But Roarke was almost positive she’d said “boys.” Plural.
“We understand,” he said, reassuringly, he hoped. “But you just said, ‘It has to be connected.’ What did you mean by that?”
She looked from one to the other of the agents.
“Oh God. You don’t…” There was a sudden, stricken look on her face. “I can’t be here. I have to go.” She fumbled for the door and fled the car, walking fast to her own vehicle.
Chapter 90
Kalispell, Montana - 2011
Cara
She puts cash on the table and leaves the restaurant, moving outside to follow the girl. As she crosses the street, a wildly oversized truck zooms around a corner, sitting high on bloated tires, its engine husky and growling, far too loud and intrusive for the snow-blanketed streets. It swerves to the curb and stops.
The group of teenage boys that spills out of the tricked-out truck is pure trouble. She would know that even without the dark girl’s reaction, a stiffening, a bracing for what is to come.
The boys have spotted the girl, too. She walks faster. Other kids on the sidewalk suddenly become very interested in the shop windows, or reverse course to avoid the pack of troublemakers.
The boys ignore the others and follow behind the dark girl, four of them, then surge forward, surrounding her in a horseshoe shape, a deliberate intimidation.
“Where you off to, Mays?” “Can’t hide those tits under your Pop’s coat.”
They have not noticed Cara gaining on them. They are teenagers, oblivious to anything not in their direct line of vision. She must skirt around the side flank of two burly, parkaed boys and stop right in front of them to halt them on the sidewalk.
They are slow to take her in. Two of them are obviously slow in general, the leader marginally less so. He is bigger, bulkier. Handsomer in a brutish way.
“Who the hell are you?” he demands. Cara says nothing, just stares back at him without moving.
“I’m talkin’ to you, bitch,” he snarls.
The girl takes advantage of the distraction and slips silently away, with a quick, dark look at Cara: alarmed, suspicious, grudgingly grateful.
Cara keeps her eyes on the pack leader and remains silent.
“Are you dumb, or just dumb?” he quips. The other boys laugh dutifully.
She stands on the sidewalk without moving, with no response. Already her silence and stillness is making him twitchy. He is not used to being challenged by a woman.
The other boys shift beside him, shuffling uncomfortably. And she sees a flicker in his eyes. A deep-down fear that this is something he has never seen before, and might be more than he can manage with young, brute force.
She steps up close to him, puts her hand on his arm, and whispers. The look on his face turns from unease to sheer amazement at his luck.
“Aw, hell, yeah.” He grins at his pack. “Catch you guys later.”
The others respond predictably, leering and catcalls.
Cara backs away from them, deliberately. The leader turns and follows her, swaggering, as she moves into an alley between two buildings.
Here, out of sight of the street, she ducks behind a Dumpster and stops, waiting for him.
He is not long behind. Immediately he traps her against the icy wall, palms flat against the bricks, arms barricading her. Which suits her well, because it gives her room to bring the knife right up between his legs, jabbing its point into the base of his balls.
His eyes go wide as he yelps.
“I wouldn’t move,” she says flatly. He has enough consciousness to heed the warning and freeze.
She puts more pressure on the blade so he can feel the sharp metal slicing through his jeans, grazing his skin. But stopping short of cutting. “You bother that girl again and you’ll lose it all. Don’t think I won’t find you.” She recites his truck’s license plate number.
He nods frantically.
Another jab to be sure he understands. “Step back. Slowly,” she says.
He complies, edging backward.
“Now go.”
And he is off, stumbling in the snow.
When she exits the alley, the boy is far down the street, not looking behind him.
She glances around and sees the girl across the street, between two buildings. Waiting. Watching.
Cara stops on the sidewalk, looking across the road at her. The girl flinches and moves quickly along the sidewalk.
Cara is no longer interested in the hunter. The boys she has forgotten already. She will follow the girl.
Chapter 91
Whitefish turnoff, Montana - 2011
Roarke and Snyder
Jean Lange’s truck sped out of the parking lot, disappearing around the upward curve of road. The agents sat in the ATV, and Roarke gripped the steering wheel in frustration. “I spooked her. I went too fast.”
Snyder’s response was calm, reassuring. “No. She was surprised that we knew about the Northwest Brigade. She’s obviously terrified of doing anything to cross it.”
Across the chasm in front of them, gray mist rolled off the sides of the mountains. Roarke stared at the mist, replaying the conversation in his head. He spoke, repeating Lange’s words, “‘It has to be connected.’ What has to be connected to what?”
Snyder nodded, considering. “She has reason to think Strauss would abduct a child.”
“And not just one,” Roarke suggested, wondering if Chuck had heard what he had.
“No,” Snyder agreed. “Not just one.”
So Roarke hadn’t imagined it, the plural. Boys.
“She’s looking out that window at Strauss’s store every day she’s working. No telling what she’s seen. Do we go after her?”
Chuck reached for his phone. “Too many variables. We’ll need to check in with Ziskin. We can’t dig into this until we find out what he wants us to do next.”
Chapter 92
Kalispell, Montana - 2011
Cara
She stands against the outer wall of a liquor store, watching the girl walk across the parking lot of a motel. A not very nice motel, in a not very nice part of the city. Cara has seen many of them. Not a good place for this girl to be. She waits, tensely.
The girl walks along a row of rooms toward a cleaning cart standing unattended in front of a room with an open door. A slim and harried woman in her late thirties steps out of the room. And Cara relaxes. She can see the family resemblance even before the girl approaches and gives the woman a dutiful kiss. They have a brief exchange of words, then the girl walks back to the office and goes inside.
Cara waits for a minute or two, then moves close enough to catch a glimpse of the girl through the not very clean front window. She sits on a sagging sofa, earbuds in her ears, scribbling homework.
She looks fairly settled, no doubt waiting for her mother to get off her shift.
So Cara walks back to the street she started on to get her ATV. She drives back to the motel and parks it at the edge of the lot, with a view of the office, where the girl is still seated on the couch.
It is in moments like these that Cara is glad to have the portable heater. She turns the engine off and the heater on and waits, warming herself in the ATV in the parking lot for another half hour, before the girl’s mother emerges from a hall without the cleaning cart, and gestures to the girl inside the office.
The girl emerges through the door, zipping up her backpack, and mother and daughter climb into an ancient truck, corroded by salt along the bottom and pitted with rust holes on the side.
As the two drive out of the motel parking lot, Cara follows.
She is not in the least surprised when they make the turn toward Snake River.
The old truck drives through the main street of town without stopping and on to a more rural road. After about ten minutes the truck turns again at a cluster of mailboxes with a familiar chainsaw-carved grizzly bear looming beside them.
Cara is right back where she lost the hunte
r and the van.
The path is always revealed.
She stops the ATV beside the mailboxes as the old truck proceeds down an unpaved road. She can see a barn through the trees.
She drives on a few hundred yards, parks the truck and gets out into the icy cold. She circles back on foot through the wooded property, crunching through snow in a copse of trees, and stops inside the tree line to look out at a rundown farm. A rail fence. The small barn she spotted from the road. And a clapboard farmhouse, with the old truck parked under a sagging carport.
There is a dog inside the house that stirs up a fuss when she skirts the side of the barn, but a woman’s voice speaks faintly and the dog is silent again. Cara slips through the barn doors. The musty space has several stalls, inhabited by a cow and a horse, some chickens, and a large, furry, sleepy cat.
She finds an unoccupied stall with a crack in the plank wall that allows her a view of the house. The horse in the stall next to hers nickers softly at her but doesn’t seem bothered.
Within minutes the girl leaves the house, heading straight for the barn. Cara steps further behind the stall door. But the girl walks past the barn, out into the woods.
Cara watches which way she goes, then leaves the barn and follows at a distance.
The girl drifts through the mostly bare trees of the woods. It is not quite the aimless wandering of a teenager. Cara senses some more focused purpose.
It is like following the hunter in the van, staying back far enough that the girl cannot see her. But there is no need to keep close. It is easy to spot her boot prints in the undisturbed snow.
About a half mile into the woods, in the midst of the towering, sticklike bare trunks, she comes across a single, small perfect tree covered in flaming red leaves.
Cara stops in the snow, arrested by the sight: the tiny, vibrant tree surrounded by the much taller bare ones.
She moves on, thoughtfully.
The trees open up into a clearing. And in this snowy circle is a small, old plank church, obviously no longer used. The windows have been shattered by rock throwers and gunshots. There are bullet holes in the walls.
No sign of the girl. But the boot prints lead up to the warped front steps.
Cara approaches the church, mounts the steps, pushes open the door and slips inside.
Inside it is dim and wrecked. Light filters through the bullet holes in the walls. Some of the pews are broken up.
There is a crunch of snow on wood flooring behind her.
Cara turns to see the girl, standing ten feet away. Aiming a shotgun.
The girl knows how to hold the gun. They face each other in silence for a long moment, then the girl speaks.
“I can shoot.”
“I know you can,” Cara answers.
“Did you follow me here?” the girl demands.
“Yes.”
This obvious truth seems unexpected. The girl’s grip tightens on the shotgun. “Why?”
Cara takes her time answering. “I think you have something to show me.”
“I don’t know you,” the girl says belligerently.
“That’s true. But we crossed paths.” She lets the girl think about that for a moment, lets her remember the incident on the sidewalk with the pack of boys.
The girl is silent. But she is listening.
“You knew I was following. You led me here. I don’t think it was to kill me. You know things, don’t you? Things that are eating you up inside.”
For a fleeting second, the look on the girl’s face is total trauma. “How do you know?” she cries.
Cara thinks of the hunter, the shopkeeper, the sheriff, the strange, furtive exchange in the hardware store. “There are men in your town who think they can hide what they are. But you can see it, can’t you?”
The girl looks nervously around her. “They’ll kill you if they find you here.”
Now they are getting somewhere. Cara nods. “Not just kill me. Killing would come later.”
The girl gives a shudder of revulsion. Involuntary, Cara thinks. The girl doesn’t know what she knows, but she senses it deeply.
“Because men like that, they only do one thing with girls.”
The girl mumbles something incomprehensible. Cara doesn’t hear. But she knows that whatever it is, it is the crux of everything.
“I’m going to sit down,” she says.
The girl doesn’t respond, so Cara lowers herself slowly to a seat in the nearest intact pew. She waits a moment, and when there is no response, she speaks again. “There’s something wrong in this town.”
And she waits. The girl fidgets, conflicted. She’s also tired of holding the gun. Cara can see the barrel starting to droop.
“It’s hurt you.”
The girl doesn’t answer, but there’s no telltale flinch. Not her, then.
“Or it’s hurt someone you know.”
Now there is not a mere flinch, but a full-body shudder. “Why should I trust you?” the girl demands.
“Maybe I can help.”
This gets the girl’s attention. Her eyes become very focused and still. Cara presses the point.
“I did before, didn’t I?”
“Those guys,” the girl says, with a contempt that shows surprising strength. “They’re just assholes.” The boys on the sidewalk were bigger, older than she is, but she’s not afraid of them. It’s the men she fears.
Cara says it aloud. “There’s a bigger problem, though.”
The girl’s face ripples with anguish. “You don’t get it. They will fucking kill you.”’
“If they would kill me, they would kill you, too.”
The girl is trembling now. The gun is shaking with her.
“But you know that. That’s what men like that do.” And now, carefully. “You said something, before. What was it?”
She whispers it. But this time Cara hears.
“Not just girls.”
Chapter 93
Portland - present
Roarke
Roarke sat on a boulder in the woods. He had not moved for some time, as he forced himself to review the timeline Singh had built of his life.
For a moment, he’d put aside unthinkable questions of Cara.
Because in a sea of bewildering unknowns, there was one solid revelation. He would bet any amount of money that Singh and Snyder were off in Montana, retracing that 2011 militia case. Following the loosest of threads, in search of a theoretical killer he and Chuck had called “The Wolf.” Investigating the million-to-one chance that somehow Young John Doe had disappeared from Montana without anyone ever coming forth to claim him.
With no apparent evidence, his colleagues—and friends—were off in pursuit of a child killer.
But there was much, much more to it.
According to the case board in Snyder’s study, Chuck and Singh had eliminated Roarke’s own main suspect for the Wolf, John Lombard, because they thought Lombard was dead.
Because they thought Cara had killed him.
The thought made him shaky.
Here. She was here. In Portland, on that night we were after the Street Hunter. I was in that study feeling mortal danger because it was her out there, going after Lombard herself.
It was the most mad of thoughts. Far beyond what he’d ever let himself think before. Uncanny. Almost supernatural. But every moment of their…
Relationship
Connection
Connectedness
It had all been that, and more.
The red string.
His rational mind was still saying, “It can’t be.”
But the larger part of him, the knowing part, was focusing. If Cara had been here in Portland, there was someone who could actually tell him so.
He stood abruptly and started down the path again, headed for the nearest MAX train stop.
Chapter 94
Snake River, Montana - 2011
Cara
Outside the sky has gone to blue twilight. Cara can see
the moon rising through one of the broken windows.
The church is freezing inside. The girl is shivering, unconscious of the fact. Now that she has opened up, she can’t seem to stop talking.
Her name is Maise. She had a brother, Danny. Two years ago she was eleven and Danny was thirteen.
“But everyone always thought he was older. He was just bigger. All the coaches wanted him for football, baseball.”
The man Cara saw in the hardware store, behind the counter, is the store’s owner. Strauss. He is one of the baseball coaches for a church team, which Danny started playing on a little while after their dad took off and left the family.
Danny was only on the team for a few months before he quit. He didn’t tell their mother, but he confided to Maise that Strauss was making up excuses to touch him. An arm around the shoulder. A playful spank. Progressing to more blatant touching.
Cara can only feel a dull rage. The whole town, most of the town, probably knows all of this. Certainly if Maise does, there are adults who know.
“And then one day Danny… he was just gone. Everyone says he ran away.” Maise is shaking so hard her teeth are chattering. “That kids his age do. That he went to find our dad, or he just wanted to be someplace more cool. But he would’ve told me.” Her voice rises. “He would have told me. He would’ve texted. Called. Something. He’d never let it go so long without… without telling us.”
Cara speaks carefully, neutrally. “What does your mother think?
“Sheriff said he was seen in the bus station in Kalispell, so Mom believes him.”
But you know better.
The girl swallows. “Last month this family came through the town on the way to Flathead. A bunch of people saw them. And now their boy is disappeared, like Danny. I saw his picture in the paper.” Her eyes are dark in her pinched face. “He looked like Danny.”
“You think Strauss killed your brother.”
It’s more a shudder than a nod. But the answer is clear. “They think they own everything.”
“Who are they?”
“The Brigade. That’s what they call themselves. The Northwest Brigade. They go out on the weekends, into the woods, and do drills. Like how to survive. Only it’s more like how to take over than surviving. They go out in the woods in camo and do training for the War.”
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