Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(91)

Where the road was starting to curl back to the right, I blew up the satellite image of our position and saw a razorback spine of rock in the woods to our left and, well above but running parallel to a CSX railway maintenance trail, the rail tracks, the bottom, and the river itself.

“Stop,” I said.

Cafaro slowed, put the vehicle in park. “We hit the panic button here.”

I showed her the satellite image. “Through those trees about sixty yards and parallel to the road, there’s a ridge. See how it could block the fob’s signal?”

She nodded but didn’t move. “You go on and try if you want to. Lot of ticks in there. And I am done with Lyme in my life.”

I thought of Billie Sampson, looked at Bree, then opened the door. Bree got out after me.

We pushed and forced our way into the woods through brambles and thorns and cobwebs and, no doubt, ticks until we reached that spine of rock. It was sheer-faced and about seven feet high.

After making three unsuccessful attempts to get up on the razorback, I remembered something our climbing instructor taught me, Jannie, and Ali. I found a significant crack in the rock, which gave us a way up.

The top of the spine was wide, easy to stand on. We still couldn’t see the river, but we could hear it below us.

I aimed the fob south, punched the panic button, and got nothing. I turned it north and tried again. No sound other than the whine of insects and biting flies attacking us.

Bree slapped at one. Feeling defeated again, I was about to head back to Deputy Cafaro’s Suburban when the wind shifted from out of the east to out of the west and straight up the steep bank below us.

With the breeze came the smell of the river and then something fouler, a rank and rotting scent, the odor of decaying flesh.

“Please don’t be those girls,” Bree said, covering her nose.

Not wanting to, I aimed the fob straight down the steep bank through the trees toward the tracks and the river. I thumbed it hard, three times.

Somewhere far below us, the sounds of the river and cicadas were drowned out by a car alarm beginning to wail and rage.





CHAPTER 107





BEHIND US AND OVER THE howling of the car alarm, I heard Deputy Cafaro bellow, “I hear it! I’m heading for the maintenance trail!”

“Airless places,” I said to Bree and jumped down off the spine and onto the steep side hill, absorbing the shock of the fall but then slipping in the slick mud, hitting hard, and sliding.

I went fifteen feet down the side of the bank through thorns and ferns and over a few downed saplings before I could grab a tree and hold on. I looked back. Bree was creeping down off the spine.

She yelled, “Go on! I don’t want to break a leg.”

After getting upright again, I kept the wind and the smell of death right in my face as I descended, grabbing every tree trunk I could to slow me on the way down. When I reached the bottom, my hands and face were bleeding from being whipped and gouged by branches and vines.

There was a good thirty feet of thicket and thorn left there before the trees gave way to the CSX trail, the railroad tracks, and the Potomac River. The wind and the stench was to my eleven o’clock now. So was the car alarm.

I pushed into the brambles, feeling my pants and shirt catch and tear but not caring. I was getting to that van one way or another.

Soon I was so close, the wailing hurt my ears, and the stench was so bad I thought I’d vomit. But I separated a hanging tangle of vines and found a wall of recently cut, leafy branches and saplings.

I began pulling at them, trying to throw them aside, trying to get to the —

There it was, the side of the black van. I pressed the panic button and heard it die. “It’s here, Bree!”

“Coming,” she called, still up the side of the slope.

I began hurling aside everything in my way until I reached the van’s back left bumper. Green blowflies were swarming there and thick.

“Alex!” Bree shouted, closer.

“Here!” I called.

I knew I should stop, wait for her, Deputy Cafaro, and a state homicide investigator. But I didn’t.

I began to tear apart the wall of vegetation that Peters had piled against the rear of the van and up over the roof. Bree stumbled in beside me and began to help.

The flies were infernal and everywhere. I thought of the girls’ mothers, wondered how in God’s name I was going to tell them what we’d smelled and found in the West Virginia woods.

We could hear Deputy Cafaro’s sirens coming from the south as Bree moved the last of the branches and saplings while I battled the tornado of flies swirling behind the van and hit the unlock button on the fob. I heard the mechanism work before I put on latex gloves again and opened the rear double doors.

The first things we saw in the back of the van were three rectangular wooden boxes built of three-quarter-inch plywood and wood screws.

Airless places.

Coffins.

“No,” Bree moaned.





CHAPTER 108





I FELT CRUSHED AT THE sight of the coffins. In the heat, dehydrated, with all the blowflies swarming and the smell of death all around me, I got claustrophobic, nauseated, and then dizzy.

I had to go down on one knee to stop from falling.

The flies were worse down low, an aerial hive that spun by the rear bumper. Several flew at my eyes and got in my mouth and I began to cough and choke.