Perfect killer

CHAPTER 61

Fog still shrouded the landscape like a gesso wash, robbing the world of depth and color and making close things seem far away. Jasmine and I drove through a few rare spots where the sun had burned completely through, but most everywhere else we looked, a bright, lethal glare left us frowning and squinting.

"Okay, if I remember correctly, we should find a little track leading through that line of trees up there." Jasmine chewed on a corner of her lower lip as she stared intently ahead, steering the pale silver SUV south along a serpentine gravel track paved with ruts and washboard corrugations.

A thin selvage of trees and tangled vines along the Tallahatchie River hurtled past on the left. Cotton in full bloom rushed by on the right.

For the best part of an hour, Jasmine had navigated the SUV along a backwoods odyssey of roads-paved, gravel, unpaved-and more than a few dirt and mud tracks that required the SUV's four-wheel drive. She kept us off the main roads and on a mostly northerly course.

Occasionally in the distance, we saw police-car light bars strobing in the haze. It didn't take much imagination to interpret those as roadblocks, although the radio made no mention of a manhunt or the shooting of a sheriff's deputy by a mysterious blond woman.

With nothing better to do, I tinkered periodically with the SUV's Global Positioning System navigation unit. According to the GPS, we were nowhere near anything. And that offered yet another metaphor for the Delta.

Abruptly, I pitched forward as Jasmine stabbed at the brakes.

"There." She pointed. I followed her finger and, right off the tip, saw a break in the trees materialize out of the glare. Slowing to a crawl, she turned the SUV cautiously left and stopped in front of the rusted superstructure of a condemned bridge barricaded with dire warnings. She stopped the SUV nose to nose with a red-and-white- striped barrier.

"Wait here."

She put the SUV in park and got out. To its credit, the GPS display showed us on the Tallahatchie's west bank, south of Ruby. Jasmine strode confidently around the barriers and out onto the bridge.

Then she faded to a shadowy cipher on the far side, and a shadow of loss fell across my heart. I turned from the image and tinkered with the GPS for distraction, looking for Tyrone Freedman's house, which, according to the latest technology, existed nowhere except in a native Deltan's head.

While I worried about dragging Tyrone further into this mess and second-guessed my own memories of how well we had connected back at the hospital, I'd called his cell not long after Jasmine had steered us away from John's pickup in the killer's SUV.

"You're lucky I'm in the imaging lab," he'd told me. "Whole hospital's crawling with Feds and some really creepy guys with dead eyes."

He volunteered shelter faster than I could ask. I talked him out of doing more.

Jasmine made her way out of the fog now and, with an easy, swift familiarity, moved the barriers blocking access to the bridge.

"I would have thought those barricades would be a lot more permanent," I said when she got back in.

"They were once, but the locals made some changes, otherwise they have to go down to Money or up to Minter City to cross."

She put the SUV in gear, eased past the barrier then stopped. Without being asked, I got out and dragged the barrier back in place behind us. As Jasmine drove, I tried not to look at the decrepit, weathered boards covering the bridge's roadway or the storm-roiled brown water below. I also tried to ignore how the bridge swayed and yawed and struggled to ignore the great pancake-sized scabs of rust flaking off the bridge's elderly, anemic girders.*****

In the swirling silver mist, a lean, lit, muscular man stood at the edge of the trees and brush and followed the pale silver SUV's taillights disappearing across the old Tallahatchie bridge. He pulled the baseball cap off his head and ran his other hand across the top of his head and nodded to himself.

"Good try," he said quietly as he replaced the baseball cap on his head and adjusted the pitch, rotation, and yaw a degree here and there until he got it precisely where he liked it. "But not good enough to lose me."

It was a process of elimination, and from the data he'd gathered and from what he knew about the two, there would be only one place they'd go. He smiled as he walked back to his truck.