“I can handle that,” Holland said. “While you were gone, I drove over the bridge. I can put it down in some weeds; it’ll point right back to where he’ll be coming down the bank.”
“Hope you didn’t spook anybody,” Jenkins said.
“I borrowed my girlfriend’s car. She dropped it out back. Nobody saw me.”
Virgil said, “Good. I’ll have the camera all set, all you have to do is turn it on and make sure there’s no grass or weeds in front of the lens. When it senses movement, it’ll start flashing, and it’ll keep going until the movement stops. The flashes are five seconds apart.”
“Cool,” Holland said. “Where will you guys be?”
“We’ll take Jenkins’s car, head north to I-90, make sure nobody is following us. Then we’ll cut south, around the west side of the East Chain, to a farmhouse—it’s only about a half mile from the bridge, and we can walk through the farmer’s fields all the way up to 18. If we do it right, we’ll only be a couple of hundred feet from the bridge. From there, we ought to be able to ease down real close.”
“Does the farmer know you’re coming?”
“Not yet . . . just in case he might want to chat about it. We’ll tell him when we get there.”
“I have only one objection,” Jenkins said.
Virgil: “Yeah?”
“The bow hunter tried to kill you last night. What if he set this up? What if he’s going to try again? What if it’s an ambush?”
“That hadn’t occurred to me,” Virgil said. He gave it a moment’s thought, then said, “That’s unlikely. First of all, Wardell said the caller was a woman. That’d mean there’d be two people involved in the murders, and I don’t see that. This is a loner. Another thing: he would have had to think this up and deliver the letter to Wardell a couple of hours after we chased him all over the neighborhood.”
“I’m with Virgil,” Holland said. “I’m not worried about an ambush. I’m more worried about falling in that fuckin’ creek.”
“When you get killed, don’t come complaining to me,” Jenkins said.
Virgil checked the time. “We got a couple of hours. I didn’t have a chance to eat, and I . . . Man, those potpies.”
“Why don’t we all run over to Fairmont and get something decent?” Holland said.
“Good. I made it down there in, like, eighteen minutes last night,” Virgil said. “We’ll take my truck, use the lights and siren, see if we can beat the time.”
* * *
—
They spent ten minutes with Shrake at the hospital, ate, and made it back to Skinner & Holland, where Virgil parked the Tahoe out front. Sundown was about 8:40, and it was fully dark by 9:15. Virgil had worn his pale straw cowboy hat getting out of the truck, and Holland would wear it going back out.
As soon as it was dark enough, Virgil and Jenkins snuck out the back and down to Jenkins’s rented Toyota and left for the East Chain. Virgil called Zimmer, who said his patrol cars were all set. “We hid them. Nobody’s going to see them unless they go looking off-road.”
“We’ll call your nine-one-one line if we need help,” Virgil told him.
* * *
—
The farm they’d targeted was owned by Don and Donna White. Zimmer knew them—not well, but well enough that they would recognize his voice. He would call them a few minutes before Virgil and Jenkins arrived at their farm to avoid scaring them and to vouch for the state cops. When they pulled into the farmyard, the Whites were waiting at the side door.
“The sheriff told us not to turn on the porch light,” Don White said. “I got some stuff to show you.”
They followed the couple inside, where Don had sketched a map of his farm buildings, the waterways behind them, and the best way through the fields.
When her husband finished, Donna White said, “We have to warn you, there might be one tiny problem with this idea.”
Jenkins: “Uh-oh. What is it?”
“We don’t have much traffic through here at night. A little while after dark . . . maybe ten after nine, a car went past while I was doing the dishes. I couldn’t see it, but I could see its headlights on the trees, and it looked to me like it stopped a little way up the highway. Like it might have been dropping somebody off.”
Virgil and Jenkins looked at each other, and Virgil said, “We might all be wandering around the same field?”
“I thought I should mention it,” Donna White said.
* * *
—
They got the Whites to turn off all the lights on the north end of the house before they slipped outside. They were both wearing dark blue armored vests over their night clothing, and Virgil was carrying the thermonuclear flash. They both carried Glocks, and Jenkins had his shotgun. They’d memorized angles and distances on White’s map, but Holland had been correct: it was dark.
The farm did have a bright pole light by the barn, and so they were able to barely see the line of a fence that separated the farm yard from a cornfield, and they crossed the fence without a problem. White had told them that if they walked toward the lights of the KFMC radio tower in Fairmont, they would come to Highway 81, but a couple of hundred yards farther down the road than they wanted.
They decided that was okay: they were walking less than half a mile total, before sneaking back toward the bridge. They should make it well before 10 o’clock.
The field was open enough, but walking was tough: it had been plowed that spring, and they were walking across the rows of furrows. One minute out, the mosquitoes showed up. They paused to pull the nets over their heads and gloves on their hands. The nets made it even harder to see, but they stumbled on. Ten minutes into the trek, Jenkins, who was a couple of yards behind Virgil, caught up, touched Virgil’s arm, and, when Virgil stopped, he whispered, “Look at the stars.”
Virgil said, “Shhhh,” but looked: the stars were good, though he’d seen better in the desert Southwest, he thought. Still, they craned their necks upward for a minute, the Milky Way looking like a rainbow, only it was in black and white, before they moved again. They were about a hundred yards from the highway when a car went past, which helped. They no longer had to navigate by the radio tower lights, but turned straight toward the highway. There’d be another fence to cross when they got close to the road. They were nearly there when Jenkins caught up again, touched Virgil’s arm, and whispered, “Look.”
Virgil looked. He wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing, but he thought it might be the flashlight beam from a cell phone, maybe a hundred yards away toward the bridge. Jenkins breathed, “I think the idiot’s tangled up in the fence. You want to light him up?”