“Cross!” French called.

  I pivoted, stepped back around the tree, and grinned at them, feeling victorious.

  “What’s going on?” Sampson said.

  “I just spotted an old white van half under a tarp in a shed not a hundred yards from us. I think we’ve got our killer.”

  CHAPTER 75

  IT TOOK ALMOST THREE hours for the Pennsylvania police SERT and bomb squad to arrive to sweep the area. They’d had to wait until a helicopter with infrared showed no one was on the property.

  Sampson and I argued that we should be spending our time finding Eamon Diggs so we could place him under arrest. But French wanted to look at the van first.

  Neither the SERT nor the hazardous devices and explosives commanders were happy to learn we had gone all the way to the edge of the farmyard; they didn’t let us in until after they’d cleared the driveway, the farmyard, the farmhouse, and the shed.

  After they cleared the locations, they came back and told us that the entire place was empty, with no evidence that anyone had lived there for a long time. And they took photographs of the van and the ground around it before they made sure it was not booby-trapped.

  “Both teams said the dirt floor looked as if it had been raked before the leaves and whatnot got blown in there,” French said as we donned latex gloves and booties to walk over to the van along a lane of white butcher paper that had been laid down to prevent further contamination of the site.

  “Definitely the right rig,” Sampson said, gesturing to the van’s left rear quarter panel, which was scraped exactly as we’d seen in earlier security videos. “New headlight bulb cover on the left. See how it’s different from the right.”

  “I see it.”

  “New tires,” Sampson said. “Different treads.”

  “I see them too.”

  The van’s rear double doors were hanging ajar when we reached them. A bomb team member had found keys to the van on a shelf.

  French opened the two doors fully. We were hit with a blast of mustiness coupled with the scent of things rotting somewhere in the old trash, moldering leaves, and God only knew what else covering the van floor.

  We stood by as the forensics techs began to pick apart the chaos. They found several latex gloves similar to the ones we wore.

  “How old are those?” I asked.

  “There isn’t a lot of mold growing on them,” said Helen Mathers, the lead forensics officer on the scene. She was dressed in a blue hazmat suit minus the full headgear. “I’d say they’re recent, but we’ll know better back at the lab.”

  “Let me check something,” I said. “Can I use the keys a second?”

  Mathers frowned but nodded. I went up front and asked Javier Cruz, the tech working on the driver’s seat, to give me a moment. Then I leaned in, put the key in the ignition, and turned it to accessory. The dashboard glowed enough for me to read the mileage. I turned the key to start, and the engine coughed to life. I quickly shut it down, thanked Cruz, and went back to Sampson and French.

  “It started right up,” I said. “It’s been driven recently.”

  French gestured to a plastic evidence bag. “They just found a length of rope buried in there. It’s got blood and skin traces on it.”

  Sampson said, “Could be the rope that strangled the real estate agent, Brenda Miles.”

  I picked up the bag and looked at the cord. I said, “I’m betting MFP utility grade.”

  Mathers climbed into the back of the van and crouched over the right wheel well, sifting through the debris with a trim paintbrush.

  “This is going to take a long time,” Sampson said.

  “Not today,” Mathers said over her shoulder. “We’ll bag it all, then dissect and test everything back in the lab. I’m looking for the obvious at this point.”

  “Helen?” said Cruz from the front seat. “I have a shell casing. It’s a forty-four caliber.”

  John and I gave each other high fives.

  “Helen?” Cruz called again.

  “That’s good, Javier,” she said, staring down. “Real good.”

  She set her brush aside, took several photographs of whatever was in front of her, and retrieved a large pair of forceps from her pocket. She reached down somewhere we couldn’t see.

  A moment later, she came up with a two-by-three-inch shriveled piece of dark gristle clenched in the forceps jaw.

  “What’d you find, Helen?” French asked.

  Mathers said soberly, “From the hairs growing out of it, I’d say part of a human scalp, Tommy.”

  Sampson grimaced, said, “Could be from Alice Ways, one of the shooting victims. We know that a piece of her scalp is missing.”

  “That’s more than enough now, Tommy,” I said. “We need to get Diggs into custody.”

  French nodded. “Let’s go find Eamon.”

  CHAPTER 76

  SHORTLY AFTER FOUR THAT afternoon, the three of us took the squad car to the gate of the Keegan’s Granite quarry, where Eamon Diggs’s parole officer said Diggs had worked since leaving prison.

  We showed our badges and drove to the operation’s headquarters. The office manager, a nice lady named Judy, confirmed that Diggs did indeed work at the pit but had taken the day off to hunt with a bow and arrow before the rifle deer season started on Monday.

  “His creepy little friend’s with him, I think,” Judy said and gave a little shiver.

  “Who’s that?” French asked.

  “Harold Beech,” she said and shivered again. “He took the day off too.”

  French seemed to know the name.

  I said, “By any chance, do you guys use dynamite in the quarry?”

  “All the time. Why?”

  “Just interested,” Sampson said. “You keep it on-site? The dynamite?”

  The office manager squinted. “Yes, in a moisture-and-temperature-controlled vault that is inspected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms every year. You’d have to talk to Jack Stark, the operations manager, about the vault. But he’s gone until Tuesday afternoon, up at his brother’s place in the boondocks west of Wilkes-Barre.”

  French asked, “He have a pager or beeper or anything?”

  She snorted. “No, Jack’s too cheap for that. He checks in when he wants to.”

  We were turning to leave when she said, “What’d he do? Diggs.”

  “It’s unclear if he’s done anything, actually,” I said. “We just want to talk to him.”

  “Well, whatever it is, you can bet your patootie that Beech is involved. Thick as thieves, those two.”

  Before we headed back to the squad car, the police detective called his office and asked them to look up a Harold Beech, see if he had a sheet. Not five minutes later, he got a response.

  After listening for several moments, French said, “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” He hung up and told us, “Beech did eleven years for assault, kidnapping, and forcible penetration with foreign objects. Victims were two sixteen-year-old girls.”

  “Birds of a feather,” Sampson said.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Foreign objects?”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  “Brenda Miles, the real estate agent, was found with a wooden spoon in her vagina.”

  “You’re thinking Beech is involved?”

  “Spoon fits his MO. Beech could be the strangler.”

  Sampson said, “Think we need SERT with us?”

  French said, “Not unless Eamon knows his bomb went off. Otherwise, we’re just dropping by for a chat. But if I see something I don’t like, I’ll get them up here pronto.”

  We piled back into the squad car and drove toward Diggs’s residence. A mile or so down the road, we passed a woman walking an Airedale, then we pulled into Diggs’s yard. An older Chevy pickup with plates that matched Diggs’s DMV records was parked to the right of the double-wide. Next to it sat a blue beater Subaru with cardboard duct-taped where the rear window should have been.

  We got out and went to the front door. French knocked while Sampson and I kept our hands on the grips of our service weapons.

  No answer. Then a dog whined behind us.

  A woman said softly, “Hey, if you’re looking for the pervs, they’re not in there.”

  CHAPTER 77

  THE LADY WALKING THE Airedale had come up to what passed for a lawn in front of Diggs’s double-wide. She was a tired-looking brunette in her late forties.

  “Where are they?” I asked just as quietly.

  “Sit, Bernie,” she said, and the dog sat smartly at her side. She pointed to woods diagonally across the street. “It’s state land. They’ve got a blind back in there off the logging road. Bernie and I don’t go in there during hunting season, and we try to avoid them at all costs.”

  “Them?”

  “Diggs and his friend. My brother Jimmy’s a criminal lawyer. Knew all about them when they moved in here. Both of them convicted perverts.”

  “We know.”

  “Once I found that out, I had double bolts put on every door and an alarm on every window in my place. Bought a twelve-gauge too. And I wait until they’re at work or off in the woods before I take Bernie out in this direction.”

  French gestured toward the woods. “How far is this blind?”

  She shrugged. “Go down the logging road to the roundabout, then there’s three trails off it. I can’t remember which one is theirs. Bernie and I like to go for tramps off the path when we can, but anyway, it’s another sixty yards or so off that roundabout. You can’t miss it even with all the brush and branches they put on top of it.”

  We thanked her, got her name—Penelope Harris—and started toward the woods and the entrance to the logging road. Halfway there, I noticed a two-by-eight board fixed high between two large pine trees.

  A rope passed through a pulley bolted into the crossbar.

  I pointed to it, muttered to Sampson and French, “What are the odds that’s a MFP utility-grade rope?”

  “I’m thinking high,” John said as we headed for the opening where the logging road began.

  The weeds and grass growing in the lane had withered and browned after a recent frost. The maple and oak trees were already bare.

  The leaves underfoot were damp and quiet. Rain began to patter down. The wind picked up. A gloomy light seized the woods.

  Sampson had his hand on his pistol. So did I. So did French.

  We reached the place Ms. Harris had described about two hundred yards into the forest. The logging road dead-ended in a circle of sorts with three trails running off it at ten o’clock, twelve, and two.

  The police detective whispered, “We each take one. Sneak in. Second you see this blind, get out of sight and squawk like a crow. We’ll come to you.”

  I said, “I’ll take the trail on the right.”

  Sampson gestured at the path straight ahead, and French went toward the one at ten o’clock. I saw him take out his pistol before he entered the trees.

  I did the same, holding the pistol loosely at my side as I tried to make as little noise as possible with each step in those soft wet leaves and the pattering of the rain. Several small branches popped beneath my shoes about twenty yards in, and I paused.

  I scanned the woods ahead for a mound of branches, saw nothing, and kept going. About fifty yards down the trail, I heard a crow caw to my far left.

  French, I thought, and started to turn.

  From high and back over my left shoulder came a soft, two-toned whistle.

  I paused and looked up and behind me into the treetops. I saw a camouflaged Eamon Diggs on a metal tree stand about twenty-five feet in the air and twenty yards away. He was holding a bow and aiming a nasty-looking broadhead arrow right at me.

  “Toss the gun, asshole,” he growled.

  My survival instincts told me to get my gun up and fire at him.

  But his bow was at full draw, and I was holding my gun waist high, muzzle pointed down. Still looking at that broadhead, I tossed the gun and said, “I’m a cop, Eamon. Just wanted to talk—”

  Diggs squinted. He made a shrugging motion with his right shoulder.

  I caught a flash of yellow a split second before his arrow hit me square in the chest and sent me staggering. My feet got tangled and I fell.

  The back of my head struck something hard, and everything went wavy and then black.

  CHAPTER 78

  I DON’T KNOW HOW long I was out. A minute? Ninety seconds?

  All I know is when I came to, I felt like I’d been kicked by a mule. Eamon Diggs’s arrow jutted from the low center of my chest, that nasty broadhead embedded in my body armor; the shaft and yellow vanes danced above me as I struggled for air.

  “Goddamn it!” Diggs cursed. “Goddamn it to hell!”

  I looked up to see him still twenty feet up but free of his safety line and getting off his stand, arms wrapped around the tree, his thighs and upper body scraping against the bark as his right foot groped for a climbing peg screwed into the trunk.

  He found the steel step and came down the tree, still cursing, his bow hanging from a hook at his left hip.

  I heard Maria’s voice in my head: He’s going to kill you, Alex. The white-van psycho is going to come down and finish you off.

  Dazed, struggling to breathe, I knew I had to get to my gun. I started to roll over and get to my knees, but the nock of the arrow in my chest snagged the damp ground and hindered me.

  I grunted against it, feeling the bruise building beneath my armor, and gasped against the pain; the aluminum shaft bent and I got to my knees. My head was too foggy for me to stand. I started crawling along the trail when Diggs was halfway down the tree.

  I saw my pistol on the other side of the path, its handle sticking out from the leaves. The throbbing in my chest was so acute, I did not know if I could go on.

  But then I saw Maria and Damon in my mind, and the pain was overwhelmed by my love for them and for my unborn child and the knowledge of how crushed they would be if I died here in the woods. I crawled faster, ignoring the arrow flopping and catching on the roots and sticks under me, my focus on my weapon, now fifteen feet away, and now ten.

  I caught a flash of something in my peripheral vision and could not help but glance over. Diggs was almost at the bottom of his tree.

  Get to the gun! Get to the gun, Alex! With Maria’s voice screaming in my head, I scrambled forward and lunged for the pistol at the same time I heard the thud of Diggs’s boots hitting the ground. I got hung up on the bent arrow for a second before it snapped.

  But the holdup was enough to leave me four inches short of my weapon.

  “Don’t! Don’t, goddamn it!” Diggs yelled. “I don’t want to do this!”

  I looked over and saw him standing there not fifteen feet from me, his bow raised and drawn, another nasty broadhead nocked and aimed right at me. I glanced back at my gun and knew I could not reach it before he shot.

  This close, he could shoot me in the throat. No armor would save me there.

  But before I could raise my hands, I heard John yell behind me, “Police, Diggs! Drop the bow, or I will shoot!”

  Diggs glanced over. I peered back and saw Sampson in the trail about fifty feet away, crouched in a combat-shooting stance, weapon up, ready to fire.

  “Goddamn police,” Diggs said in a resigned voice. He lowered the bow and tossed it and the arrow aside.

  He gazed at me and said, his voice shaking, “I swear to Jesus Hisself, man, I did not mean to shoot you.”

  CHAPTER 79

  SAMPSON TOLD DIGGS TO lie facedown in the leaves, fingers laced behind his head. A beaten man, he complied.

  Sampson hustled forward. He secured the ex-con’s wrists and read him his Miranda rights, then came over to me. I’d struggled to a sitting position, breathing hard and hurting, adrenaline pumping, the sweat pouring off my forehead. The saliva at the back of my throat had a burned-aluminum taste that made me want to gag.

  “Jesus, he did shoot you,” Sampson said, looking at the stub of the arrow sticking out of the front of my shirt.

  “Almost point-blank,” I said, feeling dizzy. “Chest was hammered.”

  “I bet,” he said. “You’re lucky it wasn’t a bullet at that distance.”

  Diggs, still facedown and restrained, yelled, “I did not mean to do that, man. I would never shoot a cop!”

  “But you did, Mr. Diggs,” Sampson snapped. He yelled, “Tommy!”

  A second later, from off in the woods a good hundred yards, French yelled back, “I’ve got Beech in custody!”

  “Call the sheriff! Call an ambulance! Diggs shot Cross with an arrow.”

  “What!”

  “His armor stopped it. But he’s shook up bad and I want him looked at.”

  “Done!”

  By that point, I was trembling head to toe.

  “I didn’t have a chance, John,” I said, hearing my voice wavering. “My gun was pointed down and I was looking for a blind on the ground, not up in a tree. I …”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sampson said. “You’re going to be fine. You’re going to go home, see Maria and Damon.”

  “Help me up.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “I feel like I should get up, John.”

  He sighed, helped me to my feet. I stood there, my focus swirling, my balance off.

  “I might have a mild concussion,” I said, feeling a little nauseated as the egg throbbed at the back of my head.

  Sampson said, “Which is why we’re getting you checked out ASAP.”

  I reached over and put my hand against a young oak tree. “Agreed.”

  Sampson went back to Diggs. Before John hauled him to his feet, he scraped a square in the leaves around the bow and arrow.

  “Let’s go,” John said.

  “I want a lawyer,” Diggs said.

  “I bet you do.” Sampson told him to walk out the path. “And don’t run because I’d love nothing more than to shoot you in the ass.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27