But the street was empty. Wherever the Beast had gone to, he was nowhere in sight. Eddie cursed and punched the steering wheel with the callused heel of his hand.
Patience, whispered the voice in his mind. His Father’s soothing voice. Patience.
Eddie sat there until cars choked the street behind him and began honking, and when he was calm again, he took his foot off the gas and began rolling down the street, continuing the hunt. Patiently.
(4)
A ragged line of police officers, state troopers, and deputized hunters moved out of the tall corn and passed into the shadows of the great Pinelands State Forest. The trees stood rank after rank, mingling Scotch pine and Norway spruce, pitch pine and Table Mountain pine, and a dozen other varieties, spreading back into the game lands by the tens of thousands, packed so tightly together that men walking nearly shoulder to shoulder were almost constantly separated by the knobby trunks of the trees. The underbrush was heavy, tending toward stunting maple, gnarled scrub pines, and thorny bushes ringed by late-season poison ivy and poison sumac. The ground was uneven and seemed to close like a thousand hungry mouths around the ankles of the searchers. More than one man went down with a twisted ankle and had to limp back to the staging area on Dark Hollow Road. The trees were filled with crows and starlings and other black-eyed night birds who watched with ironic amusement as the men looked for what wasn’t there.
Hours hobbled by like cripples and at times the cool October sun seemed frozen into the hard surface of the sky. At the van of one long arm of the search, Detective Vince LaMastra stalked with hungry eyes, an acid stomach, and a fury that had nowhere to go but inside. He had his big shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm and he wanted to use it on that cop-killing bastard, but by three that afternoon he knew in his heart that the gun wasn’t going to be anything other than dead weight.
His team made it all the way to the Passion Pit, a flat piece of ground at the top of a steep pitch that tumbled down into the shadows of Dark Hollow. It would be time-consuming and dangerous to climb down that hill all the way to the cleft formed by the feet of three mountains, and LaMastra knew he didn’t have enough daylight for that. If Boyd had gone down there, they’d never catch him before sunset, and after dark one man could elude a thousand in that dense warren of twisted gullies, streams, and bogs. If they came back tomorrow to give it a shot they’d need rappelling gear, but by then the trail would be as dead as Jimmy Castle and Nels Cowan.
Standing on the lip of the pitch, LaMastra stared down into the shadows, feeling empty and on edge. He did not notice that all of the trees around him with filled with crows, each of them watching him with bottomless black eyes.
Back at the staging area, Frank Ferro paced slowly back and forth, hands jammed deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched against the deepening cold, thoughts blacker than they had ever been. Ferro knew that he was something of a control freak. Not really a type-A personality, but close enough. He liked answers, he liked patterns, and he liked cases that stayed within the boundaries of police work. Even when he failed to close a case, his world was balanced on the fact that it was all cops and robbers and sometimes the robbers won. This case, though, seemed to be outside of those boundaries. Vince had put his finger on it earlier when he said that the case was getting away from them. Maybe it already was. He didn’t feel that he was in charge of it in any useful way, but he wasn’t blasting himself for it because he truly felt that this case would have gotten away from anyone. It was that kind of case. Outside of all normality, beyond cops and robbers.
He tugged his cell phone out of his pocket and tried for the twentieth time that day to get hold of Mayor Terry Wolfe, but there was still no joy. Annoyed, he jammed the phone back into his pocket as he looked out over the sea of waving corn that was stirred by a piercing breeze out of the north. Night was coming on and Ferro didn’t like the feel of it.
He thought about that feeling, trying to pick it apart. Ferro was never a deeply emotional person, and certainly not one prone to romantic fancies, either in thought or action, so when he realized that he didn’t like the feel of the coming night, he felt a tickle of self-disgust. Or tried to but no amount of personal recrimination would make the feeling go away as he looked out over the corn to the forests beyond. He wanted LaMastra and the others to stop, to turn back, to leave those ugly woods.
“You’re a fool,” he said aloud, sneering at his feelings.
A minute later, though, he used the powerful satellite phone. “Vince? You got anything?”
“Not a goddamn thing, Frank. Nothing, not even a footprint.”
“I heard from the lab and they matched the shoe impressions they took this morning to the casts they took from around Ruger’s car. Definitely Boyd.”
“Shit,” LaMastra swore. “What about those teeth marks, though? Don’t tell me Boyd’s walking around wearing a set of dog dentures.”
“No word from Dr. Weinstock yet. The only new intel I have is that, teeth or no, Boyd is our man to about a ninety-nine percent degree of certainty.”
“Still makes no friggin’ sense, Frank…but between you and me, if I saw Boyd right this minute I don’t think I’d be wasting time reading him his rights. There’s a lot of places out here to bury a—”
Ferro cut him off. “Look, Vince, it’s getting late. Let’s call it. Bring everyone back.”
There was silence on the other end for a moment and Ferro thought his partner was going to argue, but LaMastra just said, “Yeah, okay.”
It took an hour for all of the police and the hunters to come back. One tracker, leading a pair of setters on leashes, came stumping out of the woods past large mounds of dirt torn up by Henry Guthrie’s foreman in order to sink a new irrigation pipeline. The dirt stood eight feet high, like a small mountain range, and as the tracker past it his two dogs suddenly jerked away from the excavation. The dogs didn’t bark, but they moved sharply and nearly pulled the tracker off his feet. The tracker yanked back on the leashes but couldn’t get the dogs to walk in a straight line past the dirt and had to let himself be dragged in an arc that went forty feet clear of the nearest mound.
He frowned at the way the dogs were moving and sniffed the air to see if there was skunk on the breeze, but the air just smelled of ozone and wet earth. Had the dogs barked or been more visibly agitated, the tracker would have investigated the mounds, because the dogs knew the scent and would certainly have barked at even the faintest trace of their prey, but these dogs just wanted to move on and move away. That sent a different message to the tracker. Not prey, but something the dogs didn’t like. Dogs liked prey, and this didn’t look like that, so none of his alarm bells really went off. The day was old, the dogs were tired, and maybe there was a skunk hunkered down in the corn poised to spray. He didn’t feel like going through all that shit tonight and soon forgot about it. The last of the men passed by, and within minutes even the sound of them moving through the corn to the staging area had faded to a whisper and finally died. Silence settled like dew over the excavation.
An hour passed, and nothing moved. Full dark came on, sliding in tidal waves of shadows across the seas of corn, washing up against the wall of pines. Stars ignited coldly overhead, and there was the faint threat of moonlight far away to the east.