that, I wouldn’t want him to get mad at me, that’s for damn sure.”
“What about after?” McGrath said.
The body was moved,” the doctor said. “Hypostasis pattern is all
screwed up. Like somebody beat on the guy, suffocated him, left him
for an hour, then thought better of it and moved the body out here and
dumped it’
Webster and McGrath and Brogan all nodded. Milosevic stared down into
the ditch. They regrouped on the shoulder and stood looking at the
vast dark landscape for a long moment and then turned together back to
the car.
Thank you, doc,” Webster said vaguely. “Good work.”
The doctor nodded. The car doors slammed. The local agent started up
and continued on down the road, west, toward where the sun had set.
The big guy is calling the shots,” Webster said. “It’s clear, right?
He hired the three guys to do a job of work for him. Peter Wayne Bell
stepped out of line. He started to mess with Holly. A helpless,
disabled woman, young and pretty, too much of a temptation for an
animal like that, right?”
“Right,” Brogan said. “But the big guy is a professional. A mercenary
or a terrorist or something. Messing with the prisoner was not in his
game plan. So he got mad and offed Bell. Enforcing some kind of
discipline on the troops.”
Webster nodded.
“Had to be that way,” he said. “Only the big guy could do that. Partly
because he’s the boss, therefore he’s got the authority, and partly
because he’s physically powerful enough to do that kind of serious
damage.”
“He was protecting her?” McGrath said.
“Protecting his investment,” Webster said back, sourly.
“So maybe she’s still OK,” McGrath said.
Nobody replied to that. The car turned a tight left after a mile and
bounced down a track. The headlight beams jumped over a small cluster
of wooden buildings.
This was their stopping place,” the local guy said. “It’s an old horse
farm.”
“Inhabited?” McGrath asked.
“It was until yesterday,” the guy said. “No sign of anybody today.”
He pulled up in front of the barn. The five men got out into the dark.
The barn door stood open. The local guy waited with the car and
Webster and McGrath and Brogan and Milosevic stepped inside. Searched
with their flashlights. It was dark and damp. Cobbled floor, green
with moss. Horse stalls down both sides. They walked in. Down the
aisle to the end. The stall on the right had been peppered with a
shotgun blast. The back wall had just about disintegrated. Planks had
fallen out. Wood splinters lay all around, crumbling with decay.
The end stall on the left had a mattress in it. Laid at an angle on
the mossy cobbles. There was a chain looped through an iron ring on
the back wall. The ring had been put there a hundred years ago to hold
a horse by a rope. But last night it had held a woman, by a chain
attached to her wrist. Webster ducked down and came up with the bright
chrome handcuff, locked into the ends of the loop of chain. Brogan
knelt and picked long dark hairs off the mattress. Then he rejoined
Milosevic and searched through the other stalls in turn. McGrath
stared at them. Then he walked out of the barn. He turned to face
west and stared at the point where the sun had fallen over the horizon.
He stood and stared into the infinite dark in that direction like if he
stared long enough and hard enough he could focus his eyes five hundred
miles away and see Holly.
TWENTY-THREE
NOBODY COULD SEE HOLLY BECAUSE SHE WAS ON HER OWN, LOCKED in the prison
room that had been built for her. She had been taken from the forest
clearing by four silent women dressed in dull green fatigues, night
camouflage smearing their faces, automatic weapons slung at their
shoulders, ammunition pouches chinking and rattling on their belts.
They had pulled her away from Readier and dragged her in the dark
across the clearing, into the trees, through a gauntlet of hissing,
spitting, jeering people. Then a painful mile down a stony path, out