Page 91 of Return of the Spider

The drive was torn up. There was mud all over from our skidding retreat, even in the leaves and pine needles we now crept across with weapons drawn.

The rut in the drive turned out to be a water bar that was supposed to drain the drive, put rain into the ditches. On the right side, Sampson found a thin cable that snaked to a pine tree ten yards into the woods. Some kind of remote device was linked to the cable and taped to the trunk.

“There’s got to be a pressure plate or something there under all that mud,” John said. “When we drove across it, the trigger was tripped.”

I said, “Kind of a long way from the trigger to the actual bomb.”

“Fifty yards?” French murmured.

“Far enough to make you wonder whether it was meant to kill or warn.”

“I think we’re fair to call it attempted murder,” French said, and continued past the water bar, stopping every few feet to examine the way ahead.

“Look for fishing line, trip wire, or another cable,” Sampson whispered to me.

“What if there’s another pressure plate?” I asked, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable about what we were doing. “Under the leaves, I mean.”

That stopped John for a moment. But not French, who kept on going to the charred bomb crater, which was about twenty inches deep and just as wide.

“Smells more like gasoline than cordite or C-four,” French said when we arrived beside him.

“I’ll let your bomb guys figure that out,” Sampson said.

We scanned the surface of the drive ahead but saw no fresh tracks in the thirty yards before it opened up into an overgrownfield, turned to the right, and vanished. The police sirens were getting close now.

French said, “Let’s see what’s what in that field before we head back to the road.”

He eased forward and we followed, eyes searching the ground and the trees ahead for signs of a second triggering device, but we found none. We reached the last big pine standing sentinel above the drive.

French eased left around the tree trunk and took a peek. When he pulled back, he murmured, “House is about seventy out. Place looks dead. Roof’s ready to cave in.”

I was standing to his right and moved aside several of the lower pine boughs on the opposite side of the tree. It gave me a different angle and a new perspective on the field that cut back toward the road.

In the deep pocket of the field, there was a long, low, open-front shed of sorts with a metal roof and pigeons fluttering about.

One of the Chester County Sheriff’s cruisers was close now, siren whooping, almost to French’s truck.

“Let’s head back, Alex,” Sampson said behind me. “Cavalry’s here.”

But I stepped forward another foot and pushed aside the last brushy tree limb blocking my view of the far end of that shed. I took in the scene for a long moment, enough time to be sure that my heart was slamming in my chest for good reason.

“Cross!” French called.

I pivoted, stepped back around the tree, and grinned at them, feeling victorious.

“What’s going on?” Sampson said.

“I just spotted an old white van half under a tarp in a shed not a hundred yards from us. I think we’ve got our killer.”

CHAPTER

75

It took almost threehours for the Pennsylvania police SERT and bomb squad to arrive to sweep the area. They’d had to wait until a helicopter with infrared showed no one was on the property.

Sampson and I argued that we should be spending our time finding Eamon Diggs so we could place him under arrest. But French wanted to look at the van first.

Neither the SERT nor the hazardous devices and explosives commanders were happy to learn we had gone all the way to the edge of the farmyard; they didn’t let us in until after they’d cleared the driveway, the farmyard, the farmhouse, and the shed.