The agents look at each other, electrified. And Agent Snyder says softly, “We’ve been searching the wrong database.”
Chapter 108
Snake River, Montana - present
Roarke and Epps
The agents stood beside the sagging couch on Jean Lange’s porch, knocking on the door. And again. And again.
No answer.
They both shifted on their feet, uneasy, reluctant to leave.
Roarke reached out and tried the knob. Locked.
The men looked at each other. “We can’t,” Roarke said simply. “Nothing even close to probable cause.”
Finally they turned to leave. But Epps stopped on the steps. “Wait.”
Roarke paused to look at him.
“Something’s off,” Epps said, frustrated.
Roarke nodded, tense. “But what?”
Epps turned, and looked around the porch. “Tara,” he said. Roarke frowned. Epps lifted his hands. “I feel like she’s… here. Or she’s been…”
“Okay,” Roarke said carefully. “Just stand there. What is it? Something you see? Something you heard?”
Epps breathed out, composing himself. He stood for several beats, and then said, “I feel her. I…” He looked around him at the flooring, the painted planks, the battered chairs. And then he focused on the couch below the window.
Roarke watched as Epps crossed to it, bent to it. He picked up a cushion and brought it to his face.
He twisted around to Roarke. “It smells like her. It’s this exotic thing she wears. Frankincense. Saffron.”
Roarke turned and strode to the rental car. He opened the trunk and rooted around in his suitcase, pulled out the Maglite he always stowed with emergency supplies in his travel bag. He walked back up the porch steps and pointed the beam of the Maglite through the window.
He put his face to the glass and stared inside as he played the beam over the shadowy living room. Worn furniture, beer cans on the coffee table, a TV that undoubtedly cost more than the sum total of other objects in the room…
Normal…
And then he saw it. Something sticking out behind the couch. Just the end of a wooden leg of some small table. But parallel to the ground. The end table was lying on its side.
He jerked back from the window, turned, and kicked the door in.
They found Jean Lange in a crumpled heap on the floor of the hall outside one of the bedrooms.
While Roarke knelt beside her, feeling for a pulse, Epps was already on the phone to emergency services, shouting the address into the phone. “I need an ambulance now.”
Lange’s pulse was erratic, but present. Roarke checked her over carefully. Her eyes were blacked and swollen, her mouth split and oozing blood, her scalp bleeding where lumps of hair had been ripped from her head. Her breathing was shallow, hitching around broken ribs.
He took her hand, held it in both of his. “Jean, an ambulance is coming. We’re going to get you to a hospital.”
She was trying to say something through a broken mouth. “Help… me,” Roarke heard. Only the “me” came out with a long “a.”
Roarke leaned in closer. “We’re Federal Agents, Jean. You’re safe. We’ve got help coming.”
“May,” she said again. Her voice was a broken whisper. “They… want… May…”
Epps lowered the phone, and the agents exchanged a glance. “Who wants May? Who did this to you?”
“Mays. They want Mays.”
Chapter 109
Many Glacier Hotel, Montana - present
Maise
The glacial lake pools at the bottom of one of a series of valleys surrounded by spiky Alpine peaks. Wind sweeps down the ski-jump shaped slopes, blowing puffs of snow from higher altitudes. Gray mist pours off one towering cliff like a waterfall.
Below a massive cliff face, on the edge of Swiftcurrent Lake, nestles a huge Swiss-style lodge: brown with white trim, slanted roofs, carved beams, gingerbread cutouts adorning the balconies. The long five-story main building is lined with wide windows. Two shorter side wings branch off from it. A marquis-shaped car port stands empty.
Inside the hotel is a soaring, empty lobby space surrounded by three upper stories of balconies supported by columns of enormous whole bare tree trunks. A bow-beamed ceiling with skylights rises in a dizzying arch like the inverted hull of a ship. A double spiral staircase leads down to a lower story.
Inside this vast silence, a lone young woman in a dark blue hotel uniform, trousers and tunic, walks past the long reception desk, the couches and chairs grouped in conversational areas, the grand piano.
She is small, but lean and strong, with striking coloring, dark hair and dark eyes against pale skin, freckles prominent by contrast. Armband tattoos show at her wrists.
She seems at home in the empty hotel. She circles around a central stone hearth with a triangular copper fireplace suspended from the ceiling by a web of cables, and pauses at a deserted row of couches and rocking chairs facing the panel of windows that overlook the wide, empty deck. The partially frozen lake is ringed by glacial mountains. An empty boat dock juts out into the ice.
She sighs out in satisfaction. She loves this view, the expansiveness of it. The pure, elemental peace. Even better, she has it to herself today. The other members of the skeleton maintenance crew are on a day ski trip and she has volunteered to stay.
During the season, the guests will come, thousands, tens of thousands of them, and that is good, too. She enjoys the variety of people from all over the country and all over the world. It is what she and Danny always dreamed of: adventure, escape. She has the money to travel herself, now. And she will—when she is done with what she is here to do. It is coming together. She can feel the signs, something just around the corner. An end to this long search.
“Soon,” she says softly to her dead brother.
She turns away from the windows to continue toward the wide doors of the dining hall.
She does not see the figure watching her from behind the reception desk.
In the dining hall she walks across the gleaming bare pine floor, under a slanted pine ceiling hung with dozens of cylindrical lamps, vaguely Chinese in design. A huge river rock chimney and fireplace dominates one wall.
She unlocks a door at the side of the room to reveal a janitorial closet. She steps inside, reaching for an upright floor polisher.
She plugs in the length of cord and switches it on, feeling the vibration flow through the machine into her hands. She turns in a slow circle toward the center of the room…
And gasps… at the sight of a shadow in the doorway.
Chapter 110
Many Glacier Station, Montana - present
Singh and Snyder
Singh drives the ATV on a winding road beside a lake of powder-blue.
The agents have tried at several stop-off points to connect to the ViCLAS database, but the road is too remote for them to catch a signal.
Agent Snyder is thinking it through, aloud. “We’ll need to search two distinct victim pools: preteen and young teen boys, like Danny Porter and Timothy Whitcomb, in the years before 2011. After 2011, for younger boys like Aaron Light.”
Singh frowns out over the lake. She is feeling a growing anxiety. “We must find cell phone reception. Not for the database. We must alert authorities in the park that Maise Porter may be in danger. We must find someone who can get there before we may be able to.”
She has no concrete reason for thinking it. And yet it is an overwhelming urgency.
Beside her, Agent Snyder shakes his head. “We can’t. Absolutely not.”
She glances at him, not understanding.
“There is no internal law enforcement authority that governs national parks,” he explains. “Investigative power belongs entirely to the sheriffs’ departments bordering the parks.”
Singh’s stomach sinks like a stone. “Sheriff Preston…”
“Exactly,” Snyder says grimly. “We’re not on his side of the park. But anyone w
e contact from any other bordering department is almost certain to contact him first.”
Singh feels lightheaded, a sensation like falling. Agent Snyder touches her arm reassuringly. “We’re not far, now.”
Indeed, it is less than a quarter of an hour before Singh is slowing the ATV to drive through the unmanned park gate, the entrance to Glacier National Park.
As she follows the winding road toward Many Glacier Hotel, she notices something she has seen before when entering a national park. As stunning as the scenery has been on the drive to the park, it cannot begin to compare to the breathtaking vistas that unfold inside the park proper.
She counts ten distinct peaks lined up along the lake, massive triangular gray mountains, and conical volcanic summits, before the ATV rounds a curve and she has to start counting again.
She pulls over a few minutes later at a redwood ranger station, intending to show their credentials, explain that they are here to talk to one of the hotel employees, and perhaps enlist help. But no lights are on in the building and no one answers their knock on the door.
The agents turn to look at each other.
“Maise,” Singh says. Snyder nods.
They return to their vehicle and continue into the park, past parking turnoffs at scenic points. Singh must drive more slowly because of the multitudes of potholes newly opened by the brutal winter.
And again, for no good reason, she finds herself gripped with unease. As if there is reason to rush.
She eases the speed up, mindful of potholes.
Chapter 111
Many Glacier Hotel, Montana - present
Cara and Maise
Maise fumbles for the switch of the sweeper and turns it off.
Cara steps forward into the room, and the two stand, looking at each other across time.
Cara often returns to places. She does not often return to people. Now she knows she has kept up with this girl because The Work is not finished. And the moment she heard the two old men talking in the restaurant in Yellowstone about children missing from national parks, it was clear to her what must be done.
Maise knows it too. It is there in the way she looks at Cara now. There is more for them to do together. It ties them like a string.
They exchange no more than a few words, and then Cara is following Maise up several flights of stairs into the employees’ wing of the hotel, corridors of small rooms.
Maise walks down one of the halls to the very end, where she opens a door and steps through into a room with slanted rafters.
Cara steps inside… and turns in the room, looking at clippings of news articles taped to the wall—along with printouts of photos of children. Some as young as four and five, others ten, eleven, twelve.
“Missing,” Maise says flatly. “They’re all missing.”
Chapter 112
Many Glacier, Montana - present
Singh and Snyder
They pass under a high trestle bridge into what the park map calls Many Glacier Village.
There the road splits in two, one leading to an empty parking lot of the hotel for guests and employees. The other fork leads up a hill toward a much larger parking lot for tourists and buses just passing through.
Singh turns toward the employee parking lot. Around the next curve they get their first glimpse of the hotel.
Singh has skiied in the Alps. The chalet-style lodge would not be out of place there. The setting is equally breathtaking.
She parks their vehicle in the empty lot beside the carport and gets out of the driver’s side, looking up at the hotel. When Agent Snyder does not immediately join her, she turns back to the vehicle.
Now Snyder shuts the passenger side door and circles around the ATV to her. She sees he has strapped on a sidearm. He holds the second Glock in one hand, extending it to her.
She hesitates.
“Humor me,” he says.
She reaches for the weapon, checks it, and slides it into the pocket of her parka.
Then she zaps the vehicle locked, and the agents walk toward the hotel main entrance.
There are no steps up to the huge double doors, just a smooth concrete surface leading from the carport to the lodge.
There also is nothing like a doorbell at the entrance. Looking up at the massive, unlit hotel, Singh realizes it may be harder than they anticipated just to get someone to come to the door. Not to mention that Maise may be in any one of the wings, or in the building beyond the parking lot which seems to be separate housing.
Then Agent Snyder reaches out to the door and pushes on it.
It swings open under his pressure.
The agents move through the doors into a short entry that opens up at a long reception desk, empty. They walk past the desk into the vast open lobby, and stand looking up around them at the three stories of balconies, the high beamed ceiling. Singh is amazed to realize that the gleaming four-story wooden posts supporting the balconies are whole tree trunks, stripped of bark and polished to a high sheen.
The silence is live, resonant.
“Call her,” Snyder says. “Better you than me.”
Singh raises her voice. “Maise Porter! Are you here? We have been sent by Jean Lange.”
They listen to the vast empty silence of the hotel.
“Anyone?” Singh calls.
They move further into the lobby, past a grand piano and rows of couches and rocking chairs looking out on the lake.
Agent Snyder stops, turns. Singh thinks he is about to speak. Instead, he raises a hand, motioning her silent.
Her eyes widen at the faint, ominous sound of approaching vehicles.
Agent Snyder crosses quickly toward the front-facing windows. Singh follows.
But she stops, and instinctively ducks behind of the tree trunk columns. To her right, Snyder has done the same. She eases her head around the trunk to look through the windows, and sees a massive truck and a van without side windows round the curve of road and enter the parking lot.
The vehicles stop outside the carport beside the agents’ ATV, and men get out. Two from the truck, one from the driver’s side of the van.
Singh feels her throat close as she sees the faces.
Sheriff Preston, with that unmistakable handlebar mustache from his photos. Furman, the snowmobile shopkeeper from Kellogg. Some tall, black-haired, tattooed man she does not recognize. All three of them are packing side arms, and as she watches, they all pull long guns from their respective vehicles. Preston walks over to their rental vehicle and tries the driver’s door she has just locked. He peers in through the window.
Then all three men turn toward the van as the side panel slides open and a wheelchair rolls out onto a platform at the side of the van.
Strauss. The shine of his ruined face is unmistakable.
Singh feels for the weapon in her pocket, and silently thanks Agent Snyder’s “Blue Sense,” that instinct that protects cops and agents in the field.
He crosses quickly to her side. “They’ve come for the same reason we have,” he says. “They’re after Maise.”
He points an index finger upward toward the overlooking balconies, then nods his head to the side stairs leading up to the balconies.
The agents hurry for the staircase and mount in silence.
Chapter 113
Many Glacier Hotel, Montana - present
Roarke and Epps
From their high position on the bridge outside the hotel, Roarke stared down at the men in the parking lot.
On approach, he and Epps had driven the loop to the upper parking lot. And as they circled back toward the hotel, they caught a glimpse of the monster truck and the van driving the loop toward the hotel.
The agents had stopped their SUV out of sight and taken positions on the trestle bridge.
They crouched, observing, evaluating, as the men in the parking lot stood beside their vehicles and checked their rifles, looking up at the hotel. The man in the sheriff’s uniform, almost certainly Preston, walked ov
er to the SUV parked in a nearby spot and tried the door.
And then the man in the wheelchair rolled off the motorized ramp of the van and joined the cluster of others.
Even from this distance, Roarke could see the horrific scars, the half-melted face. He felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach. Not just because fire was his own personal horror. Because he instantly knew what—and who—he was seeing.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, low.
Epps looked to him in agitation.
“Strauss,” Roarke said. “It must be. I was following him that night…”
He stopped again, his gorge rising. He’d been following Strauss’s truck, right behind him. If not for that wraith of a girl… if he hadn’t been stopped on the road….
He was looking at what would have happened to him that night. If he’d lived at all.
The realization was a wave of nausea.
The agents watched as the men head for the doors of the hotel.
Roarke tersely identified them. “The big one is Furman. Uniform is Sheriff Preston. Whose jurisdiction this is. The other guy I don’t know.”
There were no steps to climb; the militia men walked straight in through the double front doors, Furman holding the door open for Strauss to motor past in his chair.
“We need to get in there,” Epps said, his voice knotted.
Roarke scanned the front of the hotel, and focused on the broad, sturdy staircases criss-crossing the exterior on both sides of the main building and both wings. This was fire country. The stairs went all the way to ground level, providing safe, easy exit.
And entrance.
“They’re at the bottom,” he said aloud. “So we go up those to the top.”
Chapter 114
Many Glacier Hotel, Montana - present
Singh and Snyder
On the first balcony, Singh and Snyder take positions, each hiding behind one of the huge tree trunk columns. They train their Glocks downward at the entry beside the reception desk.
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