Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(87)

The other two buildings were much larger. They sat parallel to each other and were built of crumbling brick, three stories high at the near end and a good hundred yards long before the roof jumped another four stories to two tower-like structures.

Deputy Cafaro said the silica plant had been around for close to a century and produced fine sands and clays from its mine on the hill across the street. The modern facility had been built a few years ago and had double production.

“They’re thinking they can double it again once they’ve built the second plant on this site,” she said. She gestured at the buildings. “In the meantime, take your pick. I’ve got keys for all of them.”

“The small ones first,” Bree said.





CHAPTER 101





HEADING TOWARD THE CLOSER OF the two small, rusting buildings, we crossed the railroad track.

“This still used?” I asked.

Deputy Cafaro nodded. “Four, five times a day, north and south. There’s a spur off the main line that goes to the current plant and rejoins it on the other side. The processed sand is loaded into hopper cars and off it goes.”

I looked down the tracks south toward Berkeley Springs and a road the rails crossed. There were houses beyond. In the other direction, I could see past the old towers to the newer plant. We crossed more busted pavement and places where it was gone completely and down to sand and weeds.

I let my eyes move back and forth across the ground, trying to spot any indication of recent vehicle traffic. But there was no evidence of it that I could see.

The first building was roughly six thousand square feet and had processed specialty clays back in the day. Cafaro opened it, revealing the interior of the shell and little else. It had been stripped of all its machinery nearly a decade before.

“They all like this?” I asked. “Empty?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “Like I said over the phone.”

“What’s not empty?” Bree asked.

The deputy gestured north toward the larger buildings. “There’s still big pieces of the old conveyors and lifts in the towers to reclaim. But everything else is long gone.”

I was about to suggest we go in the big buildings when my cell phone and Bree’s went off together.

“Mahoney,” I said.

“And Sampson,” Bree said.

We got onto a four-way call with terrible, crackling reception.

“We’ve got nothing,” Ned said. “Phones are not there and Boone has an airtight alibi. He’s a telemarketer in town and worked the late shift. His supervisor confirmed it.”

“We’re still looking,” I said. “We’ll let you know.”

“We’re heading for the helicopter,” Sampson said.

We hung up and told Deputy Cafaro that we needed to search the entire complex. You could tell she wasn’t thrilled, but she got out a key and unlocked a chain wrapped around double doors at the near end of the farthest long building. We pushed them open, flushing pigeons and revealing a long, lofty space with rusting conveyor systems and cables hanging from the girders that supported the roof.

“You go down to that tower when you were in here?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Look at the floor. That’s a quarter of an inch of dust and pigeon poo; don’t you think we’d see tracks?”

“Any other way into the tower?” Bree asked.

“Where the railcars used to come in,” she said. “But we’ll have to go around. They’re chained shut too.”

She locked the double doors and led us around the side, and we started down an overgrown walkway between the two buildings, which Cafaro said had been used to screen and wash the sand. The towers had compartment-like rooms that held the sand and there’d been a complex of lifts and chutes that drained it into the hopper cars.

“How do you know all this?” Bree asked.

“My father worked here. Grandfather too.”

There were narrow horizontal slits in the sides of the towers where pigeons were fluttering in and out. She said they were ventilation windows that had let the plant workers control the humidity and allow in light on those rare occasions when the storage rooms were empty.

Then her radio squawked.

“Janet Cafaro?” the dispatcher said. “You by the radio?”

“Right here, Imogene,” the deputy said.

“We got a motorcycle wreck south of town, mile marker two. Fire and ambulance responding. I need traffic control.”

“On my way,” she said, and she looked at us. “We good?”

I hesitated, then said, “Give us the keys to the two towers. We’ll finish and bring the keys to you.”

Cafaro didn’t like that but shrugged and handed us the keys on the ring. “Just don’t sue the company if something collapses on you,” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”





CHAPTER 102





RUSTY TRAIN TRACKS LED THROUGH double doors on the east and west sides of both towers. The lock to the rear tower’s west door was rusted and it took us three or four tries to get it open. The double doors screeched when we pushed and dragged them back to reveal a yawning space, one hundred feet long and forty feet wide, with multiple chutes coming out of the high ceiling above the tracks.