“Take Highway 797 till you come to Goose Creek Road. Go left, ‘bout a quarter mile down there go right when you come to Shawtock. It’s dirt. Follow the road way up in the mountains. Road gets narrow, becomes one-way. You’ll have to back outta there. Not a good place to be in the winter. A fella got back in there two years ago. They didn’t find his body ‘till the spring thaw.”
“I plan to be gone long before winter.”
He leaned closer, his gaunt hands splaying on the counter, the smell of pipe tobacco on his breath. “If you go, you’d be smart to be outta there before nightfall. And once the sun takes a notion to set, it sets pretty fast. Gets dark real quick up in the hollow.”
Courtney almost passed it. An unmarked dirt road, maybe a half mile past a sign that read: Goose Creek Stone Bridge. She turned to her right, onto the unmarked road, scrub brush scraping against the side of the Toyota. She drove slowly through the winding back road, each turn gaining elevation, steep drop-offs less than three feet from the right side of her truck. She glanced down and could see a white water river hundreds of feet below her.
After another mile, the road seemed to dissolve into the thick woods. The road simply ended. There wasn’t room to turn the truck around. She shut off the motor and opened the driver’s side door. The air was cooler, hickory trees and pines grew high, and a hawk circled the blue sky over the ravine and the river. She could just hear the rush of the white water against the rocks far below her, the sound like holding a seashell to her ear.
Courtney lifted the pistol from between the seats and picked up her mobile phone off the console. She got out of the truck, not sure which direction to walk, or what exactly to say when she found him. She slipped a battery into her phone, waited a few seconds and then punched in the number. After two rings it went to his voice-mail. “Sean, it’s Courtney.” She blew out a long breath. “You said if I ever needed you … if I … never mind. I shouldn’t have called.” She disconnected and slipped the small phone into her bra. She quietly closed the truck door and began following the overgrown trail into the woods.
She walked more than a mile down the narrow path. The farther Courtney walked, she felt, the closer she was to finding him. She stopped in her tracks when she heard pounding. With her eyes only, she followed the sound, the hammering coming from a tree. A pileated woodpecker, its tuft of bright red feathers resembling a cap on top of its head, scurried around the bark of a pine tree drilling for insects with the ferocity of a small jackhammer.
Courtney swatted at a deer fly and continued, glancing down at the path, watchful for snakes. She stopped and pulled her left pant leg up. A tick, the size of a raisin, sucked blood from the skin over her calf muscle. She pulled the swollen insect off her, felt her shoulders spasm involuntarily, and she ran through the woods, her eyes on the obscure path.
She looked up just as she ran directly into a spider’s web that stretched between low-hanging tree branches, the sticky web covering her face, nose, and eyelashes. A black widow spider, large as a silver dollar, dropped from a limb, suspended by a strand of web, the spider’s blood-red hourglass rocking like a pendulum within a few inches of Courtney’s nose.
“Oh God!” she said, backing up and using her fingers to peel the web from her face.
“God. Do you believe you deserve divine help? My little niece, Courtney. I’ve been expecting you.”
Dillon Flanagan stepped out from behind a hickory tree.
Courtney reached behind her back for the pistol.
93
I hadn’t shaved since before leaving for Ireland. And I was better off for it. Prior to flying out of Shannon, I’d bought a pair of dark framed reading glasses, and an Irish tweed hat. I wore them both as I walked through Dulles International Airport.
CNN was on the airport TV monitors, the talking heads mentioning my name and how the Logan camp could most effectively do damage control. I heard one commentator say that the river confession video had had more than 250 million views and had achieved that number faster than any video in the history of the Internet. I looked straight ahead and walked fast, quickly finding the Hertz counter. Within twenty minutes, I was driving west on Highway 50 toward Middleburg, Virginia and into the threshold of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Walking into the lobby of the Red Fox Inn was like walking across a page of American history. Constructed from fieldstone and wood, the inn has more of a tavern feel, the kind of place Jefferson might have enjoyed a drink after knocking off the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. I stepped up to the front desk. A twenty-something blonde smiled wide, her blue eyes twinkling. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m here to pick up a package, a delivery for my boss, David Collins. Wherever we travel, it seems like our video and PowerPoint presentation travels with us. It’s such a video centric world today.”
“You’ve got that right. I blame it on cell phone cameras. All of them can shoot video, some in high definition. It takes a few clicks and the video can be uploaded to YouTube.”
“That’s good and bad.” I smiled
She pushed a strand of blond hair behind one ear. “I agree. Let me see if I can find your package.” She left through a side door and reappeared a few seconds later with the long box in her arms. “The note says Mr. O’Brien is picking it up for Mr. Collins.”
“Dave’s the boss. I take it and tote it.”
“Well, here you go.” She lifted the package to the counter. “It’s a little heavy.”
“Thank you.” I took the box and started to walk away.
She said, “You look familiar. Have you stayed with us before?”
“No.” I could see her eyes scrutinizing my face, trying to place me. I nodded, smiled, and left. I placed the box in the trunk of the rental car and then inserted the battery back into my main cell phone as I drove off.
There were three messages. I played the first one, from Detective Dan Grant. “Sean, where the hell are you? I’ve been trying to reach you for two days. But I guess every news outfit in the nation has been trying to do the same thing. Call me. I have some news about the perp we’re holding in connection with the carny murders.”
I played the second message, and was caught off guard when I heard Courtney’s voice. “You said if I ever needed you … if I … never mind. I shouldn’t have called.” I felt a lump in my throat, a tightness in my chest listening to her frightened voice. The third message was from the same number, but this time Courtney didn’t leave an actual message. She inadvertently recorded a heinous scene. It was audio captured by her phone as she ran. It could hear her breathing quickly. Panting. Running. I heard her scream, followed by, “Oh God.’’
And then I heard him.
It was the same, unmistakable voice I’d heard when he called me. The voice of my older brother. Adrenaline pumped into my bloodstream when I heard him say, “God. Do you believe you deserve divine help? My little niece, Courtney. I’ve been expecting you.”
Three seconds later, her phone sounded like white noise was pouring from the speaker.
I called Detective Dan Grant. He said, “Sean, the guy we’re holding in connection with the carny murders … we have enough to go on. We spoke to his veteran’s hospital shrink, some family members, even a couple of Army buddies he fought with in Afghanistan. This guy’s PTS is off the charts. He said after banging the crap out of his head in one of our holding cells, he began remembering bits and pieces of things — things like killing Lonnie Ebert and two other carnies. But he said he was told to do it by someone else. Get this, Sean — he said he was under a spell from the devil.”