“Rang five times, followed by a machine kicking on, and the message being played.”
Leaving his explanation to simply the message, Lipski knew there was no need for him to go into further detail.
They’d all heard it enough times at this point to know it verbatim.
Casting a glance to her left, Lipski looked to the whiteboard beside her, everything that had just been said already scribbled out in blue ink by her own hand.
“Good,” she said, “that puts us at one minute after eight. And then what?”
A few of the younger people in the room shuffled papers, pretending to look busy, being sure to avoid eye contact.
“From there, we can’t be certain,” Burrows said, “until sixteen minutes before ten, at which point he arrived at the Delta ticket counter and purchased a direct overnight flight to Chicago.”
Nodding, Lipski grunted in agreement.
The move was a bold one, at best. For the first three years Scarberry was in the program, he had been completely forbidden from travel without a marshal escort.
Not once had he even tried, though it was clear his demeanor and interaction with them grew more churlish with each encounter.
Since then, he had been taken off their red flag list, though he had been warned many times over to vet all upcoming travel with them at least a month in advance. Only once they were able to assess the possible threat level, to get further security in place if need be, would he be able to go.
Even at that, though, not once had he tried. Nothing beyond the phone call he had fought so hard to secure.
Until this.
“Chicago,” she said, extending the tip of the marker in her hand and tapping it against the board. “And then what?”
“And then he rented a car from Avis,” Jessica Marlucci, a woman just north of thirty with auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail, said. Squinting through a pair of wire-rimmed glasses she added, “Kept it for only four hours, drove south to Indianapolis, returned it to a satellite office there.”
Flicking her gaze to the whiteboard, Lipski nodded. This much they had down cold, a clear trail of flight manifests and car rental records paving the way.
It was thereafter that things got tricky, the trail completely disappearing.
Once Marlucci was done, almost every person in the room went back to keeping their face locked on whatever was before them, nobody wanting to make eye contact, to be the subject of her next barrage of questioning.
“Okay,” Lipski said, raising her voice, in no mood for any games. “And from there? What have we got?”
“Nothing financial,” Grossman said. “No credit card activity at all.”
Pursing her lips, Lipski nodded, having expected as much. If Scarberry was going to the trouble of picking up a rental car, of switching cities and disappearing, he likely wouldn’t be foolish enough to use the cards again.
Not until or unless he wanted to be found.
“Right,” she said. “How about visuals?”
“We’ve got requests in with every agency in Indy,” Burrows said. “Right now, they’re trying to use traffic cam footage to track his movements, but it’s a pretty tough process. They had him moving south for a while, but once he got out into the suburbs, their coverage becomes spotty.”
There he stopped, letting insinuation fill in the rest.
The guy had gone beyond the full reach of the grid, making it highly unlikely they would spot a useful image of him anytime soon.
Not unless they went the extra step of putting out an APB, an option they really weren’t privy to, that kind of publicity jeopardizing his anonymity.
Which was, after all, the point of his being in the program to begin with.
“His apartment?” she asked, jerking her attention toward the back end of the room.
For a moment, the pair of young men both stared at each other across the table, mouths sagging, not sure which should speak.
“Apartment!” Lipski snapped, slapping her hand down on the table, the movement again causing them both to flinch.
“Uh,” the one on the left said, his ruddy cheeks the size and color of ripe apples, “nothing. Place barely even looked like he lived there, let alone left much behind.”
Having been inside the night before, Lipski knew he wasn’t wrong, even if it was exactly what she didn’t want to hear.
“Anything written down? Any internet search history?”
“Nothing written, no computer at all,” the young man on the left said, his straw-blonde hair plastered by sweat to his forehead.
Feeling both nostrils rise a bit in a snarl, Lipski turned her attention back to Burrows. “Phone?”
“Turned off outside of Portland International,” he said. “Hasn’t been on since.”
Using her hips, Lipski shoved herself away from the table. “Shit,” she muttered, rotating the marker from one hand to another as she went back to pacing.
Tim Scarberry had been a pain in her ass for years now, someone that had forgotten exactly what role she was playing, the service they provided.
He was alive because of them.
She didn’t expect a thank you, but she damned sure didn’t feel she deserved this.
“I guess that leaves us with just one thing,” she said, thinking out loud, never once breaking stride. “We might not know where he is, but we know what sent him on his way, who he’s going to find.”
Stopping at the head of the table, she turned to face them, and asked, “So what do we know about this guy he’s been calling every month for the past six years?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The front half of Radney Creel was sunburned slightly, a shade of pink that stopped in the middle of his rib cage on either side. Heading it off by putting his t-shirt back on before things got any worse, that did nothing to save his face and the lower part of his arms, all three bright red as he walked through the front door of the house.
As he did so, Elijah Pyle jerked his head up from the table, a k-bar knife and a wet stone stretched out before him, the overhead light glinting off the fresh edge.
Why he felt the need to sharpen it, Creel didn’t have a clue, bearing witness just two days before to what the razor honed weapon was capable of.
“Damn,” Pyle opened, “you look crispy.”
Nodding slightly, Creel said nothing.
Eight hours had been spent out in the sun, staring intently at the front of the cabin. Any longer and he would have given himself up as too obvious, no human alive being able to endure the afternoon sun any longer.
From then on it would be the job of the motion activated camera he was able to get secured on the back deck, a task as simple as walking up and peering in the rear windows, posing as just another of the half-dozen curious gawkers he’d spotted throughout the day.
Seeing Pyle bent over with his knife now, he couldn’t help but think that if they had any idea exactly what it was that had been stretched out on that rug the day before, there was no way they would be within a hundred yards of the place.
Setting the knife and the stone down, Pyle leaned back in his seat, snaking a hand out and taking up a cigar beside him.
Thus far in the days they’d been sharing space, Creel had seen the man eat nothing and smoke two dozen cigars.
And that was just during the time that he was around.
“Anything?” Pyle asked.
Going to his back pocket, Creel extracted his phone, wagging it before him. “Got the camera in place, clear feed to the phone. I’ll patch you in later if you want.”
Contemplating the offer for a moment, Pyle brushed it off with a twist of his head, sniffing loudly.
“Naw, I’m good. You do your thing and I’ll do mine.”
Not once had Creel ever thought that the two had clearly delineated roles, certainly nothing that could be explained as his thing, but didn’t press it. After the day he’d had, the aching in his lower back coupling with the burn on his skin, his next hour wa
s already planned out.
Beginning with retreating to his room for some exercise. While far from ideal, a few quick rotations of sit-ups, push-ups, and body weight squats would do wonders for his body. Shove blood into places it hadn’t been in a few days. Heighten his endorphin and energy levels, better preparing him to deal with the presence of his unwanted partner.
Follow that up with the iciest shower the old house could muster, sitting beneath the steady spray until he shivered from the cold, emerge and leave his hair and body wet and dripping, hoping it would manage to offset the rise in core temperature he had from a day spent in the sun.
Once all that was complete, returning him to a state somewhat resembling human, he would call Baxter and report.
Doing so before then would be a bad look, his agitation with the heat and the situation and the lack of their target’s arrival having his acrimony up.
In such states, he’d long since found it was better to err on the side of prudence, to refrain from any interaction unless he wanted his true feelings to get out.
And one thing he knew for damned certain was that the man paying the bills had no interest in anything he was feeling.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Forcing myself to wait until sundown would have been a better option, but after what I’d seen back at Uncle Jep’s house, there was no way I could do that. My nerves, the cocktail of raw emotions pulsating through me, would have never allowed it.
Barely able to retreat from the top corner of the house without bellowing toward the heavens, letting my rage echo through the home and out into the forest, it took me just ninety seconds to extricate myself. Taking the spare key with me, I stole away from the house before turning and openly sprinting back toward the Charger, oblivious to how much noise I was making.
Hell, at that moment I almost dared something – whether it be human or a damn mountain lion – to get in my way.
By the time I made it back to the car, my entire body was soaked with sweat, pools of it collecting on the middle console, thick swaths of it striping the steering wheel.
Running a hand across my brow, allowing the congregated droplets to fall where they may, I fired the engine up and tore away from the cabin, leaving it without a second glance.
At some point, I knew I would have to return, the place likely now mine, but when that day might be I didn’t yet know.
Couldn’t rightly say I gave a damn either.
In their stead, my thoughts were squarely on my second location, the scene in Uncle Jep’s room making it clear what had occurred, what would be needed in the coming days.
Pop always liked to refer to his friend as an idiot savant. Give him a written exam on most anything, and you were likely to get back a page covered in obscenities or doodles of naked ladies.
Schooling just wasn’t his thing, but that didn’t keep him from being one of the most intelligent men I’d ever met.
He was the person that taught me how to cast a fishing pole, how to drive a car.
How to play chess.
That’s how I knew when I walked into his bedroom and saw the single piece atop the dresser, an item we had shaped with our own hands from a walnut tree nearby, what had transpired.
In the game of chess, no player was more important than a queen. It was the piece that could go anywhere, do anything, a symbol as strong as existed.
The sort of thing that Uncle Jep carried everywhere with him, a reminder of his fallen wife, the person he always said was his queen, the most powerful in his life.
There was only one place in the world he didn’t carry it, that being the sole place someone might have been able to find him.
The fact that it was sitting on his dresser when I arrived meant he had been headed there and had never come back.
Gripping the steering wheel tight in both hands, I squeezed until veins bulged in my arms. Gritting my teeth, I held my breath, my entire body clenching until light began to pop before my eyes.
To anybody else in the world, the sign wouldn’t appear like much, a random knickknack sitting in someone’s bedroom.
For me, knowing how particular he was about every item in his home, how he felt about that one in particular, it was a beacon, a spotlight pointing the way ahead.
And I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to follow it.
Where exactly it led, I didn’t have a clear idea yet, but I knew what I might need when I got there, where I could I find that much in the meantime.
Leaning hard on the gas, the enormous engine of the Charger bucked beneath me, hurtling forward. Slinging gravel and dust like some sort of modern-day Duke of Hazzard, I took corners fast, straightaways even faster, pushing forward.
Every second of it I let the anger inside build, smacking at the wheel, the dashboard, the middle console.
Anything that could be used as a target.
This was my fault. There was no other way of looking at it.
The whole damn thing was my fault.
Rounding the last corner, I turned onto a second dirt path, the lane even less noticeable than the one leading back to Uncle Jep’s. Tall grass and leaves slapped at the underbelly of the car as I eased back the speed, passing through the thick tree cover, mottled spots of light creeping up and over the hood of the car.
Winding down the path, it was obvious that nobody had been by in years.
Which was good.
It meant that what I needed would still be there, untouched.
More than a quarter mile after leaving the road, I eased the car to a stop. Stepping out from it, I glanced up to the poplar tree just past the front bumper, the single X carved into the base of it, time having healed the wound enough so that it was barely noticeable.
Much like the queen in his bedroom, a sign only to those that knew to look for it.
Which from this point forward was exactly one person.
The thought intensified the scowl on my face as I banked a hard left. Stretching my stride out to a measuring pace, I counted off twenty-seven steps before stopping and making an abrupt right.
Sixteen steps later, I turned my foot on its side, dragging it across the thick bed of pine needles covering the ground.
Years of going unused had made the layer thicker than I remembered, forcing me to kick at the ground three times before my foot struck metal. Once it did, I abandoned the movement and dropped to my knees, using my hands to push debris to the side.
Half a minute later, dirt and dried leaves clung to the sweat lining my arms, my breath coming in ragged bursts as I stared down at the metal manhole cover, a single unnatural spot deep in the woods.
Thinking nothing of it or the symbolism it might possess, I ran my hands around the top lip, scanning until I found the single indent in the rim, the spot just large enough to dip a finger into. Hooking my middle digit under it, I leaned back, the ligaments in my hand straining as the years of exposure to the elements kept the seal tight.
Rising to my feet, I positioned my body for a deadlift, the tendons in my neck bulging as inch by inch the metal wrenched itself free, an unholy sound following it with every tiny movement.
Once it was up far enough, I hooked both hands beneath the lip, jerking back, sending the object hurtling end over end into the dust.
Rising to full height, I stood panting, staring down into the darkened hole for a moment, hoping it still contained what I needed it to. Pulling my head upright, I studied the woods around me, searching for any sound, any sign that I had been followed, that it might be a trap.
For more than a minute I stood, nothing out of sorts coming back to me.
It was time.
Extending one toe toward the hole, seeing nothing but darkness within, I gingerly lowered my boot down. Aiming for the far side, my off knee bent at an angle, lowering me little by little into the space, before I struck the hard metal of a rung.
A twinge of exhilaration passing through me, I braced myself against the rung, lowering myself one step at a time. Withi
n seconds, my entire bottom half was swallowed by the darkness, the sun soon disappearing overhead as I descended.
Twenty-seven, sixteen, eighteen. That was always the combination for the place, a number Uncle Jep drilled into me more times than I could remember.
Twenty-seven paces from the poplar.
Sixteen paces to the right.
Eighteen steps down into the darkness.
Keeping count in my head, I went as fast as my hands and feet would allow, fighting the urge to simply jump down. Around me, the temperature dropped precipitously, refreshingly cool against my skin as I went further into the earth.
On the eighteenth rung, I paused just slightly, extending a toe down before feeling the blessed gravel floor beneath me. Stepping down, I kept the rungs directly before me, extending both hands to the concrete pillar they were screwed into.
My left hand was the first to find the light switch, the aging device flipping upward without opposition, a filmy yellow glow soon following, bright enough it caused me to wince, turning away.
Rotating away from it, I waited an instant for my eyes to settle before looking up, the very thing I’d been looking for stretched out wide in either direction.
Enough supplies – from food to clothing to weapons – to last someone through the coming apocalypse.
A parting gift from Uncle Jep if there ever was one.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The words of Sheriff Charbonneau were still rattling through Talula Davis’s head as she stepped through the back door of her house. Moving on legs that were so stiff they felt like stilts beneath her, Davis went slow, her entire body in a state of suspended numbness as she tossed her keys across the counter, barely noticing as they slid more than three feet before tumbling to the floor, landing in a clatter.
The role of the Sheriff’s Department in murder investigations was sometimes a touchy one, the sort of thing that obviously occurred, but to her knowledge had never once happened in Monroe County.
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