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“You’ve said a lot of things,” Acadia shot back. “Like that Cross would crumble the night we sent those pictures.”
“Cross was in pieces,” he snapped. “He still is and it’s growing worse. Didn’t you just see that with your own eyes? He’s disintegrating.”
Acadia was silent for several long moments before saying, “More I think about it, sending those photographs was a mistake.”
“A mistake?” Sunday replied, clearly annoyed.
Acadia said, “You went for the short-term shock value of having Cross see his entire family murdered with gunshot wounds to the head. But you were also giving away leverage. You did the same thing by dumping her there. A dead person can’t be helped, Marcus. A dead person can’t be saved. There’s less motivation now for him to become the perfect killer you want him to be.”
“Your understanding of the animal condition is shallow at times, Acadia,” Sunday sniffed. “This is all timing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, crossing her arms.
“Ever watch a dog trainer at work?” he asked. “I mean a real trainer, someone who teaches hunting or attack dogs?”
“My shithead of a daddy ran coonhounds.”
“Then you know what the predator-prey response is?”
“I can guess,” she said. “Critter runs in the woods, a dog chases it. Tries to kill it. It’s in its nature.”
“There you go,” Sunday said, snapping his fingers at her. “And the way trainers build that predator-prey response is by taking something away from the dog, something that the dog values highly, like a bone or a toy. They let Bowser go for days thinking his favorite bone or toy is gone for good. Then they show it to him attached to a rope. When that dog goes to chase his toy, the trainer jerks it just out of reach—all the time, just out of reach. Isn’t that right, Mitch?”
Cochran downshifted and slowed, saying, “The dog goes fucking crazy, doing anything in his power to have that toy again. That’s when the trainer steps in and takes total control of the situation, uses the toy as a reward for a job well done.”
He glanced at Acadia. “And how do I know that? We had fucking dogs at Abu Ghraib. Lots of ’em.”
Cochran took a right turn onto a muddy road a few miles south of Frostburg, in rural northwestern Maryland. They passed a ramshackle farm, and Sunday heard the echoes of pigs squealing in his mind. The road wound up into an oak forest clad in new lime-green leaves.
A mile into the woods, Sunday started looking at the trees closely, and then he said, “That’s it. Those birches on the right. Park over there.”
CHAPTER
8
COCHRAN PULLED THE DURANGO almost to the drainage ditch next to three birches that grew close together, almost as if they were shoots of the same tree.
“We’ve got ten minutes still,” Sunday said, and he turned his attention to the laptop again. But Cross was nowhere to be seen around the construction site.
“You can’t go in early?” Acadia asked, sounding irked. “I told you seventy-two hours is the limit of how far we can push things. That window’s closing fast.”
Sunday checked his watch. “We’re at sixty-seven hours. We’ll make it.”
“I gotta go number two,” Cochran said.
“What are you, in kindergarten?” Acadia snapped.
“Maybe that’s my problem, I’m too fucking childlike.” Cochran laughed, got out of the car, and walked off.
Sunday looked off through the windshield in silence, and then said, “That farm we passed brought back memories. Mulch grew up in a hellhole like that.”
“The fabled origins?” Acadia asked.
“Whence Mulch sprang. And where Mulch died.”
“Ever been back?”
“Not even close,” Sunday said, checking his watch. “I think I’m good to go now.”
