They crossed the access road and passed under a gnarled, stunted tree, the only tree within several hundred yards. ‘If you don’t think she’ll be found, why are you doing this?’ he asked.
The woman looked straight ahead, at the miles of open prairie that stretched ahead of them.
‘You can’t not do it,’ she said simply. ‘A girl’s gone missing. You have to keep searching until you know what happened to her.’
He joined a dozen different search teams that morning. They’d come from Grand Point and from Rockford, Dixon, Rochelle and tinier towns he’d never heard of. Occasionally they talked; mostly they just pushed ahead through the grasses, swarms of insects and the heat, their faces set in grim determination. By noon, the temperature was ninety-four degrees.
At twelve-thirty, a woman left the road to push into the weeds. She was waving her arms frantically, trying to shout, but her voice was too weak to be heard.
The searchers broke their lines to move toward the woman. When she got close, she cupped her hands to her mouth. ‘Sheriff’s making an announcement in fifteen minutes.’
‘What about?’ someone yelled.
‘I heard big news, nothing more,’ the woman shouted, and pushed forward to reach those who had not heard.
THIRTEEN
A hundred cars heading up simultaneously from Big Pine Road made for a maddeningly slow crawl to the courthouse. By the time Ridl parked and ran back to the square, the courthouse lawn was packed.
Sheriff Milner appeared in an arch on the second floor two minutes later. Unlike yesterday, when he’d blown into the sheriff’s department, beet red and sweating, today Delbert Milner was ashen-faced, his skin the pale gray of a corpse.
He pasted on a smile, held up his arms like a politician declaring victory, and shouted, ‘Neighbors, I have news! I believe Betty Jo Dean is alive!’
It set off a cacophony of shouted questions. Milner waited until the last of them died down, then continued, ‘I’ve received a tip. A truck driver, heading north on Route Four at about the same time Mr Pribilski was killed, caught a car in his headlights just past Poor Farm Road, headed south. Its driver was steering with his left hand and using his right to beat a young woman in the passenger’s seat.’
Fifty hands shot into the air. Milner shook his head. ‘There’s no time for questions. You need to help. I think Betty Jo Dean is being held captive somewhere south of Poor Farm Road. Get down there and help search that whole area.’
‘Those cabins along the river?’ a man in a business suit shouted.
‘Ideal spots!’ And with that, gray-faced Sheriff Milner went back into the courthouse.
He must have expected pandemonium, and he got it. He’d set loose a mob, running for their vehicles. Within only a minute or two, Route 4 was a parking lot again, this time pointed back south.
It took Ridl thirty minutes to get down to the overpass, and another fifteen to turn where most of the cars were turning, onto Poor Farm Road. All continued past the spot where Pauly Pribilski was found and followed the curve south along the river. Parked vehicles already lined both sides, narrowing the road to a bare single-car width. He found a parking spot between a white Ford Econoline van with a red Diver Down decal on its rear window and a black-and-white sheriff’s cruiser, then headed through woods of maples and oaks to the bramble that grew alongside the water.
A dive team worked from a small blue, square-fronted boat anchored off the opposite bank. A man in a black wet suit sat at its stern, resting his hand lightly on a slim slack rope dangling over the side. It was a signal line, tied to a partner below.
Down river, fifty of Milner’s energized citizens were darting about like crazed insects through a long row of run-down shacks that lined the riverbank. Ridl walked up to a man who’d hung back at the edge of the clearing to talk to newcomers. ‘We got no warrants,’ he said. ‘We can’t ask to see inside. Just look anywhere you can.’
Ridl nodded and walked ahead.
There were twenty-one cabins spread unsociably apart in that deep shade along the Royal. All had started out as small shacks, little more than lean-tos, constructed haphazardly of whatever scrap wood had been around for the taking. Some had been expanded into large shacks as more material – wood crating, old fence lumber and the like – became available. Most had outhouses, except for three that had been modernized, of a fashion, with straight pipes aimed from indoor toilets right into the river. All were unadorned, except for one whose mildewed plank siding had been decorated with several fish heads, which in turn had long since been picked clean by the ancestors of the hundreds of flies that now buzzed around Ridl’s head.
It was dark, dank and perfectly isolated for holding a girl who’d witnessed a murder. The cool of its shade might have been equally perfect for holding a corpse for some brief time as well.
He worked alongside the other searchers, peering under cinderblock pilings down into the pits below the fetid outhouses, and beneath upside-down boats and canoes set on low wood bucks. They scrutinized the moss-slicked ground for signs of recent digging, and knocked on the doors of every cabin. Few people answered, of course, and that made it dumb work, for if anyone in those cabins knew anything about the girl’s disappearance, they would have already come forward. Unless they were a killer or a kidnapper, in which case they would have simply lied.
More people came as the afternoon wore on. Some helped search while some stayed by the river, watching the divers who might dislodge the girl at any moment.
He spotted Laurel Jessup staring at the water, and walked up. ‘What are you seeing, Daily Illini? Frogs, or a Pulitzer for investigative reporting?’
She gave him an odd smile. ‘Don’t look around, but I’m seeing a cop who’s been watching me all afternoon.’
‘Young cop? Maybe it’s lust.’
She put her arm through Ridl’s. ‘Then this’ll give him something to stew over.’ Embarassingly, she had to bend down to kiss Ridl on the cheek.
‘I should sputter,’ Ridl said, only half kidding.
‘Wait ’til I’m gone,’ she said, laughing, and walked away.
He did look around after she’d gone several yards, but by then the cop had disappeared.
The divers came out of the water at seven, and carried their gear and square-fronted blue boat through the woods to the road. The searchers followed them. By then, everything had been searched as well as it could be without warrants.
Ridl stayed behind as the woods went silent, looking at the river rippling white in its hurry to get down to Biloxi or Baton Rouge or wherever it was headed. He would not have wanted to be a diver in that fast current, though he supposed the water might be moving slower below the surface, calm enough to hold a weighted body in place.
‘That your Volkswagen, parked on the road? Yellow thing, black top?’
A round-bellied sheriff’s deputy who was maybe thirty-five had come up on him, silent as a panther. The man’s substantial jowls surrounded a jaw clenching a corncob pipe. A torn cigar stood ludicrously in the bowl of the pipe. He could have been mistaken for a hick, a cracker cop, except for his eyes. There was nothing comical about the way they didn’t blink, or the way he’d appeared so soundlessly.
The name on his shirt tag read Reems. He was the chief deputy who ran the law in Grand Point.
‘You’re Jonah Ridl, Chicago Sun-Times.’
He met the man’s unblinking eyes. ‘Why try to shoo me out of town?’
‘You’re asking questions that are meant to make us look like fools.’
‘You’re being dishonest.’
Reems pulled out a chrome Zippo lighter and lit the dead cigar. ‘How so?’
‘Pribilski got shot once in the heart, then multiple times in the crotch. That’s rage, not robbery.’
The chief deputy rocked back on his heels. ‘New leads are popping up all the time, just like this here,’ he said, nodding toward the row of cabins. ‘We just learned of a gray-haired gent who parks his car on Poor Farm Road, usually around midnight. According to one person, he was there Monday night into Tuesday.’
Ridl took out his notebook. ‘Was he alone, this man?’
‘Yes. Maybe he just likes to watch the moon, or maybe he likes to watch others. Or maybe he’s a wienie-wagger, bringing his privates out to delight in the night. We’ll find him.’
‘Not a local?’
‘Don’t even know that, yet.’
‘What else?’
‘There was a Pontiac on Poor Farm parked just ahead of Pribilski’s car.’
‘I thought it was a couple of guys in a heap, hassling a guy who owned a Pontiac at the Hacienda.’
Reems smiled, releasing a puff of smoke. ‘There you have it: we heard it both ways and more. We’re checking everything out.’
‘Along with every man or boy that ever went out with Betty Jo Dean?’
‘And every girl that went out with that Polish, and every boyfriend of every one of those girls. Problem with jealousy is that it’s everywhere. It’s a long list of leads we’ve got.’ He started walking toward the road.
‘You think you’ll ever find her?’ Ridl called after him.
Reems turned around. ‘Betty Jo’s reputed to have more than a touch of the Devil in her. I’ll settle for her being someplace safe, laughing her ass off, though at what I can’t yet imagine.’
Watching the chief deputy move silently away, he knew it would be a mistake to dismiss the man as a buffoon. The extra fifty pounds he was packing and the cigar jammed ridiculously into his pipe were camouflage. Clamp Reems was no bumpkin.
Likely as not, he was Betty Jo Dean’s best hope.