'Correct.'
Magozzi felt like he was swimming through Jell-O. 'We need the names of the men you identified and the sites you raided.'
Knudsen shrugged. 'You can get them from the man out at the front desk, but if you ask me, it's a waste of time. Agents are still crawling all over every site, and for miles in every direction, and we haven't turned up anything. Listen. We appreciate your concern over your missing people, and we're impressed with what you've put together so far. So impressed, in fact, that we're going to have a long talk with you all later about how you managed to do that. But we can't see any kind of a possible connection between your missing people and our operation. Just a freak coincidence.'
'The coincidence is the connection,' Magozzi said.
'Whatever. At any rate, we're willing to give you the run of the roads in the county, as long as you keep watch for a few things we're looking for and report back immediately if you see them.'
'So what are we looking for?'
'Milk trucks.'
Knudsen stayed in Sheriff Pitala's office to make some calls while the others went out to the lobby. Harley strutted up to the suit at the front desk to collect the names and raid sites that Knudsen had promised.
Halloran signaled Sheriff Pitala with a jerk of his head, and the rest of them went outside.
Halloran was face-to-face with Sheriff Pitala, but both men had their hands in their pockets and were looking down at the ground.
'That little twerp in there ask you to do anything for him?' Pitala asked.
'Yep.'
'He told you to look for something, right?'
'Right.'
Pitala nodded, looking off into the night. 'Yeah, well, he told us to look for something, too. That was the only way he'd let my people out on the road to find Doug Lee. Wonder if it was the same thing.'
'Milk trucks,' Magozzi said, and Sheriff Pitala smiled and pulled out a Marlboro.
'Thank God. Didn't know how long I'd be able to keep that one under my hat.'
Harley burst out the door and thrust a sheet of paper at Magozzi.
Magozzi glanced at the sheet, then passed the paper to Roadrunner. 'Three names, three places of business, three houses. Maybe you can do some computer magic with these the Feds can't, but to tell you the truth, I think it's pretty much a dead end.'
'No shit,' Gino said. 'The Feds are all over those sites already. No reason for us to travel down that road. So once again, we get a piece of the puzzle, and we aren't any farther ahead. We still don't have a clue where to start looking.'
Magozzi turned to Sheriff Pitala. 'You have your people covering the whole county, looking for Deputy Lee?'
'I've got thirty-five people out there, including a couple of secretaries.' He raised his eyes to Magozzi. 'It's a small department. That's damn near my whole roster. Most of them are concentrated in Doug's patrol area-that was the northern sector tonight. Five hundred square miles.'
'Jesus,' Gino murmured. 'You could have a thousand men out there who'd still miss him if he was standing behind a tree.'
'Yep.'
Halloran was looking out at the cars in the lot, rubbing the underside of his lip the way he always did when he was thinking hard. 'On the phone, you said you tried to radio Lee when the Feds first pulled your patrols.'
Sheriff Pitala nodded. 'Tried to. Couldn't reach him, but didn't worry about it. Figured he was on his way home anyhow.'
'But you said you thought he was probably in a dead radio zone, that's why you couldn't reach him.'
'That's right. We've got a few of those in the hollows where we don't have enough repeaters around, and some more near the high tension lines. . , oh, shit. Goddamnit.Goddammit.'
'It might not mean anything.'
'Maybe not, but it's a connection I should have made. Stay put. I'll be right back.'
Gino nudged Bonar with an elbow. 'That was a nice call your boss made.'
Bonar beamed like a proud parent. 'That boy shines under pressure. Always did.'
Inside of a minute, Sheriff Pitala was back with a copy of a county map with all the dead zones marked; another two minutes, and he was inside, sharing the information with Knudsen, begging to contact the few people he had on the road who had radios in their personal cars. Knudsen wouldn't let him.
Pitala went over to a side desk and sat by the phone to wait for check-in calls on the landline, his head in his hands. By the time the first call came in, the RV was long gone.
GRACE, SHARON, and Annie had been stunned into immobility by the startling cell-phone call. They'd heard a fragment of a single shouted word that Grace and Annie had been absolutely certain was Roadrunner calling Grace's name, and then nothing but static. Grace had talked into the phone anyway, words tumbling over one another, and then the cell had abruptly gone dark.
They tried everything they could think of to get the phone to work again, to recapture that fragile connection, not knowing if anything that Grace had said went through.
'It's not the signal,' Grace finally said. 'The phone's dead. It's a miracle it ever connected after being in the water that long.'
Annie was glaring at the useless phone in frustration. 'I didn't even know you had that thing with you.'
'I always have it with me.'
Sharon sagged against the corner of the barn, devastated to have been so close to salvation, only to have it snatched away. 'Stupid.Stupid,' she hissed bitterly. 'We finally find a place high enough and open enough to catch a signal, and we don't have a goddamned phone because we were so stupid that we left them where those guys could find them.'
Grace took Sharon's arm and shook it a little. 'We don't have one second to think of things like that. We've wasted too much time already. We have to hurry.'
They backtracked the same way they had come: into the cornfield at the side of the farmhouse, between the rows, green leaves rustling at their hurried passage, down onto their hands and knees when they broke out of the corn into the tall grass of the field that abutted the road.
This used to be fun, Annie thought as she crept ahead on all fours. When you're a child, dropping to your hands and knees and scrabbling through the grass was something you did for the sheer joy of it. But once you reached a certain age, the posture implied degradation, submission-'he was brought to his knees,' 'she came crawling back on her hands and knees'-even the language recognized that somewhere between age five and ten, crawling ceased to be fun and became humiliating.
Grace paused at the edge of the field while the others came alongside. They all dropped to their stomachs and peered through the last fringe of tall grass before the land sloped gently down into the ditch, then up onto the road.
To their left, the asphalt climbed the small rise that kept them out of sight of the roadblock; to their right, it rolled gently down into the deeper blackness of Four Corners.
Grace held her breath, listening, watching, caution pressing on her back and tapping her on the shoulder. Crossing the road was the only time they would be totally exposed. She clenched her jaw and concentrated on the evidence of all her senses.
Nothing. No sound, no lights, no sign of life.
She nudged the other two, then held up a forefinger. One at a time. They'd cross one at a time, just in case all the soldiers hadn't gone to the perimeter, just in case they'd left an odd one here and there to keep watch, just in case anything.
Annie and Sharon nodded understanding, then watched with wide eyes as Grace slipped down into the ditch, up the other side, hesitated, then darted across the road and disappeared into the ditch on the other side.
Sharon caught a deep breath, then followed; Annie went a few seconds later.
On their bellies once more, single file, they wriggled like the disconnected segments of a crippled worm back
