He shone his light across the creek, which at this point was no more than two feet wide, and saw some flattened grass on the other side and what looked like a trail going up the hill. The gate was normally locked with a double-end snap, which was now gone. So someone had let them out. Or had sneaked into his yard, discovered two big dogs, and let himself out in a big hurry. Pursued by the dogs? There was a faint chemical smell hovering down in the grass, despite the wind. Something in the creek? He sniffed hard, but he couldn’t place it. He called for them, but only the wind answered.
He went back to the house, aware that he was clearly silhouetted by the backyard spots as he walked up the lawn. Had the dogs gone on up into the Holcomb property? And if so, why? Looking for him maybe? Frick might do that, but Frack would stay behind and watch. And they would certainly come when called.
He yawned. He was exhausted. And yet, if his dogs were nearby and in trouble, he knew he’d never sleep. He went back into the house, got his gear, turned out the spots on the back deck, and went down to the creek. One pass, he promised himself. I’ll go up the hill, look around the buildings, then come back. Tomorrow is another day-or rather, today is. I’ve got bigger problems than two missing dogs.
Get some backup, he told himself as he went through the gate, but then he remembered the looks the two deputies had exchanged. Not again, and if they weren’t dog people, they wouldn’t be too happy at traipsing through the underbrush in search of his two runaways. The Holcomb place would be spooky by moonlight, but he and the mutts had been up there a hundred times before. He yawned again, then started out up the hill. He kept going, pretty much in a straight line. The farmhouse loomed up to his right, the barns and a topless silo to his left.
He checked the barns first, sliding a large wooden door to one side and scaring off an owl and some other unidentified nocturnal creatures. The place smelled of musty old hay, ancient grease, and decaying wood. Ghostly mantles of cobwebs swayed in the draft from the open door, but there were no other signs of life in the building. A piece of tin on the roof flapped gently in the wind. But no dogs. He looked into the empty concrete garage briefly, saw signs of a teenage love nest with all the appropriate graffiti, and then turned to the house itself.
There was plywood on the doors and first-floor windows, but it had been put up a long time ago and the local demon spawn had evidently been going inside the house, too, as some of the panels, warped and grayed by weather, were stuffed rather than nailed into the window embrasures. Cam had poked his nose in once several years ago, and said nose had advised him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to pursue his explorations. He didn’t really intend to go inside now, other than to call for the dogs. Even as he pulled one of the plywood panels aside, he knew that if the dogs were inside, they’d have been whining at the windows.
Once inside, his search was anticlimactic. An abandoned old house on a windy night should have been at least a little creepy, but with the smell of empty beer cans, rotting Sheetrock, human excrement, fast-food cartons, and mouse droppings, the place was mostly just annoying, even in the dark. He gave up and went home.
65
A week later, Cam found himself sitting in his office, realizing that his career as a police officer was all over but the shouting. His formal announcement that he wouldn’t testify had put the expected crimp in the vigilante investigation. The day after his dogs disappeared, he’d been called into a meeting with DA Klein and the grand jury foreperson. He’d told them then that in order to save a hostage from certain death, he’d made a deal with his own voice mail that he wouldn’t testify.
“So what?” Steven said. “She wasn’t there, so they didn’t keep their part of the deal. Why should you?”
“Because we still don’t have her back,” Cam replied, suppressing a desire to add a “duh” to that. He pointed out that Jay-Kay never had answered his question as to when they’d get Mary Ellen back, and logically, that wouldn’t happen until they knew he wasn’t going to testify.
“Are you trying to tell me that the Sheriff’s Office is just going to quit on this one? And even if you all are, you don’t really suppose the feds will just close the book, do you?”
“I can’t speak for the feds, counselor,” Cam said. “But we got our vigilante, didn’t we?”
“You mean Sergeant Cox?”
“Yes, Steven,” Cam said with a sigh. “I meant Sergeant Cox. And as for the feds, they now know that their fancy consultant was on the wrong side of this problem. And now she’s out of the picture.” Until their computers blow up, he thought, although he didn’t say it.
“We have that list. I’ll remind you that my office didn’t make any deals.”
“You go right ahead, Steven,” Cam said evenly. “But if we get Mary Ellen back in a body bag, that will be on your head, not mine. Plus, Jay-Kay was pretty clear that at least some of the so-called evidence she gave you was not everything it seemed.”
Klein, furious, had thrown him out of the office. Cam was sympathetic but not too worried. Much of the cell’s effectiveness had been that no one suspected they even existed. And the Sheriff’s Office had that list, too. Bobby Lee would work it one day, back-channel if he had to. But first they had to vet the whole thing, because the source of the list was, of course, Jay-Kay. MCAT’s efforts to track her down had come to nothing. She had disappeared, leaving behind her office and apartment complex in Charlotte, along with two IBM mainframes running diagnostics on each other with nothing else left in their vast memory banks but some transient electrons. A check of airlines and passport controls revealed no one by that name leaving the country. Her fancy car was gone, and the Sheriff’s Office dutifully had a warrant out for the car and its owner. The Bureau reported similar results, although they were a little vague as to precisely which strings they had been pulling to find her. But Cam well knew that if anyone wanted to go off the grid, that woman was more than qualified. She could as likely be in Indiana as back in India.
The sheriff was recovering but slowly. The doctors had beaten one infection but were now confronting another one, and the range of antibiotics was narrowing. Cam had been able to see him twice, and, if anything, he looked sicker the second time. With the sheriff out of action, Cam had become increasingly isolated within the Sheriff’s Office, especially after Steven had started running his mouth. He had a similar meeting with the federal authorities from Charlotte. They had most of the secondhand story, of course, but short of imprisoning Cam until he talked to them, the only physical evidence anyone had amounted to one dead minimart robber and bits of the homemade electric chair that had killed him, one dead wilderness guide and the head of the mountain lion that had killed him, one missing Sergeant Cox, the remains of one smashed-up vehicle grille, and bits and pieces of two bombs, one from Annie’s house and a second from the trucking terminal.
Cam’s bigger dilemma was how to reestablish his good reputation within the Sheriff’s Office in general. It didn’t take a genius to tell that a slow freeze-out was beginning, and this was reflected in the way other officers in the Sheriff’s Office were treating him. There’d been polite hellos, but increasingly the others evaded him: “Sorry, don’t have time to shoot the shit right now. Lots going on. You know how it is.” The members of the MCAT team had been individually detailed to various training and recertification courses, and there were rumors that the team was going to be broken up, due, somehow, to “budget constraints.” Rumors were spreading everywhere, and he desperately wanted to sit down with his contemporaries and tell them why he had recanted.