Flashlights crisscrossed through the darkness and she could see thick clouds of grey and white drifting through the trees near the first incline. The man who had thrown the stun grenade, the one with the shaved head and night-vision goggles, had moved out of his hiding spot. He stood near the spot where she’d found the phone.
He threw another grenade into the air, in the direction of the backyard. Darby turned away from it and closed her eyes, waiting. Automatic gunfire erupted from somewhere above her.
When she heard the explosion, she opened her eyes and, using the trees for cover, started moving to the bald man.
He darted up what looked like a second incline and disappeared from her view.
Darby gave chase. For the past week she had run in this oppressive heat with a sixty-pound backpack full of sand strapped to her back. She wasn’t weighed down now. Even in the mud, she ran fast and well.
The man had a good lead. There was no way she could close the gap. She debated about stopping to fire when he disappeared from her view.
A car door slammed shut. Tyres peeled away in a squeal of rubber. By the time she reached the top, all she found was a pair of dimming red tail lights coming from a car far down the dark road. In the distance she could hear the wail of multiple police sirens. Someone had radioed for back-up and the Belham dispatcher had sent out several units.
As impressed as she was by the quick response time, it wouldn’t do any good. Blakely Road, she knew, connected to Route 135. From there the car could jump on to the main highway, Route 1, and disappear.
Worse, she couldn’t offer up a description. She hadn’t seen the car or a licence plate. As for the men, the only thing she could say with any certainty was that all three were white. No, make that four. The body was that of a white male.
Darby holstered her weapon and made her way back down the incline, her legs wobbly from adrenalin. Dozens of flashlights moved through the thick haze of grey and white smoke filling the woods. Everywhere she heard men coughing.
She cupped her hands over her mouth. ‘
A group of patrolmen rushed to her with their guns raised, their eyes red and watery from the smoke. They tried to hold their arms steady as they coughed.
One of them saw the gold shield clipped to her belt clip and the laminated ID badge hanging around her neck. He motioned for the others to lower their weapons.
Darby addressed the group. ‘Is Detective Pine back here?’
The tall one with the cleft chin nodded, wiping at his eyes. He could barely keep them open.
‘Find him and tell him the shooters are gone,’ Darby said. ‘Tell him to meet me in front of the house – and tell him to get everyone the hell out of the woods until the smoke dissipates. Call for an ambulance and make sure they bring plenty of oxygen. Get going – wait, not you.’ She grabbed the soft, flabby arm of a short patrolman with a pot belly. ‘I need to borrow your flashlight.’
He handed it over and stumbled away, gagging.
It took her a few minutes to locate the spot where she’d first seen the man who had tossed the stun grenade. The area offered a lot of tree cover. A perfect place to hide – and watch. From this location she could see the backyard.
Her eyes started to water and her throat burned as she ran the beam of light across the ground. She found several footwear impressions – none of them useful – and a single aluminium-foil blister pack.
Ducking underneath the branches, she moved across the soft ground covered with pine needles and leaves. She threw an evidence cone next to the blister pack. Voices shouted to move out of the woods. One kept calling her name.
‘
She made her way back to the incline and saw that most of the flashlights had been shut off. The ones still on were moving away, retreating back to the house.
A patrolman was on his hands and knees, struggling to breathe. Darby helped him to his feet, then wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She grabbed the last evidence cone from her pocket and slowly retraced her footsteps back to the spot where she’d found the mobile phone. It was gone.
7
An hour later Darby walked to the corner of the backyard where Pine stood running water from a hose over his face. He had breathed in too much smoke. She could hear his laboured wheezing over the water splashing against the flagstone walkway. He didn’t care about getting wet. His clothes were already soaked and covered in mud.
Coop was also in the backyard. He stood alongside Michael Banville, watching the photographer taking bracketed shots of the back gate. There was no reason for Coop to be out here supervising photography. Darby knew the real reason: he was pretending to be busy so he could keep an eye on her.
Both Coop and the photographer wore protective goggles and breathing masks. Grey and white clouds of smoke drifted through the woods and into the backyard. On her way out, she had found a grenade still hissing smoke. The grenades had a slow burn rate. It would be at least another hour before anyone could go back inside the woods.
By some miracle of God none of the officers had disturbed the bloody handprint during their mad rush into the woods. The same couldn’t be said for the blood she’d found on the grass. The evidence markers had been trampled.
Only one patrolman had been seriously injured in the skirmish. A stun grenade had exploded near his head.
‘Christ, this shit stings,’ Pine said. ‘What the hell is it?’
‘Hexachloroethane. It’s a chemical used in smoke grenades. Keep flushing out your eyes.’
‘My lungs feel like they’re on fire.’
‘You should get to one of the ambulances for some oxygen.’
‘In a minute.’ Pine rubbed his eyes under the running water. ‘Something exploded in front of me. There was this bright light and then I couldn’t see.’
‘That was a stun grenade. It causes momentary blindness.’
‘How do you know so much about this shit?’
‘SWAT training.’
Pine drank from the hose, wincing as he swallowed.
‘The guy you saw, the one wearing those night-vision glasses?’
‘Goggles,’ Darby said.
‘Whatever. You get a good look at him?’
‘No. I just saw a flash before he ducked behind the tree. Black clothing and black gloves, a tactical vest holding grenades.’
‘Any way you can trace them?’
‘The stun grenades explode on impact. If we find enough fragments, we might be able to locate a serial or model number. As for the smoke grenades, we can give the numbers to the manufacturer and see where they were sold. Maybe they were stolen from a munitions locker at a police station or an army base.’
‘You don’t sound too confident.’
‘You can buy them on the black market. Go to any gun show in the South and you can have your pick. A lot of weekend-warrior types collect them. We’ll run the numbers but most likely it’s going to lead to a dead end. The guy with the night vision is too smart to leave us something to trace.’
‘How do you know this guy is smart and not some sort of Rambo douche bag?’
‘He came prepared.’
‘For what? A shootout in the woods?’
