“Nothing behind us,” Lucas said. “So we go east? You’re welcome to track along with us.”
“More trees that way,” the deputy said. “We’ll be taking it slow.”
They again took it slowly, four or five miles an hour, getting out to walk in some spots. They had two false alarms but never did find anything good.
But another deputy did.
Her name was Marlys Weaver, and she found the logs fifty feet up a remote forest road, a place called South Branch Hills Drive, which crossed the mountains toward Virginia.
Lucas took the call from the sheriff on his cell phone. “Ol’ Marlys says she’s found them. I personally didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in hell, but Marlys always knows what she’s talking about.”
“How do we get there?” Lucas asked.
—
LUCAS AND BOB AND RAE,in their two trucks, followed the sheriff’s deputy cross-country, the deputy playing with his lights and siren though they rarely saw another car. Running hard on poor roads, they got to Marlys Weaver in twenty minutes.
When they came up to Weaver’s patrol car—and saw the sheriff’s car coming in from the other direction—Lucas piled out of the Evoque and joined Bob and Rae, and Bob said, “Man, we should have looked here first. If I was going to find a spot...”
They were fifteen miles from the accident scene, on a lightly used road that ran east up a shallow valley toward the top of the mountain ridge, and down the other side. On the right side of the road, a track cut off to the south, up the wall of the valley.The deputy, Weaver, was standing a hundred feet up the track and twenty or thirty feet above them. She shouted, “Don’t let anybody drive up. We have some tire tracks.”
Rae said, “No fuckin’ way,” and the sheriff came up, and Lucas, Bob, Rae, the sheriff, and the deputy who’d been working with them all walked up the middle of the track to Weaver. She was a stout young woman with short hair and glasses, dark patches of sweat at the armpits of her black-and-green uniform. As they left the road, she shouted again, “Watch your ankles. I might’ve kicked a copperhead out of there.”
“Oh, that’s good,” the sheriff muttered. He was a broad, anxious-looking man with a red face and redder nose. “Somebody else walk ahead of me.”
“The first walker only scares them,” Rae said. “They strike at the second one in line.”
“Good to know, young lady,” the sheriff said. “Two of you walk in front of me.”
—
THE TRACKhad no apparent reason for its existence. It ran a hundred yards up the hill and then simply petered out. “There’s an illegal dump back there, doesn’t get used too much,” Weaver explained, pointing on up the hill. “I didn’t see the logs when I walked up, spotted them on the way back down. Right over here.”
The track itself ran up a sloping spine, which rolled off to each side. To the west of the road, a patch of raspberries spread across the hillside. Weaver led them down a foot-wide track, and there, fifteen feet into the berry patch, were four logs, each at least twenty feet long and five or six inches in diameter.
“Got silver car paint on them.” She looked at Lucas. “You said that Caddy was silver, sir...”
“That’s right,” Lucas said. He knelt by the logs, found scrapes of silver paint, and Bob, working beside him, said, “Look here.”
Lucas looked, and Bob pointed at cuts that went horizontally around the logs. “That’s where they put the chains, or the ropes, to tie them together.”
Lucas looked at Weaver. “Great job. Great job. You said there were tracks?”
“Yes, sir. Only fresh ones up here and only about a foot long, but somebody ran right up into some softer dirt here.”
She pointed, and all of them crawled out of the raspberry patch to look. The track wasn’t entirely clean: weeds grew up out of the tread marks, but they were clear enough if you looked closely. The sheriff said, “Might have some more over here...” and they found another six inches of similar track. “Need to check the whole road out,” the sheriff said.
Lucas: “I’ve got to make a phone call. Let’s stay away from the logs completely, and out of that raspberry patch, in case they left behind some DNA. And let’s try to stay away from snakes but work that track, see if we find more treads, coming or going. They must have turned around up here somewhere.”
—
BOB, RAE, AND THE SHERIFFgot everybody organized as more deputies rolled in, while Lucas got on his phone and called Carl Armstrong.
“Guess where I’m at,” he said, when Armstrong got on the phone.
“Minnesota? You went home?”
“I’m on a mountain road here in West Virginia. We found the logs, with silver paint. We’ve got treads. We need an accident investigator.” He looked up at a growing thunderhead to the southwest. “We need him quick in case it rains.”
