Conway had left his hands tied at the front, because, after the Sux injection, he didn’t want muscle spasms or a choking fit to spoil his wares.
Shouldn’t have gotten that close. The man lifted the .22 caliber handgun and pointed it at the hostage’s head as he approached him. The prisoner didn’t even blink: his pale brown eyes followed the man’s movements and spotted his limp and the awkward lump under his shirt where the bandage was. It was like being watched by a predatory animal.
The man came close, placed the muzzle of the gun against the prisoner’s brow, and felt his carotid pulse with two fingers of the left hand. At that distance he wasn’t going to miss the shot. The prisoner’s heartbeat was steady, not even a little jolt for the inconvenience of having a gun to his head.
“Feeling better?” the man asked him.
John Cameron didn’t reply.
“Any breathing problems? Muscle spasms?”
He took Cameron’s silence as a negative reply, straightened up, and backed away. Everybody’s life would take a turn for the better as soon as this package was delivered.
The lock slid back into place.
Madison glanced at the map on the passenger seat. The cabins had been split among the teams: they had three on their list. She followed Deputy Andrews’s unit along the Mt. Baker Highway. He had picked up his partner on the way and had given her a radio to keep in touch and listen to the calls from the other officers, and their voices crackled and sputtered through the speaker.
After Maple Falls a bend in the road opened onto the North Fork Nooksack River: deep green flowing past a white-pebble bank before the woods closed in.
Pretty, Madison thought.
Peter Conway’s old picture from Fred Kamen’s file had been handed out together with a brief but comprehensive catalog of his achievements as a human being. John Cameron’s photo had also been released with the warning that there would be a second abductor working with Conway. The sheriff’s office had called in off-duty deputies, and the search party was spread out over three counties.
The first cabin on their list was ten minutes’ worth of negotiating a steep, narrow lane toward the border. They couldn’t just roll up to the front door without an excuse, and the sheriff had come up with the pretext of a missing hiker who might be injured.
Madison held back. She scrunched her hair up into a ponytail and threw a WHATCOM COUNTY CITIZEN ON PATROL green T-shirt for camouflage over her new ballistic vest. The old one could not be saved after its last engagement. As she tightened the side straps, the flutter of a memory came and went. Madison checked her piece in its holster and exited the pickup.
The car parked in front of the cabin was a brand-new silver SUV. The deputies knocked on the door, and a minute later a woman opened it with a toddler in her arms. They spoke briefly, and then the deputies came back.
The SUV had been a giveaway by itself: whatever Conway was driving, it would not have see-through windows. They were looking for a van or a small truck with darkly tinted windows—it was not going to be a showroom model with kiddie toys in the backseat.
Back on the highway Madison listened to each and every word that came through on the radio as, one after another, the cabins were checked and crossed off the list. The sheriff had dispatched one unit to each airstrip known to be in the area, and so far there had been no unusual traffic.
Madison kept watching the sky: every dot that could be a plane, every cloud that might mean rain and a delay in the flight. Her brain was in ticker-tape mode and would not stop: an airstrip up in the mountains required a small, agile plane and an experienced pilot; a small airplane wouldn’t have enough fuel to fly up from California and back without refueling; a small airplane might take off from a British Columbia airport fully fueled, pick up its cargo, and continue on to California. And if the big payoff for Conway was the price of selling his hostage, then that was how Jerome McMullen had been able to afford his services—he wouldn’t be paying Conway; the LA drug dealers would. McMullen. Sweet Jesus, it was McMullen.
Madison left a message on Dunne’s voice mail to check McMullen’s contacts within the jail and see whether there was a chance he had met someone inside who was connected to the right people. Forget the gardening groups and the compulsory probation period: if McMullen got out, he would be gone.
Nathan Quinn picked up his cell and called Conrad Locke. Locke picked up on the second ring.
“Nathan, is there news?”
“No, not yet.”
The kidnapping had been all over the media since the early morning.
“Conrad, I need to ask you something,” Quinn continued. “It’s something the boys talked about that Fourth of July, back in 1985, when we were at your estate. I know it’s a lifetime ago, but you might remember about this.”