I could hear him fumbling with the phone, then the door slam.
“Tell me what you wanna know,” he said.
“Do you have any suspects?”
“Suspects? No, sir. I’m sure it was someone from out of town.”
“Was he investigating a crime or anything of that sort before he was killed?”
“We don’t get a lot of crime in these parts. Mostly speeders, but they’re usually not from around here. He made some routine rounds, checked up on a noise complaint, but…”
“Did he make a traffic stop near where he was killed?”
“Not so far’s I know. That was my theory, but he didn’t call anything in.”
“No run-ins with anyone?”
“Not that he mentioned.”
“Any theory at all what might have happened to him?”
“No, sir. I wish I did. That kid-they didn’t make ’em any better than that one-” He seemed to swallow his words, and he went quiet for a moment.
“I’m very sorry.”
“If that kid met Satan himself he’d offer him the shirt off his back. Only bad thing I can say about him is he probably wasn’t cut out to be a cop. That’s on me. I shouldn’t never have hired him.”
“The day he was killed, what were his duties?”
“The usual. I mean, I asked him to look into a sort of, well, I call ’em nuisance calls. We got a fella called Dupuis who’s sort of a fussy sort, you know? Kept calling to complain about one of his neighbors, and I asked Jason to go check it out. And I’ll bet you Jason didn’t even-”
“What sort of complaint?”
“Oh, I dunno, Dupuis said he thought the guy down the road stole his dog, like anyone would want that mangy mutt, and he said the guy mighta been doing work without a permit.”
I was about to steer him into another line of questioning when I had a thought. “What kind of work?”
“Construction maybe? All I know is, there hasn’t been no one living on the Alderson farm for years, not since Ray Alderson’s wife died and he moved down to Delray Beach. I figured maybe Ray had a caretaker getting the place ready to sell, because they had your, whatcha call it, earth-moving equipment delivered a week or so back.”
I’d stopped listening. I was less than ten miles away. The rain was drumming the roof of the car and the hood, though it seemed finally to be letting up. The visibility wasn’t great. Ten miles in weather like this could take twenty minutes.
Then a couple of words jumped out at me.
Caretaker.
Moved down to Delray Beach.
That meant the owner didn’t live there.
“This caretaker,” I said. “Has he been there a while?”
“Well, of course, I’d have no way of knowing that. I’ve never met the fella. Foreigner, maybe, but they all are these days, right? Can’t get an American to do manual labor worth a damn. Far as I know he just showed up one day, but we keep to ourselves up here, try to stay out of other people’s business for the most part.”
“Do you have a street address?”
“We don’t really go by numbers so much around here. Ray’s farm is a nice piece of land, more than two hundred acres, but the main house is a wreck, you know? Doesn’t show well, which is why-”
“Where is it?” I cut in sharply.
“It’s on Goddard just past Hubbard Farm Road. You thinking the caretaker had something to do with this?”
“No,” I said quickly.
The last thing I wanted was for the local police chief to show up and start asking questions.
“Because I would be more than happy to take a run over there. Take the four-by-four-that’s a summer road, and it’s surely a swamp by now.”
“No hurry,” I said. “Next couple of days would be fine.”
“You wanna talk to the owner, I can probably rustle up Ray’s number down in Florida, give me a couple minutes.”
“Don’t bother. I know you’ve got your hands full. This is for the database. Routine data entry. It’s what I spend my life doing.”
“Well, it’s important work,” the police chief said kindly. “Somebody’s got to do it. I’m just glad it’s someone who speaks the language.”
I thanked him and I hung up before he could ask anything else.
“Dorothy,” I said fifteen seconds later. “I need directions.”
92.
By the time I drove into Pine Ridge, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The main highway looked recently built. Its asphalt surface was as smooth as glass, the road crowned, the drainage good. I passed Pine Ridge Quality Auto, which was nothing more than a glorified gas station, and then the Pine Ridge Memorial School, a modern brick structure built in the architectural style best described as Modern High School Ugly. Then a post office. At the first major intersection was a gas station on one side next to a twenty-four-hour convenience store that was dark. At the next light I took a left.
I passed farmhouses and modest split-level ranches built too close to the road. There were unmarked curb cuts, narrow lanes sliced through the woods, most of the roads dirt, a few paved. The only landmarks were mailboxes, most of them big, names painted on, occasionally press-on letters.
About three miles down a narrow tree-choked road I came to a roadblock. Hastily improvised: a couple of wooden sawhorses lined with red reflector discs.
This was Goddard Road. About two miles down this way was the Alderson farm.
If I’d guessed right, it was also where Alexa Marcus was buried in the ground.
And where I might find Dragomir Zhukov.
I nosed the car right up to the sawhorses, clicked the high beams.
The road was rutted, deep mud. Walking the two miles, especially down a road like this, would be tortuously slow, time I couldn’t afford.
I got out, dragged a sawhorse out of the way, got back in the Defender, and plowed ahead.
It was like driving across a marsh. The tires sank deep into the muck, and a curtain of water sprayed into the air. I kept it in third gear and drove at a steady pace. Not too fast, not too slow. You don’t want to be in too low a gear when moving through mud. Drive too slowly and you risk water seeping into the exhaust pipe and flooding the engine.
Gradually the road became a narrow dark lane choked with tall pines and birches. The only illumination came from my headlights, which skimmed over the river of mud.
The car performed like an amphibious vehicle, though, and soon I was halfway there.
Then the tires sank in a few more inches and I was finally stuck.
A mile to go.
I knew better than to rev it. Instead, I lifted my foot off the accelerator pedal, gave it some gas.
And I was still stuck.
A quick burst of gas, just a tap of the pedal, and it started rocking back and forth, and after a few minutes of this the car climbed out of the gulley and back through the brown soup.
Then my high beams lit up a rusty metal mailbox that said ALDERSON.
An absentee owner, a caretaker recently arrived. Earth-moving equipment: Might that include a backhoe?
Everything was pure speculation at this point.
But I had no other possibilities.
93.
The driveway to the Alderson property was the main access road. If this was indeed the right place-and I had to assume for now that it was-Zhukov was likely to have surveillance equipment in place: cameras, infrared beams, some sort of early-warning system.
Then again, it’s not easy to set up equipment like that outdoors and have it work effectively. Not without advance preparation.
But, it was safer to assume the driveway was being monitored.
So I drove on ahead, past the entrance, plowing through the muddy river another half mile or so until it came to an abrupt stop. There I drove up the steep bank as deep into the woods as I could.
According to the map Dorothy had sent to my phone, this was the far end of the property. The farm was two hundred and forty acres of land with a half mile of frontage on a paved road and a mile of frontage along this dirt path.