Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [153]
Mac took one of the maps. The printout showed a large, shadowed area, crisscrossed by a maze of lines. He followed the various markings with his finger. “What are these?”
“The dashed lines represent hiking and biking trails bisecting the swamp. The broader lines here are unpaved roads. The thin dark lines reveal the old canals, most hand-dug by slaves hundreds of years ago. When the water levels were higher, they would use the canals to harvest the cypress and juniper trees.”
“And now?”
“Most of the canals are marshy messes. Not enough water for a canoe, but not dry enough to walk.”
“What about the roads?”
“Wide, flat, grassy; you don’t even need four-wheel drive.” Levine already understood where he was going with this. She added, “Technically speaking, visitors aren’t permitted to bring vehicles onto the roads, but as for what happens under the cover of night . . .”
Mac nodded. “Okay. So our guy needs to get an unconscious, hundred-and-twenty-pound body into the heart of the swamp. He’d want to take her someplace remote, where she wouldn’t immediately be found by others. He’d need a road for access, however, because carrying a woman through a hundred thousand acres would be a bit much. Where does that leave us?”
They all studied the map. The marked hiking paths were fairly centralized, with a clear grid pattern occupying most of the west side of the swamp. Closest to them was a simple loop labeled a boardwalk trail. They immediately dismissed that as too touristy. Farther in lay the dark oval shadow of Lake Drummond, also highly populated with hiking trails, roads, and feeder ditches. Beyond the lake, however, moving farther east, north, and south, the map became a solid field of gray, only periodically bisected by old, unpaved roads. This is where the swamp became a lonely place.
“We need to drive in,” Kimberly murmured. “Make it to the lake.”
“Branch off from there,” Mac agreed. He looked at Levine intently. “He wouldn’t leave her by a road. Given the grid pattern, it would be too easy for her to walk out.”
“True.”
“He wouldn’t use a canal either. Again, she could just follow it straight out of the swamp.”
Kathy nodded silently.
“He took her into the wild,” Mac concluded softly. “Probably in this northeastern quadrant, where the trees and thick underbrush are disorienting. Where the predator population is higher and that much more dangerous. Where she can scream all she wants and no one will hear a thing.”
He fell silent for a moment. It was already so hot out this morning. Sweat trickled down their faces, staining their shirts. The air felt too heavy to breathe, making their hearts beat faster and their lungs labor harder, and it was barely sunrise. Conditions were harsh, bordering on brutal. What must the girl be going through, trapped here for over three days?
“Going there ourselves will be dangerous,” Kathy said quietly. “We’re talking brier thickets so dense in places you can’t even hack your way through. One minute you might be walking on hard-packed earth; the next you’ll have sunk down to your knees in sucking mud. You need to be on the lookout for bears and bobcats. Then there’s the matter of cottonmouth snakes, copperhead snakes, and the canebrake rattler. Normally they keep to themselves. But once off the trails, we’re intruding in their terrain, and they won’t take it kindly.”
“Canebrake rattler?” Kimberly spoke up nervously.
“Shorter than its cousin, with a thick, squat head that will scare the piggy out of you. Cottonmouth and copperhead will be around the wet, swampy patches. The canebrake rattler will prefer rocks and piles of dead leaves. Finally, we have the bugs. Mosquitoes, yellow flies, gnats, chiggers, and ticks . . . Most of the time, none of us considers the insect population.