33. Listening Ears
Nobody spoke. The Mustang sped up and the case fractured in Sally's head. Another body? Who? Why? They tore past a sign for Greatstone.
"Where?" she asked, at last finding her voice.
Bledd held up the screen and she glanced at it; a brackish patch of forest with a sliver in the center, surrounded by the gray slab monuments that had to be the 'Listening Ears'.
Undeniably a body.
Laid flat on its back, older, female this time, arms arranged like driftwood at her sides. Something was familiar but Sally couldn't say what. Maybe the clothes, a red and green jacket over long green waders.
A car horn blared and she refocused on the road. "Any sign of the Rooks?"
"Checking," Bledd said. "Turn right now."
Sally pulled into a side road past a sign for 'Romney Sands Holiday Park', then rumbled down a chalk trail lined with white static caravans.
Ahead lay the forested stretch of green-brown marsh, watched over by the insect-like drone hovering above.
Liam said something but she didn't hear for the pounding pulse in her ears.
"Left," Bledd called as the track ended at an expanse of black water.
She swung off the trail onto grass. A fence ran to the right but there was a break ahead and she pushed the Mustang through, weaved between trees and bushes down an embankment toward a brown dirt path.
A couple walking hand-in-hand leaped to the side, and Bledd pointed.
"There."
The Mustang raced along a long, narrow clay causeway across the lake. Dark water spread to either side, then low trees, then the trail ended in a fence and she saw them: an array of three huge, concrete monoliths on a forested island 30 yards away.
She killed the engine and lurched to the fence, swamped by the buzz of the drone.
The structure on the right was a stone parabola, hollowed out like an empty eye socket.
Easily 30 feet high, stained with black lichen and pocked with divots.
The center shape was smaller and oval, maybe 20 feet tall, faceted like some otherworldly gray jewel.
Past it to the left stood an enormous wall, 200 feet in length and as tall as the eye socket, curved like a ship's radar.
Only a fence and a narrow beam walkway barred the 10-foot gap to the island. Sally vaulted the fence and started across the beam.
"Mayhew's sending everything she's got here," Liam called.
"I'd belay that, Officer O'Connell," came the firm voice of Arthur Bledd. "Officer Rogers, wait."
Sally turned, almost tipping herself from the beam. Bledd was out of the car now, the briefcase on the Mustang's roof. The sound of the drone receded as it flew north.
"Why?" she shouted.
"The Rooks are not here. But I know where to look. If they're there, I'll have them in minutes. How far away are your armed teams?"
His gaze was steady and his words burrowed through the adrenaline and found bedrock. She turned.
"Liam?"
"Half an hour at best," he said. "We're still the closest."
Sally looked at Bledd, torn. She needed to see the body. She needed to find the Rooks. But what if Liam was right about Bledd? What if this was the distraction? But then, would he have led them to a body if he was really the killer?
It made no sense. None of this did. Maybe a bluff or a double bluff, or just a coincidence, and–
"Let's go," she barked, the decision locked as she dropped off the fence and ran to the Mustang. The body would wait. The Rooks would not.
Back in the Mustang, she spun a donut turn and raced back across the causeway, up the embankment and back through the holiday camp, slamming the horn to drive holidaymakers from her path.
"I have them!" Bledd called over the engine's roar, eyes intent upon his drone screen. "Three men. It's the Rooks!"
Sally floored the gas pedal. "Where?"
"St. Mary's Marsh." Bledd worked his controls while Liam relayed the location to Mayhew.
"There's a self-storage facility surrounded by sewers.
They're in a flatboat on the move." He turned to look at Liam.
"If you send officers to St. Mary's Road, Jefferstone Lane and the northern reach of St. Mary's Bay, they'll have no way out. "
Liam repeated that into his phone as Sally whipped out of the holiday camp and back onto the coastal road heading north.
"Drone's battery's done," Bledd said. "I'm putting her down. We don't have eyes-on anymore."
Sally felt Jason Harrow's gaze on her now as she pushed the car to 50, closer than ever, along with a new pair of eyes. That of an older woman, her limbs limp, her sun-lined face blank.
Familiar.
Recognition struck Sally like a winter squall. Of course.
It was Nancy Cagen.