Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(42)

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 were 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.”