"What do you think?" Highsmith asked.
"Let's walk along the fence to see if there's another entrance. There's no sign she came in here."
"These are new shoes," Highsmith complained.
Page started off along the periphery without answering. The ground had been stripped bare of grass during construction. Page felt the mud oozing around his shoes.
He peered through the fence as he walked, occasionally shining his flashlight inside the site. Most of the land was empty and flat where the bulldozers had done their work.
"Al, bring your- light here," Highsmith shouted.
He was pointing at a section of fence that had been cut and folded back.
Page ran over. He turned away for a second and clutched his collar closer to his neck.
"Look at this," Page said. He was standing under an ancient oak tree pointing the flashlight beam toward the ground. Tire tracks had gouged out the ground where they were standing. The canopy formed by the leaves covered the tracks. Page and Highsmith followed them away from the fence.
"Someone drove off the road across the field in this mud," Page said.
"Not necessarily tonight, though."
The tracks stopped at the street and disappeared.
The rain would have washed away the mud from the asphalt.
"I think the driver backed up to the fence, Al.
There's no sign that he turned around."
"Why back up? Why drive over to the fence at all and risk getting stuck in the mud?"
"What's in the back of a car?"
Page nodded, imagining Nancy Gordon folded in the confined space of a car trunk.
"Let's go," he said, heading back toward the hole in the fence. In his heart, Page knew she was down there, buried in the soft earth.
Highsmith followed him through. As he ducked, he snagged his coat on a jagged piece of wire. By the time he freed himself, Page was well ahead, obscured by the darkness, only the wavering beam of the flashlight showing his location.
"Do you see any tracks?" Highsmith asked when he caught up.
"Look out!" Page cried, grabbing Highsmith by his coat. Highsmith pulled up. Page shone his light down.
They were on the edge of a deep pit that had been gouged out of the earth for a foundation. Muddy walls sloped down toward the bottom, which was lost in darkness. Suddenly the moon appeared, bathing the bottom of the pit in a pale glow. The uneven surface cast shadows over rocks and mounds of dirt.
"I'm going down," Page said, as he went over the rim. He edged along the wall of the pit sideways, leaning into the slope and digging in with the sides of his shoes.
Halfway down, he slipped to one knee and slid along the smooth mud, stopping his descent by grabbing a protruding root. The root had been severed by a bulldozer blade.
The end came free of the mud, but Page slowed enough to dig in and stop his slide.
"You okay?" Highsmith called into the wind.
"yeah. Randy, get down here. Someone's been digging recently."
Highsmith swore, then started edging down the slope. When he reached the bottom, Page was wandering slowly over the muddy ground, studying everything that entered the beam of his flashlight. The ground looked as if it had been turned over recently. He examined it as closely as he could in the dark.
The wind died suddenly and Page thought he heard a sound. Something slithering in the shadows just out of his line of sight. He tensed, trying to hear above the wind, peering helplessly into the darkness.
When he convinced himself he was the victim of his imagination, he turned around and shone the light near the base of a steel girder. Page straightened suddenly and took a step back, catching his heel on a timber half-concealed in the mud.
He stumbled and the flashlight fell, its I)earn fanning out over the rain-soaked earth, catching something white in the light. A rock or a paper cup. Page knelt quickly and recovered the flashlight. He walked over to the object and squatted next to it. His breath caught in his chest.
Protruding from the earth was a human hand.
The sun was just coming up when they dug the last body out of the ground. The horizon took on a scarlet tinge as two officers lifted the corpse onto a stretcher. Around them, other officers walked slowly over the muddy floor of the construction site in search of more graves, but the area had been scoured so thoroughly that no one expected to find one.
A prowl car perched on the edge of the pit. The door on the driver's side was open. Alan Page sat in the front seat with one foot on the ground, holding a paper cup filled with scalding, black coffee, trying not to think about Nancy Gordon and thinking of nothing else.
Page rested his head against the back of the seat. As the darkness retreated, the river began taking on dimension. Page watched the flat black ribbon turn liquid and turbulent in the red dawn. He believed Nancy Gordon was in the pit, buried under layers of mud. He wondered if there was something he could have done to save her.
He imagined Gordon's frustration and rage when she died at the hands of the man she had sworn to stop.
The rain had ended shortly after the first police car arrived. Ross Barrow took charge of the crime scene, after consulting with the lab techs about the best way to handle the evidence. Floodlights shone down on the workers from the rim of the pit. Designated search areas were fenced off with yellow tape. Sawhorses had been erected as barriers against the curious. As soon as Page was certain Barrow could get along without him, he and Highsmith had grabbed a quick dinner at a local restaurant. By the time they returned, Barrow had positively identified Wendy Reiser's body and an officer had located a second grave.
Through the windshield, Page watched Randy Highsmith trudge toward the car. He had been in the pit observing while Page took a break.
"That's the last one," Highsmith said.
"What have we got?"
"Four bodies and positive ids on Laura Farrar, Wendy Reiser and Victoria Miller."
"Were they killed like Patricia Cross?"
"I didn't look that closely, Al. To tell the truth, I almost lost it.
Dr. Gregg is down there. She can give you the straight scoop when she comes up."
Page nodded. He was used to dealing with the dead, but that didn't mean he liked looking at a corpse any more than Highsmith.
"What about the fourth woman?" Page asked hesitantly. "Does she match my description of Nancy Gordon?"
"It's not a woman, Al."
"what!"
"It's an adult male, also naked, and his face and fingertips were burned away with acid. We'll be lucky to identify him."
Page saw Ross Barrow slogging through the mud and got out of the car.
"You're not stopping, Ross'?" '-There's nothing more down there. You can look if you want."
"I was sure that Gordon… It doesn't make sense.
She wrote the address."
"Maybe she met someone here and left with them," Barrow suggested,
"We didn't find any footprints," Highsmith reminded him. "She may not have found a way in."
"Did you find anything down there that'll help us figure out who did this?"
"Not a thing, Al. I'm guessing all four were killed elsewhere and transported here."
"Why's that?"
"Some of the bodies are missing organs. We haven't found them or any pieces of bone or excess flesh. No one could clean the area that thoroughly."
"Do you think we have enough to arrest Darius?
Page asked Highsmith.
"Not without Gordon or some solid evidence from Hunter's Point."
"What if we don't find her?" Page asked anxiously.
"In a pinch, you could swear to what she told you.
We might get a warrant out of a judge with that. She's a cop. She'd be reliable. But, I don't know. With something like this, we shouldn't rush."
"And we don't really have a solid connection between Darius and the victims," Barrow added. "Finding them at a site owned by Darius Construction doesn't Mean a thing. Especially when it's deserted and anyone could have gotten in."
"Do we know if Darius is Lake?" Page asked Barrow.