permitted it with a flick of his wrist.
Maddox walked back past the cars lining the baking road to where Ripsbaugh was setting down his cones. 'Kane,' Maddox said.
Ripsbaugh straightened, Maddox getting a sense of the strength inside his saggy pants and silent attitude, years of steady labor bound up in muscle. 'Don.'
'Hey, uh?' He nodded back at Hess. 'They want you to leave. They don't want you around.'
Ripsbaugh stared. 'I'm closing off the road. This turn here?'
'I know. I know. I'm just telling you what they said.'
Ripsbaugh looked toward the turnout at the bridge. Hess was ignoring him, talking to someone else. Ripsbaugh was usually hard to read, but here the insult was plain.
Twelve hours after the DNA results had come back, Ripsbaugh's state police shadow simply disappeared. No apology to Ripsbaugh, no explanation. Because Ripsbaugh was never officially charged, he didn't have to be officially cleared. So add to the taint of cuckoldry a cloud of suspicion still lingering over Ripsbaugh's head.
Maddox said, 'Leave the cones with me. I'll pick them up when they're through here, run them on back to you.'
Ripsbaugh slowly set down the cones. He was the kind of man who knew little of life other than the satisfaction of hard work. Take away his work and you leave him with nothing.
Maddox returned to the bridge. They had brought the boys up from the brook and sent down the dogs, handlers walking them back and forth over the cracked mud bank. The dogs sniffed and prodded aggressively, turning up zilch. Then CSS guys tossed down paper bags for the handlers to rip open underneath the dogs' noses, one containing a black T-shirt, the other a ratty pair of black crew-length socks. Clothes from Sinclair's apartment. The handlers snapped commands in German, and the dogs dutifully explored the site a second time. One of them seemed to scent something, but was unable to follow it.
The handlers then led them in wider, concentric circles. Maddox slapped at bugs while Hess remained a portrait of serenity, watching the police dogs working below for him.
As they moved to the Borderlands side of the short bridge, the handlers regripped leashes, winding the taut straps around their wrists as the dogs started to pull. A handler called up to say that they were 'indicating,' and a CSS guy moved sideways down the short embankment carrying an oversized pair of tweezers and a paper evidence bag. What he found on the top curve of the bank he held up for Hess to see.
Maddox wasn't sure. But he thought it might be the flattened butt of a hand-rolled cigarette.
The dogs led their handlers farther into the trees, skirting the dry, snaking bank of the brook. Hess and Bryson made their way down to follow, as did Maddox after a moment, tagging along unnoticed.
The dogs abruptly left the brook for the trees, straining against their leashes and pawing through the litter of the forest floor, scrambling over lumpy roots, following a trail. Maddox tried to envision it as he moved. Sinclair ditching his bike by the bridge. Hiking through the forest along this very route. Hiking or running? Could he have been chased?
The midnight gunshot Heavey had heard. Could Sinclair have found his way through these woods after dark, even with a flashlight? What was he doing biking out here in the first place?
The dogs' barking picked up, and Maddox saw sunlight ahead, a clearing in the trees. The old fire road. Hard-packed and baking in the heat.
The dogs stopped, snarling, pawing madly at the shoulder of the road. Uncanny, the canine sense of smell. Nearly psychic in its ability.
The handlers promenaded the animals around a small perimeter, but to no avail. The dogs strained to get back toward the shoulder. The trail had ended.
The handlers released them from command and their leashes, the dogs jumping back and forth among the dead leaves and pine needles, digging at the ground, agitated and whimpering. They were indicating something, and suffering for their inability to communicate just what it was.
Hess stepped past them out into the middle of the road. He looked west where it curved, disappearing into the treeline. 'Where's this go?'
No one else answered, and Maddox realized he was being addressed. 'Access road. Runs the length of the forest, from the trailheads on the northeast side of town out to Aylesbury, I think. Near the state border. Ungated at either end.'
Hess looked the other way, back toward Black Falls. 'Who drives it?'
'No one. Unless you're looking to wreck your suspension. Teenagers run it on a dare sometimes.'
'Teenagers?'
''Hell Road,' they call it. Every year, every graduating class. Rite of passage. The old haunted-forest thing.'
'What's the legend?'
'Pequoig Indian spirits seeking revenge for a massacre out at the falls. That's the classic version. Others say there was a boy who got lost out here and froze to death around the turn of the last century. People claim to hear him crying and calling out for help after the first snow.'
Hess nodded. 'Nothing else?'
'You could probably find somebody who would talk up midnight masses and devil worship.'
Hess didn't like the way Maddox phrased that. He passed another silent judgment on Maddox, then looked away, ignoring him. 'Hell Road,' he said to Bryson.
Bryson shielded his eyes from the high sun. 'A midnight stroll through the forest seems unlikely, though stranger things have happened. And that gunshot report, it's still a big 'if ' in my book. But the dogs place him here, no question. He could have met someone.' Bryson mimed his theory, intrigued by the possibility. 'Shot them, took their car. Because he needed wheels, because he knew he was blowing town. He went after Frond maybe for some traveling cash.'
Hess said, 'Forty dollars was still tucked inside the kitchen creamer.'
'So he failed.'
'Then what's he doing for money? No ATM hits, no pings out in the real world.'
'Hiding. A wanted man.'
Hess closed one eye. 'Okay, but if he had a gun, why didn't he shoot Frond? Why tear him up like that?'
Bryson sputtered, out of gas.
Hess said, 'What if he didn't go anywhere at all?'
Bryson squinted. To Maddox, it seemed like Hess had left Bryson twisting. Like he had allowed him to fail here.
Hess said, 'Maybe he was only trying to look disappeared. Maybe he walked out here, turned around, walked right back. Left the bike where he had dumped it, waded through stream water back toward town.' Hess chewed the inside of his cheek, watching the confounded dogs. 'We know he was inside the witch's house for some amount of time. Days, maybe.'
Bryson said, 'You're saying Sinclair's still nearby?'
'We've got alerts out there. A guy with shaved eyebrows, that's tough to miss.'
Bryson scanned the trees they had just walked out of. 'Okay. Then where's he hiding now?'
While Maddox was distracted by this back-and-forth, one of the unleashed dogs had cut back around its handler toward him. Maddox stiffened, the dog nudging his shin, starting a low-grade growl.
The handler heeled the dog with a German command, and it sat at eager attention, eyes fixed on Maddox, lips back and baring its teeth.
Maddox explained, 'I was inside the apartment earlier.'
The handler said nothing. He took up the leash, wound it tightly around his hand, and eased the hungry dog away.
Maddox saw Hess standing closer to the shoulder now, watching him, his big arms pretzeled.
35
RIPSBAUGH
RIPSBAUGH RIMMED THE fire pit in the Bobcat, dozing dirt onto the smoldering ash. Cinders lifted off in a huff of protest, flakes of leaf and yard bag flaring orange before dying black and drifting down like hell snow. Smoke rose from the pit, gray and thin.
The heat off the crater made things wavy, but the white jersey immediately attracted Ripsbaugh's eye, as will any clean thing in a dump. Maddox coming toward him between lanes of landfill. Ripsbaugh made another smothering pass, covering up the carcass of a pillaging coyote he had snared with an illegal leg trap.
'Saw the smoke,' said Maddox, talking over the Bobcat engine. 'I dropped the cones in the back of your truck.'
Ripsbaugh nodded and motioned Maddox aboard. Maddox gripped the outside of the cage as Ripsbaugh drove back up the rise to the equipment shack. Maddox stepped off as Ripsbaugh killed the ignition and climbed out, plucking his T-shirt away from his sweat-soaked sides. He swiped at his brow with his back-pocket rag, admiring the soot that rubbed off.
Maddox's face and nose looked pinched, but to Ripsbaugh the stench of sun-baked garbage was second nature. Maddox said, 'How do you stand burning in this heat?'
'Piles up otherwise. It don't stop for summer.' He popped open the
