“How far could that pontoon boat have gotten by now?”
“Give or take, thirty miles either way.”
“Between the two of you, how many people can you put in the field?”
The two cops exchanged glances, then the Lancaster sheriff said, “Whatdya think, Jerry? Eighteen, twenty?”
“ ’Bout that.”
“And I’ve got about the same,” said Oliver. “That gives us about forty. Here’s what I’m thinking: We pair them up — one agent, one local — put them in plainclothes, then canvass every launch, dock, and camping site within thirty miles. Somebody has to have seen our guy. Thoughts?”
The sheriff nodded. “I like it.”
“Me, too,” said Chief Nester. “Sundown’s in about two hours. We can get all the fishermen coming off the river. That’s a lot of eyes.”
“Good,” Oliver said. “Let’s get to it.”
“One question,” said Nester. “Now that we’re all friends and such, how about the real scoop? I mean, how dangerous is this guy?”
“Three days ago he and his cohorts murdered four security guards — shot each one execution style in the back of the head. Does that answer your question?”
“Oh, lord.”
“Tell your people if they see him, stay away. If this guy gets even a whiff of trouble, we could have a mess on our hands.”
As Nester predicted, their first tip came twenty minutes after dusk from a pair of fishermen who’d spent the afternoon jigging for bass near Bair Island. “They’re sure,” the chief told Oliver and McBride. “It was a pontoon boat, one guy at the wheel.”
“And it was coming downstream, not up?” Oliver asked.
“Yep. He came around the bend at House Rock Creek doing a good eight knots. They were pissed; he had water slopping over their gunwales.”
“I don’t get it,” McBride said. “If it’s him, he’s had all day to get a head start. Why come back?” And then a reason occurred to him. He glanced at Oliver. “You don’t think …”
Nester said, “What?”
“Maybe he dumped her,” Oliver explained.
“Aw, shit.”
“Did they see where he was headed?”
“Duncan’s Thumb,” Nester answered. “It’s a little spit of land that sticks out between Reed Creek and Brubaker Creek; it forms kind of an inlet. Last they saw, he was heading for the mouth of it. That don’t make much sense, though.”
“Why?” asked McBride.
“After about a mile it dead ends, narrows down to nothin’. Hell, with a pontoon, he wouldn’t get more than a couple hundred yards before he’d be stuck.”
Oliver grabbed the map from the table and started unfolding it. “How far is it?”
It was fully dark when Oliver and McBride pulled their rented Lumina to a stop behind Nester’s cruiser. In the driver’s seat Oliver pressed the dome-light overide and they climbed out. Behind them a pair of GMC vans, headlights dark, pulled up, gravel crunching softly under the tires. Without a word, Scanlon and his team began piling out and unloading equipment.
Though they were only two miles upriver from Bob’s Boat Rental, it had taken forty minutes of backtracking and circling to reach the spot. The forest bordering the Susquehanna’s eastern shore was thick and the roads weren’t as much roads as they were dirt tracts. Even Nester, a lifelong resident of Erbs Mill, had to stop several times to consult his map under the glow of his dome light.
A half mile to their west lay the bank of the inlet and, according to the report they’d received just before leaving, a dilapidated fishing shack Which an unidentified man was seen entering earlier that afternoon.
Whether it was Hekuran Selmani or not was anyone’s guess, but the fluttering in McBride’s belly was telling him they were close. Whether that was imagination or premonition he couldn’t tell. The report of Selmani’s mysterious trip upriver before returning to Duncan’s Thumb troubled him, but if it had been a dump job why would Selmani have come back? No, McBride told himself, if she were dead, he’d be on the run, not holed up in a shack.
Now outside the car’s air-conditioned interior, the heat enveloped McBride like an electric blanket. The humidity hovered in the mid-nineties and he could feel the damp clinging to him. Cicadas buzzed in the brush along the tract. He felt the sting of a mosquito bite on his cheek and slapped at it.
Walking up, Nester tossed him a can of bug repellant. “Coat yourself. Without it an hour from now you’ll be one big welt.”
“Thanks.”
Oliver stood staring at the tree line. “Please don’t tell me we’ve got to chop our way through this,” he said to Nester.
“There’s a trail around here somewhere; it should take us to the water. The bad news is, if you wanna reach the spit we’ve got two choices: wade across the inlet, or go upstream and pick our way through the swamp.”
Oliver had earlier assumed they would take a boat and put ashore on the other side of the peninsula, but Nester had advised against it: The fishing shack in question sat on a rise with an unobstructed view of the river. Unless Selmani were deaf and blind, they wouldn’t get within fifty yards of the shack before being spotted.
Oliver asked McBride, “Gotta preference, Joe? Swamp or swim?”
“Whatever’s got less mosquitos.”
“Better to wade,” Nester told them. “Unless your commando boys are gluttons for punishment, I’d steer clear of the swamp — it’s just a good way to get ass-kicked before they even get there.”
Scanlon’s commander walked up. “This swamp — would it give us a better approach on the shack?”
“A little, but if we’re quiet it won’t make much difference.”
“I say wade,” the HRT commander said.
Oliver nodded. “Whenever you’re ready.”
After fifteen minutes of searching, Nester found the right trail and the group set out. McBride could see little in the darkness, but he could sense they were moving downhill into the river bottom. He kept one eye on the trail and another on the green glow of the chemlight one of the HRT men had clipped to the back of Nester’s shirt. It hovered in the trees ahead of him, winking like a firefly.
After fifteen minutes they reached the inlet. McBride could hear the lapping of water and the croaking of frogs. The air was heavy with the tang of algae and something else McBride couldn’t quite put his finger on. Rotting something, he thought. Sun-baked dead fish.
Scanlon gestured for them to wait, then he and three HRT men continued to the water’s edge, where they began loading their equipment onto a life raft they’d borrowed from the Erbs Mill Fire Department.
Crouching beside McBride, Oliver said, “Not just a job, it’s an adventure.”
“Uh-huh. Damn, I hate mosquitos. If this turns out to be some dopehead using the shack to get high, I’m gonna be unhappy.”
“I don’t think it is. Neither does Jerry.”
Nester said, “It’s a regular stop on the game warden’s route. Nobody’s been in the shack for years.”
McBride said, “That still doesn’t answer the big question: What’s Selmani doing here? If she’s dead, why stay? If he’s still got her, why here? Why travel only a couple miles?”
“All good questions,” said Oliver. “We’ll know soon enough.”
They watched as Scanlon and his team ferried the raft across the inlet. Once on the opposite bank, Scanlon disappeared into the foliage, then reappeared a few minutes later. At the double wink of his red-hooded flashlight, the rest of the HRT waded across then vanished into the underbrush. Another double red blink appeared.
“That’s us,” McBride said, and started crawling toward the water’s edge.
Nester put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Uh, when you get to the other side, you might wanna check yourselves,” he said.