Page 90 of Return of the Spider

“Young woman gets taken, drugged, assaulted, sometimes repeatedly, scoured clean, and then dumped alive in a rural area.”

“Alive. That’s surprising,” I said.

“He was also a suspect in two murder-rapes, but we could never make them stick.”

“So you wouldn’t put homicide past him,” Sampson said.

“Not a chance.”

Within ten minutes we were taking a left at where the preserve began, and French was explaining how the property was managed with fire in adherence with American Indian practices. Indeed, over the next few miles, we saw several long wide strips of grassland that had been burned and now awaited the regrowth of spring.

“Here we go,” French said and turned at a dilapidated mailbox that was leaning so far right, it defied gravity.

The cornfields to our left had been harvested; the odd stalk stuck up out of the dirt here and there. There were several rows of mature pines on our right, which French said had probably been planted as a windbreak.

We had almost reached the farmyard when we bounced through a muddy rut.

One hundred and fifty feet ahead of French’s pickup, dead center on the gravel drive, thunder clapped.

A fireball erupted, blowing a column fifteen feet high.

The truck’s windshield shattered.

CHAPTER

74

With gravel, rocks, andmud raining down on his truck, Tommy French roared, “He’s booby-trapped the place!”

The detective rammed his pickup into reverse and floored the gas. The Ford F-150 slid and swung in the wet dirt, throwing clods of greasy mud around as Sampson and I dug for our service weapons.

When we were all the way back to the road, French slammed on the brakes and threw the truck in park, panting as he looked through the filthy, spiderwebbed remnants of his windshield toward the flames at the far end of the drive.

“We need backup, Tommy,” Sampson said at last.

“We need more than that, John,” French said, picking up his police radio with shaking hands, which made me realize my own hands were trembling. “Goddamn it, this was my dream truck!”

The police detective got patched through to the Chester County dispatcher, identified himself, and reported the explosion. “I need enough manpower to seal off the road on the south side of the barrens ASAP. And the east side of the old Lawton place. No one crosses until we know what we’re dealing with.” He went on barking orders, calling for a helicopter, a special emergency response team, and a team from the hazardous devices and explosives unit.

By that point, I’d regained enough of my composure and strength to climb out of the truck. The case was now out of our control.

Squirrels chattered in the pines. Crows cawed somewhere behind me. Falling leaves from the scattered oaks floated on the chill breeze.

If I hadn’t noticed the last of the fireball dying at the other end of the drive, I might have called it an idyllic scene. Instead, my nerves twitched at every sound.

Sampson climbed out. French still had the dispatcher on the line.

“He’s calling in an army,” John said.

“He should. We don’t know what we’re facing here.”

French got out, the radio receiver still held to one ear. In the far distance, from back toward Oxford, we could hear the first sirens.

He told the dispatcher we were going to take a walk to the explosion site. Then he hung up and walked around his truck, looking at all the dings and pockmarks from the blast and shaking his head. Finally, he shrugged. “Chopper won’t be here for forty minutes. Let’s do a little recon before the cavalry comes.”

“And set off another bomb?” Sampson asked.

“No, just up the drive, past that rut we hit before the explosion, so SERT has some idea what we’re dealing with.”