It promised to be a pleasant enough evening.
The North Carolina State Police duty officer contemplated the message slip. A citizen had reported seeing a woman being manhandled into a helicopter that had been parked in a remote clearing in the wooded land that bordered the freeway. The woman had been struggling and then she had gone limp, the witness thought. The helicopter had taken off immediately. Direction? Unknown.
Color of hair? Unknown. She had a bag or something over her head, he thought. Color of skin? The citizen did not know.
Descriptions of the assailants? There had been two – or maybe three. They had been casually dressed.
He could not really tell much else. How close had he been? He had been hiking in the woods and had seen all this as he was walking back. He was fifty to seventy-five yards from the clearing. Something like that. He wasn't real good at estimating distances.
The duty officer called in the dispatcher. "This is pretty thin. What did he sound like? Citizen or crank?"
The dispatcher shrugged. "Elderly, a little vague, but he definitely believes he saw something."
"Why was he hiking in the woods?"
"He said he is a birdwatcher. He was looking for the red cockaded woodpecker. He's sure about that."
"So he saw all this through binoculars?" said the duty officer, somewhat encouraged. He had been wondering how much an elderly man could see at fifty yards when peering through the gloom of a forest. Or was it seventy-five yards? It could be a hundred. It could be thirty.
Could you really tell the difference between a woman being helped aboard and pushed aboard? A bag over the head sounded more like a head scarf to retain some semblance of a hairstyle under the assault of a rotor wash. Not a clear picture.
"Apparently not," said the dispatcher. "They were hanging around his neck, but he just forgot. He said he was too surprised, but he insists that he saw what he described. Adamant would convey the degree of emphasis. This guy was all fired up."
The lieutenant smiled and checked the report again. The incident had happened – if anything had happened – forty minutes ago. His nearest patrol car was a good fifteen minutes away. And he was short two men.
"What kind of chopper?"
The dispatcher was getting a little irritated. "I asked him. He's into birds, not aircraft. Single rotor. Civilian paint job, something pale. That's all he knows."
"Did you ask him why he didn't report his earlier?" said the lieutenant. "I don't know what he expects us to do after forty minutes. The helicopter could be sixty miles away by now."
"He had to get to a phone," said the dispatcher. "And then he said he found he hadn't a dime."
The lieutenant shook his head. Where did they find them. He was tempted to log the call as requiring no further action, and then a thought occurred to him. He checked the map again. He knew that clearing. He'd patrolled that area. Hunted around there, too.
"If this is about a kidnapped woman, what would a helicopter be doing in that clearing? It's only about a hundred feet across." He looked at the map again and racked his brains. "There's a shitload of other places in the area you could land in more safely."
"Unless you didn't want to be seen," said the dispatcher. She waited a beat before adding, "sir."
The lieutenant looked at her. He was good at looks. This one connected. Whatever the witness had said, given FortBragg's proximity, it was most likely a military chopper on some damn fool exercise. Still, maybe not. The red cockaded woodpecker was a protected species. The military, much to their chagrin, had been instructed to give the bird a wide berth. The word was they were even printing maps with little woodpeckers printed all over them. Hell of a note.
"Who is the closest?" said the lieutenant. "Richardson?"
The dispatcher nodded. "Sergeant Richardson," she confirmed.
"Tell him to go to the clearing and have a look around. He's got a good eye, and who knows… maybe the Russians are invading."
The dispatcher grinned and shook her head. "North Carolina in all this heat and humidity. No chance."
State trooper Sergeant Andy Richardson had a reputation for thoroughness. He was not academically bright, but he had learned you could go a long way in police work by just being organized, methodical, thorough, and healthy. And common sense did not hurt either.
He was completing his notes on a minor traffic accident when the call came in. It was not urgent, so he finished the cup of herbal tea he had resting in the cup holder and completed his notes.
He then closed his eyes and meditated for several minutes. It was not exactly police procedure, but his wife Susan was a great believer in cultivating inner peace, and it certainly seemed to work. He did not complete his shift stressed out like many of his colleagues. He could take most things in his stride.
Despite taking his time, he reached the turnoff to the clearing only fifteen minutes after the dispatcher's call had come through. The unpaved access track stretched out ahead of him. The clearing, he recalled, was about a quarter mile away. The forest crowded in on either side.
He was tempted to drive on down the track, but he decided to think this one through. If someone had been pushed into a helicopter in the clearing, they had to have been brought there. It could, of course, have been another helicopter, but if so, why make a switch? No, the chances were that a vehicle would have been used.
Richardson got out of the cruiser and examined the track carefully. He could see one recent set of wheel marks in the dust heading toward the clearing but none coming out. The hairs on the back of his neck started to prickle. The supposed incident had happened about an hour earlier. The vehicle that had been reported as being involved in the transfer should have left – or else it was still inside. There was one other possibility.
He picked up his radio and gave his call sign. "Did our birdwatching witness drive to the clearing?"
"Negative," said the dispatcher. "His home is about two miles back, and he walked. He's there if you need him."
"I've got one set of tire tracks going in," said Richardson. "I'm going to block off the road and go in on foot. I'll call you in ten."
"Need backup?" said the dispatcher.
"No," said Richardson. "This probably doesn't amount to anything. But…"
He parked the cruiser across the track. Then he unclipped his shotgun. You never knew, and the mere sight of a shotgun tended to make potential assailants think twice. There was something about the sheer size of the muzzle.
He walked carefully and slowly down the track toward the clearing, examining not only the track itself but the undergrowth and woods on either side. If someone had been struggling in the car, they just might have been able to drop something out of the window. Perhaps some identification or a note. Well, it was unlikely, given the prevalence of air-conditioning combined with fully closed windows, but he had to check and now was the best time.
It was alarming how quickly the integrity of a crime scene could be compromised. Items of value that might also be clues had a tendency to vanish no matter how you tried to secure the scene. Human nature was just that – all too human. Of course, this was not yet a crime scene, but when you had a report you had to act as if the location might be. Certainly this was Richardson's way.
He held his shotgun in his right hand and used a stick to push aside the vegetation. All kinds of things that crawled and slithered and bit flourished in North Carolina – and not all were human. He smiled to himself, and then the joke lost some of its flavor as his stick revealed a rattlesnake curled up next to a rock. The snake seemed to look at him as if debating the odds, then shot into the undergrowth. It did not like shotguns either.