CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
As Irene watched the West Virginia
countryside speed by, five thousand feet below, she tried to figure
out why the Donovans would return to Arkansas—to the “scene of the
crime” as it were. It sounded so cliched, she hated even to think
the words. These fugitives had worked so hard for so long to stay
invisible, how could they possibly profit by stepping into the open
like that? It didn’t make sense.
But Frankel was convinced, and when
you sat in the big office, your hunches carried the weight of law.
What he didn’t say was how he knew. Something about a hit on a
computer field by some staffer at EPA, but between the sputtering
cell phone connection and Frankel’s clipped, pompous way of
speaking, she couldn’t get half the details she wanted. That was
okay, though. She had staff back in Charleston to piece all that
together for her.
Ironically, her team had just
discovered the Donovans’ white van, stashed in a dilapidated old
barn, when word came from Frankel. It had taken a cool head and
strong nerves for the Donovans to stay put like that in the middle
of a full-scale search. Fact was, they’d done exactly the right
thing. Had they tried to bolt, they’d have been caught for
sure.
They always
do the right thing, Irene mused. It’s really beginning to piss me
off.
Judging by the equipment and supplies
they left behind in the van, they hadn’t anticipated being caught
in West Virginia. She figured that to be good news. The farther she
could knock them off their plan, the more likely she’d be to force
a mistake.
Best she could tell, they’d been
planning an extended camping trip. The van was loaded down with
sleeping bags, lanterns, lamp oil, and canned goods—everything
they’d need to hide out from civilization for weeks at a time, even
with the approach of winter. Even more interesting, they’d
abandoned an arsenal of weapons: three hunting rifles, a shotgun,
and enough ammunition to invade Mexico. Frankly, the weapons
confused her. Should she be relieved they hadn’t taken them along,
or concerned that there were even more lethal weapons in the
Donovans’ possession?
Always better to err on the safe side.
That’s why the flyers on the Donovans read “armed and extremely
dangerous.”
For a few minutes there—before
Frankel’s call—Irene felt certain she’d figured it all out.
Clearly, the Donovans were experienced woodsmen—a suspicion backed
up by the magazines and literature found in their trailer back in
Phoenix—so she’d have bet a pretty penny they’d be making a Von
Trapp–style march over the mountaintops. In fact, she’d been in the
process of mobilizing a search, in cooperation with the U.S.
Marshal’s Service and the Park Service, when she got yanked away by
her boss’s hunch.
So how did they get to Arkansas?
Answer: they had help. Paul could barely contain himself. He’d been
first to suspect a connection with Harry Sinclair—the mystery man
who’d yet to resurface—and sure as hell, it looked like he was
right.
She closed her eyes against the din of
the chopper and rested her head against the bulkhead, trying to
figure out if she’d done everything she needed to do. Why was it
that she could never get ahead of this case? Normally,
investigations took on a rhythm, and once you caught it, you could
put together a plan to catch the bad guy. Here she found herself
arriving perpetually too late, only to find out that the Donovans
continued to be slippery. This whole thing was taking on the
bumbling quality of a Keystone Kops adventure. Assuming that
Frankel was right—that the Donovans were in fact returning to the
Newark site—then she could only assume they’d get in and out
quickly.
But what do
they have to gain by going back there?
She ran through the details of the
case, ticking them off one at a time, and couldn’t think of a
single one she’d missed. The Little Rock field office had agents en
route to Newark, and she’d notified the local police chief—a guy
named Lundsford—to keep an eye on the site. If the numbers she ran
in her head were correct, it would be another hour and a half, two
hours, before any feds got on the scene out there, which made her
exceptionally dependent on the abilities of the local cops.
Remembering the bumbling antics of Sherwood and his crew back in
Phoenix, the thought brought her little comfort.
Officially, the Newark Hazardous Waste
Site was only about a hundred acres in area. Unofficially, the site
extended to virtually all 75,000 acres. Some addresses just didn’t
lend themselves to corporate business cards. Of the few companies
remaining in the business park, all were fly-by-nighters,
representing new technologies in an industry known to vaporize
inventors right along with their mistakes.
For Jake, it was like reentering a
nightmare. Everything was close to the way he remembered it, but
nothing was exact. Areas that had been so carefully cleared during
the park’s boom years had largely been reclaimed by the aggressive
Arkansas undergrowth. Entire buildings had been swallowed up by
field grasses, roads erupted by surging tree roots.
The big Cadillac looked comically out
of place, dodging potholes and throwing gravel on its way toward
the middle southwest section of the park. On this trip, the
protective gear took priority over passenger comfort, forcing
everyone but the driver—Nick—to sit at impossible angles and hang
on for dear life to keep from getting launched through the roof or
crushed by a falling box.
“You sure you know where you’re
going?” Carolyn asked hesitantly.
“As sure as I can be.” Nick shouted to
be heard over the clatter of shifting equipment. “I studied the
site maps pretty closely while I was waiting for you guys to
arrive. So far, everything looks as it should.”
“How much longer?” Travis wanted to
know. His voice sounded strained against the weight of the
breathing apparatus boxes.
Nick shrugged. “Two minutes maybe?
Ten? No way to be sure.”
Actually, it was four. The access road
dead-ended at a chain-link fence, which stretched left to right in
front of them for as far as they could see. Every few feet, at
shoulder height, red-and-white signs had been posted on the fence,
reading:
DANGER
HAZARDOUS WASTE SITE
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY LIKELY TO CAUSE DEATH
DANGER
“We’re here,” Nick said simply. He
made a sweeping motion with his arm, the latex gloves making his
hands look oddly artificial. If there was one stupid mistake he
didn’t need to make, it was to leave fingerprints.
No one replied for a long moment as
they took in the message from the sign. Carolyn grasped her son’s
hand and squeezed.
“I’d feel a lot better if that guy
Thorne was here,” Travis grumbled. The stinging no-confidence vote
drew a look from Jake, but Travis held his ground. “No
offense.”
Jake let it go.
“So what do we do now?” Carolyn asked.
“We can’t drag this equipment a mile into the woods.”
“There’s a gate right here on the
fence,” Travis observed.
Nick shook his head. “No, they’ve got
an alarm on the gate. We need to snip our way
through.”
Jake twisted his face incredulously.
“They alarm the gate, but nothing happens if you cut the
chain-link?”
Nick laughed. “Who in their right mind
would want to break in, Jake? It’s not like there’s anything to
steal, you know. The alarm just makes sure that the gate gets
locked back up in case somebody has to come in to do
something.”
Amid the pile of equipment sent ahead
by Harry Sinclair’s New Jersey connections were two long-handled
bolt cutters, which made quick work of what people with right minds
purportedly would never do. When they were finished, the hole was
just barely big enough for the car.
Jake winced at the sound of metal
dragging along the paint.
Once through the hole, Nick steered
the car back onto the roadway, which continued on the other side of
the gate. Half a mile later, as advertised, they arrived at another
fence and another gate. Nick threw the transmission into park and
turned in his seat to face the rest. “Here we are,” he announced.
“Just your garden-variety certified hazardous waste exclusion
zone.”
“We’re in the middle of the woods,”
Travis objected. “I thought there were supposed to be a bunch of
storage buildings.”
“Look again,” Carolyn told him,
pointing. “They’re here. They’re just overgrown.”
At its heyday, this part of Arkansas
had been mowed flat, turned into a grassy flatland extending from
horizon to horizon; perfectly level but for endless rows of storage
magazines which arose from the ground like so many swells in a
grassy green sea. From the air, back then, the place would have
looked like a mogul field on a ski slope, only green; and
constructed at intervals that were far too precise and with lines
too straight to have been a random creation of nature.
Today, from the ground, this part of
the facility was so overgrown that nature had camouflaged
everything. Trees now grew where roadways used to be, and thick
undergrowth—kudzu, mainly, cohabitating with countless other
varieties of the region’s most hearty bushes, vines, and
creepers—had long ago choked out any ground cover as fragile as
grass. To the casual observer, these woods might have been around
since the beginning of time, untouched by any human. On closer
examination, though, beyond the thick tapestry of leaves and the
random angles of the foliage, the repeating pattern of the land
became obvious, rising and falling at precisely the same height and
precisely the same interval. Like staring at one of those
computer-generated 3-D art creations, the longer Travis examined
his surroundings, the more the place began to look like the
explosives storage facility it once had been.
The image solidified in his mind the
instant he saw the first of the concrete-filled steel blast doors,
set back in an overgrown tunnel, precisely in the center of one of
the earthen mounds. Having seen one, it became easy to see others;
dozens of them just by pivoting his head.
“Whoa,” he breathed, his tone alive
with wonderment. “This place is unreal.”
“Are we safe, Nick?” Carolyn
asked.
Nick’s head bounced noncommittally.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to build my dream house here, but it should
be pretty safe, yeah. Certainly for the short time we’ll be
around.” He opened the door and stepped out. The others followed as
he walked up to the fence and cut a hole big enough for people to
pass through. That done, they all climbed to the crest of the
nearest mound. “See there?” Nick asked when he got to the top. They
all followed his finger. Two rows away, they could just make out a
brownish black stain against the bright, fall-colored foliage.
“That’s where we’re going,” he said.
“God Almighty,” Jake said, clearly
overwhelmed. “It’s a moonscape.”
“Pretty close,” Nick agreed. “Won’t
get much to grow there for the next hundred years.” He looked first
to Carolyn and then to Jake. “Ready to rock and roll?”
“Um, guys?” Travis said, an odd look
on his face. “I—I don’t know how to work any of the
equipment.”
Jake smiled and rumpled the boy’s hair
as he descended the steep hill. “That’s good,” he said. “Because
you’re staying here.”
“I am not!”
Jake stopped midway and made his smile
disappear. “It’s not because you’re not good enough, Travis, or not
smart enough or not strong enough. It’s because we only have three
sets of gear. You need to stay back and keep an eye out for the
security people. If you hear anything, you’ve got to let us
know.”
Travis looked for a moment as if he
might argue but ultimately said nothing, choosing instead to help
unload the car.
Deputy Sheriff Sherman Quill mumbled
audibly to himself as he pulled his nightstick out of his Sam
Browne belt and slid it into its spot next to the driver’s seat.
I hate going out to this
place.
Ever since he joined the force, Newark
Industrial Park had been the bane of his existence. Every time he
turned around, there was some damn thing going on out there, and
with only the two of them in the department, he handled fully fifty
percent of the calls. For some unfathomable reason, the local
teenagers—local, hell, he’d arrested them from as far away as
Little Rock—found it to be a romantic spot.
To date, no one had been stupid enough
actually to climb the fence and get it on, but they’d come damn
close, giving themselves away by jiggling the lock on the gates.
But for the coils of razor wire along the top of the fence, he had
little doubt that people would be scaling the thing every day.
Crazy kids.
Now he was on his way to “check the
place out,” whatever the hell that meant. Apparently, some hotshot
FBI lady had called the chief and told him to expect some kind of
trouble out there. If Sherman had heard correctly—and he must have,
else why would the chief have said it twice?—the same people who
started it all way back when were returning to do it
again.
“Don’t make no sense,” he grumbled,
putting his ten-year-old Ford in reverse. “Ain’t nothin’ left out
there to burn, for God’s sake.”
Damned entertaining thought, though,
getting his hands on the son of a bitches who squeezed all the life
out of this town. Sherman’s family had come from these parts for
generations; even stuck around during the bad times in the sixties,
when Sherman himself was coming up as a teenager. People used to
stick around, because sticking around was the thing to do. Now the
kids were flying out of Newark as soon as their wings were big
enough to support them. The luckier ones got to go to college
somewhere and then get decent jobs. For the others—folks like
Sherman, who struggled through high school with just enough Cs and
Ds to warrant a diploma—it was damned difficult to find something
that paid enough money to keep food on the table. As it was,
downtown Newark had all but closed up. Places like the health
clinic stayed open just because the state said they had to. God
knows they had enough business to go around, just none of their
patients had any money to pay their bills with.
Goddamned sad state of affairs is what
it was. If Sherman could get his hands around those punks who made
the whole world afraid of his hometown, then that just might be the
best present anyone had ever given him.
One of the funny things about all this
hazardous waste stuff was that no matter how much you rationalized
the problem away in your head, and no matter how hard you listened
to all those suit-and-tie experts the EPA sent out to tell you just
how safe everything was, it was tough not to listen to the rest of
the world. When everybody thought of Newark, Arkansas, in the same
light as Love Canal or Chernobyl, it was hard to stand up as a
resident and say, “No, no. My home is safe!” The instinct was to
listen to what the other people had to say. The instinct was to
avoid the place like the plague.
Which was why Sherman hated going out
there so much. He’d signed on as a cop eighteen years ago to deal
with crime and criminals. God knew they could be dangerous;
especially on Friday and Saturday nights when the knife and gun
clubs got together after an evening of drinking and hollering. But
the biggest and the baddest guys he’d ever run into on the street
were visible, living creatures. Well, the winners were living,
anyway, and the losers didn’t pose a hazard to anybody. Out there
at Ground Zero, the worst hazards were invisible.
The suits from the EPA were very clear
about that. The chemicals that were spilled out there were mostly
odorless and tasteless, and the ones that weren’t were so toxic
that by the time you smelled them, you were already poisoned.
They’d say this stuff, and then in the next breath, they’d tell
Sherman and his neighbors that they were perfectly safe where they
remained. How stupid did the government think they were,
anyway?
What Sherman wanted to know was how
the hell could they be so sure that there was nothing wrong if
there was no way to know the hazard was there in the first place?
That just didn’t make any sense.
So what did the EPA do to protect the
community? They built a damn fence. They start with a hazard that
nobody can detect, and then they try to throw a fence around it!
Like the germs or the atoms or whatever the hell you called those
toxic little monsters were afraid to cross a line drawn in the
dirt. Who was kidding who here?
Sherman was no scientist; far from it,
and he’d be the first to admit it. But he knew that things that
were invisible weren’t going to stop at any fence line. They were
going to get picked up by air currents, and they were going to be
spread all over hell’s half-acre, poisoning everything and everyone
they came in contact with. Unless the government had come up with
some special kind of force field that they hadn’t told anybody
about, and if they’d done something like that, why wouldn’t they
have said?
No, sir, a fence was just a fence,
nothing more. It wasn’t designed to keep out anything but people
and animals.
Which made him reflect that, after
fifteen years of inbreeding, some mighty scrawny, mighty
strange-looking deer lived inside those fences. Sherman and his
buddies—avid hunters all of them—had talked about that a lot over
the years. One of these days, Sherman liked to say, one of them
deer was going to talk back to him, and when that happened, he was
leaving town for good.
God damn he hated this part of the
job.