Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(8)

Behind these canine units came the other troopers, an uneven line as wide as two football fields. Their orange vests flashed like huge fireflies flitting through the gray woods.

Mutant fireflies, DeMarco told himself. Drawn here not by love, but by Huston’s rage and madness.

He breathed in the scent of the woods as he walked, a damp and heavy fragrance, adumbrated and autumnal, the perfume of decay yet somehow fecund and sweet. DeMarco was a man who loved the dark woods, loved the stillness punctuated only by the chirp of birds, the chittering of a squirrel. He loved the thumping flight of a whitetail as it crashed through the brush. The explosive wing flutter of a flushed grouse. The distant warbling gobble of an amorous turkey.

The crackle of his radio, on the other hand, was as startling as a bee in his ear. “Got a cave over here, Sergeant. Looks like he might have spent the night in it. Left flank, about a hundred yards from the lakeshore.”

DeMarco sent the canine units ahead of him, ordered the other troopers to hold their positions. By the time he arrived at the shallow cave, the dogs were straining at their leashes, wanting to leap forward, whining with their eagerness to pursue the quarry.

“Keep those animals still,” DeMarco told the handlers.

He knelt outside the depression, shined a flashlight beam inside.

“These pine branches were broken off, probably used to cover up the opening,” Trooper Morgan told him. Morgan was a slender man of medium height, long jawed and taciturn. He smiled frequently but infrequently spoke. “You can see over here where they were dragged along the ground.”

DeMarco imagined what it must have been like for a man six feet tall to lay huddled in that tiny space. The earthen walls were indented with a hundred heel marks, half-moons gouged into the soil. DeMarco put his fingers to one of the heel marks. He rolled and turned and pushed at these walls through the longest night of his life. But the soil was cold. Huston had fled at least an hour earlier, leaving nothing behind but a damp depression filled with his scent. It was enough to make the dogs crazy, make saliva drip from their black gums, make their long tongues flap. But the sight of that hole filled DeMarco with grief. A brilliant man reduced to a beast.

DeMarco pulled away from the cave and stood, flicked off the flashlight. He looked at the dogs. “Let’s get ’em moving,” he said.

Two and a half hours later, legs weary, DeMarco and the four canine units paused along the edge of an unpaved road overlooking a swamp. On the photocopied map DeMarco carried, this area was labeled Cranberry Bog, but to DeMarco’s eyes, it was nothing more than a vast, wet morass of thorny bushes and vines. “There’s no way he went through this mess,” DeMarco said aloud, though only to himself.

Three of the dogs sat panting beside their handlers; the fourth lay at his handler’s feet, chin in the dirt. DeMarco thought the posture of the dogs reflected dejection, maybe even embarrassment. Ten minutes earlier, Huston’s trail had intersected with the dirt road and, initially, had turned south. But after only thirty yards or so, the dogs had come to a halt, retreated, found the scent again, then sniffed their way northwest along the same road only to lose the trail at the edge of the swamp.

And DeMarco said, “He changed his mind.”

One of the troopers asked, “You think he’s headed home?”

Another trooper said, “That wouldn’t be very smart, would it, Sarge?”

DeMarco offered no reply. The dogs were idle, the troopers at a loss.

Three of the troopers moved close together not far behind DeMarco. Only Trooper Morgan was from the Mercer County station, DeMarco’s station, and only he did not participate in the conversation.

“You don’t think he waded or swam across that bog, do you?”

“It would be a good way to put the dogs off.”

“Yeah, but Christ, that water can’t be more than fifty degrees this time of year.”

“It would take him, what, twenty, thirty minutes to wade across? He’d have hypothermia in ten.”

“You say ‘wade’ like you know how deep it is.”

“It’s a cranberry bog, for Chrissakes. How deep can it be?”

“So you’re an expert on cranberry bogs?”

“I know they aren’t very deep.”

“Then how deep are they, genius?”

“I’d say three to five feet. Somewhere in that range.”

“So wade on out there and let’s see.”

DeMarco flashed a look of annoyance at the trooper from his station. DeMarco and Morgan had known each other for seven years, had worked together many times. Morgan turned to the others now and said, “Keep it quiet, guys.”

“Why bother?” one of them asked. “If he was anywhere near here, the dogs would know it.”

Morgan faced the man who had spoken. “Quiet,” he said again.

Overhead, the droning whir of a helicopter faded in and out as the craft flew a grid between the cranberry swamp and Lake Wilhelm. DeMarco thumbed down the button on his radio. “Still nothing?” he asked.

A trooper in the helicopter studied his infrared screen. “I’ve got your group beside the swamp,” he said. “I’ve got the rest of the troopers making their way to where you are. Between them and you, nothing.”

“Take it north of the swamp,” DeMarco said.