Sweepers (34 page)

Threw her in a car and went down the road and gone. Too bad she left that Dobo6 in the house.”

“That’s a great-looking dog,” Mcnair said to Train.

“Lennne ask you something. You running a proforma investigation for the NIS, or are you sort of freelancing?”

Train looked at him for a moment, wondering where this had come from.

“Freelancing, after a fashion,” he said.

“I’m under tasking, but not from NIS. From Admiral Carpenter, that admiral you met the-“

Mcnair nodded. “Yeah, the JAG. Okay. I do a little freelancing myself, like when I need another Cadillac or something. So I know about the elasticity of rules. Now, about that spook shit, and all those ‘mights’-“

“I’m going to go back to Fort Fumble and pull on that string,” Train said.

Mcnair gave him a blank took. “Fort Fumble?”

“The Pentagon.”

Mcnair flashed a grin, but then his face sobered. “We’ll do the standard deal,” he said. “A neighborhood canvass.

See if anyone heard or saw anything. Not likely, this area, all these estates, but who knows? And we’ll put a tap on her phone, record who calls in.” He looked over to where Lieutenant Bettino was standing, speaking on a cellular phone. “And, of course, if all else fails, we might have to bring in Fart, Barf, and Itch, eventually.”

“Um,” Train said.

“Um what?”

“There’s a remote’possibility that the FBI may already be working the edges of this case.”

Mcnair thought about that for a moment, then looked up at Train. “Don’t tell me. We’re in the middle of some kind of turf fight between the housekeepers and the gatekeepers?”

Train shrugged. This guy didn’t miss much. “My main concern right now. is that somebody has Karen Lawrence,” he answered.

“This lady mean something to you personally?” Mcnair asked.. I Train re Train gave him a circumspect look. “Yeah, plied, trying to be very careful. “Not something she’s aware of, but yeah, I want to find her.

Alive, and soon. And I’m willing to break some rules and/or bones if that’s what it takes.”

Mcnair looked over towed his lieutenant again. The lieutenant was protesting something, waving his free hand in the air. “Okay. I’ll keep that in mind,” Mcnair said softly.

“But you keep me in mind, you hear things. I’m just a lowly homicide dick, okay? Personally,-l don’t give a rat’s ass if there’s some kinda heavy-side layer developing on this case.

I want to know the who and the how of what happened to Walsh and Schmidt, even if we locals do end up getting shut down here.”

He was looking straight at Train, his body language sending a pretty clear signal. Train said he understood. As Mcnair walked away, Train checked that Gutter was still in the back of the car. He waved to Mcnair, who was now talking to Lieutenant Bettino, got in, and backed up to turn the big vehicle around. He drove past the patrol cop who was watching the front gate, then headed for the village of Great Falls, where he parked in the shopping center parking lot. Once parked, he got on the car phone and called the office. One message-from Mccarty: “Check in when you have something to report. The admiral is very upset.”

Train thought about that. I’ll just bet he is. The admiral had charged him with keeping Karen safe. Now she was missing. He put a call into Captain Mccarty. The yeoman said that the EA was in a meeting with the admiral but that he’d left a message for Mr. von Rensel in case he called.

“He said to read it to you, sir. Verbatim.”

“Shoot.”

““Orders from JAG. Back out of the Sherman matter.

Focus on the Lawrence problem exclusively until you receive further orders.’ “Say it again, please.”

The yeoman read it back to him. “That’s all of it, sir.

Uh, the EA wanted to know that you understood.”

“Okay, reply as follows-. Orders understood. Will com. I ply”

Movement. Karen felt movement in the haystack. Her heart quickened. Had the police found her? Or was this her abductor coming back? She fought down the urge to thrash or struggle. Go limp, she commanded her body. Go limp and maybe Definite movement. The weight on her chest eased, and then the nearest bales were being removed. One at a time, not the urgent scrabbling of rescuer’s hands.

Damn. Wrong finders.

A bale was lifted off the edge of her face. Now the one on her hips.

Then the one across her thighs. Breathe. Control. In. Hold it. Out, slowly.

And then all the weights were off. She could feel the solid blocks of hay all around her, as if she were lying in a shallow grave in the middle of the haystack. The image spiked her fear, but she gritted her teeth and clamped down on it.

Control. She could feel but not hear. It was maddening.

Total helplessness.

Then there were hands, strong hands, under her shoulders and at her feet, lifting her out of the grave-no, the cavity in the haystack. Get that word grave out of Your mind. If they were going to kill you, they could have done it long ago. They. Had to be two of them. But they’re not going to just kill you. They could have done that by simply leaving you there, trussed, taped, utterly helpless in a rubber bag, and closing the zipper.

Control. Breathe. In. Out.

She felt herself being lifted and then carried, and she tried to visualize where they were in the hayloft. There had been at least four hundred bales of hay up there the last time she had dropped hay into the service room. About twenty square feet of bare floor around the trapdoor, the rest covered in piled bales. Were they going to drop her?

The trapdoor was the only way out of the hayloft, not counting the conveyor used to load the hay up into the loft-Then suddenly she was vertical, the strong hands letting go of her shoulders and holding what had to be straps on the bag, her feet no longer supported, but jammed down into the bottom of the bag by her own weight. She tensed, waiting to be dropped, but no, she was being lowered, bumping her back along the rungs of the ladder that came up through the trapdoor. She felt her feet hit the concrete of the ground floor, and then she was falling, sideways, into a heap on the floor. She grunted in pain as her left hip hit the cold concrete, but at the last instant, she remembered to go limp, protecting her head and shoulder.

She lay on the floor, her thoughts whirling. They were taking her somewhere, but where? And how? Was there a car pulled into the aisleway of the barn? What time was it?

Was it dark? Then, partially lifted by those shoulder straps, she was being dragged across the floor, her calves bouncing hard against the doodamb of the hay service room. Out of the service room and into the aisleway. Then she was dropped again, and this time she did bang her head.

Silence. Damn them for putting cotton in her ears and then taping it.

She was in nearly total sensory deprivation.

Eyes, ears, and mouth taped off, hands and feet immobilized. All the movement had produced a sudden, desperate need to urinate. How long had she been in the bag? What time was it now? What were they going to do with her?

Panic rising again. Control. Breathe. No point in struggling.

Hold your strength in reserve. Maybe they’ll free you, and then, then you can-what? One level of her mind was spinning out images of her coming out of the bag and surprising them, lashing out, hitting someone and then running away.

But below that level, her cooler subconscious mind knew that was all a pipe dream. She would come out of the bag with her joints stiff and rubbery and her muscles weak and spastic. Then they picked her up again, and she was being carried, carried like … well, a body. She went limp, waiting to be dropped again.

Train decided to drive back to Karen’s house after his call to the Pentagon. Twenty minutes later, he changed his mind and pulled into the rear parking lot of the French restaurant that Karen liked at the end of Springvale. There was a wall of Dumpster’s at the far end of the lot.

He parked near them to hide from any passing cops. He assumed the cops would be gone by now, but it was better to be safe. It was full dark as he shut down, and he waited to get his night vision adjusted.

He pulled a canvas satchel out from behind the driver’s seat and opened it. He shucked his coat and tie, then pulled on a large olive drab Marine Corps woolly pully sweater.

He exchanged his office dress shoes for a pair of well-worn -topped hiking boots. The suit pahts would just have to’t their chances.

Now for the good stuff. He double-clicked on the switch of the electric door lock and a panel toward the bottom Of the left-front door edged open. He removed a bolstered black Glock pistol and a four-inch sheath knife from the compartment in the door. He attached the sheath knife to the top of his right ankle. He eased the pistol out of its thin canvas holster and checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber. Then he stuffed the bolstered automatic into his waistband, at the small of his back, snapping a small canvas flap through a belt loop and covering the rig with the sweater. Not as good as a shoulder holster, but certainly along for the ride.

He pulled a small Maglite from the glove compartment and then stopped to think. Gloves, and something to cover his chrome dome. He fished around in the bag and then rooted in the side pockets of the front doors before finding a pair of black leather gloves and a black knit Navy watch head. cap. He pulled the cap over his He got out of the car, released Gutter from the back compartment, told him to heel, then broke into a casual jog through the big oaks surrounding the back of the parking lot and reached the verge of Beach Mill Road. There was no sidewalk, but most of the traffic was coming from behind him, homeward-bound, so he only occasionally had to leap out of the way of a car coming toward him. He actually passed another jogger going the other way. The guy was dressed out in a Day-Glo orange vest and was looking nervously at the big Doberman trotting along beside the even bigger man in the dark sweater and watch cap. Train wondered what warp factor the jogger could achieve if he turned around and started to follow him. He pressed on. It wasn’t far from here.

She was lowered, not dropped. But not into a car. What was it? They were turning her on her side and then bending her in the middle, forcing her into something, bending her trussed legs back toward her hips in an accordion fold. She couldn’t figure out what they were putting her in until suddenly she was jerked up into a slant, head up and her knees wedged down against the sides of something. The cart, the big Garden Way cart that sat in the aisle. They had dumped her into the cart and now she was rolling. She could feel the bumping through the bottom of the cart, almost hear the rumble of the wheels. Then a big bump. They had to be outside now, rolling over the rougher ground. But where?

Where were they taking her? It felt as if they were hurrying.

When Train passed Karen’s driveway, the gates were closed and appeared to be chained. There was a strip of yellow crime-scene tape fluttering behind the gates. He jogged on past for about two hundred yards, and then, pausing for a break in the intermittent stream of cars, trotted across the road and climbed over the pasture fence. The Dobe hesitated at the fence for an instant, but when Train had the top strand of barbed wire held down, he snapped his fingers and Gutter cleared the fence in a single smooth bound. Train moved away from the road for about twenty yards and then hunkered down in the dewy grass to get his eyes further adjusted. The dog sat down next to him and waited.

The’night air was clear, but there was no moon yet. The trees bordering the paddocks looked like solid walls in the darkness. He tried to remember the layout of Karen’s place.

She had described it as a rectangle, divided roughly into four quarters.

Three of the quarters were pastures, and the fourth, nearest to Beach Mill Road, contained the house and its immediate grounds. He remembered that there was a state park that bordered the west banks of the river all the way down to the Great Falls cataracts. He could see the house clearly across the pasture because the cops had left the external lights on over the garage.

Train stood up then and started across the field toward the barn. The last phone message on her voice mail before his calls had been about feeding the horses. So if she had been snatched anywhere, it had been down at that barn, which, of course, was a great place to do it-out of sight of the road, so a car could be positioned in or near the barn.

Grab her, truss her, into the car, and then drive out easy as you please.

Damn, I wish you’d taken Gutter, he thought. They might have shot the dog, whoever this was, but there would have been one hell of a ruckus, and she might have made a run for it. Karen was certainly fit enough to sprint her way out of a problem if she had some warning. He closed in on the barn, once again stopping to hunker down in the grass, this time alongside the gate leading into the barn enclosure. The headlights out on the road were not so distracting in here, and he realized he could actually see better in the darkness.

The barn was entirely dark. The aisleway was a black rectangular mouth in the side of the building. Not going to just amble on in there, he thought. He sent Gutter instead.

The dog went into the aisleway like a torpedo, loping all the way through, and then came straight back to Train.

Okay, no humans waiting in ambush. He went in, with the dog at his heel, and quickly made a flashlight survey of the’ barn. The door to the tack room was closed and locked, as was the feed roomi The stalls were all empty, and the only other door led to that small hay room. As he was looking in there, Gutter made a noise. Train turned around to find Gutter circling the area around the door to the small hay room, sniffing hard at the concrete. He snapped on the Maglite. There were bits of hay on the floor. That was new.

“Whatcha got, dog? Find it, Gutter,” he called, encouraging whatever the dog was up to. Gutter gave a small yip and then trotted out of the barn, nose down, ears up and forward. Train hustled along behind him. The dog had a scent, but of what? Karen? He mentally kicked himself for not bringing the dog back down to the barn after his initial look. He should have done it right, given him a piece of Karen’s clothing and then turned him loose, crime scene or no crime scene. Dobes weren’t famous as scent hounds, but a dog’s nose beat the hell out of a bunch of cops tramping around in the weeds. The thought that Karen may have been hidden there all day gave him a cold feeling as the dog led him straight out from the barn into the third pastures Gutter hesitated at the twelve-foot-wide farm gate, circling anxiously until Train found the chain and opened it up. Gutter shot through, prompting him to rein in the. dog with a sharp command to walk. Train’s night vision was very well adapted by now, but it was still pitch-dark, and he was going away from houses and civilization, down toward the dark band of deep woods bordering the river. Not an area he wanted to run toward, especially if the dog was following someone.