“Probably, but I’ve also figured out a small variation on the whole plan.”
“What’s that?” Rae asked.
“I’m going to tell these sheriffs and their deputies that the reason this is so important is, we believe somebody tried to assassinate Senator Smalls, and actually did murder his friend,” Lucas said. “That this isn’t some fishing expedition looking for a minnow. And it might be something they’d like to get credit for.”
Rae stopped chewing on her strip of bacon. “Lucas, that’ll wind up in the newspapers, sooner or later. Or on TV.”
Lucas nodded. “For sure. Because if one of the sheriffs doesn’t leak it, I will.”
—
BACK AT THE HOTEL,Bob and Rae hauled their equipment bags down to their rented Tahoe, Lucas rolled out his Evoque, and at ten o’clock, dressed in jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and boots, on a day that was already sweating heavily, with thunderheads building to the southwest, they took off for West Virginia.
Included in the equipment that the two marshals had brought were radios with headsets so they wouldn’t have to talk on cell phones. Lucas set the pace, and they rolled west on I-66 and, at ten minutes to twelve, arrived in the small town of Strasburg, Virginia. Since everyone involved was a cop, they’d agreed to rendezvous at a convenience store that also sold Dunkin’ Donuts; when they arrived, the parking lot looked like a policeconvention, with seven sheriff’s cars scattered around the blacktop. The store wasn’t big enough to hold all the cops, so they got ice-cream cones and donuts and sacks of potato chips and gathered in the shade of an ash tree to talk.
Lucas introduced himself, Bob, and Rae. The sheriffs said that they already had deputies out looking, but without any luck at that point.
Lucas said, “Look, we appreciate your help. This is important: we have developed some evidence, which I’m not allowed to talk about, that this so-called accident was an assassination attempt aimed at Senator Smalls. The killers wound up murdering an innocent woman, but we believe she was what you call collateral damage.”
They seemed skeptical. One deputy said, “You know how many trees we have in West Virginia? If somebody said a billion, I’d say that’s probably low. Might be that many downed tree trunks, too.”
Bob jumped in. “I know what you’re thinking, that this sounds like some kind of federal horseshit, but I promise you it’s not. We’re not fancy federal cops. We’re street guys; we make our living kicking down doors and kinda, you know, looking for trees. This might be the most important case we’ll ever work on—and that you’ll ever work on. Even if you have your doubts, I hope you’ll work it hard.”
Rae: “Lucas and Bob and I will all be out there, combing through the woods, right along with y’all. If we find what we’re looking for, we’ll have hard proof that this was murder.”
After some more back-and-forth, and the purchase of massive numbers of additional donuts, Cokes, Diet Cokes, a couple of Pepsis, and water, the crowd broke up, still with some grumbling.
Lucas, Bob, and Rae caucused before they left, Lucas asking, “What do you think?”
“They’ll look,” Bob said. “At least for today. Maybe tomorrow. Not much longer, though. It’s too goddamn hot out there.”
Rae touched Lucas’s arm, and said, “Don’t get your hopes up, big guy. This is a needle in a haystack.”
—
LUCAS EFFUSIVELY THANKEDall three sheriffs before they left, including the two from Virginia, but believed that the tree trunks, if they were to be found, would be in West Virginia. “They wouldn’t have gone far before they got rid of them. All they needed to do was get caught in somebody’s headlights and they’d be dealing with witnesses.”
Bob said, “They could have pulled over one minute after the accident, taken the trees, the lattice, whatever, taken it apart, thrown the trees in the bed of the truck, and taken them to a landfill somewhere.”
Lucas was shaking his head. “No. When they made the lattice, they would have wanted to protect the entire length of the truck. I looked up the F-250, their model: it’s almost twenty-one feet long. But they’ve got a short bed, and the cargo box is only like six feet nine inches long. If they put twenty-one-foot logs in a six-foot box, they’d have a fifteen-foot overhang. That’d be as noticeable as hanging them off the side.”
“Then let’s go find the needle,” Bob said.
—
THEY STARTEDwhere the accident took place, looking down the steep slope at the river below. Rae said, “Think about it: theaccident happens, do they watch to make sure they go over the cliff or do they keep going?”
“For one reason or another, they apparently kept going,” Lucas said. “Porter told me that he was afraid they’d come down the hill and finish them off, so he got a gun out of the back and hid out... nobody came down, and he never saw the truck again or even its lights.”
Rae: “How far would they drive before they pulled over? They’d have to be thinking that there might be a witness, so it wouldn’t be in the first two minutes they’d actually want to, you know, get away. Get out of sight.”
“Look for places they could do that,” Lucas said.
—
BOB AND RAE LED,with the Tahoe’s wheels edging the road, Rae hanging out the window as Bob drove. Lucas edged the wheels of the Evoque off the other side of the road, looking in the ditches for any changes in the foliage. The ditch on his side was shallow, and there were occasional ripples in the weeds, but he saw nothing that looked suspicious. The going was brutally slow and hot, and Lucas had one arm hung out the window, the better to get his head out where he could see; by the end of the day, he thought, he’d be bruised from his armpit to his elbow.
When they got to the main intersection leading out, they saw a sheriff’s car crawling toward them. They stopped to talk, and the deputy said he’d followed the road four miles out, both sides of it, and had seen nothing. “There were some woodlots back there, right along the road. I got out and looked, but there were only a couple of spurs back into the trees. I didn’t see anything fresh.”
