Sacrificial Ground

from her.”

The three young faces softened somewhat, and for the first time, Frank thought he saw something other than the self-centeredness of youth in them: a little bit of sympathy, a little bit of fear.

12

It was almost noon by the time Frank reached the downtown headquarters, and the streets were already baking in the same unrelenting heat that had plagued the city for the last few days. The cool of the air-conditioned interior of the building swept over him soothingly as he entered it, and for a moment he wondered why he’d not been able to live the life of an office worker or junior executive, a calm, climate-controlled life in rooms where blood never dripped from the walls.

The elevator door opened and Caleb walked out into the lobby. “I left a note on your desk, Frank,” he said.

“What’d it say?”

“Just to let you know where I was headed.”

“Where are you going?”

“Toward Marietta. A little past the Chattahoochee.”

“What for?”

Caleb grabbed Frank’s upper arm and tugged him forward. “Come on along with me,” he said, “I’ll fill you in.” Frank had intended to go out to Karen’s to check Angelica’s room, but he let Caleb carry him along instead.

Traffic was moving briskly on the northbound side of the expressway, and before long, even the faintest outline of the city had disappeared behind them.

Caleb flung his arm out the window as he drove, and the rushing air flapped loudly in his sleeve.

“Anybody ever mention to you whether or not Angelica had a car?” he asked.

“No.”

“Turns out she did,” Caleb said. “But that’s getting a little ahead of things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, about an hour ago, I got a call from an old hometown buddy of mine,” Caleb said. “Name’s Luther Simpson. A regular good old boy. He moved to Atlanta about the same time I did. We was both just kids. I got hooked up with the police, and Luther, well, he took a different way altogether.”

“What way was that?”

“A life of crime, you might say,” Caleb told him. “Oh, nothing big-time or really that bad. Petty stuff. A whole yellow sheet of it wouldn’t add to much. We’re talking about a little bootleggin’, maybe some gambling on the side.” He looked at Frank. “Nowadays, he’s mostly a car cutter.”

“Where does he do it?” Frank asked.

“He don’t steal them, you understand,” Caleb said, “he just cuts them.”

Frank nodded. “Out this way?”

“About ten miles out,” Caleb said. He pressed down on the accelerator and the car surged ahead. “He works for Dave Goggins. Goggins runs four or five cut operations. He’s been doing it for years. Everybody knows it, but nobody’s been able to nail him yet.” He stared about the steadily thickening countryside. “Sometimes I do think about getting back to the woods, Frank,” he said. “Just think how nice it would be to have a place out here.”

Frank stared straight ahead. He could see a line of gently rolling hills in the distance and, beside their quiet beauty, the city did sometimes appear as little more than a steel and cement canker on the surface of the earth. Perhaps that was why Sarah had chosen to leave it behind, to take the very same road out of town and head toward the very same rolling hills that stretched before him now. They were calm, green, utterly silent. But as they grew larger as he approached them, they also seemed to take on an odd, stalking life. He could feel a puzzled rage building in him, squeezing his throat. He had felt it before, and it seemed little worse now than at those other times, when he’d relieved it with a long night in some grim, honky-tonk bar.

“Well, Luther gave me a call about an hour ago,” Caleb said.

“What for?”

“Because he got a car in this morning that gave him a little scare.”

The man who’d stumbled upon Sarah’s car had been scared too, Frank remembered. But by then the car hardly mattered. Sarah had been gone for days, and he’d already convinced himself of the worst, that she was dead, dead, dead, and that nothing could reclaim her. It was Alvin who’d finally come to tell him, his hat in his hand, standing glumly in the doorway: We found her, Frank. He had not needed to say another word, and Frank had only answered: Where?

In those hills, he thought now, as they began to loom sullenly above him. He’d gotten into the car with Alvin, and sat silently for the short ride. Then he’d gotten out and staggered off into the woods, slowly at first, following Alvin, then more quickly, passing him and moving still more swiftly until he was running at full speed toward a place he had never seen and could not have known about, running so fast, plunging through the thick undergrowth so loudly that he could barely hear his brother struggling far behind him, and then could not hear him at all, but only the sound of his own body as it crashed through low-slung limbs, until, at last, he broke through the last of them and saw her in the little clearing, her body framed by the river, and rushed to her there, dropping to his knees, lost in a silence that seemed to last forever and that was broken only by the breathless, exhausted sound of Alvin’s voice: Sweet Jesus, Frank, how did you know she was here?

“Just over the river, here,” Caleb said as the car nosed down a small hill and headed toward a narrow, concrete bridge. “That’s where Luther does the cutting.”

Frank struggled to bring his attention back to the case. “What about the car, the one that’s bothering him?”

“Well, Luther’d read about Angelica in the paper,” Caleb said. “And early this morning a red BMW comes in, and it’s got the initials LAD right on the dashboard, and inside the glove compartment, there’s a program of some play or something that was given at Northfield.”

“So he thinks the car’s Angelica’s?” Frank asked.

Caleb turned toward him. “Yeah,” he said. “And it turns out he’s right.”

“Angelica had a car?”

“Yes, she did,” Caleb said. “I called her sister. What’s her name?”

“Karen.”

“Yeah, Karen. She knew about it. She figures Angelica bought it with her new money.”

“Why didn’t she report it missing?”

“I guess she didn’t think about it,” Caleb said. “But I asked her to check the garage, and when she got back to me, she said the car was gone. That’s when I went back to Luther and got the serial numbers on the BMW. I ran them through the computer and it comes up owned by Angelica.” He gave the wheel a sharp turn to the left and the car headed off onto a dusty, unpaved road. “Cutters don’t exactly stay right on the beaten track,” he said.

The car lurched forward down the winding road. Low-slung limbs slapped loudly against the windshield, and glancing in his mirror, Frank could see a long trail of dust as it wound behind like a furry orange tail.

“Guess you haven’t been on roads like this since you left the piney woods, have you, Frank?” Caleb asked. He pressed the accelerator a little harder, and the car slammed loudly into an enormous pothole, then plowed out of it effortlessly.

“I did a little dirt racing,” Frank said, “but we stuck to better roads for that.”

“There was a few nights in those days, Frank, when I’m not sure we even bothered with a road.”

Frank smiled, but his youth now seemed so far away that he felt as if it had been lived by someone else. “How far to this place?” he asked.

“Maybe another mile or two,” Caleb said brightly. He slammed down into another hole, and a huge smile spread across his face. “God, I love this,” he said with a laugh.

Frank closed his eyes for a moment, and felt himself go back involuntarily to the farm country of his youth. He remembered the clear, cold streams and granite cliffs, the long summer nights with Sheila beneath him, her back on the cool ground, her breath in his face, the moon above them like a kind, unsleeping eye. His mind shot forward and he saw Karen in the darkness before her house, her arms at her sides.

“Yonder it is,” Caleb said.