“This is not good,” Robin said. Ken looked grim.
Robin headed toward the stone wall.
“Where are you going?” Ken asked.
“I’m going to look for something I hope I don’t find,” she answered.
Robin slipped on a pair of gloves while she studied the wall for handholds. Then she took a deep breath and started to climb. Ken followed. When they were both on the other side, Robin turned to Ken.
“Climbing the wall was easy. Samuels would have had no trouble getting onto the grounds.”
There were no streetlights on the road to Black Oaks, and the light from the moon was so dim that it made the potholed surface almost impossible to see. Robin used the flashlight beam to illuminate the uneven road just as a gust of frigid wind swept up the mountain.
Three-quarters of a mile down from Black Oaks, a massive mound of mud had spilled across the road. Robin played her flashlight over it and stopped the beam on several smeared indentations on the edge near the guardrail.
“Someone scrambled across the mud here, and it looks like they were going up toward Black Oaks instead of down,” she said.
“I agree.”
“Let’s see where they were coming from,” Robin said as she made her way across the waist-high mound of mud and rock, trying hard to keep from sinking into it.
An eighth of a mile farther down the road, a section of the guardrail had been ripped apart. The jagged edges were pointing out from the cliff and toward the valley. Robin stopped on the edge of the cliff and sent her beam down into the shadows until it illuminated the trunk of a car.
“Hold the light,” she told Ken. “I’m going down.”
Ken took the flashlight from Robin and lit the way in front of her. Robin’s descent was treacherous. Handholds and toeholds that had seemed solid betrayed her and slid out from under her fingers and feet, sending rocks and soil hurtling down the cliff. She made her way slowly, pausing often, her stomach in a knot, as she barely escaped falls that would have killed or maimed her.
When she was almost at the car, she saw the massive tree trunk that Samuels said had halted the car’s descent. The passenger door was wide open, and the headlight beams were not on. The driver would have needed to have his headlights on during the precarious drive up the mountain. Robin guessed that they had been turned off to delay the discovery of the vehicle.
“Play the beam over the car so I can see inside!” she yelled up to Ken.
Ken shone the beam through the rear window. Robin edged around the passenger side of the car and peered into the interior. The passenger seat and the rear seats were empty, but the driver was folded over the steering wheel. He was only wearing hisunderwear. A pair of jeans and a blue work shirt lay on the floor in front of the passenger seat.
The rear window weakened the light from the flashlight beam, and Robin had to strain to see the driver clearly. She was afraid to lean into the car for fear of falling, but she was pretty sure that the dark stain that covered part of the side of the driver’s head was blood, and she thought she saw a bullet wound in the driver’s right temple.
“I’m coming up!” she yelled.
Robin edged along the car until she was behind the trunk. Then she let go and turned into the side of the cliff. She was certain that she would slip and fall every inch of the climb up the waterlogged, mud-slick cliffside, and it seemed like hours had passed before Ken grabbed her arm and helped her onto the road. When she was safe, she let her legs dangle over the edge of the cliff while she caught her breath. Then she told Ken what she’d seen in the car.
“I couldn’t get far enough inside to be certain how the driver died. If I had to guess, I’d say he was shot in the head. What’s important is that the driver was only wearing underwear, and there were clothes that looked like clothing an inmate would wear on the passenger side of the car.
“Changing inside the car after it went over the cliff would have been very difficult. If I’m right, the driver was killed while the car was on the road, then the killer sent the car over the side after he changed clothes. I’m willing to bet that the mud-stained clothes Samuels was wearing when he arrived at Black Oaks would fit the driver perfectly.”
“We have to get back to the house before Samuels figures out that we’re onto him,” Ken said.
“My thought exactly,” Robin said as she got to her feet. “Are you armed?”
Ken nodded.
“Then let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Robin and Ken raced back to Black Oaks and scaled the wall. The front door was still wedged open. They took out their guns and inched into the entryway. The house was dark and silent.
“Let me lead the way to Samuels’s room and go in first. I’ve done this before,” Ken said. “You back me up.”
Robin wasn’t afraid to enter Samuels’s room first, but she knew that Ken had been a police officer, a Navy SEAL, and a CIA field operative, so she was smart enough to bow to experience.