18
"Where the hell are we?" Jack muttered as he followed Brady along a dark, twisting road through the Jersey sticks.
Seemed to be a pretty popular back road, which was good. Jack had kept his distance as he'd followed Brady off the Parkway. His Mercedes was now riding behind a battered old pickup and ahead of a Taurus. Jack kept behind the Taurus.
He was pretty certain they were in Ocean County, although they could have been at the lower end of Monmouth. He hadn't seen a sign either way. Not that it mattered. He wasn't too familiar with either.
Not so Brady. He seemed to know where he was going. Not a hint of hesitation in the way he negotiated the hilly curves and turns since the Parkway.
The next turn took Jack by surprise. As the road crested, Brady hung a sharp left and disappeared. Jack slowed as he reached the spot but didn't stop in case Brady was checking for tails. He caught a glimpse of an opening through the trees, a concrete skirt abutting the road's asphalt, and then nothing but open night sky.
He doubted Brady had driven off a cliff, so he continued on for about a quarter mile until he found a spot wide enough for a U-turn, then doubled back. He killed his headlights as he turned onto the skirt and stopped. He faced a wide expanse of starry sky as he sat overlooking some sort of pit, a huge excavation maybe seventy or eighty feet deep, with a cluster of odd-shaped buildings nestled against the near wall. Light glowed through a few windows in one of the taller structures where three or four cars were parked.
Jack backed up and drove downhill to where he'd made the U-turn. He pulled the car off the road and parked it between a couple of pines, then walked back. He hugged the wall of the pit as he made his way down the steep concrete driveway.
At the bottom he came upon a small fleet of cement mixer trucks. Each had printing on the cab doors that he assumed to be the company name. Something about the design above the name drew him to the trucks. He sidled over to one. Keeping its bulk between himself and the buildings, he risked a quick flash of his penlight.
Centered on the door was something that looked like a black sun or black sunflower. Beneath that…
WM. BLAGDEN & SONS, INC.
He'd seen that design and that name before. But where?
And then he remembered: a couple of months ago, in Novaton, Florida, on the cab door of a dump truck.
The driver had said he was hauling sand to New Jersey. Jack had thought it strange at the time—no shortage of sand in Jersey—and had meant to check it out when he got back. But with so much happening in his life these days, he'd never gotten around to it.
And yet here he was, standing in the yard of Blagden & Sons.
A familiar heaviness settled on Jack. This was no coincidence. No more coincidences in his life, and here was further proof.
In September a Blagden & Sons sand-hauling dump truck had been stolen and used to run down his father. And now in November he'd followed Luther Brady here, to the Blagden & Sons factory or mill or whatever a concrete making-mixing place was called.
And the sand? Sand was a major ingredient in concrete, and just twenty-four hours ago the late Cooper Blascoe had spoken about Brady's life project, the one he'd been funneling church funds into, and how it involved burying concrete pillars in specific locations around the globe… in the same pattern as that on the skin from a dead woman's back.
Connect the dots and form a picture. But only part of one. Most of the big picture remained obscured.
Jack knew he wouldn't be part of this particular dot right now if another woman, the one on Beekman Place, hadn't involved him with the Dormen-talists.
Manipulated at every turn…
He saw his life becoming less and less his own, and loathed the idea. But despite his growing fury he couldn't seem to do a damn thing about it.
He banked his burning frustration and focused on his mission: Was Jamie Grant here?
Keeping an eye out for any security, Jack stayed in the shadows as he crept closer to the building. No sign of guards. Too bad. He would have liked to get his hands on one of Jensen's TPs and wring Jamie's whereabouts from him.
When he reached the building he recognized Jensen's Town Car next to Brady's Mercedes; the cops obviously hadn't latched onto the GP yet—if they ever would. A big Infinity and a Saab he didn't recognize were also parked before the door. Jensen and Brady here but without a squad of TPs. Not what Jack would have expected.
He found a dirt-caked window around the corner. Using the heel of his hand he cleaned a patch large enough to spy on the interior but too small to be noticed.
His attention was drawn immediately to the metal column braced upright under a chute on the far side of the vaulted space. He spotted a group of people on a walkway ten feet off the floor. Jensen was the easiest to recognize. And here came Luther Brady walking toward them.
If only he could hear what they were saying.