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Lewis gave an uneasy laugh. “Well, aren’t we a couple of gunslingers.”
“Move in slow, move in quiet. Get the fire going. Then come back around. Let ’em all get out before you start shooting. Last thing we want is to have to go in and get anybody. You counted three, right?”
“Yeah, but now I think about it, the woman turned her head and said something. She wasn’t looking at the two men. Maybe there’s somebody else.”
“Okay, we’ll plan on four.”
THE ROPE GANDY had used to hook her to the tie-down in the back of the fourteen-foot van was thick and made of nylon-strong but slippery. Bry
She collapsed into the front seat of the van, catching her breath. Her stomach muscles were in agony from the navigation to the front and from the smack of the club Gandy’s wife had used on her. Bry
Then behind her a woman screamed.
“Michelle,” she whispered. Had she returned, had they found her at the lake and dragged her back here? Bry
Bry
The little girl was inside! she thought, panicked.
The voice called again, “No, no! Please!” The woman’s voice wasn’t Michelle’s. It was Amy’s mother’s.
Then the crack of pistol fire.
The boom of a shotgun.
Four or five more rounds. A pause, for reloading maybe. More shots.
Silence. Then a voice, high-pitched in fear or desperation. A man or woman or child?…Bry
Another shot.
More silence.
Please, let her be all right. Please…picturing the tiny girl’s face.
Motion flickered in the side-view mirror. A figure, carrying a pistol, was walking around the camper, studying it carefully and the bushes nearby.
He then turned toward the van Bry
She looked around for anything that would free her hands. She slipped them around the gearshift lever between the seats and began to saw. The gesture was futile.
She glanced outside. The figure was now looking directly at the van.
SHERIFF TOM DAHL stood over the two bodies in the kitchen: a businesswoman in her thirties, looking like she’d kicked off her shoes after work, happily anticipating a weekend of relaxation; the other corpse was a solid man about her age, with a mop of post-college hair. He was the sort of guy you’d have a beer with at The Corner Place in Humboldt. The blood made huge stains on the floor.
Although Dahl had the edge most law enforcers develop from the job, this particular crime shook him. The majority of deaths in Ke
He was staring at their pale hands; those of the typical dead around here were ruddy and calloused.
And on top of it all, his own deputy-his secret favorite in the department, the daughter he would have liked to have-was missing from a house tattooed with small-arms fire.
He exhaled slowly.
Footsteps came downstairs. “The friend?” Dahl asked Eric Munce, the man he’d chosen not to send here, picking instead Kristen Bry
“No sign of her.”
One relief. He’d been sure that they were going to find her body upstairs in the bedroom. Murdered and maybe not right away.
Munce said, “They might have her with them. Or she’s with Bry
Let’s pray for that, Dahl thought, and he did, though very briefly.
A call came in for him. The FBI, Special Agent Brindle explained, was sending several agents-now that Emma Feldman, a witness in the case against Mankewitz was dead. A State Police commander was headed here too and wouldn’t like the Feebies-he tended to squeeze hard in pissing contests-but Dahl was all for the more the merrier. No criminals ever escaped because too many talented cops were on his trail. Well, most of the time.
A crime scene unit from the State Police was en route as well, so Dahl ordered his boys to leave the evidence for collection but to look everywhere they needed in order to figure out what had happened and where Bry
It didn’t take long to find significant pieces of the puzzle: gunshots through windows, gunshots inside, gunshots outside, footprints that suggested two males were probably the perps. Bry
The Mercedes sat in front of the garage with gunshots in two tires, window smashed and hood up, a battery cable dangling. Another car had burned rubber-well, scattered gravel-as it fled. Another had limped out, dragging a flat.
But the jigsaw pieces didn’t give any sense of the big picture. Now, standing in front of the fragrant fireplace in the living room, Dahl summarized to himself: a mess. We got a mess on our hands.
And where the hell is Bry
Eric?
I’d rather it wasn’t him. You know how he gets.
Dahl noticed something in the woodwork. “Anybody trying to play CSI?” he asked sourly, eyes on Munce.
The deputy looked where he was pointing. It seemed like someone had dug a bullet out of the molding. “Not me.”
Why would somebody take the trouble to dig out one but not the other bullets? Why? Because it had his DNA on it?
Most likely, and that meant he was wounded.
It also meant that he was a pro. Most crimes in Ke
A hit man.
Okay, think. The two men had been hired to kill Emma Feldman. They’d done that-and killed her husband too. Then, maybe, they’d been surprised by the friend who’d driven up with them. Maybe she’d been out for a walk or upstairs in the shower when the killers arrived.
Or maybe it was Bry
Somebody, Bry
But what had happened next?
Had they ditched their car somewhere and taken Bry
Were they dead?
He called deputy Howie Prescott on his radio. The big man was near the lake in the yard between 2 and 3 Lake View, where they’d found some footprints. He was looking for any sign of a trail anybody’d left. Prescott was the best hunter in the office, though how the 280-pound man snuck up on his prey was a mystery to them all.
“Anything, Howie?”
“No, sir. But it’s dark as night here.”