Crimson Shore (Agent Pendergast, #15)(34)
Pendergast moved with a feline grace, using the waxing moon as his only source of light. He paused now and then, to test the wind direction or smell the air. Once, briefly, he had caught the faint scent of a wood fire; whether this was from the distant houses of Dill Town, five miles northward, or from the homeless man alleged by Boyle to live in the marsh, was hard to say; nevertheless, he paused and, noting his position on the map and the direction of the wind, drew a line upwind.
Pendergast had chosen as his insertion point a section of marsh about a mile upstream from where the body of the historian had been found. This was along a channel that he guessed, given the movements of the tides and wind, was where the man might have been killed and initially dumped. It was a crude guess, but the best he could manage with the facts he had. He found nothing of interest at the spot. So he turned his attention to his ultimate destination: the isolated marsh islands in the far western reaches of the salt marsh, beyond the boundary of the refuge.
As he slipped through the grass, he did not think. Stilling the interior voice, he was like an animal, existing in the moment only as a collection of highly tuned sensory organs. Thinking would come later.
The salt grass was about five feet high and he moved through it in a straight line, parting it with gloved hands as he went along. The ground was spongy underfoot, with occasional sinks, muskrat holes, and potholes excavated by extreme high tides. The grass was sharp, but he was well swaddled in chest waders and a black Filson tin-cloth jacket.
In a half mile he came across two paths through the grass. Both were too narrow to have been made by human passage, and a minute examination of the ground revealed the hoofprints of deer in one and the paw prints of muskrats in the other.
Shortly, the salt grass gave way to a mudflat, about a quarter mile wide, through which snaked a small channel of water—all that remained at low tide.
Pendergast ventured into the mudflat, with each step sinking into the muck. In eight minutes he had made the difficult traversal to the other side, where a marsh island lay. A dilapidated sign, almost erased by time, indicated he was exiting the boundary of the wildlife preserve.
He continued on through a mixture of salt grass and mudflats. The tide was now slack and would soon be coming in. They were big tides, over ten feet vertical: he had about two hours before he would be cut off by the incoming ocean, the channels too deep and the currents too swift to wade.
Deep, deep into the marshes, in the middle of the remote island, he came across a tunnel through the grass that was not an animal trail. Now he knelt and, keeping the penlight low to the ground, turned it on and examined the earth. Almost immediately he saw the image of a human footprint, shod, made by what appeared to be a crude hobnailed boot, the hobs worn to nubs and many of them gone altogether. The footprint was fresh, perhaps no more than two or three days old.
He spread out the map and marked the location of the trail, and then he moved slowly along the tunnel-like path. It meandered about and, after a mile, ended in a mudflat at the edge of the marsh island, where any tracks had been erased by tidal currents. He could see, on the far side of the flat, where the tunnel in the grass continued.
He turned now and headed back toward the center of the island. The USGS map he had consulted indicated an area of slightly higher ground at the farther end: only three feet of vertical elevation, but three feet in a potential flood zone was significant. He struck off in another straight line through the salt grass, which was thicker and higher here, almost six feet, mingling with cattails that were beginning to lose their fluff. Where the cattails ended the land rose almost imperceptibly.
Pendergast began making a circle around the higher land, then cut across it, back and forth, in a kind of lawn mower pattern. Every few minutes he would stop, kneel in the thick grass, and examine the soft ground. At one point he smelled woodsmoke again, which he marked on his map, with another line drawn upwind.
The two lines he’d drawn intersected at a spot about two miles distant.
He resumed his search pattern, continuing for almost an hour in silence. And then, toward the center of the marsh island, Pendergast found, poking from the edge of the mud, a flat rock. He pulled it out and examined it: a worn piece of schist. Rocks did not occur naturally in mudflats. Putting it back in place, he marked its location on a handheld GPS. At that point he began moving in tighter circles, finding, here and there, additional stones. He continued punching the location of each into the GPS device. He worked as long as he dared, and then, knowing that time was running out as the tide came in, he tucked the GPS and map away and made a beeline back toward his starting point.
He had gotten no more than ten feet when he heard a noise: an unholy, ghastly, drawn-out wail that echoed over the vast marshes from a distance. Pendergast had heard that kind of scream before. It was a distinct, unique, human scream, one full of surprise and disbelief, then pain, and finally existential horror.
It was the scream of a man being killed.
20
The scream died away into a gibbering moan, which seemed to dissolve in the sighing of the night wind through the salt grass. Pendergast stood stock-still for a moment. And then he tested the wind again, knelt, removed the map, quickly unrolled it, and drew a narrow cone on it, indicating the approximate direction from where the sound had come. It seemed to be in the middle distance, carried on the wind and yet not from afar: perhaps half a mile, at most. This would put the murder—he had no doubt that was what it was—in the middle of the most inaccessible area of the entire Exmouth marshes: a riddle of channels, mudflats, and stagnant cattail swamps.