Silken Prey

straight.”
    Lucas: “Jenkins, pull off and kill your lights. Sarah, keep going behind Jane, turn around as soon as you can.”
    As Jenkins moved to the shoulder, Lucas pulled over behind him, then fished an iPad out of the seat pocket behind Del.
    Jenkins, looking at the GPS tracker, called: “He’s gone right, he’s headed down toward the river.”
    Lucas thought,
Perfect graveyard.
He called back, “Wait one,” brought the iPad up, went to Google Earth, got a satellite view of the area and said, “There’s no bridge down there. It’s not a dead end, just a bunch of back roads.”
    Jenkins: “Let’s go to the top of the overpass.”
    “Go,” Lucas said, and they waited until a couple of cars passed, then ran dark to the overpass and up the exit ramp, and pulled off at the top. In the distance, probably a mile away, they could still see Dannon’s taillights. He seemed to be moving slowly, tentatively. Lucas went back to Google Earth, pulled up a measuring stick. He hopped out of the Lexus and carried the iPad to Jenkins’s car, and stood by the driver’s-side window.
    “He’s about one-point-two miles in,” Jenkins said, looking at the monitor for the GPS bug.
    Lucas enlarged the satellite view, then stretched the measuring tape down the map. There was nothing on the map at 1.2 miles, but at 1.4, there was a minor track going off to the left, probably gravel or dirt, along the river.
    They watched the monitor and the iPad, and at 1.4, the taillights disappeared, but they could see the faint streak of headlights, now running parallel to both the highway and the river. Two-tenths of a mile down the side road, Dannon stopped. Below them, on the highway, Shrake did an illegal U-turn across the interstate median, and came up the ramp; a minute later, he was followed by both Bradley and Stack.
    When they were up, they got out of their cars and gathered around Lucas, who said, “We’re going to head down to that intersection. About one-point-four miles. No lights. When we’re there, we’ll go in on foot. He’s about two-tenths of a mile in, probably three or four hundred yards. I want Sarah and Jane to stay with the cars.”
    “I want to go in,” Stack said.
    And Bradley: “I do, too.”
    “I don’t have time to argue,” Lucas said. “The fact is, we’ll be on foot, and you don’t have the shoes for it. If he sees us coming, he could come busting out of there in that truck, and we’ll be in trouble. We need somebody in the cars who can take him, if it comes to that. Jenkins, Shrake, Del, and I have all done this before, and we’ve all been in gunfights. You two haven’t. So, you stay with the cars. End of story. Let’s load up and go.”
    •   •   •
    T HE TWO WOMEN WEREN’T happy about it, but they did it.
    Jenkins had a pair of night-vision goggles, and the most experience with them. He’d lead. All six of the cops had LED flashlights, big 135-Lumen Streamlights. They all loaded up and started down the side road, running dark, except for taillights, following Jenkins.
    The countryside was densely wooded, with breaks for the occasional farmstead and backwoods house; and with the clouds, black as a coal mine. Lucas could barely see the road in front of him, and took it slowly, at twenty miles an hour, watching Jenkins’s taillights, feeling for the right edge of the tarmac with his tires.
    “At twenty miles an hour, how long does it take to go one-point-four miles?” Del asked.
    “You’d go a mile in three minutes,” Lucas said. “You’d go the rest of the way in four-tenths of three minutes. Three minutes is one hundred and eighty seconds, and one-tenth of that is eighteen seconds. Four-tenths would be seventy-two seconds. So, four minutes and twelve seconds.”
    “How big a grave can you dig in four minutes and twelve seconds?”
    “Don’t have the math on that one,” Lucas said.
    •   •   •
    A T A LITTLE MORE than 1.3 miles on Lucas’s odometer, they saw the road going left, which looked like a darker tunnel on a black sheet. Jenkins pulled off to the left side of the road, Lucas edged off behind him, and the others followed. They all climbed out into the cold night, and Lucas whispered, “No talking. This guy might have experience night-fighting. Spread out, don’t shoot each other. Stay on the road. No noise.”
    The four men moved off, spread across the road like gunfighters in an old spaghetti western; and, Lucas thought,