“Thanks a lot, Mr. Lincoln.”
“Come back with Miss Meg when you can set, and if you want to just run through my dooryard, the two of you, like stung-up hounds, don’t bother coming back.”
I ran all the way back to the car. As I drove another two miles toward Chickenhawk, I told D. D. Wheeler what I’d learned from the old man. I watched the shoulder on the left and when I saw where cars had turned off I started to pull over. “Keep going!” Wheeler ordered.
“But I tell you she—”
“Keep moving! Can’t you follow a direct order?”
I drove on. We went through the hamlet of Chickenhawk. Four miles beyond Chickenhawk, the road hair-pinned down a steep slope, and when we were on the floor of a narrow valley, he had me pull over as far as I could and park.
“Brint kept telling me you’re a smart officer.”
“My wife is back there, Sheriff.”
“Look at this map. Here’s this cow path we’re on. About here is where that logging road cuts off of it. Over here is where Keepsafe used to be, and it’s high ground, and it’s less than a mile from there to the top of Burden Mountain, which reads forty-four hundred feet high. There were some gaps where I got a look at it, and it looks pretty bare on top, like it was mostly rock. I looked over your list of the stuff McAran bought. There’s binoculars on that list. That damn mountain looks down on every little road in the area.”
I swallowed and said humbly, “Meg has told me about a trail to the top of the mountain. Look, we could go back on foot, maybe.”
“Just the two of us? Real heroes? Sneak up on ’em and rescue the woman?”
“She’s my wife!”
“She’s a cop’s wife, and you’re a cop. Because she’s been a damn fool is no reason for you to turn yourself into one, Hillyer. She found her brother and his friends over an hour ago. If she’s alive right now, she’ll probably be alive at dawn. If she’s dead, they may stay there and they may try to move out, depending on how nervous it made them to have somebody dropping in. One thing sure, they won’t let her go, because she saw too much in the first sixty seconds. I’ll bet they knew a car was on its way in from the minute she turned in there. So get me some place where this damn radio will work, and we’ll do all we can do with the idea they are looking down our throats every minute.”
Three miles beyond the valley, when we came to a ridge that could not be seen from the crest of Burden Mountain, D. D. Wheeler had me stop. They couldn’t hear distinctly enough in Brook City, so Wheeler used the State Police setup at the Slater Barracks as a relay.
He gave them the map co-ordinates for the aerial photography. He told them where to post four unmarked cars. He said we were coming in, the long way around, and to pull everything else out of the hills.
“She wouldn’t be in this at all if I hadn’t let Chief Brint talk me into it,” I said.
“She wouldn’t be in this at all if you hadn’t taken up police work. She wouldn’t be in it if the two of you had never met. None of us would be going to all this fuss if he hadn’t hit the Hanaman girl too hard. If I had two heads I’d be living in a jug in a side show.”
“All I meant was—”
“Shut up and let me do some thinking. We can’t go in there the way I wanted to. We got to go in there like climbing a glass ladder barefooted.”
“If they don’t try to move out first.”
“I don’t think they will, somehow. Everything has been working for them. Your wife said in that note she won’t tell them. And she sounds like a strong woman. She knows it’s set up for dawn. Maybe she’ll have a chance to move fast when we give those people the message. You see, Hillyer, people like Miller, Deitwaller and Kostinak have to get hit with a great big dose of helplessness. Right in that first tenth of a second is when you get your chance
to take them easy, when all of a sudden they feel as exposed as a bug in a bathtub, with nothing to hit back at. Every time a holed-up man kills a law man, it makes me feel sick at my stomach because it’s never necessary. It comes about through a childish display of guts, or because somebody gets bored and careless. This thing is going to be run right.”
And when we got back, they had a dirty surprise waiting for us. Rossman and Raglin had conducted the investigation, and Rossman repeated his verbal report for the information of D. D. Wheeler and myself.
“At ten this morning Mr. Theodore Perkins reported his daughter Catherine missing. He said her bed hadn’t been slept in. He thought she was sleeping late because he thought she had probably gotten in late last night after he was asleep. Detective Raglin and I made the investigation. She had gone to the movies last night with a girl friend. We checked that out. They got on a bus downtown at about quarter of eleven. The Perkins girl got off the bus first. As the bus started up, the other girl saw the Perkins girl start to walk toward her home two blocks away, and saw a car which had evidently been following the bus pull up and stop, and saw the Perkins girl start over toward the car. She says it was a new-looking car, a sedan, possibly a Ford, gray or light blue, and then the bus was out of sight. Mr. Perkins said there was a phone call for his daughter at about nine o’clock, a call from a woman who did not give her name. He said he told her what movie the girl had gone to. We checked the houses in the vicinity of where the car had stopped. A man in the second house from the corner on the other side was letting his cat out at about five after eleven when he heard what he thought was a drunken argument. He heard a scream and a scuffling sound, and heard a man curse somebody. Then a car door was slammed and he saw the car drive away at a high rate of speed.”
I explained the relationship between McAran and the Perkins girl to D. D. Wheeler. He cursed softly, steadily, thoroughly.
“Mr. Perkins said the woman on the phone sounded sort of tough,” Rossman added.
“It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense,” Larry said.
“There’s one way it makes sense,” Johnny Hooper said
softly. “Suppose McAran told Miller he’d decided to send for the Perkins girl after the job was finished. If Miller didn’t like the idea, and didn’t trust the girl from what McAran told him about her, and couldn’t talk McAran out of it, he could send McAran and the Frankel woman down into the town here to pick her up and take her back where Miller could check her out. Wasn’t it a woman who got him messed up last time? And probably the Frankel woman has had some practice on picking a girl off the street like that.”
“So we’ve got two of them up there,” D. D. Wheeler said wonderingly.
“Why didn’t they make it real easy for us?” Larry grumbled. “Why didn’t they hole up in a kindergarten?”
“We’ve got work to do,” Major Rice said firmly.
xii
My wife didn’t come down out of the hills and I knew she wouldn’t. I knew when I read her note we wouldn’t stop her, and she wouldn’t come back out. I phoned Fran West and asked her to keep the kids another night. She sounded slightly teary, so I knew Chuck had told her about Meg.
All during the afternoon the news people kept moving in on us in ever increasing numbers. We no longer had anything to fear from newspaper coverage, but we knew that any leak over commercial radio might blow the whole thing. We had to settle for an off-the-record briefing, telling them that Meg’s life might depend on silence.
When dusk came I could no longer sustain the sharp edge of my concern for Meg. I felt numbed and lost, as if I would never be able to feel anything very acutely again. I had the feeling that none of this was real.
After dusk the command staff moved five patrol cars into position, five two-man teams, and the unmarked cars were pulled down out of the hills. Two teams took their positions right at the mouth of the old logging road, after some difficulty in finding it. They reported back that the road had been recently cleared, that trees over ten feet tall which had grown up in the middle of the road had been hacked down and pulled out of the way. They examined the tracks with a hooded light and reported that it was so narrow Meg had obliterated previous tracks as she drove in, but it looked as if at least two other cars had used it recently, one of them leaving the distinctive tread marks of the new tires McAran had purchased.
They drove one car into the road, without lights, and parked it just short of the first sharp curve. They took up positions on both sides of the logging road and rigged a stationary flare which could be activated with a pull wire and made themselves comfortable for a long wait. The other cars were spotted to cover any alternate exits we might not know about, spotted on the roads those exits
would have to feed into. We got the aerials at 8
P.M.
, fresh from processing. The superb lens and the very fine grain of the film provided incredibly clear enlargements of the whole Keepsafe area. Looking at them was like being suspended a hundred feet in the air over the little plateau where the hamlet had once been.
There had once been, as Meg had told me, a general store, a small church, a one-room schoolhouse and four homes in the village itself. The store, the church and one of the homes had been destroyed in the same fire. You couldn’t tell what they had been. The rectangles marking the foundations were obscured by weeds and alders and berry bushes. Of the remaining houses, one had collapsed into an overgrown clutter of weathered boards. Another sagged on the edge of collapse. There were some rickety barns and sheds standing. But it looked abandoned for ten generations rather than only twenty years. It drowsed by a weedy road. Some big trees shaded the unused yards. There had been about a hundred acres of open fields around it. This land was thick with alder, scrub maple, young evergreen and berry patches. The plateau was tilted slightly to the south. To the north was the mass of Burden Mountain. At the south the land dropped steeply into a wooded valley. There was forest to the east and west of the cleared area. The photo technicians had pieced the enlargements together, so that the picture of the area was one huge photograph, six feet by four feet, but hinged by the tape on the back so that specific areas could be examined conveniently.
“Here’s the fresh tire tracks coming out of these woods here at the west,” Major Rice said. “They turn onto the road and come right up here. No mystery about what building they’re using. These marks are where they’ve made paths through the tall grass, going over to this creek on the north. The cars are in this shed, from the way the tracks go. Here’s footprints in the mud by the creek. Here’s where they’ve fixed fires. No washing hanging out and no cans and bottles thrown around, and nobody outside, so they think they’re being careful, but they might have just as well have written their names on the roof. This house is the center point of every pattern of tracks.”
“Can we safely assume they’re still holed up in that house?” Wheeler asked.
“Why would they move? I don’t think the plane would spook them. If having the woman arrive gave them the jumps, they wouldn’t set up a new place right in the same area. They might take off in the night for a new spot a dozen miles away. We’re ready for that, if they go by car. But I say they’ll stay put. They’re confident. They wouldn’t have picked up the Perkins girl if they weren’t. Maybe having the Lieutenant’s wife arrive this morning upset them a little, but McAran would know—and be able to convince the others—that she would be able to find them a lot easier than anybody else could. But let’s not ignore the most important clue we have, gentlemen. They must be ready to make their move, otherwise they wouldn’t risk detaining Mrs. Hillyer, or risk kidnapping the Perkins girl. Perhaps they even wanted the Perkins girl as a hostage in case something went wrong with the job they’re planning. Now they have two.”
After a few seconds of silence, Wheeler said, “Let’s figure the positions for our three groups on the map. Three groups of ten.”
“I want to be with the group you can spot closest to the house,” I said.
As both Wheeler and Rick looked at me dubiously, Larry Brint said, “Fenn has earned that much, and it will be a good place for him to be. He’ll do as he’s told. And he has more reason than any of us to see it work out just right.”
At midnight I avoided the night watch of reporters by going down the back stairs and out a side door onto the dark grounds behind City Hall. I walked through the deep shadows and sat on the base of the World War I monument. I lit a cigarette and looked toward the invisible hills, remembering how the top of Burden Mountain had looked in the midday sunlight.
I remembered Meg telling me, “There was a path up Burden Mountain, and I used to climb up there all by myself on clear summer days. There was always a smoky haze over Brook City. I knew it was the highest place in the world. Sometimes I could look down on the hawks flying. I used to pretend things, all those shiny and wonderful things, all the kings and castles little girls pretend. I kept a secret treasure back under the twisty old roots
of a pine that grew out of the rocks. I kept it in a little square tin box—a Chinese coin with a hole in it, a real sea shell, a piece of red silk ribbon and a button with a green stone in it. I was certain the stone was an emerald. For a while I kept a note in there. I had printed it. All it said was ‘I love you.’ It wasn’t written to anybody, and it wasn’t supposed to be something written to me. It was just something to put in a treasure box. When I left, there wasn’t time to get it. It’s still there, I guess. Sometimes I remember it. Some day I’ll go back and get it.”
“Alone?” I had asked.
“You may come with me.”
Suddenly a voice startled me. “Busy day, Fenn?”
I turned sharply and saw Stu Dockerty outlined against the lighted windows of the police wing. “No comment. Orders from on high. No comment about anything.”
“I filed the last ounce of crud in person, and I was strolling back and saw your face when you lit the cigarette, Fenn.” He sat beside me on the weathered black marble, and leaned back, as I was, against the chiseled names of the long dead. “As soon as they’ve aged a little, all wars are alike.”
“What? Oh, I guess so.”
“Romantic, gallant, kinda quaint.”