“Fuck, I don’t have AIDS or anything if that’s what you’re thinking. You gotta drink something.”

Ignoring the bottle, Lydia lowered her mouth to the water in the quarry and drank deep. It was salty and metallic. Disgusting. She choked, nearly vomited.

“Jesus, I told you,” Garrett snapped. He offered her the water again. “There’s all kinds of crap in there. Quit being so fucking stupid.” He tossed her the bottle. She caught it clumsily with her taped hands and drank it down.

Drinking the water immediately refreshed her. She relaxed some and asked, “Where’s Mary Beth? What’ve you done with her?”

“She’s in this place by the ocean. An old banker house.”

Lydia knew what he meant. “Banker” to a Carolinian meant somebody who lived on the Outer Banks, the barrier islands off the coast in the Atlantic. So that’s where Mary Beth was. And she understood now why they’d been traveling east—toward swampland with no houses and very few other places to hide. He probably had a boat stashed to take them through the swamp to the Intracoastal Waterway then to Elizabeth City and through Albemarle Sound to the Banks.

He continued. “I like it there. It’s really neat. You like the ocean?” He asked her in a funny way—conversationally—and he seemed almost normal. For a moment her fear lessened. But then he froze again and listened to something, holding a finger to his lips to silence her, frowning angrily, as his dark side returned. Finally he shook his head as he decided that whatever he’d heard wasn’t a threat. He rubbed the back of his hand over his face, scratching another welt. “Let’s go.” He nodded back up the steep path to the rim of the quarry. “It’s not far.”

“The Outer Banks’ll take us a day to get to. More.”

“Oh, hell, we’re not gonna get there today.” He laughed coldly as if she’d made another idiotic comment. “We’ll hide near here and let the assholes searching for us get past. We’ll spend the night.” He was looking away from her when he said this.

“Spend the night?” she whispered hopelessly.

But Garrett said nothing more. He started prodding her up the steep incline to the lip of the quarry and the pine woods beyond.

… chapter six

What’s the attraction of the sites of death?

As she’d walked the grid at dozens of crime scenes Amelia Sachs had often asked this question and she asked it again now as she stood on the shoulder of Route 112 in Blackwater Landing, overlooking the Paquenoke River.

This was the place where young Billy Stail had died bloody, where two young women had been kidnapped, where a hardworking deputy’s life had been changed forever—perhaps ended—by a hundred wasps. And even in the relentless sun the mood of Blackwater Landing was somber and edgy.