Diet Coke, took more pain reliever. Then he asked her where they'd been headed, and told her he would know if she was lying. She gave him the name of this park. He drove the RV here.'
'Where it looked right at home,' Berry observed out loud.
'They had a reservation and arrived as expected,' Ski said, 'so nobody was alerted to trouble. Once inside the park, Starks tied up and gagged Mrs. Mittmayer again. He dozed awhile longer, then washed up, exchanged his clothes for some of Mr. Mittmayer's, then locked them inside, unhitched their car, and drove away in it. This was about noon yesterday, while we were tracking him to the Walmart parking lot.'
'He drove to Houston in their car. Made that call to Berry from near the stadium.'
Ski agreed with Dodge's theory. 'That's my best guess. We've got an APB out on the Mittmayers' car.'
'How are the Mittmayers now?' Caroline asked.
'Your deputy told us that man there had found them,' Dodge said.
The man with the spider bite was now talking to Andy. His arm was wrapped in gauze. 'Neighboring camper,' Ski said. 'It took most of her strength, but Mrs. Mittmayer finally managed to worm her way over to a wall. She hammered on it with her fist. That guy had got up early this morning to go hiking, heard the pounding. He'd seen Starks unhitch the car and drive away yesterday, so he was curious as to who was inside the RV doing the knocking. He checked it out. Found them. She's basically okay, severely dehydrated. She's getting treated at the hospital.'
Berry, along with Caroline and Dodge, looked at him expectantly.
He looked down at the ground, expelled his breath. 'Her husband's skull was fractured. He didn't make it. He was seventy-six years old.'
Dodge cursed. Caroline gave a sorrowful moan. Berry just stood there staring at Ski, futilely wishing none of this was happening.
'Mrs. Mittmayer identified Starks by his picture,' Ski said. 'The only good thing to come out of this is that he left indisputable evidence. Prints, DNA, an eyewitness. Add kidnapping to his other felonies. He'll be charged with a capital crime.'
'Not if I catch him,' Dodge muttered around the cigarette he was lighting, despite the bans against smoking in the area.
Ski said, 'I wanted you to hear this firsthand, not on the news, not in snatches with rumors mingled in.' Addressing Dodge, he said, 'Take them home. There's a female deputy inside the lake house. Two outside patrolling the grounds and watching the lakefront. They're in constant touch with me and everyone else in the department.'
Berry said, 'For all we know, Oren is still in Houston.'
'For all we know,' Ski admitted. 'But this indicates that he's going for broke. I'm not taking any chances.'
'I'll drive them home,' Dodge said, 'but I'm coming back and joining the hunt.'
Ski hesitated, then grudgingly agreed. Eager to get into the fray, Dodge hustled Caroline around to the passenger side of the car. Ski opened the back car door for Berry. 'You okay?'
'Not at all okay.'
'Since Friday night, you've received one shock after another.'
Berry glanced over at Dodge and said softly, 'They haven't all been bad.'
Ski's cell phone rang. It was already in his hand; he raised it to his ear. 'This is Nyland.'
Instantly Berry could tell the call was urgent. He began talking rapidly. 'Yeah. Yeah. Say again? Okay.' He began walking quickly toward his SUV, then jogging. He ended the call and shouted back at Dodge. 'They found the Mittmayers' car.'
'My daughter says it's a sizable
'Twenty-five thousand dollars.'
The man smiled broadly, affording Ski a repugnant view of uneven, gapped teeth stained by chewing tobacco. 'When can I collect?'
'Soon,' Ski promised. 'We're all a little busy right now.'
'Trying to catch a fugitive from the law,' the man said, nodding sagely.
'That's our priority, Mr. Mercury.'
Ski had his cell phone to his ear. He'd been put on hold by his friend with the search dog business, otherwise he wouldn't be giving Ray Van Mercury-like-the-car this much of his precious time. The man was like a pesky flying insect, buzzing with seeming aimlessness but repeatedly coming back to the topic of Caroline King's reward like a housefly to a sugar cube.
'Ski, you still there?' his Army buddy asked into the phone.
'Give me some good news.'
'Still trying to track somebody down. Instead of holding, want me to call you back?'
Ski impressed upon him the urgency of the situation.
'I hear ya.'
His friend clicked off. 'He has to call us back,' Ski told Dodge, who'd had all of Ray Van Mercury-like-the-car he could stomach and had moved several yards away to smoke.
'Every minute we waste standing here, Starks is getting farther away,' Dodge grumbled.
'Not if he's in there.'
Ski looked into the forest. Footprints of athletic shoes, like the ones that Starks had bought at Walmart and that had been described by Mrs. Mittmayer as the kind of footwear he'd been wearing, led from the elderly couple's abandoned compact car into the densest part of the Big Thicket. No-man's-land.
The Big Thicket National Preserve had countless legends and mysteries associated with it, everything from a resident Sasquatch to capricious lights with no traceable source. Famous outlaws of Texas lore had eluded capture in its endless bogs and dense forests.
It was a popular destination for outdoor activities. There were campgrounds, marked trails, and waterways navigable by fishing boats and canoes, but many of the preserve's vast, off-limits acreage was composed of twisting bayous, monotonous swamps, and forests too dense for a gnat to wiggle through, much less a human being. It was a teeming habitat for poisonous snakes and other reptiles, biting insects, and carnivorous predators.
Dodge said, 'I don't see why we can't just--'
'I've told you why,' Ski snapped. 'You don't know what it's like in there. We'd lose his tracks, and then I'd have men going in circles, getting lost, getting tangled up in brambles, getting bogged down--literally--looking for a needle in a haystack. Worse than that, actually.'
Ray Van Mercury piped up. 'Lucky for y'all I found the car. Or he'd've got clean away.'
He was a tough, spry old man. Ski estimated he weighed no more than 130. He had a greasy gray braid that hung down his back to his waist. His lined skin was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell, and a lot of it was exposed because all he had on was a pair of grimy jeans unevenly cut off at his knobby knees.
'Yep, lucky for y'all I decided to go fishing this morning. You know,' he said, lowering his voice to a confidential pitch, 'you ain't s'pposed to go wandering off the trails in the Thicket. You ain't s'pposed to fish 'cept in designated areas. Them park rangers'll get you good, they catch you at it. But I ain't never got caught and I ain't gonna. I've been in the Thicket all my life. I've slithered through parts of it a pissant couldn't get through.
'My mama was one of the Alabama-Coushatta tribe. I know, I know, I don't look like one of them people. I took after my daddy. So Mama said. I never laid eyes on the man myself. He was an oil
