Free Blood Echoes by Thomas H. Cook

been committed in the history of the state.”
    He was about to find out.
    Within moments of his arrival, Deputy Director Jim Stanley came into Angel’s office and told him that there had been what he called a “major homicide” in Donalsonville, Georgia. Stanley went on to say that Major Beardsley, the GBI director, had decided it would be handled by the Major Case Squad, the division Angel now headed, and that Angel would be in charge of the investigation.
    Angel dispatched Agent Jim Duff to Donalsonville by car, then headed for the local airport to meet Dr. Larry Howard, the forensic pathologist who’d been assigned to the case.
    When he reached the small airport on the outskirts of Atlanta, Angel could hardly believe what he saw, a rickety, moth-eaten old wheezer of an airplane that Dr. Howard owned and that he fully intended to fly to Donalsonville himself. The whole structure of the plane looked alarmingly unsteady, and the windshield was so old, cracked, and stained that Howard could not even see through it. Instead, during the long, uneasy flight to Donalsonville, he leaned out over the side of the plane in order to navigate it, staring at the blue expanse before him and the steadily flattening farmland several thousand feet below.
    On the way, Angel went over what was known about the case so far, amazed at just how little it was. Some people had been murdered, but no one at GBI headquarters had been sure of just how many, whether they were male or female, young or old, or even precisely when or how the murders had taken place. As to the critical issues of suspects and motivation no one had a clue, and the only thing Angel had been given to understand was that a hippie commune was situated not too far from the murder site, and that some “hippies” had been seen in the area not long before the murder. Just what he needed, Angel thought wearily as he glanced toward the ground below, some Charles Manson type on the loose in southern Georgia.
    He looked at his watch. It was 10:00 A.M. He would not sleep again for four days.
    Meanwhile, in Donalsonville, Mary Alday was still missing. As he stood near the Alday trailer, watching Mary’s dog as it darted back and forth from the driveway to a spot down River Road, Jerry Godby recalled the two cars he’d seen the preceding afternoon. He was reasonably sure that one of them had been Mary Alday’s, and after a moment, he decided to take a drive down the road in the same direction as that strange convoy had taken not quite twenty-four hours before.
    Once in his truck, he drove slowly, glancing left and right, not quite sure what he was looking for, but only looking, hoping that something would strike him as he tried to retrace the route of the cars. He passed the Alday homestead, its yard and driveway now cluttered with the cars and trucks of their neighbors, then on along their recently planted fields until he reached the peanut fields he’d been spraying when the cars had passed him the final time. This was the last time he’d seen them, but he had noted their direction, and now he decided to drive on down the road, following it as far as the cars would have had to follow it before turning left or right at the nearest crossroads.
    He was drifting even more slowly now, his foot barely touching the accelerator as he glanced about, meticulously searching the bordering woods. They were thick with summer growth, the tall oaks and pines towering above the forest understory of dogwood and gallberry, sweet-leaf and greenbrier, all so dense that Godby could only see a few yards before everything disappeared behind an impenetrable wall of broad green leaves and brightly colored wildflowers.
    Even so, the outer reaches of the forest were visible, and it was a sudden disarray within them that drew Godby’s attention as he continued down the road. At first it was no more than a few broken branches, slender tendrils of weed and vine that