Acadia nodded. “No choice in the matter. Not like us at all.”
“A different subspecies,” he offered.
“Fascinating,” she replied.
They trailed the blue Impala and Cross’s unmarked car north out of the District onto Maryland Route 97, which winds through the subdivisions of Wheaton, Glenmont, and Aspen Hill. It wasn’t until Olney that farmland appeared.
There was less traffic on the road here and Sunday had to lag so far back that he lost sight of the blue Impala, and then of Cross’s car after they’d both taken a left off the rural highway at Sunshine, heading west on Damascus Road.
He could see well down the road. They were gone. “Where’d they—”
“They must have gone to that reservoir back there,” Acadia said. Sunday stomped on the parking brake and spun the wheel going forty. They went into a screeching U-turn that threw them into the opposite lane. He released the brake and hit the gas, looking for the road to—
“There it is!” Acadia cried. “Triadelphia Reservoir Road.”
Sunday took the left without braking and shot up the dirt road, heading north once more. They passed one farm after another, separated by thick patches of timber. Where were they going? The reservoir?
He crested a rise in the road.
“Oops,” Acadia said before Sunday said, “Fuck.”
The unmarked car was parked off the shoulder not eighty yards ahead and twenty yards shy of where the woods gave way to hay fields. The detective and his wife were already out, doors shut. Bree Stone was holding a walkie-talkie and moving toward the front of the car, the edge of the woods, and the fields.
But Alex Cross? He was standing there looking right at them.
Chapter
70
I watched the dark-blue Chevy Tahoe with the tinted windows and the DC plates pass by at a solid clip, giving me nothing more than a pair of silhouettes, a man and a woman. I started walking toward the fields, watching the SUV until it had passed the other end and a line of trees before disappearing around a bend in the road.
“What is it?” Bree asked.
“Probably nothing,” I said, slowing as we reached the edge of the woods. “Lot of dark-blue Tahoes with tinted windows in DC. Whole fleet of them at the White House.”
Beyond the field my eyes studied a long wall of pine trees, a windbreak of sorts that stretched from the road back toward an old farmhouse and an older barn surrounded by low brush. Through the binoculars, I could just make out the top of Carney’s Impala parked in the side yard by the house. From a long way off you could see that the white house paint was blistered or gone to bare clapboard. The roof of the barn looked like it had been hit by lightning at some point. There was a charred, gaping hole on one corner. The whole structure sagged left.
“They’re in that house,” Bree said.
“They have to be,” I agreed, scanning the area with the glasses, understanding that we did not want to cross that open field to get to the farmhouse. We could be seen too easily.
My wife was thinking the same way and said, “We take the ditch on the left side of the road up to that tree line, then go across.”
It made sense. We took off, running low at the left side of the road, and jumped down into the drainage ditch. Stooped over, even I couldn’t be seen as we covered the hundred and fifty yards until the line of pine trees blocked any possible view of us from the farmhouse.
Moving along the road, hugging tight to the big conifers, we crept toward the farmyard and stopped behind the very last tree. Carney’s Impala was parked next to the house and a door. The shades were drawn in every window. And what was that noise? Almost like chickens clucking?
“Cover me, then call for backup,” I whispered, drawing my pistol and meaning to run around the pines, through the brush, and get to the side of the house as fast as possible.
But when I cut around the last tree, I ran directly into an explosion of cackling, squawking, and beating wings and flying feathers that became a flock of wild turkeys flushing all around me, ten or more.
I almost had a heart attack, so surprised and startled that it was at least ten seconds before Bree grabbed me by the elbow and together we sprinted around the back of the Impala and plastered ourselves against the side of the farmhouse.
“So much for being sneaky,” I whispered, still shaking inside but aiming my pistol at the side door, expecting it to open at any moment. After that much racket, how couldn’t Carney come to investigate?
But a minute passed, and then two. Was it possible he hadn’t heard any of it? Where was—?
A man’s voice, the words unclear but the tone threatening, echoed to us from inside the house. Then a woman’s voice chimed in, equally abusive in tone.