There was no Mary Ellen Goode.
Cam swore silently.
Two members of the team went in, being careful not to disturb any of the items lying around the floor. They checked the tent, where they found a mummy-style sleeping bag, an old duffel bag, and several scraps of duct tape. After a quick initial exploration, they backed out to wait for the CSI people. Cam could only shake his head in total frustration. Where the hell was Mary Ellen?
“From all appearances,” the team leader said, “there was someone being held hostage in this thing. But not now.”
“Any signs of violence?” the sheriff asked.
“No visible bloodstains,” the lieutenant replied. “CSI will have to confirm that. That chair doesn’t smell so good, though.”
“Did you see a cell phone in there?” Cam asked. The lieutenant was about to answer when a chirping noise started up inside the tent.
On the third ring, they all heard the trailer’s generator ramp up. Red and green lights blinked on across the control panel of the welding machine. Cam and the sheriff exchanged glances and then the sheriff yelled for everyone to back out. The SWAT guys jumped down out of the trailer and joined the general exodus. The generator suddenly went to very high rpm as they swarmed back through the big hole in the chain-link fence. Cam and the sheriff were the last to get through the hole, and as they turned to watch, the chair turned into one massive arc as current flowed through wires attached to the the welding machine. With no one in the chair, its metal arms and legs dissolved in a blazing ball of directcurrent lightning, blinding all the cops as they stared in fascination. Then there was a deep red glare at the deep end of the trailer and then it blew up in one enormous fireball, blasting bits of metal, tires, and decking all over the parking lot. The two trailers on either side caught fire from the blast, and half the SWAT cops found themselves sitting on the ground, their ears ringing despite their helmets. Cam had turned away from the searing light and was thus standing partially behind the sheriff when the trailer went up. When he regained his balance and turned back around, the sheriff was sitting on the grass, looking curiously at a foot-long wooden shard that was sticking into his upper chest.
“Medic!” Cam shouted as he knelt down beside the sheriff. His ears were ringing from the blast and he couldn’t be sure he’d made himself heard. The sheriff was bleeding, although not very much. He had been wearing his protective vest, but the piece of wood had gone right through him. The part of it sticking out of his back was blackly slick in the harsh light of the portable spots. Bobby Lee coughed weakly and Cam had to hold him upright as he swayed dangerously.
The team’s medic came on the run, saw the shard, and called for an ALS ambulance. Cam backed away as a second medic knelt down and helped keep the sheriff upright. Cam could see that there were other SWAT team members down, but they were all in full body armor and none of them looked to be seriously injured. Most were being tended by other members of the team. The ambulance came through the perimeter, its lights flashing. A heavy pall of bomb smoke lay over the parking lot, and Cam was pulled back to the sights and sounds of Annie Bellamy’s yard. It even smelled the same. C-4 again, he thought. So these bastards never hurt other cops, huh?
Mike Pierce came over and watched with Cam as the medics loaded Bobby Lee onto a gurney and then pulled it through the fence to the meat wagon. While some of the cops were spraying the burning tires of the nearby trailers with fire extinguishers, other SWAT team members were standing around the back of the ambulance, saying encouraging things to the sheriff, which meant that he was still conscious.
“That looked bad,” Pierce said.
“It was high up,” Cam said. “Maybe clipped a lung, but there wasn’t much bleeding.”
“Not outside anyway,” Pierce said, confirming what Cam had been thinking.
“This changes the equation,” Cam said.
“We sure that ranger wasn’t in there?”
Cam nodded. “It was empty, but somehow they knew the trailer had been opened up. Either they had someone here or it was electronic.”
“They told you to come alone. This wasn’t aimed at the SWAT guys.”
“They had to have known we’d bring a crowd eventually,” Cam said. “They might have expected I’d open the trailer, but they must have figured there’d be backup.”
“Sheriff’s Office bad guys would know,” Pierce said. “Federal bad guys might not.”
“And where’s Mary Ellen Goode?”
Several of the SWAT guys were looking up at something. Cam did the same and saw a small airplane with an oversized Perspex bubble cockpit and ridiculously long wings swoop low overhead.
“ Owl says something blew up,” the controller announced in a dry tone.
“Go, Owl, ” Cam said glumly.
64
Cam drove down his street at 2:30 A.M. He slowed as he drove under the lone streetlight in the cul-de-sac. He was bone-tired, still sore from his adventures in the river, and hugely disappointed at not finding Mary Ellen Goode. He’d been on the phone with Ranger Marshall after getting back to Sheriff’s Office headquarters, and it had not been a pleasant conversation. Apparently everyone up in Carrigan County would be calling for his head.
Me, too, he thought as he pulled up into his driveway. His ears were still ringing. The house was dark, and the Leyland cypress trees were swaying gently in the wind. The word from the hospital in Triboro was “satisfactory.” The sheriff had been the only serious casualty. The shard hadn’t severed any major arteries but it had not been a clean wound, and infection was a major concern now. He scanned the front of the house but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He hit the remote for the garage door, but nothing happened. He hit it again. Nothing.
He parked in the driveway and turned off the engine. The streetlight was on, so there should be power in the house. And where were the dogs? They would ordinarily have heard the car, come through the dog door, and run around to the fence in the side yard. No dogs. He was tempted to blow the horn to see what would happen. He hit the remote again, but the door continued to ignore its signals. He checked the little red LED to see if it came on when he pressed the button. It did, so the remote was working.
He unholstered the Sig. 45 and got out. Then he got back in and called the ops center to request that a cruiser be dispatched to his house. “Ten minutes,” the operator said. Decision time: He could take a quick look in and around the house, or wait for the cruiser. No-brainer. Wait for the deputies.
Two units showed up in six minutes, and the two deputies and Cam went into the house together. The lights worked normally inside, but the dogs were nowhere to be found. The deputies accompanied Cam into every room and the garage. They looked for signs of explosive or incendiary devices, and they checked the windows and doors for evidence of tampering, but everything appeared to be normal. They made a sweep of the backyard, going all the way down to the creek, and then made a quick, if somewhat creepy, walk through the cypress groves on either side of the house.
Embarrassed, Cam sent them away forty minutes later. He knew he’d done the right thing, but still, the expressions on their faces had told a story. The only thing still very much out of order was the fact that the dogs were gone. They never roamed. The wind was steady now and the moonlight was dimming as the sky filled with low-hanging gray-white clouds. It was unseasonably warm. So where were they? He got one of his big flashlights and went back down to the creek line again, checking for signs that they’d gone under the old fence. And then he found the gate open.