Six hours. He’s had her six hours, by now.
Some of the searchers, a lot of them, were fathers themselves. And there were mothers, too. Would they go home if it were their son or daughter?
“No fucking way,” he said aloud.
No fucking way I’m waiting until dawn.
He’d clocked out. No one was to say he couldn’t camp. He had his pack. He’d done it a million times before in this park.
Okay, maybe four.
If he could do that on a normal day, why couldn’t he do it tonight, when Tracy’s life might depend on it?
He hustled the rest of the way to his car and grabbed his camping gear from the trunk. There were still quite a few cars parked in the dirt lot: law enforcement, the pro volunteers. But he knew a short cut up through the oak woods that would bypass the official trail head and evade the search coordinator.
What he was doing was against the rules, but it didn’t feel wrong. It actually felt the opposite of wrong. And if he ran into someone who wanted to know what he was still doing there, he’d say…
Well, he’d figure that out if he had to.
He slipped into the shadows outside the perimeter of the parking lot, and disappeared into the woods.
Walking in the almost-dark was difficult enough to keep him focused. He couldn’t use his Maglite or his headlamp, for fear of being discovered. Instead he moved slowly and strained his eyes through the swiftly descending shadows.
He’d decided to go back to the ridge he’d stopped on just before he’d headed back down the mountain. It was random, but he had to start somewhere.
Once the moon rose, there would be a view of the valley and he’d be able to search again. It would be full tonight. He’d pick a spot to rest and wait for the moonlight.
Twenty minutes later he’d made his way back to the ridge and a smooth, sandy spot to camp out. It was full dark now, too dark to have done anything for the last ten minutes but feel his way carefully upward, one foot in front of the other.
But now that he was on the ridge, he could see the lights in the valley, and make out the vague shapes of hills below and the tower of tumbled boulders above.
He unrolled his sleeping bag and sat on it with his back against a rock to wait for moonrise.
He groped in a pocket for his phone, checked it—but the Nokia wasn’t showing any bars at all.
He suddenly remembered that he was supposed to be going to a concert with Caitlin tonight. He hadn’t thought about her all day, hadn’t texted to let her know what he was doing. He knew that even in these extreme circumstances, it was probably not a good sign for the relationship. But he pushed those thoughts away.
Instead he took his area map from his pack and studied it under the light of the Maglite, finding his place on it and situating himself visually, fixing the four directions and layout of the trail and hills in his head.
Then he leaned back against the boulder to look out over the valley.
He was aware of how tired he was. There was fatigue in every muscle of his body, not even really from physical exertion, but from the stress of the responsibility, the anxiety about Tracy.
But it was a whole world better than sitting at home, doing nothing.
It took him a while to calm down. His muscles, his nerves, his mind, were all jittery, scattered.
Relax, he ordered himself. And then said it more softly. Relax.
The night went from dark to ebony, and suddenly there were stars, as if someone had just flipped a switch. It wasn’t like the jewel-crusted dome you got out in the desert. There was light pollution as well as the light of the rising moon below the horizon line that was already fading out some of the starry brilliance. But still.
There was a quick dim motion in the blackest corner of the sky. So faint he wasn’t sure if he saw it or just willed it.
He decided to believe he saw it. And that he’d see more. He breathed in, breathed out,
His scrambled thoughts slipped away from him. The dome of sky above him grew darker black, expanding and deepening. At first he’d seen a patina of stars, painted as if on a ceiling. Now there were layers. He could see farther, deeper. His body seemed to sink into the earth….
A star flashed by, startling him. Not faint this time. An electric blaze. “Whoa,” he said. aloud.
There was another. Bigger. Almost in slow motion. Like the sky was showing off for him now.
And then they were falling like gentle rain.
Chapter 10
All of the world is moving around her.
Millions of flying stars, like a snowstorm. Every pore of her is open to the cosmos. Her stomach doing rollercoasters.
Stars flying past like snow flurries, and the—
Matt blinked awake.
For a moment he had no idea where he was.
He’d been looking up at the shooting stars and had drifted off, dozed. And it felt like he had been… somewhere else. Somewhere warmer, and deeper, and far, far away. Perhaps had been someone else….
He had a vague recollection of a feminine presence. But when he grasped for it, it was gone.
He was still in a soporific half-sleep state—not sleep, more a kind of hyper-clarity. He could hear the wind, infinite variations of it. Low, like breath, a whining whistle, an ebbing and murmuring. The scrambling rustle of a squirrel, the leaf-crackling, the flutter of bird wings….
When he heard the cry, it was so faint, like that first shooting star, he thought he dreamed it.
A voice, hoarse and tiny and desperate.
“Anyone? Anyone? Can you hear me?”
“Please. Please help me.
Matt sat for a moment, frozen, stunned. Then he scrambled up to his feet, straining toward the sound.
The voice had come from below him, far below in the valley.
He didn’t want to use his Maglite for fear of alerting the abductor.
So he started down the sandy hill, feeling his way by moonlight, steering around pale boulders, his eyes and ears straining to hear, to see.
Sage scrub scraped at his legs and caught in the canvas of his cargo pants. He kept going, heading down, down…
The wind ebbed and flowed, and the night seemed to breathe around him. He was suddenly back in the feeling of his nightmare.
Something out there. Something so huge…
A rustle and crashing in the bushes sent his heart into his throat, his pulse skyrocketing.
The darkness seemed to part… and she was there. So unexpected it felt like a dream.
She was just as in the photo—and not. Her wide eyes were dark and glazed. Her hands and her small bare feet were bloodied from the rocks she had been scrambling over, her bare legs were scratched from thorn bushes. Her skin seemed to hang off her. In some part of his mind Matt recognized dehydration, but for a moment, in the moonlight, she appeared as a living skeleton.
“Tracy,” he gasped.
She wore only a ripped T-shirt, and he tried not to think about what that meant. But there was a fierce, tensile strength in her young limbs as she stumbled toward him, shaking.
“Coming,” she croaked out, in a voice raw from screaming. “He’s coming. We have to go.”
He didn’t think. He didn’t hesitate. He scooped her up. “Hold on,” he said. But he didn’t have to tell her. Her wiry arms locked around his neck.
He turned and barreled through the dark, upward, uphill, through spiny brush, over jagged granite. He tried to hold Tracy high enough that the branches didn’t claw at her. He could feel her ragged panting, her heart beating like a rabbit’s as he ran.
And as he stumbled upward, his pulse leaped at the sound of someone crashing through the brush below them.
Pursuing.
And gaining on them.
Tracy whimpered in his arms. She too had heard.
“Hold on,” he whispered. “Hold on.”
His chest was on fire as he ran straight up through the brush, not bothering to look for a trail. Pumping his l
egs hard, harder. Tracy trembling in his arms.
He was gasping. And shaking.
The terror
It felt as if some preternatural thing was after them. He could visualize it, slobbering and gibbering behind them.
He could feel its breath—
Then his heart shot through his chest as the sound came from both sides. A deliberate crashing in the brush, coming straight toward them, encircling them….
A shadow loomed up in the path—
“FREEZE!” a male voice shouted. Matt stopped in his tracks, clutching Tracy to him, his heart racing like a mad animal. But the intonation of the voice was familiar. It was salvation. It was a police command.
His eyes focused in the darkness. They were surrounded by a circle of deputies with weapons drawn, all trained directly on him.
In a flash, Matt realized what the men might think. He found his voice, shouted out, “SLO police! I have Tracy Collier.”
The officers surrounding them were frozen in shooting stance, deliberating.
He shouted again. “I’m putting her down.”
He lowered Tracy gently to the ground, keeping his hands on her shoulders until he was sure she could stand. She threw her arms around his legs and held on.
Two deputies converged on Matt and wrested him away from the girl. Matt felt the hard impact of the ground as they threw him down.
He tasted dust, but all he could think as they cuffed him was—It’s over. She’s safe.
She’s safe.
Chapter 11
Portland – present
Singh
Agent Snyder falls silent. The story is done.
Singh sits across from him in the study. Her heart is racing as if it has been she herself scrambling up the mountain through jagged brush in the dark, carrying the little girl with her.
It takes her some moments to come back to herself, to Agent Snyder’s study, to the present.
Around her, the boxes have been restored to order. She and Agent Snyder have worked through the files in several of them, and those she has moved to a storage space. Other files have been sorted into their proper boxes by year, awaiting entry into the database. Agent Snyder’s tale has unfolded over several days this week, on breaks, in between the dozens of ViCAP entries they have already completed.
Now that she has heard it all, her first reflection is that it is all so very Roarke. The dogged refusal to give up. The willingness to bend a rule so far that it begins to take on a different form, a new meaning.
Snyder gives her the ghost of a smile. “Now you know what happens when you let me talk. Three days later, and I haven’t even begun to answer your question.”
Singh has to think to recall that she had begun, all those days ago, by asking how Agent Snyder and Roarke had met.
“But I see, now,” she responds. “It became a mission for him, that night. With Tracy.”
Agent Snyder shakes his head. “Oh, no. It had been a mission long before then. The first time Matthew applied to the Academy was when he was nine years old.”
She stares at him. “But—how?”
“He wrote a letter to the Director. Of course, they didn’t take him up on it. But he’s been prepping for the job ever since.”
Singh has not heard this before. “At nine,” she repeats, sensing some significance. “Was there something in particular…” And then she knows what Agent Snyder will say as he says it.
“It was the Reaper.”
And now she feels a wave of unreality.
Agent Snyder continues. “The family massacre case gripped the West Coast, particularly California. It would’ve been impossible to avoid the coverage, the state of fear and anxiety that citizens were in. But as a nine-year old boy from a family quite similar to the ones that Nathaniel Hughes chose to slaughter: educated and affluent parents, children the same age as Matthew and his brother… one can only imagine how personal it must have seemed to him.”
Singh knows Roarke enough to imagine very well. “And he became attached to Cara Lindstrom—at least, the idea of Cara Lindstrom—”
“At nine.”
Singh feels a chill as it sinks in. “He decided to become an agent…”
“Because of Cara Lindstrom.”
Driving on the road back to her hotel, she cannot get the story out of her mind.
And the implications.
It is a huge revelation: that Roarke’s history with Cara goes back much further than Singh has ever thought. That their connection is more profound than she ever guessed.
It is an incredible secret for Roarke to have been keeping, these many months that the team has been in Cara’s pursuit. Then she wonders if Damien knows. Roarke would not have any reason to tell her, but he may have told Epps. Or not. It is a mystery.
It changes everything.
She walks into her hotel room and closes the door behind her.
Then turns and stands facing the map.
She put it up days ago: a map of the continental United States depicting the interstate system, covering nearly an entire wall of her suite.
Her secret work has progressed. It no longer just a journal. She has marked Cara’s known murders on the map and dated them, using a different color push pin for each year in which a murder has occurred. She has marked off Interstate 40, which she believes to have been Cara’s first route. And she has begun searching databases for murders and suspicious deaths that occurred along that route in the summer of 2005.
But now there is a new factor.
She reaches into a pocket for her phone and Googles Tracy Collier abduction. She stares down, frozen, at the date.
June 10.
It is a sudden, shocking insight.
She knows where Cara was that day.
That very day.
Chapter 12
Grand Canyon, Arizona - June 2005
Cara
She stands looking out over the stupendous gorge. Layered bands of red and pink and black and white, rock formations as big as cathedrals. Thousands of feet deep. Millions of years of geologic history. An entire world below ground level.
The Grand Canyon.
It takes her breath away.
That first night of freedom, she’d made it across California. Fort Mojave Indian Reservation at the border. Lake Havasu at the crossing of the Colorado River. Then Kingman, at the east end of the Mojave Desert, and the strange little town of Seligman, its main street a living museum of Route 66 memorabilia and bizarre art installations.
Driving has already become a way of life.
She starts every day by looking at her map: the US with the interstates in red and blue, like arteries and veins. Every night she sleeps under the stars. Even if she did know how to register in a motel, which she doesn’t, after all those years of confinement the thought of being boxed inside four walls is unbearable. Instead, she lives outside, immersing herself in the totality. The smell of rain. The feel of the air when the heat breaks at dusk. The live, pulsing silence in the smoky blue twilight.
And views like these. She leans into the metal rail of the overlook, still hot from the day’s sun, and looks out on this panorama of infinity, colored by streaks of sunset.
Her brain can barely process the immensity. It seems more like a vast, two-dimensional canvas than a real place.
To gaze out into this enormity compared with her two years in a cell…
It is living, breathing Beauty.
She found the words in a roadside gift shop as she crossed through Fort Mojave. Painted on a sandstone souvenir plaque, a Navajo prayer:
As I walk, I walk in Beauty.
Beauty above me.
Beauty below me.
Beauty to my left.
Beauty to my right.
Beauty before me.
Beauty behind me.
Beauty around me.
As I walk, I walk in Beauty.
A prayer, a gift, a way forward.
The words have kept her safe. She has no
t had a single intimation of It since the beginning of her journey. It is her secret hope that the prayer will be her salvation.
She lifts her face to the gold-red rays of the sun, breathes in the sunset.
Driving into the park, she’d taken the first stop she could, scenic Mather Point on the Rim Trail. But there are far, far too many people on this sightseeing path. She knows she must go further, deeper, out of range of humanity. To descend into the earth, into that vast beauty.
She turns from the railing and heads back toward the visitor center. On the short walk she hears five different languages, which interests her. It occurs to her that she can use her high school languages as a disguise. As a foreign tourist, she will be more anonymous. The accent, the foreignness, will be what people remember.
Back at the Visitor Center she stands in front of a huge map, framed in a glass display case, and studies it, frowning. There are so many trails: South Kaibab, Bright Angel, North Rim—
A voice speaks behind her: “Rim to Rim.”
Adrenaline shoots through her. She has been so engrossed in the map that she has forgotten to be vigilant, to keep aware of her surroundings.
She twists around—
But the person standing in front of her is no threat: a girl about her own age, a year or two older at most, with sun-bronzed skin and freckles. She’s dressed for hiking in khaki shorts, boots and thick socks, a faded tank top in psychedelic tie-dye. A bandana pulls her sun-bleached hair into a bouncy ponytail.
She gives Cara a radiant smile. “You’re trying to decide on a trail, right? First time? Rim to Rim is the only way to fly. Are you on your own?”
There is no guile in the last question, but Cara answers, “No,” quickly, automatically. She wants no invitation, no questions, no probing, no danger of letting something slip that will trip her up later.
The girl seems unbothered. “Well, either way. Totally doable. I’m Sierra,” she adds, extending a brown hand.
Cara forces herself to take it for a quick shake. “Lesley,” she lies. And realizes she has forgotten to try an accent.
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