see if there’s even a speck of black paint.”

  “When we decide to officially look at the truck, we’ll call,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT, Lucas walked over to Kitten Carter’s apartment complex and took an elevator to the fourth floor. She was standing in the hallway and waved at him when he stepped off the elevator.

  Carter lived in a two-bedroom unit, with the second bedroom converted into a compact, messy office with a desk and two visitor’s chairs. Lucas saw the office as he walked by, but Carter pointed him into the living room and asked him if he’d like a glass of wine or a bottle of water. He took water, and she asked if he wanted bubbly or still, and he took bubbly. When they finally sat down to talk, he told her about finding the truck.

  “Then we’ve got . . . something? What do we have?”

  “We’ve got one end of the string,” Lucas said. “If we find black paint on the logs, we could pick up Ritter. But I don’t think they’ll find any—I’ve looked at that truck and I didn’t see a single scrape or mark of any kind. So we get Armstrong over here to go over the truck, we roust Ritter, but we don’t take him yet. Let’s see if we can create some cracks in their team.”