"Charlie, come!" Magozzi slapped his thigh.
Charlie looked up, then back down at whatever treasure he'd been examining, then snatched it up in his jaws and raced toward Magozzi and dropped it at his feet.
Magozzi picked up a battered, filthy, purple high-top tennis shoe and held it with two fingers. Christ. All hell was breaking loose, and the dog wanted to play fetch with a piece of someone's discarded trash. He heard Halloran whisper, "Oh, shit," and turned to look at him. The man was staring at the shoe, looking like he was about to double over.
"That's Sharon's."
Magozzi looked at what he was holding. "It's a shoe. It could belong to anyone. It could have been here for months."
Halloran was shaking his head back and forth. "It's a Converse. Lavender high-top. They stopped making them years ago. Sharon loved those stupid, ugly shoes. It was one of the first things she asked me to bring from her place when she was in the hospital in Minneapolis."
Magozzi looked into the shoe and felt his stomach turn. There was blood in there. "Shit," he murmured, glancing up as Charlie raced away. He called after him, but the dog ignored him and just pressed his nose down hard on the tar and started trotting, the dog who was afraid of anything and everything, who hid between Grace's legs when toddlers on tricycles approached, and there he was, weaving past fire engines and stepping over hoses, dodging scary, shouting men in big yellow coats, oblivious to everything except the twin streams of air and scent going in and out of his nostrils.
"Goddamnit!" Harley shouted from inside the rig, banging his hand on the wheel. "Roadrunner! Get your ass up here and get that dog!"
Roadrunner came racing up from the back, clutching a forgotten piece of paper in his hand, and jumped clear of the narrow steps instead of trying to negotiate them in his size-twelves. Gino was right behind him, both of them hurrying to catch up to Magozzi and Halloran, four grown men chasing a mangy mongrel down a road while the world was burning.
Harley and Bonar were in the RV, staring at the spectacle in disbelief.
"What the hell?" Bonar said.
"It's Grace's dog," Harley explained. "Anything happens to that dog, she'll kill us all." He moved the rig forward slowly, easing past the two fire trucks while Bonar held his breath, waiting for the sound of metal screeching against metal. A hundred yards farther, and Harley stopped to pick up the men. It had taken the dog less than a minute to leave them far behind.
"What the hell got into him?" Bonar asked when the others were back inside, panting and sweating.
Magozzi nodded at where Halloran was clutching a filthy shoe against his chest. "Charlie found that. Halloran says it belongs to Sharon."
Bonar looked at it more closely, and his face fell. "Oh my God."
Gino was banging on the back of the driver's seat. "Goddamn, that dog is a friggin' genius. I swear to God he's tracking, and there's only one thing in the world that dog would be interested in finding, and that's Grace MacBride."
Roadrunner was staring out the big front window as Harley eased the RV forward to keep pace with the dog. Charlie was moving at a dead run, covering ground at an astounding pace for a dog who sat upright in chairs and took his meals at the table like any other fat, slow human being.
Gino was bent over, still breathing hard, waiting for the heart attack. "That dog nearly killed me. How far has he gone?"
"Over a mile-maybe two."
"Jesus, he's fast."
Roadrunner caught his breath when Charlie made an abrupt right onto a narrow dirt road.
"Harley," he whispered. "I know where he's going. And you gotta catch him. He's got another three miles to go, and he'll be dead by then."
"Three miles to where?"
"I just pulled up an old deed on one of those pieces of property Hemmer owns. It has a building on it, and it's less than five miles from Four Corners."
IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for Grace to decide that this overgrown field was deserted, and that all the cars parked in the high grass were empty. There were two doors accessing the corrugated steel building-a large, rolling one for heavy farm equipment, and a smaller, man-sized door next to it. Both were chained and padlocked from the outside.
"Stay on her; stay down!" she'd commanded Annie when her friend had tumbled out of the car onto the ground next to Sharon, and Annie had done what Annie always did best. . , wrapped her arms around Sharon and held her still, kept her safe, just as she had held Grace on a few occasions, back in the days when she was the strong one.
While Annie and Sharon lay there next to what had once been Deputy Douglas Lee's patrol car, Grace did what had to be done. She crawled out the back door, around to the front, and pulled the man who had called himself Deputy David Diebel off the console so she could get to the radio and computer. The computer didn't work, and no one answered her desperate radio calls.
"He was telling the truth about the dead zones," Sharon finally called up from where she lay in the comfort of Annie's arms. Except for the few times that Halloran had touched her, each erotic memory seared in her mind, she hadn't felt genuine caring from another human being in years. Annie had been holding her close-probably to keep her still and silent-but the effect was identical to when her mother had held her as a child, chasing away the demons of the night. Mute tears leaked out of her brown eyes and onto Annie's plump forearm.
While Sharon was sitting up, wiping the embarrassing tears from her cheeks, Grace was wiping blood from her fingers. The radio had been covered with it. She looked up toward the building and wondered if Diebel had been telling the truth about the landline inside. "I'm going to try shooting off one of those padlocks."
"There should be bolt cutters in the trunk of the patrol."
Grace looked at Sharon, a little surprised by the strength she heard in her voice. "You okay?"
Sharon was already on her feet, collecting her weapon from where it had fallen in the grass beside her. "Better than that. I'm pissed." She extended a hand to Annie to help her up, then went to the car, reached into the front seat, and popped the trunk without glancing at the body a few inches from her arm, without even letting her brain acknowledge that it was there. She wiped her hand on her slacks when she was finished, but she never looked at what she was wiping off. Grace and Annie found the bolt cutters in the trunk, then the three of them moved toward the steel building together.
The inside was pitch-black and dead silent, except for a low, distant hum that they couldn't identify. Grace wished for the flashlight, wondered where she had dropped it. She found a bank of electrical switches on the wall and started flipping them up. The annoying buzz of a hundred fluorescents Bickering to life overhead, lighting the enormous space, ended the silence.
The women just stood and stared.
Seven enormous tanker trucks were neatly parked in a row facing the big rolling door. "Good Health Dairies" was emblazoned in bright blue across their silvery skin.
"Funny place to keep milk trucks," Sharon murmured.
Annie was frowning. "I thought milk trucks were those cute little white vans with the cute little bottles jangling inside."
"These are the bulk carriers. They travel from farm to farm to pick up raw milk and transport it to the dairy . . , oh, shit. Do you think these are the trucks?"
Grace looked at the lumbering, innocent-looking things with their happy blue lettering, thinking what better way to transport something lethal without detection? She pushed the thought to the back of her mind and turned away.
An elaborate computer setup on a desk against the far wall explained the humming sound. She couldn't see the phone but guessed it had to be there. By the time Annie and Sharon joined her, she had tracked the single phone line to the back of the computer and nowhere else.