A group of patrolmen rushed to her with their guns raised, their eyes red and watery from the smoke. They tried to hold their arms steady as they coughed.
One of them saw the gold shield clipped to her belt clip and the laminated ID badge hanging around her neck. He motioned for the others to lower their weapons.
Darby addressed the group. ‘Is Detective Pine back here?’
The tall one with the cleft chin nodded, wiping at his eyes. He could barely keep them open.
‘Find him and tell him the shooters are gone,’ Darby said. ‘Tell him to meet me in front of the house – and tell him to get everyone the hell out of the woods until the smoke dissipates. Call for an ambulance and make sure they bring plenty of oxygen. Get going – wait, not you.’ She grabbed the soft, flabby arm of a short patrolman with a pot belly. ‘I need to borrow your flashlight.’
He handed it over and stumbled away, gagging.
It took her a few minutes to locate the spot where she’d first seen the man who had tossed the stun grenade. The area offered a lot of tree cover. A perfect place to hide – and watch. From this location she could see the backyard.
Her eyes started to water and her throat burned as she ran the beam of light across the ground. She found several footwear impressions – none of them useful – and a single aluminium-foil blister pack.
Ducking underneath the branches, she moved across the soft ground covered with pine needles and leaves. She threw an evidence cone next to the blister pack. Voices shouted to move out of the woods. One kept calling her name.
‘Coop. Coop, I’m fine. Meet me in the backyard.’
She made her way back to the incline and saw that most of the flashlights had been shut off. The ones still on were moving away, retreating back to the house.
A patrolman was on his hands and knees, struggling to breathe. Darby helped him to his feet, then wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She grabbed the last evidence cone from her pocket and slowly retraced her footsteps back to the spot where she’d found the mobile phone. It was gone.
7
An hour later Darby walked to the corner of the backyard where Pine stood running water from a hose over his face. He had breathed in too much smoke. She could hear his laboured wheezing over the water splashing against the flagstone walkway. He didn’t care about getting wet. His clothes were already soaked and covered in mud.
Coop was also in the backyard. He stood alongside Michael Banville, watching the photographer taking bracketed shots of the back gate. There was no reason for Coop to be out here supervising photography. Darby knew the real reason: he was pretending to be busy so he could keep an eye on her.
Both Coop and the photographer wore protective goggles and breathing masks. Grey and white clouds of smoke drifted through the woods and into the backyard. On her way out, she had found a grenade still hissing smoke. The grenades had a slow burn rate. It would be at least another hour before anyone could go back inside the woods.
By some miracle of God none of the officers had disturbed the bloody handprint during their mad rush into the woods. The same couldn’t be said for the blood she’d found on the grass. The evidence markers had been trampled.
Only one patrolman had been seriously injured in the skirmish. A stun grenade had exploded near his head.
‘Christ, this shit stings,’ Pine said. ‘What the hell is it?’
‘Hexachloroethane. It’s a chemical used in smoke grenades. Keep flushing out your eyes.’
‘My lungs feel like they’re on fire.’
‘You should get to one of the ambulances for some oxygen.’
‘In a minute.’ Pine rubbed his eyes under the running water. ‘Something exploded in front of me. There was this bright light and then I couldn’t see.’
‘That was a stun grenade. It causes momentary blindness.’
‘How do you know so much about this shit?’
‘SWAT training.’
Pine drank from the hose, wincing as he swallowed.
‘The guy you saw, the one wearing those night-vision glasses?’
‘Goggles,’ Darby said.
‘Whatever. You get a good look at him?’
‘No. I just saw a flash before he ducked behind the tree. Black clothing and black gloves, a tactical vest holding grenades.’
‘Any way you can trace them?’
‘The stun grenades explode on impact. If we find enough fragments, we might be able to locate a serial or model number. As for the smoke grenades, we can give the numbers to the manufacturer and see where they were sold. Maybe they were stolen from a munitions locker at a police station or an army base.’
‘You don’t sound too confident.’
‘You can buy them on the black market. Go to any gun show in the South and you can have your pick. A lot of weekend-warrior types collect them. We’ll run the numbers but most likely it’s going to lead to a dead end. The guy with the night vision is too smart to leave us something to trace.’
‘How do you know this guy is smart and not some sort of Rambo douche bag?’
‘He came prepared.’
‘For what? A shootout in the woods?’
‘He came prepared for a fight. Artie, what time did the 911 call come through?’
‘Ten twenty.’
‘And how long before the first responding officers arrived?’
‘Ten thirty-three. There was a unit in the area.’
‘Did the officers search the woods?’
Pine shook his head under the running water. ‘I was the only one who went back there.’
‘What time was that?’
He thought about it for a moment.
‘I’d say around quarter past eleven, give or take.’
‘So we’re talking almost an hour between the 911 call and the time you entered the woods,’ Darby said. ‘If those men had been back there watching the house, they would’ve had plenty of time to haul away the body.’
‘But you saw it.’
‘He had a lot of blood on his shirt. If this person got shot with one of the Magnum rounds, you’re talking a massive amount of blood loss in a short amount of time. He could have bled out while running through the woods.’
‘And somehow his buddies found him.’
‘Which leads me to believe he placed a call before he passed out,’ Darby said.
Pine dropped the hose. He shut off the tap and reached inside his pocket.
‘You thinking these guys arrived the same time you did?’ he asked, mopping his face with a handkerchief.
‘They were in the woods when we were talking by the back gate. I think they were waiting for us to leave before they started to haul the body. If they’d started moving around, they would have made too much noise. We would have heard them.’
‘When I went through the woods, I didn’t see a body back there. There was no one back there.’
‘Maybe the guy with the bloody shirt found a place to hide. I don’t think the others were there when you were. The guy with the night vision? He was carrying what I’m sure is a compact HK MP6. It definitely was a sub-machine gun. And I know I saw a scope. If he had been back there when you were, he could’ve taken you down with a single shot to the head. He planned to come out of hiding, find the phone and leave. Nobody would’ve heard a thing.’
‘You’re saying all of this was for a goddamn phone?’
‘It’s gone, isn’t it?’
Pine didn’t answer. His eyes were red and puffy, his face pale.
‘A phone is a key piece of evidence,’ Darby said. ‘You’ve got logs of incoming and outgoing calls, maybe even an address book full of contacts. Who knows what we would’ve found? Night-vision man certainly thought it was important enough for me not to get my hands on it. He came out of his hiding spot to treat me to a stun grenade. Then he covered the woods with HC smoke canisters and gunfire to keep everyone back.’