As they walked the beach past the lighthouse, he noted that there were more tourists here than he’d anticipated. They were sure to have inadvertently wiped clean any traces that might have remained from the people in the Zodiac.
Shannon spotted the place where the boat had been stashed before he did. She pointed to muted grooves in the sand on the shoreline away from the water’s edge. “There,” she said, “that’s where the deputies must have driven onto the lakeshore. This is federally protected beach, so it had to have been the cops.” She glanced sideways at him to see if he’d taken offense at her use of the colloquialism. He grinned back; he hadn’t.
There were obvious drag marks around the site, and he was pretty sure that looking for clues here among hundreds of footprint impressions was an exercise in futility. He was wrong. Shannon walked away toward the woods a few yards, and announced, “Here, here’s where a group of three . . . no, four men stopped.”
He looked where she was pointing, trying to make sense of the marks she pointed out to him. She placed her index finger next to depressions in the grass.
“See,” she said, “there are four sets of boot prints here. Lug soles. Two are about size 10, but with different traction patterns. One is a lot smaller and narrower—maybe size 8—and the last one is pretty big; size 13, maybe.”
Colyer nodded. He could see the disturbances in the foliage when she pointed them out to him, but he had to take her word when it came to describing what they were.
Shannon continued as if he were following her every word. “These flat, pressed-down areas were made by the bottoms of backpacks when they were set on the ground. They put on the packs—see how the bootprints got deeper here?—then they headed off together in that direction.” She pointed into the forest.
She had Colyer’s complete interest now. “Do you think you can follow their tracks, Shannon?” he asked earnestly, noticing for the first time that her eyes were deep blue.
“Oh, sure,” she answered, “four guys with packs can’t help but leave clear sign. But I can’t commit a lot of time to it. I have sled dogs at home who don’t understand when they miss supper. Besides,” she said, glancing at the lengthening shadows from the trees, “it’ll be dark soon.”
He assured her that it was okay. He’d take whatever help he could get for as long as she’d provide it. His curiosity was piqued now, and he was convinced that her ability to follow these guys through the woods could make the difference between finding these four and losing their trail. His attempt to answer questions had only created even more questions. He had to know what this quartet of men was planning.
Chapter Fourteen
PURSUIT
Rod had circled back to the campsite just in time to see the slender dark-skinned man shoot Sue Morgan in the forehead. Hidden behind a stand of young spruce trees a hundred yards from the campsite, his traumatized mind replayed the event over and over. He squeezed his eyes shut to block out the image of her brains exploding from the back of her skull, but the vision continued. He felt even sicker than he had before.
He watched in a daze as the burliest of the remaining men dragged Sue’s body out of his sight, then came back a few minutes later for her brother. He was a square-faced, blocky-headed man, heavily built and muscular. He looked Russian, or something closely akin to it. It wasn’t a cogent deduction on Rod’s part, but more of a vague realization in a beleaguered mind that had seen too much, without enough time to digest it.
He sat back heavily against a red pine. The three men returned and rearranged their backpacks. Except for a little smoke from the hastily covered fire pit, there was little obvious sign that anyone had ever been there. The men shouldered their backpacks. The youngest looking of them referred to a map and took a bearing on an old-fashioned military lensatic compass. He pointed into the woods, and the trio set out in that direction.
Rod stayed where he was until his labored breathing eased a little and his chest stopped hurting. He still felt nauseous, but at least his heart didn’t feel like it was going to burst from his rib cage.
His digital watch said it was 6:32 PM when he rose unsteadily to his feet and sneaked cautiously back to the campsite. He might need equipment, so the first thing he did was to locate where the killers had hidden the backpacks. He found his own among them, stashed on the mucky riverbank in a stand of cattails. He hauled it up to the dying fire pit, unconsciously avoiding the human gore that lay on the ground, and started going through its contents. He discarded most of the gear in his pack. He needed it to be light if he was going to move faster through the bush than the killers.
In a moment of revelation, he realized with some surprise that he’d already decided to follow these three guys. He grinned bitterly to himself: Why not? What were his options? He dared not go back. The cops would arrest him. They’d eventually turn him loose—probably—but only at their convenience, and only after they’d deprived him of freedom and livelihood for an unacceptable period of time. A single hour in a jail cell was too long.
On the other hand, if he went after these confirmed killers, they’d probably murder him for his trouble. They had guns, they obviously didn’t give a damn about human life, and they were three to his one. But they’d killed his survival students, they’d tried twice to kill him, and now he’d killed one of their members. The entire situation infuriated and terrified him on a half-dozen levels. The way Rod saw it, he was between the proverbial rock and a very hard place.
Rod didn’t locate the bodies. He didn’t want to. He’d noticed where poor Sue and her brother had been partially hidden in a cluster of young jackpines when he’d gone looking for the backpacks. He hadn’t taken a closer look because the thought of seeing their lifeless bodies evoked awful emotions in him. He’d never had a weak stomach, but he was repulsed by the corpses of these folks he’d been hiking with only hours ago.
In the end, Rod’s pack was nearly empty. He gathered all the granola and fruit bars from his students’ packs, and a Schrade Bomb Tech survival knife that he’d provided as part of Bill Morgan’s outfit. He might need a lot of calories, and it might be impossible to stop and cook, but he needed high-energy foods that he could eat on the move.
It would be dark in less than two hours. Until then, he’d have little trouble following the clear trail left by three men who looked as if they were in a hurry. They had a destination, and it made sense that they’d follow the straightest line the terrain allowed. He determined after a quarter-mile that the general course direction was south from Whitefish Point.
Referring to his own well-worn, plastic-laminated map, he extrapolated where they meant to arrive. Somewhere on highway M-28 probably. There were only two highways that crossed the length of the Upper Peninsula, east to west, and M-28 was one of them. There were only two paved roads between here and there, and the only route to M-28 for a hundred miles was a stretch of M-123 that ran twenty-two miles from Paradise. Most of M-123 was bordered on either side by wet lands, tamaracks, and spruce that only moose found penetrable. He couldn’t imagine them cutting cross-country through there with heavy backpacks.
Whatever their end purpose, they deemed it sufficient to justify murder and torture. But not robbery—the survival students were on vacation, and the men, at least, were most likely carrying a wad of cash and their credit cards. Historically, most of his male clients were unwilling to leave their money at a stranger’s house. Having cash in their pockets made them feel more secure. Nor had they taken Sue Morgan’s impressive set of wedding and engagement rings. Or showed any sign of sexual inclination toward the attractive woman. These men had something bigger in mind, some sort of mission.
He followed the clear trail the trio had left until the sun fell below the horizon. Then he took his Surefire Saint headlamp out of his thigh pocket and continued on. The broad arc of its bright LED light illuminated fifty yards around him at its highest setting, but he dialed down its continuously variable brightness to a level that he figured was the bes
t compromise between seeing without being seen himself. Even with an artificial light, three men with medium-heavy backpacks and very heavy feet left a trail that was easy to follow. He made good time.
Chapter Fifteen
READING SIGN
Shannon Elliot was also making good time. Special Agent Colyer had a tough time keeping up with her as she almost scampered through thick, darkened forest that—if the truth be told—gave him a slight case of the willies. He had no idea what might be out there, but she seemed to know every nuance of this terrain. She claimed to be following a trail that he was having more than a little difficulty seeing in places. He had to take her word for it, because he sure couldn’t read the signs she told him she was following. It occurred to him that she could just disappear and leave him here, hopelessly lost, any time she wanted to.
The terrain was pretty awful to him, but Shannon seemed tireless. He was glad that he’d had the foresight to wear hiking boots, but his Nike Street Hikers were clearly not the equal of the Vasque boots that Shannon had worn for this outing. She wore a near-empty light backpack with the Coleman logo and the word Exponent emblazoned across its back. He had the feeling that the few items it did contain were essential tools of wilderness survival. Suddenly he felt very vulnerable and very stupid, not the in-control FBI agent he was accustomed to being in every situation.
They came to a dirt track. Shannon pointed to it on her map and said, “Wildcat Road. A two-track that crosses Vermillion Road. It starts on the west side of Whitefish Point Road—the road I live on. It looks like they crossed here. Their trail is heading south.”
Colyer looked at the map with her. “They do seem to be on a beeline south, directly away from the lighthouse. Maybe leaving Whitefish Point?” It was a question. He was asking her opinion.
Shannon looked squarely into his eyes—frank and unafraid, a mark of an honest person with nothing to be ashamed of. She nodded in the affirmative.
“Agent Colyer, I don’t know who these guys could be, or why the FBI would have such an interest in what they’re up to, but there’s nothing I know of on Whitefish Point that would interest anyone but a tourist.”
He met her gaze and replied honestly, “Mrs. Elliot, I’m telling you the truth when I say that I don’t know why they’re here either, but I suspect that it isn’t to do a good deed.”
Shannon nodded, still looking directly into Colyer’s eyes. She didn’t expect full disclosure from this federal cop, especially since he was basically conducting an investigation based on no more than a personal hunch. Her years of experiences with Rod had shown her that probably most cops were little more than bullies with badges. Rod had always claimed that they’d been the same kids who were shut into lockers and given swirlies in high school, and now they were out to take revenge. From what she’d seen with her own eyes, Rod was more often right than wrong.
But this FBI agent seemed to be a genuinely decent man. He’d treated her with the respect an American citizen deserved, and he’d asked, not ordered, her to help. He didn’t bluster and act macho when he was clearly out of his element. So long as he behaved like a real person with her, she’d respond in kind.
She shrugged off her backpack and unzipped it. From inside she extracted a Brunton LED headlamp, and handed him one with the words Black Diamond on its headband.
“Here,” she said, “This might come in handy when it gets dark.” She grinned at him and shrugged, “You strike me as a man who thinks there’s some urgency here. And you seem to be one of the good guys, so I’m kind of obliged to lend a hand. There’s nothing at home that can’t wait a few hours.”
He smiled, genuinely surprised. “Thank you, Mrs. Elliot. That’s a refreshing attitude. I’m not used to it.”
She smiled back at him. “De nada,” she said, “and it’s Shannon, by the way.” She looked at the darkening sky. “It’ll be too dark to see without a light in another hour, and I’m not quite as good a tracker as my husband. We’d better get crackin’.”
They followed the men’s trail for another four miles, and then crossed a road that she identified as Vermillion Road. Their quarry had walked down the poorly asphalted road for a hundred yards, and then cut back into the woods on an old logging road. Shannon couldn’t follow their trail on the paved surface, but she calculated that they would follow the easiest route, and her guess that they were headed southward proved correct.
She looked at him and said, “Look, these tracks are almost a day old, and if they’re moving as fast as it appears, we’re probably never gonna catch them on foot.”
Colyer had a feeling she meant that they were never going to catch them so long as he was along to slow them down, and she was probably right. He was convinced of her tracking expertise so far. He had no inclination to doubt her latest assertion.
“What would you suggest?” he asked earnestly.
She looked pensive. “Well, I’d take my truck—it’s closer than your car now—and I’d follow the road. Along the way, I’d stop every mile or so and walk back to the trail to confirm which way they went.”
He nodded. That strategy seemed sound enough to him. They arrived at her house in ten minutes, and he climbed into the passenger seat of her Nissan Titan. They traveled the length of Whitefish Point Road, stopping every mile to walk back to the two-track and confirm that the men’s trail had continued there.
They reached the campsite on the Betsy River on their second stop. Shannon spent a couple of minutes deciphering the sign she found there. Then her face went ashen. She picked up a clump of what looked like sand and twisted the surprisingly malleable substance apart. After inspecting it for a moment, she dropped it to the ground as though it had burned her fingers. She looked at Colyer with a grimace that was between disgust and horror, and wiped her hands against the legs of her coveralls.
“Oh God,” she said as she continued wiping her hands against her legs. “Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .”
Colyer picked up the fragment she’d dropped so abruptly and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. He held it to his nose and smelled it. An icy chill ran the length of his spine as he realized that it was a chunk of raw flesh. He involuntarily let it fall to the ground, and he also started wiping his hands against the legs of his suit trousers.
Shannon was already off, tracking like a bloodhound, following disturbances that he saw only after she’d started to trace them. She found the body of Shawn Hennesy first, haphazardly concealed under a pile of freshly broken, jackpine boughs. Then she returned to the campfire and began following another set of drag marks. She gasped audibly when she found the corpse of Sue Morgan at the end of the trail. Even Colyer couldn’t stifle a sharp intake of breath at seeing the woman’s body with one missing ear.
A look of hardness settled over Shannon’s face as she steeled herself for the awfulness of the task at hand. Colyer admired her strength.
“I knew these people,” she said. “They were my husband’s survival students. There were three of them.”
Only then did Colyer notice the dark stains on the ground. He dropped to all fours and held his nose to the sand. It smelled like blood. It had soaked in, and someone had kicked dirt over it, but it was definitely blood.
After an hour of searching the area, Colyer and Shannon found four bodies. Shannon could identify the three survival students who’d been her husband’s clients, but the fourth man was a stranger to her. Whoever he was, the man had been killed in as violent a manner as Colyer had seen in all his years as a federal officer. In fact, the whole scene was more terrible than any he’d had the misfortune to investigate.
Shannon was of course relieved to find that her husband wasn’t among the corpses. She was shocked by the carnage, but she was bracing up exceptionally well. Colyer spoke into the mini digital voice recorder he took from his button-down shirt pocket, and scratched a few diagrams on his notepad. Then he called Central Dispatch. Cellular reception was spotty this far out in the forest, but the Dispatch operator
managed to get his location, and promised to send a four-wheeler with a forensics team.
Chapter Sixteen
THE TREK
Aziz’s wristwatch alarm woke him from a deep sleep with its steady beeping. He rubbed his gritty eyes with the backs of his knuckles and tried to recall the fleeting dream he’d had about the majestic sand dunes of home. So different from this tangled, green nightmare of forest and swamp filled with mosquitoes and biting flies. They’d had their scheduled four hours of sleep, all three of them, because he didn’t think it was necessary to post a sentry way back here in the woods.
Truth be told, he’d had a tough time falling asleep, even with a low dose of Ambien, and he’d awakened several times with a start when he heard some unidentified animal moving in the darkness. After the events of the last twenty-four hours, all of them had trouble sleeping, but only Aziz had been stricken with visions of vicious man-eating carnivores rushing from the shadows to devour his flesh. His fears were unfounded—animals did not typically attack humans—and the educated part of his mind knew that. But like most children, he’d been reared on fables of big bad wolves and killer bears, usually told at bedtime, so that a child was sure to have nightmares about them. And like most modern people who were accustomed to artificial lighting, he had an unfounded terror of invisible creatures lurking in places that were too dark for him to see.
He scratched one of the numerous itchy bumps on his arms. Ironically, the real bloodthirsty animals in these woods had been insects. They’d made the hike here fairly miserable for them all. Grigovich had pulled a fat, blood-engorged tick from his neck—it was one of the grossest things Aziz had ever seen. He hated the bugs here. The Arab had dealt with biting insects before, but not at this level. These were the most prolific, most determined bloodsuckers he’d ever imagined. He slathered on more insect-repellent lotion. This was just one more aspect of America that he hated, and that only made him more determined to fulfill his mission.
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