“Yes, sir.”
From the back of my Ford, I removed the tools I’d need to get inside the Lexus. I gave Clyde some water and downed him in the shade, then shucked off my jacket and pulled on sunglasses. I swung the strap of my small duffel over my shoulder and made a wide circle of my own around the Lexus, careful not to disturb the immediate area.
Samantha Davenport’s car was a late-model mint-condition black SUV with tan leather interior. Vanity plates showed a stretch of green prairie with a mountain range in the distance and the word Madonna. An impressive ego. Or maybe a business name. I walked around to the front of the car. Grass blades and thistle stems bristled from the front grill, shoved through the grate by the speed of her passage through the field. A spatter of mud clung to the wheel wells and along the running boards.
Samantha Davenport—or whoever had been driving—had come off the road in a hurry. And, judging by the mud, she’d arrived here during or shortly after the late-night thunderstorm. With luck, the crime scene guys would manage to pull some footprints. In the thick tangle of weeds, all I could make out were a few broken stalks.
I walked to the road and looked north, the direction she’d come from. There were no rubber burns on the asphalt. If she’d hit the brakes before veering off, she hadn’t braked hard. A quarter mile beyond the railroad overpass, she’d swerved, plowed through the brush by the road, and come to a stop a few feet short of the embankment that dropped steeply toward the railroad tracks.
“What were you looking for?” I asked softly. “Or was this simply your only chance? Did you run off the road hoping your daughter could escape?”
Or—an even uglier thought—had the engineer been wrong about what he thought he’d seen? Had Samantha shot her family then killed her daughter somewhere else before climbing onto the tracks? Maybe the blood hadn’t been hers.
That was a path I didn’t want to go down.
Assuming the killer had taken Lucy somewhere nearby, I did a three-sixty. Half a mile to the north lay a two-acre sprawl of warehouses and industrial buildings. Two miles southeast, a new housing development. Directly east, a pair of silos were just visible behind the ridgeline of a hill—an abandoned cement factory that sat slowly decaying on DPC property from the days when trains had hauled material to and from the plant on a T&W short line.
I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes had gone by. Wilson was now talking into a small voice recorder. I used my forearm to wipe sweat from my face and fumbled in my pocket for cigarettes I didn’t have. Agitation burned in my stomach with the delicate touch of a welding torch.
“Day’s wasting,” I said to Wilson.
“Yeah, I know.” He dropped his recorder in the pocket of his suit jacket. “Let’s do it.”
I pulled on latex gloves then walked around to the rear driver’s-side door. I wedged a strip of hard plastic into the narrow gap between the top of the door and the frame, then used my fist to pound it in until the gap was wide enough to allow me to squeeze an air bladder into the opening. I inflated the bladder until the gap widened, then slid a metal rod inside and hit the unlock button. I opened the door and got out of Wilson’s way.
The detective took photos of the car’s interior, then leaned in with gloved hands and dislodged the stuffed animal.
“One brown stuffed animal, a monkey,” he noted into his recorder. He looked around the back seat area. “The only other items visible in the car are an adult’s blue rain jacket, also in the back seat. And a pair of sunglasses hanging from a clip on the driver’s sun visor. We are not touching the glove box or the console between the front seats.”
He emerged from the car and backed away to where I waited.
There was no way of knowing if the monkey belonged to Lucy. It could be hers or belong to one of her siblings or even the family dog. But it had a pink lace ribbon pinned to the top of its head. And a single long, light-brown hair caught around one of the shiny black buttons.
Wilson used tweezers to remove and bag the hair. Then he dropped the toy in a paper bag and handed it to me. I turned my attention to Clyde, who came to his feet, tail swishing.
“Ready to get to work, boy?”
I showed him his Kong, a bright-red chew toy that he adored. His ears came up and his tail wagged faster. For Clyde, like other military working dogs and K9s, work was play. More than that—work was joy.
I opened the bag to give him a good whiff of the sock monkey, then waited until his eyes returned to mine.
“Seek!” I said, giving him the search command.
Clyde made a beeline for the Lexus and thrust his head through the open doorway. I called him back, then gave the command again, indicating he needed to look for the scent elsewhere. He circled the SUV, found Lucy’s scent on the far side and trotted down the embankment toward the train. I followed him, my heart in my throat.
“Dear God,” Wilson said.
Deke was sure that only Samantha Davenport had been on the tracks. But if Deke had struck an eight-year-old child with a four-hundred-ton locomotive churning out more than ninety-seven thousand pounds of force, a glancing blow wouldn’t make a sound or cause a ripple.
Then, fifteen feet from the tracks, Clyde did a ninety-degree turn and headed away from the tracks and the silent train. I found my breath again. He trotted briskly, tail straight out, hips swaying with confidence.
Where would a terrified eight-year-old go in the darkness? Storm clouds. No moon. She would have run anywhere that was away, I figured, her mother’s voice in her ears. Maybe the train tracks—empty then—had given her a faint path in the dark.
Clyde stayed steady.
“It’s a good scent,” I told Wilson, who was jogging behind me.
“How will we know we’re getting close?”
“Clyde will tell us.”
Up above, a car drove past going the opposite direction. I glimpsed the gawking face of a woman through the driver’s window and the flash of brake lights as the driver slowed before resuming speed.
“Ketz, get that roadblock up, now,” Wilson snapped into the radio.