The Kill (29 page)

He saw her in the moonlight, kneeling in the dirt on the edge of the woods. Relief flooded his body and he reholstered his weapon.

Olivia knelt on the ground, her legs unable to support her any longer, the beam from the flashlight dancing over the gray stone in front of her.

It looked like a gravestone.

The now-familiar dots and dashes had been carved deeply into the stone, as if the craftsman had spent hours and hours at work, then polished it until it was as smooth as river rock.

“Olivia!”

She heard Zack’s voice, but it seemed to come at a distance. Instead, she heard Missy’s voice, loud and clear.

“Just let me finish this chapter.”

The names and faces of thirty similar victims flashed through Olivia’s mind until she felt nauseated. Lives cut short, girls who didn’t have the chance to grow and learn and love and be loved.

Nor had Olivia ever learned to truly love. She had never accepted anyone’s love because she’d been trapped in the past, her heart dead.

No longer would she allow Missy’s murder to stop her from living. No longer would she be a prisoner of her regret and guilt.

Zack knelt on the ground beside her. “Liv, what’s wrong?”

He sounded worried. She pointed to the stone.

“It looks like a gravestone, but there’s no disturbed earth.” She shined her light on the garden that surrounded them. In the daylight, the area would seem to burst with color.

“It’s a shrine,” she said, “to his dead sister.”

Zack nodded. “I called in Doug Cohn’s people. They’ll be here shortly. I’ll point this out.”

“For so long I’ve let the past control me. The career choices I made, the friendships I fostered, my relationships with people.” She stared into Zack’s eyes, imploring him to understand her. She didn’t know how to express the revelation that had come to her as she stared at the sad stone half-buried in the earth.

“My father’s indifference, my mother’s grief, my own feelings of guilt. I’ll be forty next year and I feel like I haven’t led my own life.”

She stood and looked down at Zack squatting next to the marker. “No longer. My decisions are my own. My
feelings
are my own.” She touched his head, her fingers brushing against his ear, his rough cheek, her fingers skimming across his lips. He kissed her thumb, took hold of her hand, and stood.

“You know what I think?” he said, his voice low and smooth, sending shivers across her skin. He took her hands in his, his thumbs skimming along her palms. “I think every choice you made in your career has led you here to this place and time. To me. You can’t think about the past, what might have been. What is, is. What you’ve done, you’ve done. So many things are out of our control, Liv. Too many things. But the choices we’ve made, to be on the right side of justice, balance the scales.”

He kissed her lightly, all too briefly. “Let’s go meet Cohn at the docks. I hate waiting around, but until we have more information, we can’t do anything else.”

They walked away from the garden shrine.

“Thank you, Zack.”

“For what?”

“For helping me find myself.”

He shook his head. “You were never lost.”

Chris stopped the truck halfway up the Cascade Mountains, ninety minutes east of Seattle. The temperature had already dipped into the forties, and he had to set up camp. He’d checked out the area many times and had never seen hikers or campers here. He’d gone through the surrounding area, up and down the road, on foot and never seen recent tire treads or evidence of people. He suspected it was used primarily by rangers, and he’d hear them coming long before they reached him.

Being in the military had served him well; years of preparation and planning made setting up camp painless and easy. He’d leave nothing of himself behind. And any mess that was left when he freed the angel would within months be buried under snow. The ground would soak up her life, and he’d dispose of her shell.

She would be free, living without pain and sadness.

He sat on the ground, closed his eyes. Prepared.

It started when Mama died. Chris didn’t know how she’d died, not then, because Bruce took him and Angel from school and they left New Jersey.

“Your ma died in an accident. I have to find work.”

They never went home. Never collected his bug collection or books or toys. Angel wept for her teddy bear until Bruce slapped her.

They first went to Texas, a long way off. It took days and days to get there.

They had a one-room apartment where Chris could hear the people next door fighting. Bruce slept in the bed with Angel. Chris slept on the floor. Angel cried all night.

Bruce hurt her.

It didn’t take long for Chris to know what Bruce was doing to Angel, but he didn’t stop him. He was small for an eleven-year-old. His mother told him he’d grow big and strong, but he hadn’t. Bruce was so big and mean and Chris didn’t want to be hurt, too. But he took care of Angel when Bruce left. He cleaned her up and hugged her and bought her a new teddy bear with money he’d stolen from Bruce’s wallet.

He had loved her and taken care of her for three years, and now she wanted to leave him.

He couldn’t let her. He would be lost without her.

Angel could never leave.

Chris rose from his spot and crossed to the truck. He unlocked the back and reached in for his angel.

A sudden, sharp jolt across his chest startled him. He reached out blindly in the dark, his fingers brushing against hair, but he was falling down.

He jumped up immediately, sensing rather than seeing his angel leap from the back of the truck and start running.

Anger burned deep and hot in his veins. She was trying to run away. Leave him.

He would never allow that.

Zack and Olivia met the Coast Guard at the docks. Doug Cohn and his team disembarked. Zack filled him in on what they’d discovered, then went back across the Sound with the Coast Guard.

“Detective Travis? You have a radio call,” one of the officers said and handed him a walkie-talkie.

“Travis here.”

“It’s Quinn Peterson. We have an Amber Alert call. Two sightings of the truck in question on Highway 90 heading east into the Cascades. One guy swears he saw a white truck turn off onto Road 56, which crisscrosses the middle north fork of the Anchor River.”

“The Cascades are huge, and Road 56 is virtually impassable in places.”

“That should make it easier for us to find him. I’ve called the forest rangers to increase patrols; we have a helicopter standing by. The sheriff’s department has already called in all off-duty personnel to start a manhunt.”

“It’ll take us two hours to get there,” Zack said, discouraged. Two hours could be the difference between Nina living or dying.

“Thirty minutes, tops. I have a helicopter waiting for you at the Coast Guard station, with a search-and-rescue expert already on board.”

“Who?”

“My wife, Miranda. And if anything happens to her, I’ll hold you personally responsible.”

Nina ran faster than she’d ever run before. Even when she was exhausted and didn’t think she could take another step, she kept going. Or stumbled. Sometimes she crawled. But she was too terrified to stop moving.

She was in the mountains, that much she knew, so she focused on running down, down, staying off the road. Couldn’t chance that he would see her, hear her. It was really dark up here, too dark.

Nina hated the dark.

There were so many sounds competing with her rapid breath and occasional cries. Hooting owls. Scurrying rodents. The call of larger animals. Rushing water, a river.

None were as fearsome as the man she’d seen.

He looked normal. But one glance into his hateful eyes told this little girl that if she didn’t find the strength to run, he’d hurt her bad.

How long had she been running? Was he still coming? Would he catch her? Could he hear her?

She was in the middle of nowhere, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t wait and try to hear him. She prayed and pleaded with God to help her. The moon came and went behind clouds, alternately guiding her and hiding her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement even before she heard the rustling of a body moving through trees. Her heart pounded so hard it hurt.

A sliver of moonlight reflected off two eyes.

He was there. Right there. Feet away.

He would kill her.

She stifled a scream, and the body—covered in fur—ran past her so close she felt the animal’s terror. Or was that her own fear?

It was a deer. A deer, not a man.

She sank to the damp earth and cried. No one would find her. She didn’t know where she was, how close she was to Seattle, if she was even in Washington State.

Get up, Nina.

No. I don’t want to. I’m tired.

But the voice was persistent.
Get up, get moving, keep running. Be smart, Nina. Start marking your trail
.

She found a thick branch on the ground and started marking trees by either breaking a small branch or scratching the trunk with the branch she held. She didn’t know if it would do any good, but doing
something
actually calmed her down.

She didn’t hear him following. She heard nothing but four-legged predators. They were far less scary to her than the bad man. Like the deer, they feared her more than she feared them.

What was that?

She stopped. Listened. Faint, in the distance, a motor. Lights suddenly cut through the woods, then as the vehicle bounced, the light cut high and low.

Had help arrived?

She listened, her fear growing. No, not help. It sounded like the same as the truck the bad man drove. It was
him
.

She hunkered down.

A screech and an inhuman cry.

Thud. Crunch.

Silence. Dead silence.

She ran. Ran as fast as she could along a narrow trail, then suddenly she was falling . . .

Zack had told Olivia that Miranda was coming with them on the helicopter search, but seeing her was still a pleasant surprise. Miranda gave her a big bear hug and asked, “How are you?” then glanced at Zack, who was talking to the pilot. “Quinn told me everything,” Miranda whispered. “Your secret is safe with me.”

Olivia relaxed. “Thank you. We’re so close. I don’t want to blow it now and not be here when we find him.”

“I know, Liv. I know exactly how you feel.”

Out of everyone, Miranda did understand. Having her friend here, not only to find Nina but as support, grounded Olivia. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was in Seattle when you called the other day.”

“We’ll talk about that later. Now,” she looked over at Zack, “I assume that’s Detective Travis?”

“Yes.”

“He’s umm, well, as sexy as Viggo Mortensen in
Lord of the Rings
.”

Olivia blushed. Miranda knew Olivia loved Tolkien’s trilogy. “Miranda! I hadn’t noticed.” Of course she had, the minute she saw him.

“Then you’re blind.” Miranda glanced at the sky. “We need to get a move on. The fog is creeping in.”

Zack approached. “Miranda Peterson?”

“Yes.” She shook his hand. “Let’s get going and I’ll tell you my plan on the way.” She handed both him and Olivia copies of a map of the central-west section of the Cascade Mountains.

“I just got word from my partner,” Zack said as he put on headphones and adjusted the equipment in the front of the helicopter to fit his long legs. “They found the owner of the truck. It’s registered to Karl Burgess. He and his wife left on vacation early this morning. Their neighbor said they drove themselves to the airport. Boyd is on his way to find Driscoll’s vehicle. We have a warrant and will tow it to the lab, plus have a twenty-four-hour stakeout at the airport in case he returns for his car.”

“I hope he doesn’t come back,” Olivia said. Miranda and Zack both looked at her skeptically.

“If he returns, Nina is dead.”

Zack coordinated with the sheriff’s department from the helicopter and listened to Miranda lay out her plan. They spoke through microphones attached to the headphones they all wore, their voices competing with the helicopter noise.

“Until the sheriff’s department says otherwise, we’re assuming the witness is accurate about the white truck he saw turning onto Road 56. That puts us . . . here.” She pointed to where Road 56 was accessible from the main highway. “In here are homes and cabins, spread out. Within a mile or so, the mountain starts a steep climb up. Here is the middle north fork of the Anchor River; you can see how Road 56 crosses it here and . . . here.”

“All the way up the mountain,” Zack said. “I’ve been up there. Beautiful in the summer, impassable in the winter.”

“There are two places we can land other than this field near the turnoff. We can go up three miles to a lodge which has a flat, wide meadow. I talked to them already and cleared it. If we need it, it’s there. Or, we can land here.” She pointed about a mile farther up the mountain. “It’s a campground owned by the Boy Scouts.”

“He won’t be anywhere people might see or hear.”

“Agreed. He wants privacy, but he also wants accessibility. I’m thinking he’s already staked out a site.”

“He doesn’t need a lot to survive,” Olivia interjected. “His house was bare bones. Nothing extraneous. He won’t need a fire. He’ll plan ahead with a sleeping bag maybe, a space blanket. Water. Rations.”

“I agree,” Miranda said. “He was in the military; he knows how to live with minimal supplies. But he’s also going to want an escape route. He’s not going to isolate himself so much that he can be trapped.”

“But he’s been killing for years. He’s not going to think we’re on to him,” Olivia said. “We only learned his identity this morning.”

This morning? It had been a long day, Olivia realized. She rubbed her temples, suddenly weary. She was surprised when Zack reached over and massaged her neck with one hand.

She caught his eye.