by Nalini Singh
Then the chopper was up and at an angle that made it impossible to see Keira May any longer. Dismissing Daniel’s wife and Nikau’s obsession, Will raised the binoculars to his eyes and began to scan the landscape. It looked even more unforgiving from up here. Serrated black rocks that thrust up from the sand in huge broken shards, foaming water that took no prisoners, and a wilderness so tangled and thick that it was difficult to see beneath the canopy.
Daniel went down low without prompting, low enough to give Will the best possible chance of spotting a woman lying injured below. The one thing in their favor was Miriama’s bright choice of running gear.
“Did you try on the other side of the whirlpool?”
Will didn’t look away from the trees below, intent on spotting even a hint of hot pink or orange. “What’s on the other side of the whirlpool?”
“A kind of cave formed by the way the rocks fell there,” the other man said, his voice echoing through the headphones. “We used to hang out in it as teenagers—it’s safe at low tide.”
Daniel angled the chopper back over a particularly dense patch of trees so Will could take a second look. “There’s a running trail right above the cave that hardly anyone uses. It was totally overgrown the last time I overflew it, but Miriama likes to run and she’s good at it. Maybe she went there—it’s definitely a more challenging track.”
Will calculated how long Miriama would’ve had to run to get to that spot, knew it was far too long, but they had to check every possible option. Could be she’d been enjoying the run so much she’d gone far beyond her normal distance. “Let’s go.”
From above, the whirlpool looked like the mouth of hell, spilling and crashing and so dark that it felt as if its depths went on forever. Bones cold with the knowledge that if Miriama had fallen anywhere near the dangerous spot, she was gone, Will continued to scan through the binoculars.
But if he hadn’t known to look for the rock formation that formed a cave, he’d have missed it, it was so well camouflaged to match the neighboring rocks. A second later, he realized Daniel wasn’t the only one who’d thought of the spot. A male body stood in front of the stone archway, one hand on the rock.
Nikau.
Though he looked up at the sound of the chopper, Nikau didn’t wave. Instead, he ducked under the stone to disappear inside. “We should focus on the cliffs above,” Will said to Daniel. “Nikau can check out the cave.”
Fine lines bracketing his mouth, Daniel didn’t argue for once. They skimmed along the top edge of the cliffs back to the other side of the whirlpool and, while most of it was tangled growth that hadn’t been disturbed for years, Will did spot what might’ve been a disturbance in one small section. Using his phone, he asked one of the nearby searchers to have a look.
“Definite signs someone stood or walked through here,” the man confirmed. “But it’s not churned up like if Miriama went over the edge.” A small pause. “Almost as if a pig hunter maybe walked out of the trees behind me and came to stand here, look at the view.”
“Okay, leave it as it is,” Will said. “I want to have a look myself.”
Hanging up, Will considered the cave again and frowned. That cave was exactly the kind of secretive and private spot teenagers loved. It should’ve passed from teenage group to teenage group in a town like this, but for whatever reason, it had been abandoned. Forgotten.
It made him wonder what secrets lay within, what secrets tied Daniel to Nikau, Nikau to Anahera.
16
Anahera trudged through the forested track beside Vincent, conscious of the sound of the chopper fading into the distance. Nikau had designated her and Vincent a search team after they were two of the earliest people to turn up at the fire station. Peter Jacobs had also turned up around the same time, but thankfully, Nikau had matched the garage owner with one of the more experienced hunters.
“You look bad, Vincent.” Always his full name or Vin, never Vinnie; he simply wouldn’t respond to anyone who tried to call him that. “Do you know Miriama well?”
“I love my coffee, you know that.” A self-deprecating smile that didn’t reach the arresting tawny shade of his eyes. “When I’m in Golden Cove and working from home, I see her pretty much every morning and every afternoon. She always has that smile. So bright. So much life to her.”
Anahera thought again of the lovely young creature she’d met and felt a shivering chill within. The world had a way of crushing things that were beautiful and so bright that they glowed. “Is there any chance she might’ve just taken off?”
“Matilda says all her stuff is still in her room. Her wallet, her favorite jeans. She only took her phone and the iPod—just what she normally takes on a run.”
Anahera had been afraid that would be the answer. She looked desperately into the trees, in the hope she might magically spot a flash of cheerful orange or brilliant pink. But there was only verdant green and healthy brown, the curling fern fronds delicately lit by the morning sunlight that speared through the canopy.
She’d missed this so much, this primeval landscape unlike any other place on Earth, but she knew the beauty around her could be deadly. There’d been more than one lost hiker over the years she’d lived in Golden Cove. The tourists came, saw the initially unthreatening lushness of the bush and didn’t listen to warnings to be careful, to stick strictly to the marked paths.
They’d go off the track “just a little” to take a photograph or chase a native bird, and the next thing they knew, they’d be turned around and scared and unable to find their way back out through the dense growth. If the hikers had been smart and filed a plan with the town’s tourism office, then a search would be mounted as soon as they didn’t show up at the appointed time. But too many weren’t smart.
By luck, most had stumbled out or been found by locals who lived wild.
At least three hadn’t. All over the course of a single hot summer. And all young women from distant corners of the world.
Their bodies had also never been found—once this landscape took you, it held you close. In fact, the only evidence the first had even been in Golden Cove was a distinctive water bottle plastered with stickers from around the world. It had been found because of a search for another hiker who’d gone missing and who had filed a plan for her hike.
Only days later, a local hunter helping with the search had found a backpack half-buried in a stream; it was proved to belong to the second missing woman, the one whose failure to return from the bush had initiated the search.
At the time, the theory was the two must’ve become either injured or lost. A tragedy but these things happened in a country with such dense forests. The weather didn’t help. Like today—it seemed so sunny, but according to the weather forecast, a storm was building over the ocean. It would turn dark and wet and cold in a few hours.
Anahera remembered hearing the news about the two missing women, but lost hikers were pretty standard in the region and she’d been a teenager awash in summer.
But the third missing hiker . . . that had ended the sunshine.
The gold identity bracelet found in their teenage hangout, the swarm of police, the beach flapping with crime scene tape, it had brought down the hammer on all their childhoods.
Shaking off the eerie memories she hadn’t thought of in over a decade, Anahera glanced at Vincent. “Tell me about Miriama. I knew her as a girl—what’s she like as a woman?”
“Hugely talented and with an even bigger heart,” Vincent said in that restrained but intense way of his. “I’ve never seen her not smiling. She lives life like it should be lived—without limits, without trying to shove herself into a predefined box like so many other people. She’s real, honest, beautiful in the deepest sense of the word.”
Anahera wondered if Vincent was talking about himself and his perfect life with two picture-perfect children and a pedigreed woman who made the perfect partn
er on the charity circuit. It also seemed as if he was half in love with Miriama—but was that surprising? Miriama had the kind of glow that drew people.
Most of the men in town probably had crushes on her.
“I think we should head right,” she said when they came to a fork in the path. According to the quick briefing Nik had given them, that track was rarely used—it was a little bit too uneven to allow for a smooth run—but according to Josie, Miriama had run competitively at high school. “The challenge might’ve appealed to her.”
Vincent nodded and they went single file down the track. It was darker here, the canopy thicker, the bush more dense. It absorbed all sound yet made you feel as if the trees were whispering to one another, talking secrets that humans would never understand. Anahera’s calves began to ache after a while, a subtle sign that she wasn’t who she’d once been.
Jogging through the streets of her London neighborhood had in no way prepared her for the West Coast. It’d take her body time to remember that this land was in her blood. Which meant the cop had been right to tell her not to assume she could do everything she’d once done—and somehow, that pissed her off.
Poor cop, she thought. He was taking the brunt of all her anger, all her cold fury.
“She wouldn’t have gone this deep,” Vincent said from behind her, his voice certain. “It’s too far for her to have been able to get back before dark and she’s smart enough not to try to run these trails after sunset. The visibility just ends—you can’t even see your hand in front of your face.”
Bowing to his greater current knowledge, Anahera turned and they began to make their way back to the fork, from where they searched the left-hand track before going over an area others had already searched.
But lunchtime came and went, the helicopter landed, and still there was no sign of what had happened to a luminous, laughing girl named Miriama.
17
Will rubbed his face as he sat inside the hastily built police station; the place was just big enough for his desk and a filing cabinet. He’d told the searchers to stand down that afternoon, when it became obvious they’d covered every possible area that Miriama could’ve reached on foot. He’d gone over that suspicious part of the cliffs above the whirlpool, but like the searcher had said, while someone had walked there, there was no sign of anything untoward.
No drag marks, no blood, no clumps torn out in a desperate attempt to grab hold of safety. Nothing but indications of recent passage—the same in the trees behind it. He’d also walked the bush trail that opened up near that spot, but multiple teams of volunteers had already walked through it and there was nothing to see but tamped-down leaf litter.
Will also kept coming around to the fact that Miriama was too smart to have gone that close to the deadly edge above the whirlpool.
He’d known the searchers wouldn’t follow his order to stand down, but he’d needed to give it so he’d have a better chance of talking his superiors into treating this as a serious incident.
“Sir,” he said down the phone line. “We’re now looking at either a drowning—which is unlikely, given how well she knew the area—or an abduction.”
“Will, I’ve run this girl,” his commander replied. “She has a history of running away from home.”
Fuck.
Will had been hoping Miriama’s past would slip under the radar. “That was when she was fifteen and her aunt had a boyfriend who took a little too much interest in her.” It was Mrs. Keith who’d told him that, after the older woman flagged him down for a visit one day a couple of months ago.
Miriama had run by on the road while the two of them were chatting, and lifted a hand to wave, and Mrs. Keith had said, “Look at her. Like a flower just opening up. Good thing that no-good bastard didn’t bruise her.”
All Will’d had to do was look at her and she’d given him the full story. “Mattie, she’s a sweet woman. A good friend. But she has the worst taste in men.” A censorious shake of her head, her jowls trembling. “You’d think she’d have a little more sense after Miriama came to live with her as a wee thing—her mother was Mattie’s sister, you know. Went up to the big smoke, made some wrong choices.”
A look of true sadness, her eyes an incredibly beautiful blue in the fleshy roundness of her face. “Lovely girl, she was. Overdosed in a motel, poor little Miriama in there with her for more than two days before someone found them.” Coughing, she’d taken a drink from the wineglass she kept on the table beside her. “There was no question but that Mattie would take her niece. She’d been trying to get Kahurangi—that was the sister—to send Miriama down here forever.”
Another small sip of wine. “You know Mattie’s first name is Atarangi,” Mrs. Keith had added. “Her ma had a good friend called Matilda, and that’s how she got that as a middle name. But you know how it goes with names. For whatever reason, everyone just started using Matilda. It’s a shame really. Atarangi’s such a pretty name.”
Will had sat there on the porch and kept on listening, not because he was particularly interested in gossip or in Matilda’s first name, but because he’d already come to understand that Mrs. Keith was lonely. According to Nikau, who sometimes went over to fix up her fence or clean the guttering, she used to walk into town two or three times a week, but she’d gotten too big to move far these days. She’d hired one of the local women to keep her house neat as a pin, and to help with her hair and makeup every morning, but, for the most part, she was confined to the porch where she watched life go by.
And perhaps to the bedroom where she might offer certain intimate services to truckers and forestry workers—or so went the rumors in town. If she did, it was none of Will’s business. If it assuaged her loneliness and that of others, so be it. And if the whole thing was just a tale Mrs. Keith fostered to give her life a little excitement, it was a harmless one. Either way, she certainly didn’t seem to mind. In fact, from the occasional subtle comment she’d dropped into her conversations with Will, she reveled in her notoriety.
“But,” she’d said that day, “Mattie, good soul that she is, is as blind as a bat when it comes to men.”
A huff of breath. “Well, you can see how it went. Miriama grew breasts and legs and the useless man Mattie kept around back then started trying to touch her. The girl ended up in Christchurch a few times, trying to get away from him, until poor Mattie finally realized what was happening and kicked him out. She never once took the bastard’s side, that’s one thing, and it’s why Miriama never turned against her. She just can’t pick the good ones.”
“Be that as it may,” Will’s commander said in response to his clarification of Miriama’s history, “it’s a pattern. Can you say definitively that she didn’t just hitch a ride out of town?”
Will’s free hand curled on the pale wood of his desk. “She was in running gear. No money, no other clothes.”
“You know as well as I do that those things can be easily circumvented if she has the right friends,” the other man said. “Regardless, there’s not much else we can do right now. You’ve already run a comprehensive ground and aerial search, and you said none of the locals have reported any suspicious activity or people?”
“Yes.” He hated to admit it, but the other man was right—there was literally nothing the larger police branches could do that he, with Golden Cove’s help, couldn’t do himself. “I’m going to work it as a missing person, send out an updated alert.” He’d already fired off a request to his fellow officers to be on the lookout for Miriama, and he’d tapped media contacts to get the story what attention he could.
“Now that your search has come up empty,” his senior officer said, “I’ll have our press team issue a formal media release using the photograph you sent. She’s a beauty, so there’s a good chance one of the major outlets will pick it up.” No cynicism in the other man’s voice, just pragmatism. “You might even get nationwide coverage because of this
photographic scholarship she’s meant to be taking up in a few weeks. If your girl’s left the town, someone will report it in.”
Hanging up soon afterward, Will considered his next step. Even if Miriama had been the victim of foul play rather than an accident, it didn’t immediately follow that there was no hope of finding her alive. Her abductor could be holding her captive, might’ve incapacitated her so she couldn’t try to escape or cry out for help.
Until Will had a body or other incontrovertible evidence of her death, he’d treat her as a missing person. And all missing person investigations began with those closest to the vanished.
He’d already spoken to Matilda and Steve. It was time he sat down properly with Dr. Dominic de Souza.
After sending Anahera and the others home in the early hours of the morning, Will had driven out to the main road and waited. Dominic de Souza’s vehicle had appeared approximately twenty-five minutes later; by then, Will had spoken to the family who’d asked the young doctor to come out to their remote property and learned it was the mother who’d made the call—and that she’d done it just after the six o’clock news began on TV.
Approximately fifteen minutes after Tania Meikle saw Miriama run by.
So the doctor did have a small window of time where he could’ve done something to his girlfriend—except that Will had spoken on the phone to Mrs. Keith earlier in the night. She’d been adamant she’d seen Dominic’s car drive by around 6:10, 6:12 at the latest. Which meant he must’ve left immediately after the call.
It further compressed his unaccounted-for time. It took a lot longer than a few minutes to subdue or hurt a strong young woman, dump or hide her body, then change clothes to obscure any blood evidence. That’s after Dominic would’ve had to track her down. Usually, the boyfriend was the lead suspect, but Dominic’s alibi appeared solid; he’d also broken down totally when Will told him the news.