Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(41)

“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.”