by P. J. Tracy
They gathered in a circle in the far corner of the lot. Greetings and quick handshakes were exchanged before Halloran got into it. "We've got a new wrinkle. I just talked to Ed Pitala-the Sheriff over in Missaqua County that the FBI shut down-and sometime in the last ninety minutes, one of his deputies went missing. Guy was off shift on his way home in his patrol and just disappeared."
Bonar's face tightened. "Which one?"
"Doug Lee. Know him?"
"Hell, yes, I know him. That guy drank me under the table with the most god-awful sloe gin you ever tasted at the association dinner last year. What the hell was he doing on the road, anyway? I thought the Feds pulled all the patrols."
Halloran scuffed at a stray stone on the asphalt. "He was already on his way home and in one of the radio dead zones when the order came down. As far as Ed knows, Lee never even heard about it. Thirty minutes ago, Lee's wife called in a panic and the agent that set up shop in Ed's office tried to keep him from sending out his officers to look, so Ed slammed the guy against the wall and gave him a black eye."
Bonar grinned happily. "Good old Ed. Pushing sixty-five, and he's slamming Feds against the jailhouse wall and looking at twenty years. They just don't make them like that anymore."
"Amen," Magozzi added.
"So the agent finally agreed to let him put all his people on the road, as long as they used their personal cars," Halloran continued. "No patrols. No radios. They're all checking in on landlines, and they all have the descriptions of the Rover and the cake lady's car, too, but you know they're looking hardest for their own man."
Gino threw up his hands. "Jesus Christ, they've got four women and now a cop gone missing in that cluster fuck they've got going on over there, and they won't tell us whatthe fuck is going on?"
Halloran started to shake his head, then stopped abruptly. "That agent who took over our scene at the lime quarry said it was a national security operation. I didn't put a whole lot of stock in that, because that's what they told me five years ago when they were trying to bust some morons who were running a multistate dog-fighting ring out of Wisconsin. Back in those days, the Feds hollered national security whenever they wanted the local law to butt out. Thinking anything they ever said was a load of crap was a way of life. Hell, maybe this time they really meant it. Maybe something bigger than missing people is going on here, and we're about to storm right into the middle of it." He looked around at each of them. "Anybody here have a problem with that?"
"Hell, no." Harley spoke for them all. "As far as I'm concerned, Grace, Annie, and Sharon missing is about as big as it gets. I don't give a shit what kind of operation the Feds are running, national security or not. But if those women are somewhere in the middle of that operation, and figuring out what the hell is going on will help us find them, then I say let's just get down to it."
Magozzi said, "Any way you and Roadrunner can tap into the land-lines coming out of the Missaqua County Sheriff's Office?"
Roadrunner bobbed his head enthusiastically. "No problem."
"I want to catch every report from the officers Ed has out on the road when they call in."
"We'll trap all the calls, in or out."
Harley spoke up, looking at Halloran. "And the Feds are crawling all over that county, right?"
"So Ed says."
"Well, they've gotta be talking to each other somehow, operation that big. We need to figure out what kind of a network or frequency they're using, tie in, and find out what the hell is going on and where."
"You can do that from this rig?"
"You bet we can."
"Let's move, then," Magozzi said. "We'll head for the middle of Missaqua County, park this thing in a wayside somewhere, and be ready to move in any direction the information points us."
"We'll follow in our car," Halloran said. "In case we have to head out somewhere fast."
Harley smiled at him and jerked a thumb toward the rig. "She may look like an elephant, but she runs like a cheetah. You aren't going to need your car."
Bonar gave a short nod and started to walk away. I'll grab our stuff and load up."
Harley trailed along to help while the others climbed into the RV. "We've got about everything you need in there already."
Bonar kept walking. "I got a riot gun, a shotgun, goodies like that."
"Cool. Where's your car?"
Bonar pointed. "That one. Couldn't take the county vehicle through Missaqua."
Harley's mouth hung open. "Jesus Christ. That's your ride?"
"That's it. The old clunker."
Harlcy laid reverent hands on the Chevy while Bonar leaned into the backseat. "Old clunker my ass, I'm touching the Hope Diamond here. The Holy Grail. Hose me down and hang me out to dry, this is a Yenko Camaro."
Bonar passed Harley the shotgun and reached in deeper for the riot gun. "I don't know what Yenko is, but this is Charlie Metzger's old car. No real beauty, but it runs nice. Here, take this."
Harley grabbed the not gun without looking at it. He was still staring at the car. "427-cid L72 engine, front disc brakes, ducted hood, heavy-duty radiator, special suspension, and a 4.10:1 rear axle. Quarter mile in the high elevens. I'll give you a hundred right now."
"In your dreams." Bonar chuckled and slammed the door hard.
Harley winced. "One twenty-five."
"You're a penurious son of a bitch, aren't your"
Harley tightened his mouth and stomped after Bonar toward the rig. "All right, all right, you hard-ass, a hundred and fifty."
"Give me a break, Harley. I paid three thousand for this car and you want to give me a hundred and fifty dollars for it?"
Harley stopped and looked at the man. "A hundred and fiftythousand, you moron."
THE DEAD, empty weight of perfect silence lay over the little lake behind the barn. Beyond the broad clumps of cattails, the water's black surface reflected the full moon's stark light like a bottomless mirror. No water bug skated on its surface; no frog sang from its shore; no cricket scraped the hairy bow of one leg across the other. There was no night music.
For several moments after they heard the last jeeps pull away Grace, Annie, and Sharon remained perfectly still, kneeling in the water like three soggy penitents.
Annie's nose itched. Were they really gone? If she lifted her hand to scratch her nose, if a drop of water plunked back to the surface, would a dozen men leap from hiding and start shooting?
Slowly, carefully, she lifted her left hand from the water and raised it to her nose. It was covered with thick clots of swampy mud. She scratched her nose and no one shot her. "Can we get out yet?" Her whisper was barely a breath.
Grace's shoulders lifted under the surface, and the water around them rippled. "Carefully," she whispered back.
Annie rose from her knees, wobbling, water sheeting from her tattered dress, her eyes almost screwed shut when the body of the cow behind her shifted. "There's a cow in here." She moved aside to show them.
"Good Lord," Sharon whispered, staring at the thing. It looked peaceful lying there, only a portion of the belly rising above the water's surface like a hairy black-and-white rock. "That's where all the animals went. They pushed them into the lake."
The three of them waded hurriedly out from among the cattails onto the mud-flattened grass of the shore, water running from their clothes to puddle at their feet. Sharon and Annie both sagged to the ground like dazed, broken-stemmed flowers pummeled by a heavy rain. Grace stayed upright a moment longer, standing straight and tall and still, a motionless vessel for her busy eyes. Finally, she took a deep breath, and Annie knew it was safe. "That's what happened here," she said. "They were moving some kind of gas in trucks, something went wrong, and they killed a whole town."
"Oh, shit." It was the first time Grace had ever heard genuine panic in Annie's voice. "So we've been sitting in a lake filled with animals that died from poison gas?"
Grace sat down next to her, lifted a soggy piece of silk away from her neck, and laid it back o
n her shoulder where it belonged. "It's been hours. Those soldiers weren't worried, so we shouldn't be. Whatever it was isn't here anymore."
"So I don't have to strip down and look for lesions?"
Grace shook her head. "There wouldn't be lesions, anyway. It wasn't a chemical agent. It was nerve gas."
Sharon looked at her. "How do you know that?"
"Chemical agents are all corrosive. From what I saw of that cow, it was clean, and there wasn't a mark on that dog back in the house, either."
Annie thought about that for a second, then breathed out and nodded, completely satisfied, and Sharon wondered how the hell she learned to do that. She shivered, hugging her knees, feeling the very careful world she'd created for herself crumbling around her. Suddenly, what she had chosen to do with her life, profiling one killer at a time, maybe saving a life or two along the way, seemed terribly insignificant. While she was so busy-and Grace and Annie, too, for that matter-tracking single serial killers all over the country, mass murder was happening right in her own backyard. "Christ, I don't believe this. Nerve gas? This is Wisconsin, for God's sake, not the Middle East. Where the hell did they get nerve gas?"
Annie patted her on the knee. "Actually, Wisconsin's a pretty good place to get the stuff. It's pretty much pesticides on steroids. You've got the main ingredient on every farm in the Midwest, and instructions on how to make it all over the Internet."
Sharon closed her eyes. "It just can't be that easy, or every nutcake on the planet would be using it. We're not talking about fertilizer bombs here."
"It isn't that easy," Grace said quietly. "But it isn't impossible, either. Remember the sarin release in the Tokyo subway? They didn't buy that stuff from an arms dealer. They made it themselves."
Sharon rubbed at her eyes and took a couple deep breaths, thinking that this was what had killed all the people and animals here. Just breathing. "They've got two more trucks filled with the stuff out there somewhere." Her voice was trembling now, and her hand shook as she fumbled with the button to light up her watch face. "And in about nine hours, they're going to gas a thousand people if we don't do something. We have tohurry."
Grace's voice was maddeningly calm. "We need someplace to hurry to first."
"Out of here! We have to get out and let someone know what's going on!"
Annie grabbed Sharon's hand and shook it with a little scold. "You have to calm down. Just think for a minute. . . ."
"We don't have a minute!" Sharon hissed. "This isn't just about us anymore. What are we supposed to do? Sit around here, thinking, while a lot of other people die?"
Grace blew out a sigh, reminding herself that this wasn't just a panicked woman talking-the cop in Sharon had just taken over, and as far as cops were concerned, immediate action was the answer to everything. "Fine," she said quietly. "Just what would you like us to do?"
"Head for the roadblock, take out the men guarding it, steal one of the jeeps."
"You and me with our nines against who knows how many men with Ml6s?"
Sharon didn't want to hear about problems, just solutions. She spoke quickly, fueled by the desire to make things happen. "So first we try to pick them off from some kind of cover, even if we don't get all of them, we'll at least improve the odds, then we rush the jeep while we're still firing. . . ."
"Honey, that's just plain suicide."
Sharon glared at Annie. "There's too much at stake here not to try it."
"There's too much at staketo try it," Grace corrected her, speaking very slowly, very clearly. "Because if we die trying, a thousand other people die with us." She let that sink in for a minute. "We have to think of another way."
"Goddamnit, thereis no other way. We've been trying to get out of here since we got in and couldn't do it, and it's even worse now. Now they're all out there in a big circle, just waiting for us."
"Then we have to break the circle."
Annie nodded. "What we need is a diversion."
Grace eyed her. "You've been watching old war movies again." "Lots of movies. And that's what you do. You get all the enemy in one place, then you slip out in the other direction."
Sharon snorted. "Great idea. How do you propose we do that?" "Hell, I don't know. How do cops do it? If you're in the field, on the job, and surrounded, what do you do?"
"The one thing we can't do. You call for backup." Grace spun her head to look at her, went very still for a moment, and then a rare smile spread slowly over her face. "Maybe we can do both." She took a breath, looked up the slope toward the paddock, then back down at Annie and Sharon. "What if we set the whole goddamned town on fire?"
DEPUTY DOUGLAS LEE was in the one and only place he considered safe at the moment-twenty feet up in the knobby clutches of an old box elder tree.
He'd always hated the messy box elders and the massing, flying beetles they hosted. Damn things took root anywhere-in the sand or the clay, in the sun or the shade, in the middle of a cornfield or a crack in the sidewalk if you didn't keep after them. Even in the middle of a first-growth pine forest, thank God. One day a spindly sapling, the next day a monster like the one he sat in.
The lowest branches of the white pines had been too high for him to reach, and too well spaced for easy climbing. The box elder had been a godsend with its fat, sharply angled limbs and broad, cupped crotches. If he managed to live through this, he had the box elder to thank, and by God, he'd never uproot another seedling from his yard.
He didn't know how long he'd been in the tree-near half an hour, he figured. Long enough to doze off and jerk awake to a terrifying volley of gunfire that turned out to be only in his brain. The wound on the side of his head had run like a faucet while he was tearing likehell through the woods, and for long minutes after, he'd settled in the tree to listen to his heart thunder in his chest. He reached up and touched the side of his head with one of the few clean spots remaining on his bloody handkerchief. Hardly bleeding at all now. Maybe it wasn't too deep, just a bleeder like all head wounds.
He moved his head to peer down at the ground, then jerked back against the trunk when the ground moved.
Shit, Lee. You're a little woozy. Must have lost a little more blood than you thought.
Twisting his arm until the filtered moonlight hit his wrist, he peered down at the face of his watch, careful to move only his eyes and not his head. He blinked hard in disbelief, then raised his wrist closer to his face.
Jesus. Two o'clock in the morning. He'd been in this goddamned tree forhours, not minutes. He closed his eyes and thought it through. Maybe he hadn't been dozing. Maybe he'd blacked out. Maybe the head wound was a hell of a lot worse than he imagined.
His heart stuttered in his chest and his breath started to comefaster.Easy, Lee. You're okay. You've come this far, so don't panic now.
He forced slow, deep breaths, and when he was calm again, he opened his eyes and looked around. If he moved his head very slowly, very deliberately, he found he could keep a measure of equilibrium.
Even with the dense canopy of branches blocking the moon, enough light filtered down to make spotty shadows on the ground below. None of them moved. There was no sound... .
Son of a bitch. He remembered now. Earlier, he'd fluttered into wakefulness long enough to hear a disturbance in the forest beneath him. The sounds had been different than the frantic, whispered shouting of the men who had shot at him on the road. This time, the noises had been slow, more orderly. Soft murmurs, twigs snapping regularly under carelessly placed boots, underbrush swishing with the passage of a body. They'd come right under the tree, some of them, all dressed in camo like that bastard at the roadblock, all toting M16s and heading in the same general outward direction.
The direction you don't want to go,he told himself, and that was the first time he realized he planned to leave the safety of his perch.
Jesus. What the hell was going on here? No way they were National Guard on maneuvers. No way they were U.S, military of any kind, or by God he was moving to Chin
a. But there were a lot of them; they were organized; they were well armed. Christ, it wassomebody'sarmy.
He pressed his hand against his forehead and tried to rub somesense through his skin.Think, Lee. You're in some deep shit here. If they wanted you dead back there at the roadblock, they want you dead even more now. Dear God. You killed one of them.
The memory stunned him for a moment, left his eyes open and staring until he caught hold of his thoughts and made himself blink.
Never mind that. Don't think about that now.His right hand fumbled at his side until his fingers closed around his holster, and he sighed with relief. Thank God. Delirious or not, at least he'd had the sense to hang on to his weapon.
Suddenly, his mind went blank. Now what? What the hell was he supposed to do now?
Get out of here, of course. Get away from these bozos and call it in. Oh, Lord, wouldn't Dorothy just pitch a fit. Hey Dot, I've got an army out here by Four Corners trying to blow my brains out with automatic rifles. Send backup, will you?
He started to chuckle, then closed his throat, horrified by the sound. He'd sounded crazy.
Get a grip, Lee. Cheryl's waiting.
The thought of his wife paralyzed him for a moment. Ah, Jesus, poor Cheryl. Two o'clock already. She must be half mad with worry, bugging the hell out of dispatch .., oh, hey. Lee, you stupid jerk, of course. Cheryl would have called in hours ago. They must have thewhole force cruising by now . . , shit. He had to get out, get to a highway, get visible. . . . But first, he had to get past the bad guys, and the problem with that was he didn't know where the hell they were.
FIFTEEN MINUTES GONE, Grace thought when they finally started to move up from the lake toward the paddock. It took fifteen whole minutes to work it out and find the holes and agree on the timing, and if the damn thing worked and they were fifteen minutes too late for a thousand people, how the hell were they going to live with that?
After the illusion of shelter between the lake and the side of the hill that led up to the paddock, she felt dangerously exposed standing on top of the slope. They all did. They moved quickly to crouch in the tall grass next to the tractor and froze there, breathing through their mouths, straining to hear the slightest sound, to see the merest hint of movement in the lifeless landscape. Heat seemed trapped in the muggy air around them, as if a great, stifling lid had been clamped down on the world.