Deadly Cross

by Patterson, James

  Peters sat directly behind Alex. He looked at her as she shifted and then moved his gun her way. “How can I help, Chief Stone?” he said.

  Bree pressed the double barrels of the derringer against the seat fabric and said, “You could tell us if they’re alive, for starters.”

  “I could, but I won’t,” he said before shifting his aim back at Alex. “Out the gate. Take a right. It’s time to finish this.”

  “It is,” Bree said and squeezed the trigger of the derringer.

  The little gun barked and bucked in her hand as two. 45-caliber bullets blew through the seat. Both hit the rapist/kidnapper/killer square in the chest from less than three feet away.

  Peters died instantaneously and the Colt dropped to the floor.

  CHAPTER 105

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, SIRENS WAILING and lights flashing, Deputy Janet Cafaro’s patrol car squealed up to the entrance of the old silica plant. She jumped out, eyes wide and staring at the Tahoe, which we’d parked and left running with the dead man inside.

  My ears were still ringing from the double-barreled pistol going off in the car. I said, “He was going to take us somewhere and kill us. Bree saved our lives with that derringer. His gun’s there. Back seat on the floor.”

  “That’s him?” she said. “The psycho you were after, for real?”

  “For real,” Bree said. She was standing with her arms crossed in the shade about ten feet from the Tahoe. The derringer was on the hood. Our service weapons were back where we’d dropped them on the ground.

  I said, “We need to search his body.”

  Deputy Cafaro shook her head. “Not before a state homicide investigator is on the scene.”

  Bree started toward her, feeling shaky from having to kill Peters but determined that no more girls would die because of him. “His victims are somewhere close by. He told us he had them in ‘airless places.’ He came on foot. He’s got dried mud caked on his lower pants and boots. Take photographs in situ with your phone and then let us search him. Please. If those girls are in airless places, do it for their sake.”

  Cafaro hesitated. “I have to make a call, but then we’ll do it your way.”

  She returned to the patrol car, called dispatch, and requested another patrol car, a county coroner, and a state homicide investigator sent to the scene. Then she pulled out her phone and got to work.

  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.

  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 ru
nning 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.

  I got frantic, swatted at the flies, and spit them out. Bree grabbed me beneath the armpits, trying to help me up.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  The dizziness eased. I nodded and began to struggle to my feet. But as I did, I saw that vortex of flies in a completely different way.

  They weren’t pouring out of the van. They weren’t pouring from the coffins. They were coming from beneath the vehicle.

  “Wait,” I said. I shook off Bree’s help, sprawled on the ground to look underneath the van, and saw through the flies to the corpse I’d been smelling since the wind changed.

  The deer, a doe, had died in the past day or two. A knife had split the guts wide open. The heat did the rest.

  It was brilliant camouflage in its own macabre way: a vile-smelling deterrent to the nosy types who might second-guess their decision to investigate the mound of vegetation where something dead and putrid lay.

  I jumped up and told Bree what I’d seen, then climbed into the van, only now seeing the full interior. Beyond the coffins were lighting equipment, tripods, and a blowup mattress. The walls to either side were fitted with brackets for hand and power tools.

  My eyes went to the two portable drills, side by side in the brackets, both featuring large batteries and Phillips-head screw bits sticking out the noses. Bree and I grabbed them and got to work.

  I started unscrewing the first box. With a screech and then a long whine, the screw was out. I paused and heard muffled screaming inside.

  “She’s alive!” I shouted and went at the screws with a fury I have rarely possessed. I paused as the next screw left the plywood lid and heard yelling from inside Bree’s box. But nothing yet from the third.

  We kept shouting to the girls inside the boxes that they were safe now, that Peters was dead, and we were coming to help them. As I removed the third screw on my box, Deputy Cafaro charged onto the scene and Bree yelled at her to call ambulances and medevac helicopters to land on the maintenance road.

  A minute later, the last screw came up. I tried to lift the top, but it wouldn’t budge. It had been glued shut. I found a crowbar that I used to pry it off.

  “Helicopters on their way,” Cafaro said, coming back.

  I lifted and handed her the first lid, seeing poor Rachel Christopher inside the wooden box, naked, blindfolded, gagged, and bound at the ankles and wrists with silver duct tape.

  Thrilled that Rachel was alive but wanting to spare her the embarrassment of being naked in front of a man she barely knew, I said, “Deputy Cafaro, there’s a young lady in here who needs your help.”

  Then I turned and went with the drill to the silent third coffin and began to remove the screws. Bree used the crowbar to pry off the second
coffin’s lid.

  “It’s Tina,” she told me, then reached into the box. “It’s okay, honey. Let me help you.”

  Their blindfolds came off and then the gags. The Christopher twins were both shaking and sobbing as they sat up, their backs to me. Bree and Cafaro cut the duct tape from their wrists and ankles, freeing them.

  The deputy ran back to her Suburban and returned with two space blankets to wrap around the girls just as I removed the last screw on the last coffin. In quick order, I had the lid pried off.

  Dee Nathaniel was inside, bound, although not blindfolded or gagged. Her face and body had been beaten badly. Her eyes were swollen shut. There was a lot of caked blood from a gash on her head. And she wasn’t moving.

  I was starting to check her neck for a pulse when she shifted her chin, moaned, opened one of her eyes to a slit, then moved her split, swollen lips and whispered thickly, “I’m not dead yet, Dr. Cross.”

  “No, you are not!” I cried, pumping my fist and feeling like we’d triumphed over impossible odds. “You are alive, Dee Nathaniel! And you are going to the hospital and then home to your mom!”

  CHAPTER 109

  A MONTH LATER, I CLIMBED a steep, windy trail up Old Rag Mountain. It was the first of October, a Saturday, still hot but not intolerable, and there was a nice steady breeze blowing through the trees.

  “How much farther?” asked John Sampson, who was leading.

  “A quarter mile?” Bree said.

  She was behind him. Bree looked over her shoulder at me and smiled.

  My lovely wife had been doing a lot of smiling lately. She loved her new job. There was even talk of sending her to Paris on an assignment.

  I smiled back, thinking about Ronald Peters and how we’d all overlooked him. Well, everyone but Randall Christopher, evidently.