We were awakened at five-thirty A.M. by Andrea Bocelli’s superb voice coming from our alarm clock/CD player. It was still dark outside and we could hear the waterfall-like sound of the wind as it rushed through the pine trees that stand on the ridge just west of our home. I glanced at the digital thermometer and noted that it was thirty-eight degrees outside. Winter was coming.
I fed Kitch, and then Ash and I ate a breakfast of country sausage, scrambled eggs, and toast made from ciabatta rolls. Knowing I was going to be on my feet for a minimum of a couple of hours, I took some ibuprofen and hoped the pills would suppress the pain in my shin for a little while. I felt guilty about putting Kitch back into his crate, so I let him do a prewash on the plates before putting them in the sink and promised him that we’d play in the yard when I got home.
Meanwhile, Ash went upstairs to put her police gun belt on over her jeans and grab her parka. She brought my cane and shoulder rig down with her, and I slipped the holster on. Then I grabbed my knit wool cap from the hat rack, and after saying final good-byes to Kitch, we went out to the SUV.
We drove to the Rawlins farm, where we found Tina’s patrol car parked in front of the house. Now that it was almost daylight, I could see the hill that we’d been talking about the previous evening. It was closer than I’d envisioned, and I noted with dismay that the slope was covered with thick forest and what looked like dense undergrowth. With its palette of pine tree-green and mixture of autumnal orange, maroon, and russet, the hill was lovely—but I dreaded the impending hunt for evidence.
As we huddled in the yard, Ash asked, “Did anybody find the Saab?”
Tina shook her head. “There hasn’t been a word about it. So, where do we want to start?”
I glanced up at the wooded knoll. “I hate to admit it, but there’s no way I can help you search that hill. It wouldn’t be more than thirty seconds before you’d have to call the rescue squad to come and carry me out.”
“So why don’t you take some more photos down here while Ash and I go up and take a look around?”
“I suppose that makes the most sense.”
“The camera is on the front seat.” Tina nodded toward her patrol car.
“And I’ll leave you my portable radio so that we can stay in communication.” Ash handed me her walkie-talkie.
“Yeah, just in case I have to be like that old lady in the TV commercial and yell, ‘Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’ ” I grumbled.
Ash rubbed my arm, and then she and Tina started toward the hill. I watched them until they’d moved beyond the line of evergreens and were lost to sight. Meanwhile, the sun began to rise over the Blue Ridge Mountains, flooding the yard with bright light. I retrieved the camera and got busy taking photos of the driveway, barn, and exterior of the house. Although I knew these daylight orientation photos were important, it still felt like make-work, especially when I failed to find any new evidence.
I’m not certain why, but when I finished the pictures I went over to the place where Lois Rawlins had died. The tree was enormous, with gnarled meandering branches that reminded me of the century-old chinquapin oak in our front yard by the river. Almost three years had passed since the tragedy, but it was easy to see the scar where the huge limb had broken off the trunk. I wondered how Everett Rawlins had withstood the sight of that tree day after day.
I was jolted from my sad reverie by Tina’s voice crackling from the portable radio. “Mike-One to Mike-Fourteen.”
Mike-Fourteen had been my radio designator since June of last year. I pulled the radio from my coat pocket. “Go ahead.”
“Just a status check. How are you doing down there?”
“Just peachy,” I grunted.
There was a moment of silence, and I knew that Tina was complaining to Ash about my improper choice of words for an official police radio transmission. Finally, she said, “Sorry, you were covered by static. Was that
peachy
with a
P
as in
Papa
, or
B
as in
Bravo
?”
When I figured out what Tina meant, I began to laugh. The last thing I’d expected from her was a zinging come-back. Keying the radio microphone, I said, “
B
as in
Bravo
. Sorry about that. How are you two doing?”
“We’re about halfway up the hill and haven’t seen anything yet.”
“Copy. I’m done with the photos for now, so I’m going to take a look at the road that leads back to the sand quarry.”
“Ten-Four. We’ll call when we get to the place where Chet was parked.”
I slipped the radio back into my coat pocket and walked over to the rutted lane that the game warden had pointed out last night. The narrow road ran past the barn and then appeared to loop left, around the southern base of the hill. The middle of the road was still dotted with brown puddles and looked muddier than a pre-election hit-piece mailer. I kept to the left shoulder of the lane, taking my time so that I didn’t slip on the tall wet grass. I’d covered maybe a third of the distance to the curve when something caught my eye. There were tire impressions in the mud that suggested some sort of vehicle had driven down this road from the direction of the sand quarry and then made a U-turn to go back in the direction from which it had come. The marks also signified that at least one person had been on the road sometime after it began raining yesterday afternoon.
Just what we need—another piece of anomalous evidence,
I thought.
I took a closer look at the tracks. It didn’t look as if a full-sized car or truck had caused the muddy marks; the wheelbase track was too narrow. This indicated that a quad-runner or similar all-terrain vehicle might have left the tracks.
I pulled out the radio. “Mike-Fourteen to Mike-One, I think I’ve found something interesting.”
“What’s that?” Tina replied.
“ATV tracks in the mud, maybe fifty yards or so from the yard. They look like they came from the direction of the quarry and then go back the same way.”
“Copy. I’m glad
you
found something, because we came up dry. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
While waiting for the women to make their way down the hill, I took overview photos of the tire impressions. Then I checked the underbrush beside the road for other signs of evidence, but didn’t find any.
The radio crackled again, and this time it was the day-shift dispatcher. “Mike-Control to Mike-One, we just got a call from the Massanutten Crest Lodge. Some lady staying there wants to report that her Saab was stolen from the hotel parking lot sometime last night.”
“What’s the victim’s name?” Tina asked.
“Sherri Driggs. She’s visiting here from Atlanta, and the car is an oh-eight Saab, Nine-Five model, with Georgia plates of Three-Bravo-Juliet-Oscar-Zero-Zero-Six.”
I knew Ash had to be relieved to know that her information about the hit-and-run vehicle’s license plate was correct. The alphanumeric had indeed begun with the Three-Bravo-Juliet sequence. Furthermore, Georgia license plates had dark letters and numbers against a white background.
Tina said, “Got it. Send Mike-Three ASAP and tell him that I want a complete report and photographs of where the car was parked.”
“Ten-Four.”
“And call me immediately if the victim has any information about who might have taken the vehicle.”
“Ten-Four.”
We finally had a lead on the Saab, but the information merely added several more
why
s to an already baffling mix of unanswered questions. Around here, vehicle theft was still a rare crime, so why had someone stolen the Saab? Why had he gone to Rawlins’s farm contemporaneous to the murder? And if you needed some hot wheels for a getaway car, why boost them from the Massanutten Crest Lodge, where the security was tight? It was the most luxurious hotel in the central Shenandoah Valley and only about six miles away, high on the eastern slope of Massanutten Mountain. In fact, Ash and Tina probably could have seen the castle-like upper ramparts of the hotel from the top of the hill they’d been searching.
A few moments later, I heard the rustling sound of footfalls coming through the underbrush. Ash and Tina emerged from the trees about thirty feet from where I stood. It was obvious they hadn’t had an easy time of it on the hill. Both women had mud-stained knees, and their boots were caked with large wads of the claylike soil. They paused to scrape the worst of the mud from their boot soles on an old log and then joined me.
I said, “Well, here I am working my fingers to the bone, while you gals are out enjoying a mud bath at the spa.”
Tina kicked another chunk of mud free from her boot. “You’re a laugh riot, Brad. I should have let you go up there.”
“I’d have
mud
dled through. I take it you didn’t find any evidence?”
“Not a darn thing. But if someone
was
wandering around up there in the dark, I don’t know how he did it without falling and breaking his neck.”
Ash said, “You heard that last radio transmission?”
“Yeah, your Saab was a rollin’ stolen,” I replied. The expression was a California cop colloquialism.
“That explains why it took off the way it did,” said Tina.
“But not why it was here last night in the first place. And here’s some more confusing evidence.” I pointed to the tire impressions.
Tina squinted at the tracks. “So, whoever was on the quad-runner came here after it was raining.”
“Yeah, but since I can’t find any shoe impressions, we can’t say for sure that he ever got off the ATV.”
“Still, that means there was someone else on Everett’s land besides Chet and whoever was driving the Saab,” said Ash.
“That’s how it looks,” I said.
“I think we should see where the tracks lead,” said Tina.
“Me, too. But you should probably also contact the state crime lab and have one of their techs come up here to make plaster castings of the tire impressions.”
Tina frowned, and I knew she didn’t like the idea of asking for help from another agency. “Can’t we do that ourselves?”
I shook my head. “We want an expert for this. I haven’t poured a casting in over seven years and I’m not even certain I remember the exact formula to make the stuff.”
Tina used her phone to call the sheriff’s dispatcher and told her to notify the crime lab that we needed an evidence tech ASAP. Snapping the phone shut, she said, “She’ll call us once the lab gives her an ETA on the tech.”
“I’ll go get the tape,” said Ash, as she turned and headed back toward the house. She returned a minute later with the roll of yellow tape and wearing a look of concern. “Tina, there’s a reporter from the Harrisonburg newspaper out there.”
“Oh, great,” Tina muttered.
“And if the paper has found out about this, then you can bet the TV news will be here any minute,” I said.
“I guess I’d better go talk to them.” Tina sounded as if she were agreeing to undergo a root canal without anesthetic.
“And we’ll tape off the road and try to follow the ATV tracks,” said Ash. “You can catch up when you’re done.”
Tina trudged back to the house along the edge of the road while Ash and I blocked off the road with crime scene tape. We began to follow the road toward the quarry. It was a slow journey. I stopped every few feet to take another photo of the tracks in the mud.
The road curved around the base of the hill and then seemed to head straight for the Blue Ridge Mountains. I heard what sounded like rushing water from somewhere ahead. It was still fairly breezy, so my first thought was that it was simply the wind blowing through the pine forest. Then we saw the abandoned sand quarry ahead, and I realized I was wrong.
Ash gasped. “Lord, this is beautiful.”
Even allowing for the rusting metal derrick and the ancient vegetation-covered bulldozer, the place
was
beautiful. The quarry had been located at the bottom of the Blue Ridge, right next to a rushing mountain stream that looked as if it belonged in a beer commercial. You could still faintly see where the digging equipment had hacked into the side of the mountain, but over the intervening fifty years since the plant had ceased operation, trees and other vegetation had reclaimed the slopes. The forest was slowly erasing the obscenity.
“Why would you put a freaking quarry here?” I asked.
“Because Everett’s daddy could make money selling sand. Folks had a different attitude about the land back then,” Ash replied.
“Well, thank goodness times have changed.”
I took some photographs of the quarry, and then we resumed our pursuit of the muddy tracks. The dirt road ended abruptly at a large patch of gravel near the base of the metal platform, but Ash found where the tracks resumed close to the hill. It looked as if the ATV had gone up a narrow and rugged trail that climbed the hill while paralleling the stream.
“I think you’d better let me go on from here,” said Ash.
“I’m afraid you’re right, honey. One false step—and that happens to me about every seven seconds—and I’d be whitewater rafting without the raft,” I said. “Here. Take the camera and be careful.”
“I will. Don’t worry.” Ash gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and then scrambled up the slope.
She disappeared into the forest, yet I continued to look up the hill for another minute or two. Finally, I decided that searching the quarry for any further signs of evidence would be a better use of my time. I headed back over to the derrick and then took a look at the vine-choked bulldozer, which also seemed to have a cedar sapling growing up out of the left set of treads. Then I wandered over to the stream. That was when I heard a throaty grunt immediately followed by what I hoped wasn’t the clack of teeth.
The sound had come from my left. I slowly turned in that direction and then froze as a large example of
Ursus americanus
, AKA the black bear, emerged from the undergrowth about twenty-five yards away. Even though I’ve collected teddy bears for years and used to take my kids to the San Francisco Zoo to look at the bears, I’d never been so close to the genuine article, especially without an intervening fence and moat.