“The guy’s going to be a bigger problem,” he said without pause. “Me, I’m going to take him out first and save the little girl for last.”
It was still difficult to imagine. When I tried to envision one person forcing two hostages to walk through these woods after dark, I continued to draw a blank. Did the killer have a flashlight? Did he know this area so well he could find the clearing blindfolded? I voiced these questions aloud to Marino.
“I’ve been trying to see the same thing,” he said. “A couple ideas come to mind. First, he probably restrained them, tied their hands behind their back. Second, if it was me, I’d hold on to the girl, have the gun to her ribs while we’re walking through the woods. This would make the boyfriend as gentle as a lamb. One false move, and his girl gets blown away. As for a flashlight? He had to have had some way of seeing out here.”
“How are you going to hold a gun, a flashlight, and the girl at the same time?” I asked.
“Easy. Want me to show you?”
“Not particularly.”
I backed away as he reached toward me.
“The rake. Geez, Doc. Don’t be so damn jumpy.”
He handed me the metal detector and I gave him the rake.
“Pretend the rake’s Deborah, okay? I’m yoking her around the neck with my left arm, the flashlight in my left hand, like this.”
He demonstrated. “In my right hand I’ve got the gun, which is stuck against her ribs. No problem. Fred’s gonna be a couple feet in front of us, following the beam of the flashlight while I watch him like a hawk.”
Pausing, Marino stared down the path. “They’re not going to be moving very fast.”
“Especially if they’re barefoot,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, and I’m thinking they were. He can’t tie up their feet if he’s going to walk them out here. But if he makes them take off their shoes, then that’s going to slow them down, make it harder for them to run. Maybe after he whacks them, he keeps the shoes as souvenirs.”
“Maybe.”
I was thinking about Deborah’s purse again.
I said, “If Deborah’s hands were bound behind her back, then how did her purse get out here? It didn’t have a strap, no way to loop it over her arm or shoulder. It wasn’t attached to a belt, in fact it doesn’t appear she was wearing a belt. And if someone were forcing you out into the woods at gunpoint, why would you take your purse with you?”
“Got no idea. That’s been bothering me from the start.”
“Let’s give it one last try,” I said.
“Oh, shit.”
By the time we got back to the clearing, clouds had passed over the sun and it was getting windy, making it seem that the temperature had dropped ten degrees. Damp beneath my coat from exertion, I was cold, the muscles in my arms trembling from raking. Moving to the perimeter farthest from the path, 1 studied an area beyond which stretched a terrain so uninviting that 1 doubted even hunters ventured there. The police had dug and sifted maybe ten feet in this direction before running into an infestation of kudzu that had metastasized over the better part of an acre. Trees covered in the vine’s green mail looked like prehistoric dinosaurs rearing up over a solid green sea. Every living bush, pine, and plant was slowly being strangled to death.
“Good God,” Marino said as I waded out with my rake. “You’re not serious.”
“We won’t go very far,” I promised.
We did not have to.
The metal detector responded almost immediately The tone got louder and higher pitched as Marino positioned the scanner over an area of kudzu less than fifteen feet from where the bodies had been found. I discovered that raking kudzu was worse than combing snarled hair and finally resorted to dropping to my knees and ripping off leaves and feeling around roots with fingers sheathed in surgical gloves until I felt something cold and hard that I knew wasn’t what I was hoping for.
“Save it for the tollbooth,” I said dejectedly, tossing Mao a dirty quarter.