Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(90)

We helped her, taking photographs with our own phone cameras from multiple angles. Cafaro crouched down to study Peters’s lower legs and hiking shoes. She took a gloved finger and smeared the dried mud. It darkened slightly.

“Still some moisture in it,” she said. “So it hasn’t been there long. Looks like river bottom. Lot of wet clay down there now.”

Bree pointed across the road. “How far is the river?”

“As the crow flies, a mile, mile and a half? Other side of the silica hill. A lot of ground down there, all the way south to the wildlife sanctuary and north to the river bend by Hancock.”

I said, “He knew about Dee’s 911 call five hours ago and the mud’s fairly fresh. I don’t think they’re far.”

Bree nodded. “It makes me believe he was over there, across the street in those pines, watching us when we came in.”

“I’ll look there, you search his body,” Deputy Cafaro said.

“We’ll photograph everything we find,” Bree promised.

The deputy walked away from the Tahoe, head down, peering at the ground.

I put on latex gloves and reached into the pockets of the light windbreaker Peters wore over his T-shirt but found nothing. There was nothing in his left pants pocket either.

But I got charged up when I found keys and an electronic fob in his right pants pocket.

“Chevy,” I said, looking at the fob. “Probably a black panel van.”

“We’re close.”

“Five-mile radius. Maybe less.”

Deputy Cafaro came trotting back to us. “Found some dried mud on the curb over there. I called for a state trooper with a tracking dog, but it will take him at least an hour to get here.”

I said, “In the meantime, show us every road or path within five miles of here, north and south, that goes down into that river bottom.”

Cafaro went to her patrol car, came out with an iPad running Google Earth. She showed us the tracts of forests along the upper Potomac from south of the wildlife refuge and north to Hancock.

Two county roads gave access to the refuge. Another four dirt roads and improved tracks wound through the widest part of the forest behind the pit mine and north of one of its holding ponds. There was also a two-track maintenance trail running directly along the river next to the CSX rail lines.

Bree’s phone rang. She looked at Cafaro, who nodded. She picked it up, answered, and listened while the deputy and I looked at an aerial view of the forest on her iPad.

I said, “I say we go up the nearest roads first.”

Cafaro tapped her finger on the iPad north of the plant’s holding ponds. “These two roads.”

“We’ve got a helicopter,” Bree said. “Our pilot’s five miles out. He’ll take a look from up high and we’ll go low.”

The second patrol car arrived. Cafaro had the deputy seal the crime scene pending the arrival of the state homicide investigator and told us to get in her patrol car. She said, “What exactly are we looking for?”

“A black Chevy van with tinted windows,” I said.





CHAPTER 106





AIRLESS PLACES, I THOUGHT, FEELING sickened that our window to save the girls might have shrunk to minutes as Deputy Cafaro flipped on the sirens and lights and went burning north to the dirt roads that ran parallel to the plant’s holding pond.

We stopped at the entrance to the plant, described Peters to the guard, and asked if he’d seen a man resembling him or a black van out near the pond. He said he had not, but then again, he’d just come on shift.

We drove the length of both roads, saw nothing, then headed south of Berkeley Springs and picked up the Grass-hopper Hollow Road heading into the deep forest behind the silica mine.

Our helicopter roared overhead. “Nothing yet,” the pilot radioed down. “Lot of leaves though. Hard to see under the canopy.”

Where the pavement ended, I had Cafaro slow and turn down her radio so I could hang out the window with the electronic fob I’d found in Peters’s pocket. I pressed the panic button every hundred yards or so, hoping to hear the van’s alarm go off.

We heard nothing the first mile or the second, where we reached a Y in the road. The deputy said the right fork went in tight to the back of the mine, while the other wound out onto a ridge above the river.

“Which one gets more activity?”

“The right during the day. The left at night, mostly kids back in there partying. You also get more of an elevation gain going left.”

“Left,” Bree said.

“Left,” I said.

Cafaro went that way. The woods became very dense. By then the temperatures had soared into the low nineties and were bordering on stifling. In my mind, I kept hearing Peters: Airless places.

It was more than likely that the bodega owner had hidden the van or camouflaged it, so we peered at every pullout along the route and I just kept hitting the panic button. Whenever we hit a high spot, I had Cafaro stop and turn the Suburban off before I hit the button. But all we heard were cicadas whining in the heat.

Near the end of the road, it curled back left and south, almost forming a question mark before coming to a dead end. Four miles and we hadn’t heard so much as a peep in response to the panic button.

I studied the Google map on Cafaro’s iPad again, trying not to feel defeated when the deputy turned around. She headed back the other way at a much faster clip. We’d check the roads into the wildlife refuge next.