PROLOGUE – April 1978
Jack Terrington ran blindly, wheezing heavily, and stumbled down a small grassy hill, barely ducking in time to avoid crashing into a low-hanging tree branch. Heavy rain pattered to the soggy ground all around him, making the mud even more slippery, making each step more dangerous. He could easily hear the labored breathing of the dogs not far enough behind him.
He reached the bottom of the small hill and splashed into a shallow, muddy creek that traced a path along the base of the hill. Turning, he ran upstream in the water for fifty yards or so before crossing to the other side and starting up another hill on the opposite bank.
That should stall them, or at least slow them down a few minutes, Jack thought.
Even though it was a tired trick, overused in a million bad movies, he knew for a fact that it actually did have some grounding in the world of non-fiction: dogs, even trained bloodhounds, often lose the scent of anything they are tracking when that scent-trail hits water. It had something to do with their ability to track scents only on solid ground, or something like that. That creek, and the rain, would help mask the trail he left.
He ran, hitting the top of the second hill at a dead sprint, continuing up and over and down the other side, weaving his way through a thick stand of trees. Jack wanted to look back, to see if the dogs had made it to the creek yet, but he didn’t have time. Blood from his forehead tried to get into his eyes, and he angrily wiped it away with one arm of his green coat.
Jack was heading due east out of town, no looking back.
Beyond the hill was a large open area, and he ran through a large muddy field that looked like it had been freshly plowed, his boots sloshing in the muck, kicking up mud and water. The short silver chains that looped beneath each of his boots usually clinked when he moved, but now the boots were silent, caked with mud.
The dogs and their handlers and the deputies were chasing him, but the creek should give him a little more breathing room. Jack had managed to elude them and avoid capture for several days now, but he had found out the hard way that the sheriff of this little town was smart. The sheriff had put the clues together much faster than Jack had thought possible, and now the little voice inside Jack’s head, the same little voice that sometimes gave him ideas and suggestions, that voice was wailing, shrilly screaming so loudly inside Jack’s head that it hurt.
Find a way, ANY way out of this stupid little town. While he still could.
Liberty, Virginia was a quiet little town located about 60 miles southwest of Washington D.C., nestled into the rolling foothills east of the Shenandoah Mountains. Highway 132, the main road through town, ran west, curving and twisting up into the foothills and mountains before reaching Shenandoah National Park; the road also ran due east out of town through intermixed forests and farmland to Interstate-95, which in turn ran north to Washington D.C. and south to Richmond. Like many of the other small towns that he had been through, Jack had seen Liberty as just another wide spot in the road, full of stupid, sightless people.
And the cops were usually the most blind.
In Jack’s experience, it usually took the small-town sheriffs at least two or three weeks to realize something was happening. This was the eighth or ninth little town Jack had been in in less than three years, and usually he came and went, no problem. But this time, things had been different. Jack had never seen anyone catch on to what was happening so quickly. This guy, this Sheriff Beaumont, he was a smart one.
And so now Jack was running.
He’d spent the last 12 hours or so holed up in a grimy storage shed behind an abandoned house on the eastern edge of town. Jack had heard that the sheriff had formed several citizens’ search parties to search for him; Jack had guessed that Beaumont would assume he would head west, towards the safety of the Shenandoah Mountains and the expansive valley beyond. Guessing this, Jack had figured the smartest thing to do would be to travel due east, planning to take Highway 132 the fifteen miles or so out to Interstate-95, the main freeway, and catch a ride either south towards Richmond, or north to D.C. Usually he traveled the long distances by hitching from one small town to the next, catching rides with motorists and truck drivers that frequented the expansive stretches of lonely blacktop. Not only was hitching rides a terribly cheap and easy way to travel, but the people he caught rides with were usually just passing through the area and had very short memories.
But that plan hadn’t worked, either. Beaumont must have somehow figured out how to get inside Jack’s head or something, because Jack heard on a radio that the search party, or “posse” as it became known, had been called in from the foothills west of town and assigned to search the farmlands east of town, looking for Jack in the fields and forests that separated the town from the stretch of interstate to the east. They had cars, radios, dogs. And they were probably all armed to the teeth, or at least as armed as you could be in these backwoods.
Jack had his brain, his green duffel bag with the guns, and little else.
Jack rounded some trees, almost slipping and falling on the wet grass, and entered a small, wide clearing dotted with large puddles of rainwater. He ducked under the branches of an evergreen tree and dropped his big duffel bag, sitting down heavily on a mat of pine needles, planning to rest for only moment or two. His head was spinning and his breath was labored from running, but it was relatively dry under here, out of the pouring rain, and he could relax for a minute and think. He needed to think. He couldn’t hear the braying sounds of the dogs anymore, and figured that he probably had a few minutes to collect his thoughts. He was exhausted, but he needed to at least try and plan his next move – he couldn’t rely on luck and good fortune. Jack leaned back against the tree trunk, its bark moist from the rain, and he tried to think. His heart slowed its pounding in his chest.
Should he go on to the Interstate and try to hitch a ride North to D.C.? South to Richmond? Should he maybe double back and try to slip through the lines that the posse had undoubtedly formed? He’d already had enough trouble crossing the County Line Bridge on 132 that formed the city limits of Liberty, and he thought if he went back and tried to cross the narrow bridge in the other direction, he would surely be seen. Or was there maybe some other way, some other option that he had yet to consider?
What he hadn’t considered was that he was tired, very tired, or Jack Terrington would have caught himself nodding off only a few moments later.
The bloodhounds had something, from the looks of them, but when they reached the creek, Deputy Brown knew immediately that the scent was lost. He knew that any dog could smell the minute particles that came off of any person’s body as they moved about, and that bloodhounds in particular were the best breed in the business at finding and tracking those minute particles. But he also knew that that only worked if those minute particles fell and came to rest on a solid surface, like the ground or a street. A moving stream did a very good job of washing away any of the particles that might have fallen into it, erasing the trail completely, and this stream led downhill into the Anne River, the largest river in the area. If he was trying to get away by moving downstream and swimming the river, he was gone.
Deputy Jes Brown cursed under his breath as he shook his head, and reached around to the back of his sizable belt for his radio, clicking its thumb trigger, still breathing heavy from the chase. The pouring rain had made it hard enough to track the man – the stream now made it impossible.
A momentary pause, and then: “Beaumont here.”
“Yeah, Chief. Brown here. We had him there for a while, a very fresh trail, but we just hit a creek and the dogs lost the scent.” Deputy Brown could see the dogs now, nervously sniffing around on both banks of the creek and rutting around in the low bushes that grew on this side of the small creek, their breath small clouds of steam in the cold, wet air. They looked ridiculous to him, as if they were simply trying to choose the perfect location to relieve themselves, but Deputy Brown knew better – they were trying to pick up any hint of the scent-trail again. Brown didn’t have much faith in these dogs or in his Sheriff’s crazy plan to trap this guy at the Interstate, for that matter, but he had kept that to himself. No need to cause any trouble, or jeopardize his career. Jes Brown rarely agreed with his boss or his bosses’ methods, but the townspeople seemed to like him, and Jes knew enough about small town politics to stay quiet. Beaumont wanted these dogs to make lots of noise, flush the guy out and towards the road, and Brown would make sure they made all the noise Beaumont could handle. But Brown still didn’t think it would work.
Beaumont’s ragged, raspy voice came back. “Well, keep trying. Cross the creek and have the handlers take the dogs up and down the opposite bank until they pick up the scent again.” Deputy Brown could easily hear the labored breathing of Sheriff Beaumont, even over the radio; the wound from the bullet he had taken must be smarting him. “Got that?”
“Yeah, Chief.” Brown replied, shaking his head and wishing for nothing more than pie and coffee at Juanita’s. The Sheriff was a rank amateur – even the few classes Deputy Jes Brown had had at the Academy down in Richmond had taught him better. But if they did catch the guy, Brown wanted to be right there to get some of the credit.
Deputy Brown hooked his radio back onto the loop on his belt and stood in the heavy rain for a few moments longer, just watching the dogs rummaging around and he couldn’t help smiling as he whistled to summon the handlers and organize the next phase of the search. Whatever the boss wanted, he would get. Noise, and lots of it, to drive the Killer to the roadblock.
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