Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

CRISFIELD, MARYLAND, lay under gloomy, elephant gray skies. It had been raining on and off for most of the day. A lone police car raced along rain-slicked country roads with its siren screaming.

Inside the car were Artie Marshall and Chester Dils. Dils was twenty-six, which made him exactly twenty years younger than Marshall. Like many young, rural policemen, he had dreams of getting out of the area—the same kind of hopes and dreams he’d had while attending Wilde Lake High School in Columbia.

But here he was, still in Crisfield. Twin Peaks II, he liked to call the town of under three thousand.

Dils almost physically ached to become a Maryland state trooper. It was tricky sledding because of the demanding trooper exams, especially the math. But becoming a trooper would get him the hell out of Somerset County. Maybe as far away as Salisbury or Chestertown.

Neither Dils nor especially mild-mannered Artie Marshall was ready for the exposure and the quicksilver reputations they were about to get. Just like that on the afternoon of the thirtieth of December. A telephone call had come into their station house on Old Hurley Road. A couple of hunters had spotted something that looked suspicious over in West Crisfield, on the way to the camping ground on Tangier Island. The hunters had found an abandoned vehicle. A blue Chevy minivan.

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For the past several days, anything and everything vaguely suspicious immediately got associated with the big Washington kidnapping. That pattern had gotten old real fast. Dils and Marshall were ordered to check it out, anyway. A blue minivan had been used to take the kids from the school.

The afternoon was dying when they arrived at the farm out on Route 413. It was even a little spooky heading down the badly rutted dirt road onto the property.

“Old farm or something back here?” Dils asked his partner. Dils was behind the wheel. Doing about fifteen on the muddy, rutted road. Artie Marshall preferred to ride shotgun, sans the shotgun.

“Yeah. Nobody lives here now, though. I doubt this’ll amount to anything monumental, Chesty.”

“That’s the beauty of The Job,” Chester Dils said. “You never know. Monumental is always out there somewhere.” He had a short-standing habit of making everything a little more glamorous than it actually was. He had his dream and all his big ideas, but Artie Marshall thought of them more as the immaturity of a younger man.

They arrived at the dilapidated barn that the hunters had mentioned in their call to the station. “Let’s go for a look-see,” Marshall said, trying to match the younger officer’s enthusiasm.

Chester Dils hopped out of the squad car. Artie Marshall followed, though not at the same sprightly pace. They approached a badly faded red barn, a low building that looked as if it had sunk a couple of feet into the ground since its heyday. The hunters had stopped at the barn to get out of the rainstorm earlier that afternoon. Then they had called the police.

The barn was fairly dark and gloomy inside. The windows had been covered over with cheesecloth. Artie Marshall turned on his flashlight.

“Let’s have a little light on the subject,” he muttered. Then, he bellowed, “Bingo fucking Jesus!”

There it was, all right. A big sinkhole in the middle of the dirt floor. A dark blue van parked next to the hole.

“Son-of-a-B, Artie!”

Chester Dils pulled out his service revolver. Suddenly, he was having trouble getting his breath. He was having trouble just standing there. In all honesty, he did not want to go up to the big hole in the ground. He did not want to be inside the old barn anymore. Maybe he wasn’t ready for the troopers after all.

“Who’s here?” Artie Marshall called out in a loud, clear voice. “Come out, right now. We’re the police! This is the Crisfield police.”

Christ, Artie was doing better than he was, Dils thought. The man was rising to the occasion. That got Chester Dils’s feet and legs moving, anyway. He was heading farther inside the barn—to see if this was what he prayed to Almighty God it wasn’t.

“Point that lamp right down in there,” he said to his partner in crime-solving. They had come up right alongside the hole in the ground. He could barely breathe now. His chest felt as if it were constricted by a tourniquet. His knees were knocking against each other.

“You okay, Artie?” he asked his partner.

Marshall beamed the flashlight down into the dark, deep hole. They saw what the hunters had already seen. There was a small box… almost a casket, in the sinkhole. The wooden case, or casket, was wide open. And it was empty.

“What the hell is that thing?” Dils heard himself asking.

Artie Marshall bent down closer. He aimed the flashlight beam directly into the hole. Instinctively, he looked around. He checked his back. Then his attention went to the black hole again.

Something was down at the bottom of the hole. Something that looked bright pink, or red.

Marshall’s mind was racing. It’s a shoe… Christ, it must be the little girl’s. This must be where they kept Maggie Rose Dunne.

“This is where they kept those two kids,” he finally spoke to his partner. “We found it, Chesty.”

And they had.

Along with one of Maggie Rose’s pretty-in-pink sneakers. The old trusty-dusty Reebok sneakers, that were supposed to help her blend in with the other kids at Washington Day School. The really weird part was that the sneaker looked as if it had been left there to be found.