he said at last.
Lucy, still not quite comprehending, turned to Jim.
“They use it for the puppies,” he explained. “For the puppies nobody wants.”
Lucy paled. “Dear God,” she whispered. “You mean they used that thing to—?”
“That’s the way it looks,” Bronski said, his voice suddenly hard. “But they still had bodies to dispose of. And it looks to me like that’s why they had that thing.”
Lucy, her face ashen, stared at the firebox. “Isn’t it just a furnace?”
“It’s not like any furnace I ever saw,” Bronski replied. “The only place I’ve ever seen anything like that is in a crematorium.” As the Corlisses numbly looked on, he approached the crematory and touched the door.
It was still warm, but not too warm to prevent him from opening it.
The chamber inside was empty.
“They cleaned it up pretty well, but not quite well enough.”
In the corners of the chamber there were a few flecks of grayish matter. Producing a plastic bag from his coat pocket, Bronski scooped up a sample of the stuff, sealed the bag, and replaced it in his pocket.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve seen enough, and it’ll take a team of techs to go over this place properly. But offhand, I’d say it ought to be pretty easy to find out who was here. There’ll be prints all over the place, and God only knows what else.” He chuckled, but there was not even a trace of humor in the sound. “When you clear out as fast as they did, you don’t stop to clean up after yourselves. You take what you can and run. And that’s what these people did. I’ll bet they didn’t even waste time looking for Randy. Just packed up everything and took off.”
A few minutes later they were back in Bronski’s car and heading down the driveway. They stopped to reclose the main gate, but ignored the chain that still lay on the ground where they had left it.
“What now?” Jim asked as they turned back onto the main road.
“As soon as we get into radio range, ITI call headquarters and have a team sent out here. Then I think I ought to have a little talk with Paul Randolph. That’s right,” he added, seeing in the rearview mirror the look of dismay on Lucy’s face. “Just me, and maybe someone else from the department You’re out of it now, Lucy. You, and Jim, and the Montgomerys too. From here on in, it’s all got to be official.” Then, still watching Lucy’s face, he caught a glimpse of something moving in the distance. He slowed the car slightly. Behind them, a van was pulling out of a side road.
“Something wrong?” Jim asked.
Bronski said nothing, his eyes glued to the slow-moving van. Only when it turned in the opposite direction did he relax.
“Nothing,” he said. “For a second there, I just thought maybe we were being followed.”
And yet, even as he continued driving, he felt uneasy. There was something about the van …
As they rounded a bend in the road, and Carl Bronski’s car disappeared from their view, Morantz spoke softly to Kaplan.
“About ten more seconds,” he said. “Give them that, but no more.”
Bronski’s brain was working furiously now, trying to remember where he’d seen that van before.
Not long ago.
This morning?
But where? And why was the memory so vague?
And then he knew. Lucy Corliss’s block, part way down the street. He’d barely noticed it
But was it the same van?
If it was, then they were being followed. Except the van had gone the other way. Instead of following them, it was going to—
But if it had followed them, whoever was in it knew where they’d been.
And no longer cared.
“Holy Christ!” he yelled. His foot slammed onto the brake and the car spun into a four-wheel skid. “Get out! Get the hell out of the car!”
As the car skewed off the road, he yanked at the door handle. Maybe, just maybe, there was still time.
With a sudden roar, the gelignite attached to the gas tank exploded, ripping the tank loose from the car, splitting its welded seams and igniting its contents.
What a moment before had been an automobile lurching toward a ditch was now a massive fireball rolling into that ditch, through it, then coming to rest a few yards from the edge of the forest.
Carl Bronski died instantly, crushed by the weight of the car, his body a mangled mass resting grotesquely in the bottom of the ditch.
For Jim Corliss, it was worse.