“Ah, man.”
A moment of confused shouting at the other end, then, “We’ve got a chopper coming, oughta be off the ground in five, ten minutes. There’s a place down there, called, let me see, on my map it’s called Sliders, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything there. Here. Head south on Twenty . . .”
“Hang on, hang on, let me pull over.” Jake pulled into a driveway, got a notebook from his briefcase, and jotted down Novatny’s instructions. “. . . take a left on 636. You go in there a way, couple of miles, and you’ll come to the Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest headquarters. They’re telling us that’s the best place to put down a chopper.”
“Have you talked to Danzig?”
“No. I can’t get to him direct, I’d have to go through some routing. If you can call him direct . . .”
“I’ll call him. See you at the park.”
Jake backed out of the driveway, floored it, and the Mercedes took off like a scalded rabbit. He was forty miles away. He had to slow down going through Scottsville, but he didn’t slow much and turned heads as he went through.
Over the bridge and out on Highway 20, past Schmidt’s place again, he swerved around a log truck, pushed it to eighty. The countryside was rolling, the road was curvy: perfect for a high-speed run in a German car if you didn’t mind killing the occasional housewife out to get her mail from the roadside mailbox.
He worried about that, a little, but didn’t slow. Instead he compounded the sin by punching Gina’s number on his cell phone. She came up and he said, “I need Danzig right now.”
“He’s talking to the president,” she said.
“Go get him.”
“Really?”
“Go in and get him. Get him!” Jake shouted.
“I’m going to put you on hold . . . hang on.”
Danzig came up, a worried cut in his voice: “What?”
“The FBI has a burned body down south in Virginia. There’s a possibility that it’s Lincoln Bowe.”
“A good possibility?”
“A charred ID was found nearby and it’s his. The FBI’s moving on it. I’m forty miles away in a car, heading down there fast as I can. We might need somebody to sit on the sheriff’s department, if it’s not too late. You gotta tell the press office, get them working.”
“Charred?”
“I don’t know what that means. But apparently, the body’s pretty badly burned.”
“Why are you only forty miles away?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. It might not be a coincidence,” Jake said.
“All right, all right. You go, I’ll take care of it at this end,” Danzig said. “Call me back for anything significant. Anything, even if you think I might already know about it. Call me.”
He kept the car at eighty, screamed through Dyllwyn, a fast right, then another right onto Highway 60 at Sprouse’s Corner, seventy miles an hour past the county courthouse at Buckingham—hell, none of the cops would be there, he thought—a left on 24, six miles, a helicopter overhead the last mile of it, rolling through the intersection of 636 and coming up on the forest headquarters complex as the black helicopter put down in a graveled parking area.
Three Buckingham County sheriff’s cars waited on the edge of the parking area, their light racks turning. As Jake pulled in, Novatny and Parker did the weird getting-out-of-a-helicopter hunched-over high step that everybody did. They were trailed by a senior citizen who clutched a hard plastic briefcase. A sheriff’s deputy got out of one of the cars and jogged toward Jake, who parked just inside the turnoff.
“Sir, this is a restricted area.”
“I’m with them,” Jake said, pointing at the chopper.
Novatny and Parker were talking to another uniform, Novatny waving Jake over. He and the cop walked over and Novatny nodded at the senior citizen and said, “Jake, this is Clancy, he’s with our crime-scene unit, and this is Sheriff Bill Winsome, his people are working the scene right now.” Then Novatny asked, “What the heck did you do? You start talking to people and we get a burning body the next day.”
Jake said, “Hey, I just put out the word.”
Parker said, “Somebody sure as shit got it. We’ll want to know who you talked to.”
All the cops looked at Jake for a beat, then Novatny turned back to Winsome. “You were saying . . .”
“Somebody tried to burn the body with brush and gasoline. You can still smell a little gas,” Winsome said. He was an elderly man, with a round pink face and white hair growing out of his ears. He had the sad liquid eyes of a bloodhound. “The wood is still damp from all the rain and didn’t burn. They had it stacked around the body like one of them pyres.”
“What about the head?” Parker asked.
