rarely did her worst visions meet the level of this nightmare.
Mitch walked along the neatly trimmed grass margin, crouching below the windows along the side of the house. He heard a rasping, flacketing buzz, like a big insect, and glanced up with a scowl into the stormy gloom. Saw nothing.
His heart almost stopped when he realized the cell phone was still on. He reached into his left pocket and switched it off.
A gravel path reached from the back porch out to a long frame outbuilding behind the house. He avoided the path and the scrunching sound his shoes would make there, and walked along the soft margin, stepping from the grass, patchy and dead, onto the outbuilding’s concrete stoop. He peered through the small, square window set into the steel door. Why a steel door? And new, at that.
In the room beyond the small window he saw a heavy mesh gate. He quietly tried the doorknob. It was locked, of course. He stepped backward, dropped his heel in a depression in the grass, caught his balance with a hop, then walked around the side, quickening his pace. The sheriff might arrive any second. Mitch preferred recovering Stella without official help. Besides, he knew Kaye could not hold out much longer. He had to finish his reconnaissance in a hurry, locate his daughter, and decide what to do next.
Mitch had never been one to make quick decisions. He had spent too many years patiently scraping and brushing through packed layers of soil, uncovering millennia of silent, unwritten history. The peace that had filled his soul on those digs had turned out not to be a survival trait.
He had thrown that peace away, along with the digging, the history, and almost all of his past life, and replaced it with a desperate and protective fury.
Mark Augustine twitched his lips at the arrival of the man and the woman in the old truck. Little Bird gave them a series of clear, frozen pictures, at the ends of blurry swoops, the pictures cameoed on the big screens in blue-wrapped squares.
Two names came up on the last screen. Facial matching had led to an identification that Augustine did not need. The man walking around the house was Mitch Rafelson. The woman in the truck was Kaye Lang Rafelson.
“Good,” Browning said. “The gang’s all here.” She looked up at Augustine.
Augustine pinched his lips. “Enforcement is hardly an exact science,” he said. “Where are the vans?”
“About two minutes away,” Browning said. Once more, she was completely in control and confident.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Spotsylvania County
Kaye heard engines. She looked over the hedge to the road and saw two blue-and-white Virginia State Police patrol cars coming from one direction and from the other, no sirens or flashing lights, a long, blocky white utility van, like a cross between a prison bus and an ambulance. She could not see Emergency Action’s red-and-gold shield on the side, but she knew it was there.
She stood quietly as the patrol cars slowed and then nosed off with the van to see who would turn first into the private road.
“No snooping,” the old woman said. “You with the gas company?” The woman was forty feet away, nothing more than a frizz-headed silhouette. She had come out of the house very quietly as Mitch had transited the back of the long building. She was carrying a shotgun.
Mitch turned and looked up the right side of the long building, facing the back of the house. He had made his circuit and found no other entrance.
“Don’t be silly,” he called, trying to sound amiable. “I’m looking for my daughter.”
“We don’t have parties,” the woman said.
“Mother!” A man slammed open the screen door and stood beside her on the back porch. “Put that damned gun away. There are troopers out front.”
“Caught him,” the woman said. She pointed.
“Come right on up here. Let me see you. You with the troopers?”
“Emergency Action,” Mitch said.
“That’s not what he said,” the woman commented, lowering the shotgun.
The man took the gun away from her with a jerk and stepped back into the house. The woman stood staring at Mitch. “You come to get your daughter,” she murmured.
Mitch walked warily around her, then to the left, seeing the headlights of a car and a van at the end of the road behind their old truck.
“Damn it, you’ve parked all wrong,” the man shouted from inside the house. Mitch heard feet stamping on wooden floors, saw lights go on and off through the rooms, heard the door open on the front porch.
As Mitch came around the corner, a plump, active man in shorts stood on the porch between the pillars, hands up as if surrendering. “What are they up to?” the man muttered.
Mitch’s hopes were very low. He could not find Stella without making a lot of noise, and there was no way now he could imagine getting her away from the house even if he carried her. The woods behind the house and across a field looked thick. Bugs were humming and chirping all around him now that the rain had let up. The air smelled dusty and sweet with moisture and wet grass and dirt.
Kaye faced the main road and the newly arrived vehicles. Two men in two-tone gray uniforms got out of the patrol cars and walked toward her. The younger man cast a confused backward glance at the van.
“Did you call us, ma’am?” the older trooper asked. He was large, in his late forties, with a deep but crackling bull voice.
“Our daughter’s been kidnapped. She’s in there,” Kaye said.
“In the house?”
“We just got here. She called us and told us where to find her.”
The troopers regarded each other briefly, faces professionally blank, then turned toward the two figures emerging from the van: a tall, cadaverous male in a shiny black jumpsuit and a stocky female in plastic isolation whites. They slipped on gloves and face masks and approached the troopers.
“This is our jurisdiction, officers,” the thin man said. “We’re federal.”
“We have a kidnapping complaint,” the older trooper said.
“Ma’am, what’s your business here?” the woman asked Kaye.
“Show me your ID,” Kaye demanded.
“Look at the damned van. They aren’t cheap, you know,” said the thin man in the black jumpsuit, his voice haughty. “You the mother?”
The troopers stood back. The big one scowled at the thin man.
“You are here to pay bounty,” Kaye said, her voice scratchy. “I have no idea how many kids are here, but I know this is not
