The enormity of it all swept over us while we waited for the helicopters to come back.
Better, Nathan had said. Just like that snake Mingo. They hadn’t been sterilizing these little girls at that path lab-they’d been harvesting organs. Very fresh pediatric organs. That’s what had been going overseas. Coolers filled with body parts. Couriered to an airport by one of Mingo’s deputies, probably.
Then it occurred to me that if this story got out, Grinny would absolutely be forced to kill the remaining children. Once the swarm began here, Carrie and I would be wrapped up in it for a few days at least. I made a decision not to let that happen. I told Carrie that I was going to go back down to the glass-hole site and check on Nathan and the dogs. I asked her to remain at the camp to greet King and his people and to see if she could find a landing site. The radio blasted into life, and while Carrie was dealing with the first wave of questions from King, the mutts and I slipped out of camp.
I went back down to the tube. Nathan was still tied to the tree, and it didn’t look like he’d made any efforts to get himself untied. He was exhausted from his excursions on the rope. His hands were still purple, he was having trouble breathing after being semi-crucified like that, and, more important, I think he’d given up. If there had been any more black hats up there, they’d probably melted away into the hills once all the shooting started. Even so, I wrapped a canvas bag around Nathan’s head so he couldn’t see, retrieved my rifle and the shepherds, and then quietly took the dogs around the crater lake the long way as a convoy of helicopters appeared up on the ridgeline.
I hated to just abandon Carrie to the arrival of the authorities, but she’d be the more helpful of the two of us, familiar as she was with SBI forensic and scene procedures. She knew as much as I did about what had happened there and would be more than able to describe Nathan’s revelations. I, on the other hand, had zero official standing and, therefore, none of the legal inhibitions that would constrain the SBI when they finally swung into motion against Grinny Creigh.
Besides, I really, really wanted to get that woman. Mingo and Nathan had been players in their grisly business, but the real monster in the cave had always been that supremely evil old woman. They’d get Nathan into a courtroom, but I knew Grinny would die before she ever let that happen to her. I didn’t think she’d run, either. For one, it would be physically difficult for a woman that fat to move fast. Two, these were her hills, her territory, her fiefdom. She would defend it to the end. That was fine by me. And by not telling Carrie what I was up to, I reasoned, all she could honestly say to the rest of the cops was that she didn’t know where the hell I was. In a sense, I was doing her a favor. Sounded good, anyway.
“C’mon, mutts,” I told the shepherds. “We have to get to that truck before it gets really dark.” And before Carrie finds out we’ve bugged out and comes down to fang our collective asses, I thought.
It took the same two hours going down as it did coming up. Going down was still harder on the leg bones than climbing. The shepherds ranged ahead most of the time except for when we had to traverse some thick scrubland, and then I called them in as protection against any lurking Creigh-dogs. Which is why they didn’t spot the man sitting on the front bumper of my Suburban smoking a cigarette as we walked up to the parked vehicles. I was unlimbering the rifle when I recognized Baby Greenberg. He flipped the butt out onto the ground and got up as we approached.
“So, sport, who won the war up there?” he asked. The dogs greeted him warily-they didn’t like surprises or cigarettes.
“How’d you find us?” I asked.
He grinned, knelt down, and pulled the tracking transmitter from under the front wheel well. “Would you believe, federal voodoo?” he said. “For your own safety, you understand.” He put the thing back on the frame and stood up, dusting off his hands. “And where’s the rest of’us’?”
I put my stuff in the back and then sat down on the back bumper to tell him what had happened up there, and what we’d learned from Nathan about their child-trafficking business. I’d expected complete shock, but this only seemed to fulfill his worst expectations for the mountain criminal crowd.
“Parts? Human parts? From kids? A new low.”
I nodded. It was getting dark, and I was suddenly tired. We could hear the drone of another helicopter going over the ridge. I knew I needed to beat feet if we had any chance at all of saving the rest of the kids.
“There should be a fresh one in that glass hole or lava tube, whatever you want to call it,” I said. “Carrie’s up there leading the SBI through it. Assuming that they can retrieve a child’s body from that formation, and that Nathan is ready to come clean, they’ll finally have some physical evidence.”
“A body in something like that might never be found,” he said. “You know-bodies sink initially and then gas up a couple days later. But if that tube goes way down, it may not be possible to get it back. From what you’re saying, that thing could be several hundred feet deep.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and explained about the light coming in from the main lake. “But it will take time and some specialized equipment, which is why I cut loose from the goat-grab up there.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I’m headed for Grinny Creigh’s. There are five more kids still adrift, if Nathan was telling the truth.”
“Why not wait for the cavalry?”
“Same reason as last time-she hears Nathan’s in custody, she has to make those children disappear, and I’m betting they have other places where they can make that happen. Or she might run.”
He shook his head. “She’ll never run. Never in a million years.”
“Well, good, then I look forward to getting up with her,” I said.
He thought about that for a moment. “Want some backup?” he said finally.
“Where’s your crew?” I asked.
“I’m solo on this,” he said. “We’re not supposed to know you anymore, so I can’t involve my guys. They brought me up here when I found out that Mose had taken you into the hills. I actually came up to talk you guys into leaving this mess alone, but… kids?”
“We tried to tell people,” I said. “I’m not especially comforted by my government’s reluctance to jump into this with both feet. And from what Carrie found out, the federal response is being dictated more by turf boundaries than any sense of real urgency.”
“I know, I know,” he said, kicking a clump of grass. “I talked to my boss. At length. But he’s a fucking wimp. Keeps saying: Where’s the drug-enforcement angle in this? If she’s kidnapping children, then call Charlotte. If she’s moving meth, go catch her at it.”
It was my turn to think. Then I had an idea. “I was told there’s a hundred pounds of crystal meth in the escape tunnel behind the Creigh cabin.”
He looked over at me with visible skepticism. “Told? By whom?”
“Can’t say,” I said. “Have to protect my sources. But it’s a hundred pounds, all wrapped up for sale in the big city. Sounds like she’s moving meth to me.”
“That’s laughably weak,” he said. “My boss would throw you out of his office for bullshit like that. For bullshit less than that. Nobody wraps meth.”
“But your boss is a wimp,” I pointed out.
“Why, yes, he is,” Baby said.
“So: You want to go along? Explore this anonymous hot tip? Make it official?”
“Duty calls,” he said.
23
It was close to eleven that night when we reached the north end of that ridge-line crack above the Creigh place. Our vehicles back on the mountain had apparently not been disturbed, so I’d left a note for Carrie saying I was going to Grinny’s to find the missing kids. I left out any mention of Greenberg’s participation. I was counting on their not going back to retrieve Mose’s vehicle until they’d settled the various scenes up on the mountain, because once they did, and found the note, they’d have people all over Grinny’s. I wanted to have our one shot before that happened. I thought Baby was right: She’d corner up and fight, not run.