The three following cars stopped. Mo’s van had just vanished. The drive back to the Interstate would take an hour, then it would take another hour to find a motel. It wasn’t on the agenda. Kasper led the cars about three miles up the road and the three dark saloons pulled into a yard on the edge of a pine wood. It was a working yard with a yellow digger and a hut of some kind.

The six men got out. It was cold. It was coming on for midnight and the chill was creeping deep beneath their clothes. They hadn’t dressed for a night on the mountains.

‘What are you two guys thinking?’ Kasper shouted across to Asa Shelton. They shook their heads and looked around.

‘Either he pulled off the road or he cut his lights and kept on going.’

‘You think someone could drive on these roads without lights?’ Kasper asked.

‘Maybe, if he knows the roads.’

Harper walked over to the wooden shack and took out a screwdriver. With a small torch, he unscrewed the padlock plate and opened the door. Outside, the other five men looked on as a light went on inside.

A minute later, all six men were in the wooden shack. It was a sizeable working hut, with a small stove, a table and some hard hats and logging gear. Kasper was going through the cupboards looking for food and the two Federal agents had set up their laptops. ‘I can’t believe we came out here with nothing to eat. It’s fucking unbelievable.’

Harper was standing by the large old map of the region on the board. ‘This is useful. Come take a look.’ The guys crowded around the map. ‘Here we are in this cut just under the mountainside. There’s one road going through the hill, so he’s got to be up here for only one reason. There’s a pig farm up the road. Looks a small operation. I say that’s where he’s heading. There’s nowhere else this road leads to. What do you say?’

They all nodded quietly. Harper was still one of the most respected detectives on the force.

‘Okay, then,’ said Harper. ‘If he saw our headlights in his mirror then he might have taken one of these old tracks. It takes him way off track but if he follows it round, it’ll come back to the farm. I think he’s got scared and taken the long road. So what I suggest we do is get ourselves up to the farm and dig in. If he’s coming, he’ll take a couple of hours to get around the mountain.’

‘Okay,’ said Eddie. ‘Let’s go watch some hogs!’

Chapter Eighty-Two

The Pig Farm, Upstate

November 30, 1.12 a.m.

When they arrived at the pig farm, the teams hid their cars up in the trees behind the farm and scoped out their positions. Harper and Kasper set up about two hundred metres above the hog field, looking down a gentle slope. The hog field was an enormous brown enclosure where the pigs churned up the earth as they ran around freely and lolled about in patches of mud.

There could have been a hundred bodies in that muddy mess and you’d never find them. At night, it appeared the hogs all went into the great barn at the end of the field. Eddie and Tom stared out into the darkness. It was a quiet, starlit night. The big old moon was full.

‘You think he’ll come?’ Tom asked.

‘He’s maybe sitting and watching. He’s a nervous cat,’ said Eddie.

‘Or he’s spending one more night with her,’ said Tom.

‘Jesus, is this not bad enough without imagining him fucking a corpse?’

‘The guy likes these bodies,’ said Tom.

‘I guess he does, but we don’t need to hear about it.’

Harper nodded. They both looked down over the darkened hillside.

Beside the barns were the two holding ponds. These great round vats of slurry and blood were as much as thirty feet deep and contained excrement, blood, old carcasses, afterbirth, urine, chemicals and drugs. They were a horrible cocktail of thick, viscous shit. And sitting above them in the hills, Harper knew that they stank to high heaven.

A couple of hours later Harper was standing on the edge of a clump of trees, staring up at the fading stars. Eddie was sitting on the ground with his eyes closed and a blanket around his shoulders. Every few minutes Harper took a look round with the binoculars.

A faint purple glow on the hillside opposite suggested dawn was not far away. The silence was more or less complete, with hardly a breeze. Then, in the distance, headlights appeared on the road.

Heart in his mouth, Harper raised the binoculars to his eyes and looked. He couldn’t make anything out except the lights and the fact that the vehicle was moving slowly. He radioed the other team members.

‘You seeing this?’

‘We’re seeing it.’

‘What you thinking?’

‘Could be our man.’

Tom looked again. Up ahead of the vehicle, the road split, with the dirt track leading to the hog field and the road heading on to the farmhouse.

‘How much you want to put on the high road?’

Garcia came back, ‘I’ll put a fifty on the high road.’

Shelton chipped in, ‘I’ll take some of that, Harper. A hundred on the high road.’

Harper smiled to himself. They all wanted this to work. ‘I’ll take your bets, gentlemen. This one’s coming our way.’

Three sets of binoculars were trained on the vehicle as it approached the fork in the road. If it did go low, they only had a few minutes to prepare. If high, they could all relax and Harper could go back to watching as a poor man.

The fork approached. The car ground to a halt. They stared in absolute silence. Was the driver looking for the right road or was it something else?

A minute passed.

‘Perhaps they’ve seen something,’ said Garcia.

They looked around. Harper spotted it first. There was a torch lying on the ground near to the two detectives. It glowed faintly in the grass.

He radioed quickly. ‘Garcia, for fuck’s sake, you’ve got a flashlight on over there. He’s looking at the light.’

The torch went out and they all waited with bated breath as the car sat five hundred metres away at the fork in the road. Would it put him off? Did he see it? It was only a faint glow. But he hadn’t driven on. He was cautious.

Harper knew in his gut it was him. Redtop. And Redtop didn’t know what to do. He was an indecisive soul and now he had seen something that raised enough of a question to throw him. He was probably waiting now. Seeing if the light went on again.

Tom kicked Eddie, who crawled to his feet and took the binoculars. ‘It’s a Mark 2 Ford pickup. It’s his truck.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Shape of the headlights.’

Tom radioed through, ‘Eddie reckons it’s a Mark 2 Ford pickup from the shape of the headlights.’

‘Okay,’ said Shelton, ‘if he gets scared we’ve got to go after him. If it’s him, he’ll have a body in the pickup and that’s got to be enough to nail him.’

They waited. The tension was unbearable. The car sat there, engine running, for fifteen minutes.

‘Christ, this guy’s cautious.’

They watched, desperate for a sign. The truck just sat and idled. Another fifteen minutes passed by.

‘Do we take him out?’ Garcia asked.

‘Sit still,’ said Harper. ‘Sit still.’

Another five minutes passed. He’d been sitting there for over half an hour. Tom took the binoculars and put them up to his eye. The light was better now. The sun was still below the horizon but rising. Through the glasses he could make out very little at that distance, just a vague shape and no movement.

Forty minutes after the truck had stopped, it suddenly roared into life and sped down the dirt track.

‘All hands, get ready!’ called Harper.

The truck jumped and bumped down the path, hurtling at speed. When it got to the edge of the field, it slammed to a stop. The engine was left running.

They watched from the hill. Eddie had a rifle trained on the truck and Harper watched through binoculars.