Chapter 74
CHAPTER
With gravel, rocks, and mud raining down on his truck, Tommy French roared, “He’s booby-trapped the place!”
When we were all the way back to the road, French slammed on the brakes and threw the truck in park, panting as he looked through the filthy, spiderwebbed remnants of his windshield toward the flames at the far end of the drive.
“We need backup, Tommy,” Sampson said at last.
“We need more than that, John,” French said, picking up his police radio with shaking hands, which made me realize my own hands were trembling. “Goddamn it, this was my dream truck!”
The police detective got patched through to the Chester County dispatcher, identified himself, and reported the explosion.
“I need enough manpower to seal off the road on the south side of the barrens ASAP. And the east side of the old Lawton place. No one crosses until we know what we’re dealing with.
” He went on barking orders, calling for a helicopter, a special emergency response team, and a team from the hazardous devices and explosives unit.
By that point, I’d regained enough of my composure and strength to climb out of the truck. The case was now out of our control.
Squirrels chattered in the pines. Crows cawed somewhere behind me. Falling leaves from the scattered oaks floated on the chill breeze.
If I hadn’t noticed the last of the fireball dying at the other end of the drive, I might have called it an idyllic scene. Instead, my nerves twitched at every sound.
Sampson climbed out. French still had the dispatcher on the line.
“He’s calling in an army,” John said.
“He should. We don’t know what we’re facing here.”
French got out, the radio receiver still held to one ear. In the far distance, from back toward Oxford, we could hear the first sirens.
He told the dispatcher we were going to take a walk to the explosion site.
Then he hung up and walked around his truck, looking at all the dings and pockmarks from the blast and shaking his head.
Finally, he shrugged. “Chopper won’t be here for forty minutes.
Let’s do a little recon before the cavalry comes. ”
“And set off another bomb?” Sampson asked.
“No, just up the drive, past that rut we hit before the explosion, so SERT has some idea what we’re dealing with.”
The drive was torn up. There was mud all over from our skidding retreat, even in the leaves and pine needles we now crept across with weapons drawn.
The rut in the drive turned out to be a water bar that was supposed to drain the drive, put rain into the ditches. On the right side, Sampson found a thin cable that snaked to a pine tree ten yards into the woods. Some kind of remote device was linked to the cable and taped to the trunk.
“There’s got to be a pressure plate or something there under all that mud,” John said. “When we drove across it, the trigger was tripped.”
I said, “Kind of a long way from the trigger to the actual bomb.”
“Fifty yards?” French murmured.
“Far enough to make you wonder whether it was meant to kill or warn.”
“I think we’re fair to call it attempted murder,” French said, and continued past the water bar, stopping every few feet to examine the way ahead.
“Look for fishing line, trip wire, or another cable,” Sampson whispered to me.
“What if there’s another pressure plate?” I asked, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable about what we were doing. “Under the leaves, I mean.”
That stopped John for a moment. But not French, who kept on going to the charred bomb crater, which was about twenty inches deep and just as wide.
“Smells more like gasoline than cordite or C-four,” French said when we arrived beside him.
“I’ll let your bomb guys figure that out,” Sampson said.
We scanned the surface of the drive ahead but saw no fresh tracks in the thirty yards before it opened up into an overgrown field, turned to the right, and vanished. The police sirens were getting close now.
French said, “Let’s see what’s what in that field before we head back to the road.”
He eased forward and we followed, eyes searching the ground and the trees ahead for signs of a second triggering device, but we found none. We reached the last big pine standing sentinel above the drive.
French eased left around the tree trunk and took a peek. When he pulled back, he murmured, “House is about seventy out. Place looks dead. Roof’s ready to cave in.”
I was standing to his right and moved aside several of the lower pine boughs on the opposite side of the tree. It gave me a different angle and a new perspective on the field that cut back toward the road.
In the deep pocket of the field, there was a long, low, open-front shed of sorts with a metal roof and pigeons fluttering about.
One of the Chester County Sheriff’s cruisers was close now, siren whooping, almost to French’s truck.
“Let’s head back, Alex,” Sampson said behind me. “Cavalry’s here.”
But I stepped forward another foot and pushed aside the last brushy tree limb blocking my view of the far end of that shed. I took in the scene for a long moment, enough time to be sure that my heart was slamming in my chest for good reason.
“Cross!” French called.
I pivoted, stepped back around the tree, and grinned at them, feeling victorious.
“What’s going on?” Sampson said.
“I just spotted an old white van half under a tarp in a shed not a hundred yards from us. I think we’ve got our killer.”