"Quiet," he raged in a whisper, looking around. "I'm at the end of my row with you." He pulled her roughly to her feet. He could've taken her by the arm or rolled her onto her back and eased her up that way. But he didn't; he reached around her from behind, his hands over her breasts, and lifted her to her feet. She felt his taut body rub disgustingly against her back and butt. Finally, after what seemed like forever, he released her but wrapped his bony fingers around her arm and pulled her after him toward the mill, oblivious to her sobbing. He paused only once, to examine a long line of ants carrying tiny eggs across the path. "Don't hurt them," he muttered. And watched her feet carefully to make sure she didn't.
With a sound that Rhyme had always thought was that of a butcher sharpening a knife, the turning frame swished another page of The Miniature World, which was, to judge from its battered condition, Garrett Hanlon's favorite book.
Insects are astonishingly adept at survival. The birch moth, for example, is naturally white but in the areas surrounding industrial Manchester, England, the species' coloring changed to black to blend in with the soot on the white tree trunks and appear less obvious to its enemies.
Rhyme flipped through more pages, his staunch left ring finger tapping the ECU controller and moving the pages, hiss, hiss, blade on steel. Reading the passages Garrett had marked. The paragraph about the antlion pit had saved the search party from falling into one of the boy's traps and Rhyme was trying to draw more conclusions from the book. As fish psychologist Ben Kerr had told him, animal behavior is often a good model for human--especially when it comes to matters of survival.
Praying mantises rub their abdomens against their wings, producing an unearthly noise, which disorients pursuers. Mantises, by the way, will eat any living creature smaller than themselves, including birds and mammals....
Dung beetles are credited with giving ancient man the idea for the wheel...
A naturalist named Reaumur observed in the seventeen hundreds that wasps make paper nests from wood fiber and saliva. That gave him the idea to make paper from wood pulp, not cloth, as paper manufacturers had been doing up until then....
But what among this was revealing to the case? Was there anything that could help Rhyme find two human beings on the run somewhere in a hundred square miles of forest and swampland?
Insects make great use of the sense of smell. For them it is a multidimensional sense. They actually "feel" smells and use them for many things. For education, for intelligence, for communication. When an ant finds food it returns to the nest leaving a scented trail, sporadically touching the ground with its abdomen. When other ants come across the line they follow it back to the food. They know which direction to go in because the scent is "shaped"; the narrow end of the smell points toward the food like a directional arrow. Insects also use smells to warn of approaching enemies. Since an insect can detect a single molecule of scent miles away insects are rarely surprised by their enemies....
Sheriff Jim Bell walked quickly into the room. On his beleaguered face was a smile. "Just heard from a nurse at the hospital. There's some news about Ed. Looks like he's coming out of that coma and said something. His doctor's gonna be calling in a few minutes. I'm hoping we'll find out what he meant by 'olive' and if he saw anything specific on that map in the blind."
Despite his skepticism about human testimony Rhyme decided that he'd now be happy for a witness. The helplessness, the fish-on-dry-land disorientation, was wearing heavily on him.
Bell paced slowly in the lab, glancing expectantly toward the doorway every time footsteps approached.
Lincoln Rhyme stretched again, pressing his head back into the headrest of the chair. Eyes on the evidence chart, eyes on the map, eyes back to the book. And all the while the green-and-black nutshell of a fly zipped around the room with an unfocused desperation that seemed to match his own.
An animal nearby darted across the path and vanished.
"What was that?" Sachs asked, nodding at it. To her the creature had looked like a cross between a dog and a large alley cat.
"Gray fox," Jesse said. "Don't see 'em too often. But then I don't usually go for walks north of the Paquo."
They moved slowly as they tried to follow the frail indications of Garrett's passage. And all the while they kept their eyes out for more deadfall traps and ambush from the surrounding trees and brush.
Once again Sachs felt the foreboding that had dogged her since they'd driven past the child's funeral that morning. They'd left the pines behind and were in a different type of forest. The trees were what you'd see in a tropical jungle. When she asked about them Lucy told her the
y were tupelo gum, old-growth bald cypress, cedar. They were bound together with webby moss and clinging vines that absorbed sound like thick fog and accentuated her sense of claustrophobia. There were mushrooms and mold and fungus everywhere and scummy marshes all around them. The aroma in the air was that of decay.
Sachs looked at the trodden ground. She asked Jesse, "We're miles from town. Who makes these paths?"
He shrugged. "Mostly bad pay."
"What's that?" she asked, recalling that Rich Culbeau had used the phrase.
"You know, somebody who doesn't pay his debts. Basically, it just means trash. Moonshiners, kids, swamp people, PCP cookers."
Ned Spoto took a drink of water and said, "We get calls sometimes: there's been a shooting, somebody's screaming, calls for help, mysterious lights flashing signals. Stuff like that. Only by the time we get out here, there's nothing.... No body, no perp, no complaining witness. Sometimes we find a blood trail but it don't lead anywhere. We make the run--we have to--but nobody in the department ever comes out in these parts alone."
Jesse said, "You feel different out here. You feel that--this sounds funny--but you feel that life's different, cheaper. I'd rather be arresting a couple of armed kids pumped up on angel dust at a mini-mart than come out here on a call. At least there, there're rules. You kinda know what to expect. Out here ..." He shrugged.
Lucy nodded. "That's true. And normal rules don't apply to anybody north of the Paquo. Us or them. You can see yourself shooting before you read anybody their rights and that'd be perfectly all right. Hard to explain."
Sachs didn't like the edgy talk. If the other deputies hadn't been so somber and unnerved themselves she would have thought they were putting on a show to scare the city girl.
Finally they stopped at a place where the path branched out into three directions. They walked about fifty feet down each but could find no sign of which one Garrett and Lydia had chosen. They returned to the crossroads.
She heard Rhyme's words echoing in her mind. Be careful, Sachs, but move fast. I don't think we have much time left.
Move fast....