anyone in town suspected a stray whiff of death.”
“The girl was alive two hours ago,” Mercer said. “Fingers crossed.”
“Be careful what you wish for. Being alive in this guy’s hands isn’t likely to be time well spent.”
“Freezing,” I said. “What about the freezing cold she described?”
“Take off your long johns, blondie. It’s twenty-six degrees outside.”
“Her silk long johns, you meant to say.”
“Now how would you happen to know that, Brother Wallace?” Mike asked with a grin. He had cut off two cars at the exit as he careened onto the southbound highway.
“ ’ Cause Alex was kind enough to give some to Vickee for Christmas, for that ski trip we took in January. Now I’m expected to keep my wife in silk underwear.”
“Coop dresses so she don’t know from freezing. The wind blows off the Hudson, that cold air can bite like a king cobra. That’s freezing.”
“So Secaucus is remote, industrial, and a ghost town at night. But just a short hop into Manhattan,” I said. “Trucks and trains and the smell of death in the air—maybe Chat wasn’t all that confused when she called Faith.”
“I’m telling you, Coop. This town is a natural killing ground.”
THIRTY-NINE
I tried the number for the Reverend Jeanine Portland as Mike sped south. My message went to voice mail, and when I rang the landline at the Nantucket church office, I reached a secretary who told me that the minister was off-island until later in the evening. She was sorry, she told me, that she had no idea where Portland’s trip had taken her.
“You’d better call the police department there, Mercer,” I said. “Someone is bound to have a relationship with Portland. I’d like them to track her down and make sure they sit on her for the night.”
“What time’s the last boat?”
I knew the Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard ferry schedule cold, on- and off-season, for all of the years that I had been summering there with my family, before my late fiancé and I bought our home. Nantucket was even farther out to sea, and many fewer ferries ran there from the Steamship Authority dock in Hyannis.
“Probably eight tonight. If she’s traveling by car, there should be a reservation in the computer that will give us a clue to her travel plans.”
Mercer was on the phone, patching through from Information to the small police department that watched over the winter population of ten thousand. He explained the situation to a duty detective, who knew Portland and promised to track her down. He would have her met on the Cape side, escorted onto the ferry, and not left alone until we contacted him about the status of our hunt for the killer.
We took the Secaucus exit and at the bottom of the ramp were joined by two patrol cars from the local department. Lieutenant Peterson had given their boss the coordinates of the only triangulated call and sent his men to guide us to the area that was most likely the cell source. Mercer got out of the car to introduce himself and listen to their suggestions.
“Follow these guys,” he said when he climbed back in. “They’re going to take us to the spot our tech team plotted from the cell-tower coordinates.”
Not far from the highway, the cops led us off the local streets and onto a dirt road. It was lined with amber reeds, tall and willowy, that waved in the strong wind and made it impossible to see far on either side of the trail.
Mike drove for more than a half mile before the landscape cleared. Strong odors rose in intensity the farther from the highway we went, unless it was my imagination that had taken hold of all my senses.
The Crown Vic rattled as we rode over a series of gravel-lined railroad-track beds. The tracks themselves trailed off in both directions, crisscrossing back and forth as far as I could see. Old freight cars, with rusted metal trim and weathered paint chipped off the sides, stood at dead-ended points along the way as though they’d been abandoned years earlier.
“Where the hell are these guys headed?” Mike asked, honking his horn at them to slow down. “It’s the ass end of nowhere out here. We’re going to need an army to search.”
“Peterson says he’ll give us one.” I leaned forward, peering over Mercer’s broad shoulders as we rounded a curve, crossed the tracks again, and came upon a sea of white trucks, maybe thirty of them.
Mike pulled up even with the second