Camouflage(69)

Now I knew for sure what had happened to David Virden.

There was not much left of the other bundles. Remnants of sheets long ago torn into shreds and carried away to nests; jumbles of gnawed, fleshless bones, some bleached white and some with fragments of gristle still clinging to them. There was no telling how many bodies there’d been.

McManus and Carson’s victims—the ones they’d murdered since getting their hands on this property more than three years ago.

Dumping ground. Charnel house.

I got the hell out of there, still swallowing, trying not to puke into my handkerchief, and jammed the door shut tight. Chavez had backed off by several yards to escape the worst of the stink. The sick expression he wore probably mirrored mine.

He said, “The client, Virden?”

“Yeah. In there since Tuesday.”

“Must be four or five others.”

Rose O’Day and Gregory Pappas among them. “Yeah.”

“Those women … Ah, Dios.” Chavez shook his head, made the sign of the cross again. “Monstruos.”

Monsters. Tamara’s term for them, too. I was glad she wasn’t here to find out firsthand just how right she’d been.

The wind was still causing the rusty windmill blades to creak; the sound had a chilling quality now, a scrape on my nerves. By tacit consent Chavez and I moved still farther away from the well house, at an angle between the farmhouse and the creek. The stench wasn’t so bad there, upwind. I could breathe without the handkerchief and without wanting to gag.

My cell phone had some sort of glitch in it, didn’t always pick up a signal even in the city. But it worked all right out here. I put in a 911 call to the Marin County sheriff’s department, identified myself, gave the dispatcher a brief account of the situation and the address. Yes, I said, we’d be waiting when officers arrived.

But we weren’t going to do our waiting back here with that stink in the air and that damned creaking. Out on the road, by the gate. That was fine with Chavez; he had no more desire to hang around this godforsaken place than I did.

We started back across the littered farmyard. But our timing was off, just a few minutes off.

We hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when I heard the rumbling and rattling on the far side of the hill, low and distant, then rising. Oncoming vehicle jouncing over that uneven track. No, more than one—two distinct engine sounds, one louder than the other, moving in tandem toward the notch between the hillsides. Not county sheriff’s cruisers; there hadn’t been enough time.

Chavez caught hold of my sleeve.

“It’s them,” he said. “Coming back.”





27

You don’t have much time to make a decision in a situation like this. Flash through your options, pick one, take action. Four choices here. Stay where we were in the open, guns drawn—stand and deliver. Run for the house. Run for the barn. Run for the shelter of the trees along the creek behind us. We were about equidistant from each of those last three.

The engine sounds were louder now, faintly hollow—the vehicles grinding into the declivity. Not much more than a minute before the lead driver would have a clear view of the farmyard.

I said, “The barn!” and broke into a run.

Chavez didn’t hesitate; he was right there beside me. There were fewer ground obstructions in that direction, letting us run in more or less a straight line. But clusters of weeds grew along there, one of them a tall thistle plant that I didn’t see in time to avoid because I’d cast a quick sideways glance at the track. I plowed through the thistle, trampling it, and its sharp little spines snagged at my pant leg, pitched me into an off-stride stagger. I might’ve gone down if Chavez hadn’t been close enough to grab hold of my arm, keep me upright and steadied.

Thirty yards to the barn, twenty, ten. He put on a burst, reached the doors a couple of steps ahead, yanked one half-open a foot or so as I pounded up. The nose of some kind of car was just poking into view. He nudged me through the opening, crowded in behind me. When he pulled the door shut behind us, it muted the approaching vehicle sounds to a low rumble.

There were chinks and gaps in the door halves that made for eyeholes. I found one, Chavez another. Both vehicles were in sight now, jouncing along the track. Neither one was the Ford Explorer. The lead car was a gray four-door Nissan compact, dwarfed by the medium-sized U-Haul truck immediately behind. Those women were no dummies. They’d sold or traded or dumped the SUV, bought or rented the compact, and then rented the U-Haul, and they’d no doubt done the buying and renting using one or the other’s real name.

Both of us drew our weapons. I sucked in a couple of deep breaths, trying to slow my pulse rate, as the car and truck rattled into the yard. Sun glare on the Nissan’s windshield prevented me from seeing who was driving until it turned to the right off the track. Carson. With the yellow-eyed Rottweiler, Thor, beside her. The driver’s door stayed shut while the U-Haul rolled past toward the barn.