River Road(45)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

It felt good to be out here sharing the warmth of the summer day with Mason, Lucy thought. Her spirits rose. For the first time since she had arrived in Summer River, she began to relax.

“We should have brought a picnic basket,” she said.

“Stop,” Mason said. It was an order, and it was given in very soft tones.

Her first thought was that he had spotted a snake. She paused and looked at him over her shoulder.

“What?” she asked.

But he wasn’t paying any attention to her. He was studying a thick, green patch of bamboo.

“Oh, crap,” she whispered. “Definitely not native.”

“It’s a screen to cover the line,” Mason said.

Then she saw it, too; a thin black tube snaked through the bamboo.

“I guess we can forget the scenic view,” she said.

“Right.” He looked around, quartering the landscape. Light sparked on his sunglasses, but evidently he did not see anything unduly alarming. He took her arm and positioned her in front of him, pointing her back down the hillside. He gave her an urgent little push. “Go.”

She did not argue.

“Can you drive a stick shift?” Mason asked.

“Well, yes, at least in theory.”

“Good. You’re driving.”

He gave her the keys. She got behind the wheel and took a deep breath. I can do this.

Mason slid into the passenger seat. “Go.”

He leaned over, reaching under the console. She heard a click, as if a lock had just opened. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him remove a gun from the concealed compartment.

Crap. He was serious.

“Guess that explains why you don’t do rental cars,” she said.

Mason did not answer.

She got the engine going without any problem, but there was a distinct lurch when she put it in gear. Gravel spit under the wheels. She winced.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Just drive.”

She drove, gritting her teeth every time the sleek car bounced over a pothole.

Mason was half turned in his seat, watching the trail behind them.

She checked the rearview mirror and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that there was no one behind them.

Mason did not turn around in the seat until they reached the end of the gravel road and jolted onto the main road. Only then did she sense him relax.

“We lucked out,” Mason reported. “No sinister-looking SUVs with blacked-out windows and no motorcycles with armed riders on board behind us. A good day to go sightseeing at an illegal pot farm.”

She took another breath, possibly the first one since she had put the car in gear.

“Okay, that was a little scary,” she said. “I wonder if the nature conservancy that bought Rainshadow Farm knows that someone is growing pot up there on the hillside.”

Mason stowed the gun in the console box. Lucy heard another click when he locked it.

“Probably not,” he said.

“It looked like they were using the line to draw water from the old well on the property.”

“That pot farm might explain what happened to Sara and Mary,” Mason said. “If that’s the case, it blows your Colfax family conspiracy theory all to hell.”

“Do you think Sara and Mary may have been the victims of drug thugs protecting their crop?”

“It’s a possibility. But that bamboo looked like it had been planted fairly recently to cover the waterline. Sara and Mary might have come along just as the growers were setting up the plantation. The big illegal farms often bring in armed guards along with their own crews of migrant workers to tend the plants. There’s a lot of money to be made, and sometimes innocent bystanders get killed.”

“So someone might have followed Sara and Mary from the farm and forced them off road?”

“It would be a convenient way to get rid of a couple of women who had seen too much.”

“True,” Lucy said. “But the growers are drawing water from the old well. Sara and Mary knew Rainshadow like the backs of their hands. I think they would have noticed the waterline and the new bamboo immediately. They would have known what it meant, just like we knew. They wouldn’t have hung around, either.”

“I think you’re right. There’s something else here that doesn’t quite fit. Forcing a car off the road is a messy and inefficient way to get rid of two people. You can’t guarantee the results. People survive car wrecks all the time. Also, a crash scene always attracts cops. If the growers wanted to use lethal force, they would most likely have shot Sara and Mary, buried the bodies somewhere in the woods and dumped the car a long ways from here.”

Lucy tightened her hands on the wheel. “And what does this tell us?”

There was a moment of silence before Mason spoke.

“It indicates that whoever murdered Sara and Mary—assuming they were murdered—is not a pro. The car accident feels like the work of a determined amateur, maybe someone who has seen one too many car-chase movies.”

“Someone with very little impulse control.”

“Lack of impulse control is a defining characteristic of about ninety-eight percent of the criminals I’ve encountered.”

“What about the other two percent?”

“They’re strategic thinkers. They are more likely to have realistic exit strategies. But the vast majority of bad guys never do good contingency planning. Probably because they’re too obsessed with achieving their goals. Obsession is another defining characteristic of the ninety-eight percent.”

“They don’t know when to walk away from the table.”

“More like they can’t bring themselves to walk away.”

“Sara had excellent impulse control,” Lucy said. “Probably all that yoga and meditation. She was also very smart.”

“Which is why the murder of Tristan Brinker remained unsolved until after she was gone. Like I said, the best plans usually revolve around the three basics.”

“Shoot, shovel and shut up.”

“Right. You can stop here; I’ll take the wheel now. Nice driving, by the way.”

The praise warmed her for some ridiculous reason.

“A little rough, I’m afraid,” she said. “It’s been a while since my father taught me how to drive a stick shift. He said it was a skill that gave a driver a more intuitive feel for the handling of a car.”

“I think Deke said something like that when he taught me how to drive. Also, the only vehicle we had at the time was the truck.”