She turned to look at him. “What? Where is—”
Thaa-wumph!
Bree felt the ground tremble. The muted explosion sounded like it had come from deep inside the mansion.
“What was that?” Rawlins said, backing away.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I … where is Alex?”
“Dr. Cross? He—”
A second, much louder explosion cut him off; it lit up one of the second-story bedrooms like aluminum in the sun, blew out the windows, and ignited a fierce blaze. Yellow, orange, and ruby flames billowed out of the mansion and licked at the shake-shingle roof.
Bree moved back fast, feeling dread grow in her stomach. “Where’s Alex, Rawlins?” she shouted. “Where’s my husband?”
CHAPTER
108
THE HEAVY CAMOUFLAGE curtains flapped shut behind me. My eyes adjusted. I was in a storm-drain culvert, a good ten feet in diameter. Either the potential existed for extreme flash-flooding in the creek or Edgars had put the culvert in place as an escape route. I was betting that the smudge I’d seen on the satellite view was dirt from an excavation.
Forty yards ahead of me, the culvert ended, and gray light was building.
If Edgars and Pratt knew I was trailing them, they could be waiting at the other end of the culvert. But by my reckoning, the culvert had to pass beneath the dirt road that ran along the estate’s eastern boundary, which meant the other end would leave me somewhere inside the Michaux State Forest.
They’re not waiting to ambush me, I thought. They’re getting out of here and as far away as possible.
I gunned the throttle and shot out of the culvert, feeling exposed, a target.
But no shots rang out as I left the creek bed for a trail through hardwood trees. With dawn nearing, I could see tire tracks, obscure at first but growing more distinct the farther I followed them.
As I drove, I tried to anticipate Edgars’s next move. Either he was in full flight mode, in which case I would find his UTV abandoned and the tracks of a car leaving the area, or he had something more sinister planned.
In my mind, I saw Gretchen Lindel writhing in the truck bed. I began to fear that Edgars did not intend to take her or any of the other women with him. If he was as ruthless as I thought he was, he would kill Gretchen and the other blondes. Maybe he already had.
No witnesses, I thought. He’ll want no witnesses.
It was full daylight when I reached the rim of a bluff that looked out over a broad patchwork of farmland a good five miles from the estate. Looking down the steep trail, almost a quarter mile below me, I could see a farm, or at least the roof of a ranch-style home, most of a steel building, and definitely Edgars’s side-by-side Honda Pioneer 1000 parked in the snow beside it.
I switched off the Kawasaki and left it. Carrying my pistol and my phone, I sidestepped down the hillside, staying tight to the brush, hoping no one would spot me from below. I kept checking my phone for service, but there was none.
My ankle and shin were swollen and unhappy, but I refused to stop.
Snow was starting to melt off branches when I reached the rear of the farm. I stopped behind a tree, listening, watching. Nothing moved in the yard. Nothing showed in the windows of the ramshackle ranch house.
The three overhead doors on the long side of the steel building were closed. The porthole windows in the doors looked covered. The small sash window twenty feet to the right of the back door, however, was not shaded. I could see bright, glaring light inside.
I checked my phone. Still no service. But the fact that Edgars was a master coder, a creature of the dark web, made me check to see if he had Wi-Fi. He did, a password-protected access called Pharm, and another, Pharm Guest. I tried to log in to that one, thinking I could e-mail or text Bree, but it too required a password.
Inside the steel building, someone let loose with a heart-wrenching scream.
I clenched my jaw and went over the fence, moving with a stiff, painful gait. The scream faded and died. When I reached the rear window, I ducked beneath it, got to the right side of the sash, and turned to face the back door.
“No!” a woman screamed.
“Please!” another yelled. “Just let us go!”
I snuck a peek through the window and saw a John Deere tractor and some other farm equipment parked around a large open space in the middle of the building. Running down from pulleys attached to a steel beam overhead, seven taut cables were clipped to leather restraints around the wrists of Gretchen Lindel and six other women, who dangled in a line, arms stretched overhead, their toes barely brushing the floor.