“So?” Bailey asked.
“He took his son hunting,” Gant said.
Bailey stiffened and looked at Gant. Golden had a distant look in her eyes. A breeze blew through the clearing, ruffling the feathers on the tail of the arrow.
Gant had grown up in New York. His father had never taken him hunting. His father had always worked. Always been gone. The first thing Gant had ever hunted was human. He’d never understood the concept of hunting as a sport. With Goodwine he’d done some hunting, but the Gullah ate what they caught, as had Gant. And the Gullah respected their prey. No matter how much Gant had hated whoever he was after, he’d always respected the target for the very simple reason that human prey could turn and kill him just as easily as he could do it. It was fair and equal. And in the Cellar his hunts had always ended eye to eye with the quarry. And he’d always known, looking into their eyes, that they deserved their fate. It was something that would never stand up in a court-room but on occasion Gant had crossed paths with hardened homicide detectives and they had told him the same thing: they’d known whether they had a killer by looking in the eyes.
“You have Cranston’s file?” he asked Bailey. He noticed that Golden still seemed pre-occupied. Death did that to people, Gant knew. Of course he didn’t know how wrong he was about what she was actually experiencing.
“Yes. And Caulkins. And I’ll have Svoboda’s shortly. I’ll also have headquarters run deep backgrounds for links.”
Gant knew what Bailey meant about deep background. In the covert world a person’s file, even a classified one, only held the surface. There were dark waters that only a deep background check could begin to unveil. Gant had done things that were not recorded on any piece of paper or digitized in some computer memory. He had done things that he wished he could wipe out of his own memory.
Gant glanced at Golden. “She’s right. He’s taunting us. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Have the Auxiliary report anything,” he said to Bailey.
“The ‘Auxiliary’?” Golden asked. “You mentioned that before.”
Gant figured the question was a good sign. She was getting past the immediate horror. Give her a few more years of this and she might even be an asset. Of course she would have to last those years.
“We have a network of people who watch for unusual crimes,” Bailey said, as usual not going into detail.
“This was brutal,” Gant said. “And personal.”
Golden frowned. “And?”
“I’m used to dealing with professionals,” Gant said. “People who do a job. Not this. Who do things for a reason.”
“This was done for a reason,” Golden said. “And as you said, a very personal one. If we can figure that reason out, we can figure out who did it. That’s why I’m here.”
“I was wondering about that,” Gant said, ignoring the flush of anger on her cheeks as he turned and walked away. He tuned out everyone. He focused on the body, allowing his senses to expand from himself, to the shackle, to the chain, to the tree, the clearing. He had to pass over to the other side, the side where all his skills and training and experience could be warped to hurt and kill.
No conscience.
No soul.
This site was not random. The cache report indicated that. Gant had put in a number of caches during his time in Special Operations. And he had recovered some too. He remembered diving in the harbor in Kiel, Germany and recovering a Nazi cache of weapons from World War II. The guns had been wrapped in oil cloth, water-proofed in plastic and still functional after over half a century. Put there near the end of the war in the hopes of supplying a Nazi guerilla force that never materialized.
A cache was designed to be hidden and only found by someone with the report. Gant looked at the arrow. But this cache had been found before they arrived. By a father and son hunting with bow and arrow out of season. Thus this cache had been a mistake. A good plan, but events had overcome it. Not by much, by only a few hours.
But still.
If Jackson and his father had shown up five days earlier, they might have been able to save the girl. Or they might have been killed by someone watching her suffer. That was something to factor into Emily’s situation, although the entire point of a cache was to hide something and be able to leave and come back later and recover it, not sit and watch the site. But Gant had never heard of a human cache so this one might have developed differently.
Still, there were rules to covert operations, procedures to be followed. There was more to a cache operation than just the report. There was preparing what was to be cached. He looked at Padgett. He’d get the man’s report as soon as he could autopsy the body. Then there was preparing the site, the first step of which was to put observation on the location prior to insertion of the cache.
Gant looked at the tree the boy had pointed out as his hide site for hunting. Leaving the three around the body, he walked across the field. It was an oak tree, and there were worn boards nailed in to the side to allow easy access to the lower branches. Gant clambered up. A couple of one by sixes had been hammered into position forming a rough seat about twenty feet up with an excellent view of the field and the pine tree in the center. The wood was old and beginning to rot, which indicated this had been put here years before.
Gant sat down and he instinctively knew that the man he was after had sat here also. It wasn’t what someone in combat conditions would do, as the site was too obvious, but for the Kentucky woods it was good enough. But it hadn’t been.
Would he and his new partner be good enough, Gant wondered? They had a week, maybe more, but they couldn’t count on rain. For all they knew Emily was staked out in the desert, which could shorten the time considerably. But it would still take time to get to the desert. And he had a feeling that whoever had taken her would not want to travel far with her. That would make the risk of being stopped too high. A day’s travel, no more, Gant decided. By vehicle, since it appeared that was how she had been taken.
A week, Gant decided. For Emily. A lifetime to catch whoever was doing this.
Then he realized Golden was right: they needed to find Emily first. Catching the target was secondary. It was a novel situation for Gant.
He looked across the open field to the tree where the girl had died. He could see Golden standing there alone. Staring at the body. She looked like a ghost, an apparition.
Gant reached into his pocket and pulled out a satellite telephone. He hit the speed dial. He knew there was a good chance the old man wouldn’t answer the phone this late.
He was right as he got the answering service.
When the beep came he had a question. “Mister Nero. This is Jack Gant. How did my brother die? And what happened to Jimmy, Doctor Golden’s son?”
CHAPTER TEN
The old man carried his folding chair to a spot just above the surf line and set it down so that it faced the rising sun. His skin was tanned and leathery, carved hard by the sun and ocean breeze for the past eight years. He thought those who used sunscreen were cowards and expressed as much to his wife whenever they came to the beach together, thus he mostly came alone. The morning was his time with the local papers, from Destin, Pascagoula and Panama City. It was a routine he followed every day, eating up two hours of his day. It was his daily connection to his old life and he relished it, although he would never admit it to anyone.
He read the first paper carefully, the way an accountant would read a ledger. The lines around his eyes became even more pronounced as he immediately noted the lead article on the right hand side of the front page. He read it completely, before carefully folding the paper once more and placing it down. He checked the other papers, reading their version of the same story.