“I’m running out the door,” Armstrong said after Lucas told them where they were. “But it’ll be a couple of hours anyway.”
Armstrong told Lucas to get to the nearest store and buy plastic sheets—“garbage bags, anything, the bigger, the better”—to cover the tread marks and as much of the logs as possible.
Lucas told the sheriff what was needed, and one of the deputies’ cars went screaming away, lights and sirens running. “Back in twenty minutes if he doesn’t kill hisself,” the sheriff said. “Don’t think that cloud’ll hit us. Looks to me like it’ll slide off to the east.”
The deputy got back in half an hour with painter’s plastic drop cloths. They wrapped the logs and covered the tread marks they’d found. One of the deputies trenched around the treads to drain water away. With an extra sheet of plastic, and the smell of rain in their noses, they tented the wrapped logs and anchored the plastic with sticks from the surrounding timber.
Then the rain hit, a downpour that would have given Noah a hard time. They sat in their cars, running the air-conditioning and listening to music, flinching at the nearby thunder and the lightning that flickered through the woods. The rain lasted twenty minutes and rolled off to the northeast. The sheriff, getting out of his car into the last bit of drizzle, said, “Like I told you, it was sliding off to the east.”
“Too bad it wasn’t a direct hit,” Rae said. “Might of drowned the fuckin’ snakes.”
—
ARMSTRONG TOOKa bit longer than two hours to arrive. Lucas impatiently paced the road, calling him twice to make sure he hadn’t killed himself. Eventually, Lucas, Rae, Bob, and the sheriff went out to a country store that sold microwave bean burritos, the same store where the deputy had bought the drop cloths, and had a nasty lunch.
“You still gonna talk to the newspapers?” Rae asked.
She kept her voice down, and Bob had moved in to block the sheriff out of the quiet conversation; he was having a noisy campaign chat with the store owners anyway.
“I’ve got to talk to Porter’s top aide—she’s in on this and she probably has a link to somebody I could call. I’m thinking we should drop a hint, anonymously, at one of the major news stations, and maybe theWashington Post, and give them the sheriff’s name. He’s a talkative sort,” Lucas said, glancing over at him. “I don’t want it out there before we’ve got an eye on that truck, though.”
“Day after tomorrow would be soon enough,” Bob said.
Lucas nodded. “I’ll work it out this evening, after Armstrong shows up.”
—
ARMSTRONG ARRIVEDin a pickup with two crime scene investigators. The sky had cleared, and the three men carefully peeled the plastic off the logs. Armstrong looked at the paint scrapings, comparing them to a piece of metal taken from Smalls’s Cadillac. After a moment, he muttered something to himself, stood up, and walked over to Lucas, Bob, and Rae.
“If that paint didn’t come off the Caddy, I’ll eat the logs. We need to take paint samples and transport the logs. You said there were some tracks that might be associated?”
They showed him the tracks, and the two CSI guys went to work with lights, cameras, and tape measures, eventually clipping the vegetation in the tread marks and making casts with a beige-colored liquid that quickly solidified.
As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the logs were wrapped in plastic padding and loaded one by one onto the pickup and tied down, with red flags hanging from the exposed ends sticking out of the back of the truck. Armstrong asked Lucas, “What about the truck? When can I look at it?”
“Day after tomorrow, probably,” Lucas said. “We’ve got some prep work to do.”
“So do I,” Armstrong said. “I need to measure the logs and see what kind of impact marks they’d leave on an F-250 if they were used the way we think they were... although they were probably well padded. The formal lab results on the paint will take a while. And we need to go over the logs inch by inch to see if there’s even a speck of black paint.”
“When we decide to officially look at the truck, we’ll call,” Lucas said.
—
THAT NIGHT,Lucas walked over to Kitten Carter’s apartment complex and took an elevator to the fourth floor. She was standing in the hallway and waved at him when he stepped off the elevator.
Carter lived in a two-bedroom unit, with the second bedroom converted into a compact, messy office with a desk and two visitor’s chairs. Lucas saw the office as he walked by, but Carterpointed him into the living room and asked him if he’d like a glass of wine or a bottle of water. He took water, and she asked if he wanted bubbly or still, and he took bubbly. When they finally sat down to talk, he told her about finding the truck.
“Then we’ve got... something? What do we have?”
“We’ve got one end of the string,” Lucas said. “If we find black paint on the logs, we could pick up Ritter. But I don’t think they’ll find any—I’ve looked at that truck and I didn’t see a single scrape or mark of any kind. So we get Armstrong over here to go over the truck, we roust Ritter, but we don’t take him yet. Let’s see if we can create some cracks in their team.”
“How?”
“Do you know anybody at thePost, or one of the major TV stations, who you could talk to off the record? Who would never give you up?”
She nodded. “Yes. Of course. I can always feed them a tip, if you can tell me what to say.”
“I need you to give them the names of a couple of people. Russell Forte, over at the Marshals Service—and the sheriff we worked with—and Carl Armstrong in West Virginia. None of them might give much up, but if you give a good reporter a few details, he’ll be able to pry a few more facts out into the open. Especially if he talks to the sheriff.”
