Shadow Dragon (16 page)

CHAPTER 35

The faint glow of colored lights glimmered in a wet smear across the windshield. It was snowing, and the best the defroster could do was melt it into a half-frozen slush that the wipers smeared back and forth. From out of the darkness came the red and blue flashers of a police cruiser and a line of pink-white flares. Still bleary-eyed, Kyle watched from the backseat as a highway patrol officer used his flashlight to direct them forward.

The abandoned car had been found in the rest area off Highway 2 overlooking the Salt Lick, which would not normally have been such a big deal. In this country, because of the severe weather, it was not uncommon for stranded motorists to get a ride to the nearest gas station or back to town, where they could call for help or wait until morning. It was
not
common, however, for the hazards to be left on, the trunk open, and the passenger’s door left ajar.

The patrolman was bundled up in a thick, nylon parka, the hood pulled up and tightened until only a small portion of his face was exposed. He looked at the truck, and seeing the light rack and the county sheriff’s seal on the door, he waved them through.

Just ahead, the sheriff’s Yukon and the coroner’s Suburban sat beside a state trooper’s vehicle and a flatbed wrecker. Behind them was Marasco’s Expedition. No one had said anything about it, but Kyle wondered why Clayton had picked them up instead of Marasco.

The spotlights on all the vehicles were aimed at a maroon Ford Taurus. A group of three or four men huddled about the abandoned vehicle. Long, black shadows cast by the spotlights swept across the car as the men moved about.

Deputy Johnson pulled in behind Marasco’s truck and stopped. The police radio crackled as someone was dispatched to an unrelated call. Clayton reached under his seat and pulled out a big Maglite which he handed to Lewis. They stepped out into the blustery wind and blowing snow. Clayton pulled up the hood on his parka, and Kyle found himself wishing the FBI coat he wore was as well-equipped for such an environment.

As they made their way toward the car, the largest of the dark figures turned toward them. It was Sheriff Greyhawk.

“What’ve we got?” asked Lewis.

“Abandoned car with large amounts of blood in front and behind the vehicle.” He led them to the back of the car and pointed at the ground where a section of the pavement had been marked off. A large dark stain spread across the asphalt. A wide smear of blood trailed off toward the edge of the lot as if a body had been dragged through it. Small numbered tags had been placed on the ground beside the spots. A technician took snapshots of the area, the strobe causing the blood to flash bright red. Snow blew about, and occasionally, the technician had to stop and clear away some of the accumulation before he continued.

“Any chance they hit a deer or something?” Lewis asked.

“There’s no damage to the car,” said the sheriff, his deep voice carrying easily through the wind. “It looks as if someone was changing a tire. At first, the trooper who came across the scene thought that whoever was changing it might have been hit by a passing car, but the flat was on the passenger side. Then he found blood in front of the vehicle. We found this just beyond it.” The sheriff held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside was a female’s wedding ring.

Lewis pointed his flashlight at the bag. “No bodies?” he asked as he looked at the ring.

“No, we searched the surrounding area as well as we could in the dark but didn’t find anything. From everything we’ve seen, it looks like there were two victims. In both cases, there are trails leading away from the area, as if the bodies were dragged part of the way. Then the trail just stops, as if they were picked up and carried away.”

“Any footprints?”

“If there were, they’ve been covered by the snow. But look at this.” The sheriff pointed his flashlight at the front of the car.

Mounted to the bumper was a metal trailer hitch that could be raised and lowered to enable the vehicle to be towed.

“You think it was being towed?” Lewis asked.

“It could explain where the bodies are,” George offered.

Lewis nodded and handed his flashlight to Kyle. Lewis pulled out his little black pad and made a few notes, including the number of the Idaho license plate.

“So you think someone had a flat on the car they were towing, and when they stopped to change the tire, someone came along and jumped them, stashed their bodies in the back of the motor home, and took off.”

“Maybe,” the sheriff replied.

“So we’re looking for two vehicles,” said Lewis.

“That’s assuming it wasn’t a hitchhiker,” said Marasco. “He could have caught a ride somewhere along the way, maybe even with the people in this car. Then when the car had a flat, he might have gotten nervous that a trooper might come along and decided not to wait.”

Clayton chimed in, “You know, people are a lot more likely to pick up hitchhikers in bad weather.”

“And who else would be more desperate for a ride than our old buddy Tucker?” noted Marasco.

“But how could he have gotten this far?” Kyle asked. They were at least forty or fifty miles from Tucker’s cabin.

“Hungry Horse Reservoir is just on the other side of that mountain,” the sheriff said with a nod. “And Jewel Basin is just beyond that. There are trails through the backcountry all the way from there to here. It’s a long way, but he could have made it.”

“There’s been plenty of time for him to get here from the Joneses’ cabin. And if anyone knows these mountains, it’s Tucker,” said Marasco.

“Okay,” Lewis said, “we don’t want to jump to any conclusions here, but we need to get a message out to all the border stations along the Canadian border, telling them to be on the lookout for anyone fitting Tucker’s description just in case. And run the plates through the DMV to see if we can find out who owns the car.”

“I’ve already contacted the border agents,” said Marasco. “The car’s registered out of Idaho. The office is trying to contact the Idaho DMV.”

Lewis nodded as he took more notes. “Tell Davidson to get us any information he can regarding the blood types, fingerprints, footprints, hair samples, anything that can confirm or clear his presence at the scene as fast as possible. We don’t want to go running off half-cocked. The press’ll have a field day if we make the wrong call on this.”

Lewis took the flashlight back from Kyle and stuffed it and his notepad back into his coat, which he quickly zipped back up. “Damn, it’s cold,” he growled. “Any chance there’s any hot coffee around here?”

“Yeah,” Clayton replied. “In a big Thermos in the back of my truck. It’s hot, and it’s strong.”

“Just what I need,” Lewis said.

Kyle followed them back toward the truck. They were going to be here for some time still, and even though he usually didn’t drink coffee, he was tired and cold enough at the moment that he was willing to drink just about anything if it would help him stay warm and awake.

CHAPTER 36

Carrie was surprised to see sunlight sneaking beneath the closet door when she woke. She didn’t remember falling asleep again, and she was oddly surprised to find that nothing had happened. Her head was pounding, and her neck was stiff from the awkward position she had slept in. As she tried to stand up, needles of pain shot through her left arm and hand, which had fallen asleep. She groaned and began shaking and rubbing her hand in an effort to restore some feeling. Gradually, the tingling numbness faded away, and she was able to pull herself out from behind the gun cabinet.

She opened the closet door slowly and cautiously peered into the room. Everything appeared to be as it should. She listened for a while and heard nothing but the whistling of a bird perched in the tree outside the window. She slipped from the closet down the hall to the bathroom. There were no obvious signs that an intruder had been upstairs. She wasn’t sure what signs she might have been able to pick up on, aside from the fact that things just
felt
right.

In the bathroom, she turned on the cold water and splashed her face to help wake up and to relieve some of the painful throbbing of her head. She fumbled through the medicine cabinet until she found a bottle of extra strength Tylenol. She popped the cap off and took four of the caplets, washing them down by drinking straight from the faucet.

Standing back up, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was a tangled mess in spite of being pulled back in a ponytail, and her face was red and splotchy. Her eyes were even worse. They were puffy and red and underscored by dark, half-moon-shaped blotches, but more than that, the irises looked glazed and unfocused like …? Like a drunk, she forced herself to admit. She didn’t think she was a full-blown alcoholic, but she had certainly been too dependent on booze and pills of late.

As she stood there, taking stock of herself, she found she was ashamed of her behavior last night and, in fact, for the last several months. She should never have put herself in the position of being alone in the cabin after dark. She had been warned, and she knew better; however, her little drinking binge had caused her to lose all sense of rational thought. And this time, it could have cost her her life.

Though she would never have admitted it before, she realized that in some sense, that was exactly what she had been trying to do. Ever since things with Bret had gone bad, she had been doing nothing but going through the motions, waiting for her life to hurry up and be over so she wouldn’t be subjected to the possibility of being hurt again. She had never openly contemplated suicide, yet somewhere, deep down inside her in a place she hadn’t been willing to look, a part of her had been trying to attain the same result in a much more subtle manner.

And, in fact, that deepest, darkest part of her had already succeeded to some extent. She had withdrawn so much that she had stopped living, for all intents and purposes. The vibrant and confident Carrie that her grandmother had worked so hard to resurrect after the death of her parents was gone again, leaving nothing more than a shell of the person she had been, an automaton passing through the days, waiting for the end.

It was that part of her that had hoped that something would happen last night, that she would be put out of her misery by someone else. But when she had thought that someone was actually breaking in, she had been much more terrified of dying than she would have ever thought. Down in that deepest of dark places, along with the fear and despair, hope still lurked as well, waiting for just the slightest ray of sunshine to come into her life so that it might blossom.

Perhaps she
had
inherited more than just hair and eye color from her mother’s side of the family. That was certainly the way Audrey Gran had seen things.

Carrie made her way downstairs, still on the lookout for someone who might be lurking within the house. In the kitchen, she nearly became sick at the smell of rum that permeated the room from the open bottle on the table. She picked up the bottle and poured the remains down the sink. Standing there, she noticed the other bottles still on the top shelf. She stood there a moment, staring at the bottles. Then, she grabbed three of them and emptied them in the sink as well. By the time she was done, there were eight empty bottles on the counter. She found the garbage bags in the cabinet under the sink and filled one with the empty bottles.

She took the bag, the bottles clinking nosily as they bumped against her leg, and dumped it on the porch outside the back door. She was about to close the door when she noticed the tip of a tree limb hanging just over the edge of the roof. She couldn’t quite reach it, so she went back inside and dragged one of the kitchen chairs back outside with her. When she stood on the chair, she was just able to reach up and pull the limb down. It was larger than she had expected, and it made a hideous noise as it scraped across the roof before it fell over the edge.

Tears welled in Carrie’s eyes as an unexpected realization came to her. She bit her lip, struggling to keep from breaking down as she stared at the cause of her night of terror—a harmless tree limb.

Something within her snapped. Heedless of the cold, she stomped out into the snow, grabbed the limb, and dragged it away from the landing. With a loud scream, she tossed it toward the trees, where it tumbled and bounced into the undergrowth. She tilted her head back and yelled again as loud as she could, the veins on her neck standing out and her face turning red as all of the hurt and anger and frustration surged forth.

Breathing heavily, she listened with satisfaction as the yell echoed down the valley. The cold air in her lungs felt good, and her head felt clearer. After she brushed off her wet cheeks, she turned and marched back inside.

She still hadn’t decided what she was going to do with the place; however, she
had
decided on one thing she was going to do, and she started back upstairs with a renewed sense of purpose.

In the office, she began going through all of her grandparents’ paperwork that hadn’t been taken away by the feds, looking for anything unusual, relying on her reporter’s nose for the suspicious in an effort to find out why someone might have had a reason to kill her grandparents. The computer and appointment books for the trips they had booked for the coming year as well as the two previous had been confiscated, which didn’t leave her much. She went through all of the invoices, letters, tax returns, and any other paperwork for the last two years that had been filed away in boxes in the closet, but she didn’t find anything that seemed out of the ordinary.

After an hour of fruitless digging, Carrie decided there was nothing of significance to be found. Undaunted, she had already decided on her next course of action. Going downstairs, she found the keys to the Hummer hanging on a pegboard on the wall next to the phone in the kitchen—right where she had known they would be.

As she lifted the keys from the peg, she was almost overcome by emotion once again. Grandpa Bill had always been bad about misplacing his keys, and so at Christmas one year just after Carrie had moved in, she and Audrey Gran had given the little pegboard to Bill as a gift. The board was painted yellow, the varnish old and crackled. There were little squiggles that Carrie had painted to look like flying birds across the top, and
Grandpa Bill’s keys
painted in colorful letters across the bottom.

Clutching the keys in her hand so hard they dug into her skin, Carrie bit her lip and hurried out the door.