Dead Run (19 page)

Halloran gave him a steady look and nodded.

"Damn, Mike, this is scaring me to death."

THE GOOD THING about Bonar's Camaro-aside from the 427 big-block Chevy-was that he'd put in one of the county's new radio units just last year.

There was the usual weekend chatter coming out of Kingsford County-a couple of drunk-and-disorderlies, a bar fight with minor injuries, and poor old Ron Rohner, who saw aliens landing in his back forty almost every Saturday night-but when Bonar switched over to Missaqua's frequency, there was nothing but dead air.

"Ah," Bonar sighed. "The soothing sounds of the FBI."

"Why don't you put out a prank radio call to that jackass Well-spring up at the lime quarry? They'll never catch us in this car."

"Not with you driving."

"I'm not even going forty-five, which is just about impossible in this thing."

"Seems like you're going faster."

Halloran reined back the Camaro's 450 horses even further as they hit the Missaqua County line, which was a cruel irony, since this was the one place in the state they knew for sure didn't have a single patrol on the road. They both kept a close watch for Gretchen Vanderwhite's car, Grace's Range Rover, and anything else out of sorts, but the roads across the county were as quiet as the radio.

Exactly two minutes on the other side of Missaqua County and still twenty miles from Hamilton, Bonar fell sound asleep, and judging by the depth and volume of his snoring, he would probably stay that way for a while. He didn't even stir when Halloran pulled into the gas station where they were meeting Magozzi, got out and slammed the door. By the time Halloran finished his calls in the station and came back out, there was a shiny silver thing big enough to be its own tourist attraction pulled up in the truck lot. Bonar was walking around it with his hands in his pockets, his head tipped back and his mouth open. Harley Davidson, bearded, tattooed, and leathered, looking like a biker version of the gigantic Paul Bunyan statue in Bemidji, walked next to him. Magozzi and his partner, Gino, were stretching their legs in the lot, heads close together as they talked, and Roadrunner was bent in half under one of the big station lights, a collection of sticks hanging on to his ankles for some reason Halloran didn't even want to think about.

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 on 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."