The Forgotten Girls

by Owen Laukkanen

  Mila tested her ankle. Collapsed to the snow again, wincing, tears in her eyes. Bit the sleeve of her jacket to keep from crying out. She wasn’t going anywhere, not in this state. Not on her feet, at least.

  She pushed herself deeper into the forest, sliding on her butt, digging in the snow with her gloves. Her clothes were damp with sweat, her pants soaked through with snowmelt. She was exhausted and hungry. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  Mila pushed back until she came to a fallen tree, almost as thick around as she was. She leaned against it to rest and realized as she lay there that she couldn’t go any farther.

  So be it. She couldn’t fight the cold, not forever. But she could fight Leland Hurley, if and when he came for her. Mila took the pistol from her coat pocket. With the last of her strength, she pushed herself up and over the fallen tree. Landed hard on the other side, felt that pain in her ankle again, waited for it to dissipate. Turned around, propped herself up on the trunk by her elbows, facing back the way she’d come.

  Hurley was coming through those trees. Mila knew it. She gripped the pistol tight. She would be ready when he came.

  —

  The going was slow. The grade was steep. Stevens gripped tree branches and bare rocky outcroppings, tried to keep his balance as he led Windermere down through the forest. Knew if he hurt himself here, he would probably die.

  As it was, there was a better-than-zero chance they would die out here. A part of Stevens wondered what had possessed him to ignore Kerry Finley’s warnings, was thinking, best case, he and Windermere were on the verge of becoming rescue fodder themselves.

  Never mind that now. There was a young woman out there, and a killer who’d been loose long enough.

  Stevens stepped down off a rocky ledge, landed in about three feet of snow. Turned back to help Windermere down, then together they pushed through the trees to the clearing at the base of the cliff.

  The clearing was still empty. They could see the impression in the snow where Hurley or Mila had landed, the trail into the woods where they’d dragged themselves. They could see no other tracks in the snow. They couldn’t see Leland Hurley, and they couldn’t see Mila Scott.

  But that didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

  “Come on.” Windermere tugged Stevens’s sleeve. Pointed around the edge of the clearing, a dense ring of trees. “Let’s circle around to that trail.”

  She took the lead now, her Glock drawn. Stevens followed, casting glances out into the clearing, the cliff face, gauging the minutes left until dark.

  —

  Hurley was down the cliff. He was getting closer. Mila could hear the trees moving, could see snow falling from the branches. She couldn’t see him yet, but he was getting closer. He would follow her trail to the log. And she would be ready.

  Mila braced herself against the tree trunk. Leveled the pistol, followed the branches as they rustled in the gloom. She could hear engines in the distance, getting louder. Coming up the mountain. They belonged to the police, hopefully. Maybe the waitress at the diner had sent them.

  Either way, Mila realized she wasn’t alone on this mountain with Leland Hurley. There was a chance she wouldn’t die in the cold.

  She just had to survive Hurley first.

  Mila could see movement now, just a silhouette through the tree trunks. Couldn’t make out his face, but she knew it was Hurley. Mila tracked him with the pistol, her finger tensed on the trigger. Tried to remember what Ash had told her, about exhaling partway. Squeezing the trigger. She waited until the silhouette was standing directly in front of her, fifteen yards away. She took a breath, let it out.

  Then she pulled the trigger.

  77

  Nothing happened.

  The gun didn’t go off. Mila pulled the trigger again. Nothing. Maybe the gun wasn’t loaded. That had to be it. She fumbled in her pocket for the spare magazine, couldn’t make it work. Hurley was closing in, and she couldn’t even figure out how to load the damn gun. There wasn’t any way she could stop him.

  She crouched against the tree, as still as she could manage, praying that Hurley wouldn’t see her in the dark. Maybe he would walk right past her. Totally miss her. But that wasn’t freaking likely.

  Mila watched the silhouette get closer. Tried to resign herself to the inevitable. She’d brought the police here. They would find Hurley and arrest him. She had done right by Ash.

  But had she?

  Would they arrest Leland Hurley?

  She had replaced Hurley’s box of keepsakes underneath his rug. She’d covered the evidence that would prove to the police what he’d done, and what she hadn’t hidden she’d brought into the woods. Hurley could hide her body, bury his mementos. The police would never know it was him.

  Mila felt sick with disgust. Fear. She’d come all this way, come so close. And she’d fucked up again.

  She would never be like Ash.

  Then it came to her. The freaking safety was on. She’d seen enough action movies to know about that. Mila turned the pistol. Found the little lever on the grip of the gun. Slipped it into fire mode. Braced herself again, found the attacker in her front sight, ten yards distant. Held the gun steady. Let off her breath. Squeezed the trigger back.

  This time, the gun roared.

  78

  Windermere threw herself to the ground as the gun exploded out of nowhere, everywhere, about ten yards ahead, point-blank. The muzzle flare lit up the forest for a split second, showed her nothing but trees and an overturned log, and then she was diving for cover.

  The snow cushioned her fall. Swallowed her up, face and all, and she rolled away from the gunfire, spitting out ice chips and wiping her eyes. Hurley had missed her, she realized; she wasn’t hit and she prayed Stevens wasn’t, either. Prayed he had the good sense to get down and stay there.

  Bang bang bang!

  More shots. Windermere heard them ricochet off rock behind her, splinter trees. Couldn’t tell how close they were coming to her head, didn’t really want to find out. She crawled out of the firing line until she found a tree stump. Rolled behind it, flipped onto her stomach, raised her Glock in front of her, and waited for Hurley to fire again. He didn’t disappoint.

  Bang bang bang bang!

  Found him.

  Windermere swung her pistol toward the source of the gunfire. Squeezed off four shots of her own, saw wood chips flying. Heard more shots somewhere else, realized it was Stevens, across the other side of the log. Surrounding the bastard, moving in slow.

  Good work, partner. We got this asshole.

  Windermere pushed out from the snow as Hurley returned fire in Stevens’s direction. Ran forward five feet or so, took cover behind a tree. Ducked out, looked for the muzzle flare. Couldn’t get a good shot from here.

  “Drop your weapon!” Stevens was shouting. “FBI, Hurley. Give it up now!”

  Windermere inched left. Saw another stump a couple yards over, good cover, good line of sight. She counted to three, made a dash for it. Heard Hurley open up behind her, heard bullets whiz past. But she made it. Landed safe. Could just make out the log in the last of the daylight. Trained her Glock on the middle of it, an unmissable shot, and waited for Hurley to pop his head up again.

  —

  Mila was out of bullets. The gun had clicked empty, and she still couldn’t figure out how to reload. Hurley was yelling something, but she couldn’t make out the words. Her ears were ringing from the gunshots. Hurley seemed to be firing at her from everywhere.

  She was going to die out here in the snow.

  Mila crouched low. Fumbled with the pistol. Hurley was right on top of her now. She was almost out of time.

  Then she pressed a button by the trigger and heard the magazine fall into the snow. Bingo. Mila dug the other mag from her pocket. Stuffed it into the gun, heard the satisfying chunk just as she saw a shad
ow move to her left, five yards from the log. She swung around, racked the slide, finger back on the trigger. Was about to let fly when a woman called out from behind her.

  “FBI, Hurley, we have you surrounded. Put. The gun. Down.”

  A second shooter. A woman. Mila couldn’t be sure, but she swore she’d heard FBI. These were the freaking cops shooting at her.

  Her mind struggled to process. Couldn’t make it work. Why were the cops trying to kill her? Did Hurley have the FBI in his pocket?

  No.

  Impossible.

  “It doesn’t get any easier, Hurley, I promise. Put the gun down and let’s end this thing peacefully.”

  They thought she was Hurley. They thought she was the ghost rider. They thought they were shooting the bad guy.

  And the FBI knew Leland Hurley was the bad guy.

  Mila called out, as loud as she could, “I’m not Hurley. Please don’t shoot me!”

  There was a pause. A long pause. Then the woman called back.

  “I’m a special agent with the FBI, hon,” she said. “My partner’s here with me. We’ll show you our badges if you promise not to shoot us.”

  “I won’t shoot you,” Mila told her. “I thought you were Hurley. I thought—”

  “Put the gun down,” the woman said, her voice calm. “Stand up, nice and slow. Keep your hands up until we can figure this out, okay?”

  Mila leaned against the log, tall as she could. “I can’t stand up. My ankle . . . I fell off the cliff.”

  From out in the gloaming, a flashlight appeared. It shone over the snow until it found Mila’s log. Mila raised her hands. Squinted into the beam. To her left, another flashlight. Footsteps. The agents lowered their lights as they approached the log, and Mila could see a black woman and a middle-aged white man.

  “I’m so sorry I shot at you,” Mila said. Her heart was still pounding. “I thought you were Hurley.”

  “We thought you were Hurley,” the man said. “Glad we sorted things out before . . .”

  He didn’t have to finish. Mila let her body relax a little bit. Then she thought of something. “Wait a second,” she said. “If you guys didn’t catch Hurley, then where is he?”

  79

  Hurley was nearly at the cabin when the cavalry arrived, three Flathead County deputies in souped-up Dodge Durango off-road vehicles, lights blazing, men piling out with rifles drawn, faces flushed with excitement and pent-up adrenaline.

  Hurley stuck to the forest at the back of his property. Circled the cabin, watching the men as they secured the clearing, as a couple of them entered the cabin.

  It was time to leave. It was time to set out from this place and get far, far away. Whether the FBI found the girl or not, Hurley knew he was made. This was what manhunts looked like before they got off the ground. This was a goddamn situation.

  He kept calm. Pushed the anger down in his gut, the frustration that flashed when he thought of the girl in the forest, the three cops behind her. Two of them women, as if it weren’t bad enough already.

  He chased the thought from his mind. Stole away through the trees until he’d found his hand-hewn road, followed it along the ridgeline, moving fast through the snow, ignoring the chaos behind him.

  Night fell as he walked, had fallen completely by the time he arrived at his snowmobile, the forest dark and silent this far from the cabin. Hurley started the engine, tensed as it rumbled to life, fearing the law would hear it and know immediately where he’d gone.

  But the forest remained mute. No lawmen appeared to challenge Hurley. He straddled the machine and drove farther into the mountain range, the road narrowing now, progress slow.

  Then he reached the end of the road, a wall of trees where he’d been forced to halt his efforts at the end of the summer season. Hurley killed the engine, strapped on his snowshoes again. He kept survival gear in a cargo box on the back of the machine, spare rations and fresh water, a bivouac sack and a lightweight subzero sleeping bag, a compact shovel to dig into the snow for shelter. He kept spare ammunition for the rifle, too, and a pair of night-vision goggles he’d found at the military surplus store in Kalispell.

  Hurley abandoned the snowmobile. Double-checked his supplies, shouldered his rifle, and adjusted his goggles. He set off into the dense woods beyond his crude road and didn’t look back.

  80

  A shootout with the victim herself.” Windermere cast an arched eye at her partner. “That’s a new one.”

  Across the booth, Stevens didn’t know whether to laugh or have a heart attack. He was still trying to process the events on the mountain, still struggling with how close they’d come to shooting Mila Scott dead.

  “Good thing she’s a lousy shot.” Windermere drank her coffee. “Otherwise, you and I would be full of holes, partner.”

  “I guess we’re pretty lousy shots ourselves,” Stevens replied. “And I’ve never been so thankful to say it.”

  It was nearly midnight. They’d helped Mila out of the woods and back to the base of the cliff. The Flathead deputies, spurred on by the sounds of gunfire, had arrived shortly thereafter. They’d dropped blankets and food down the cliff to the agents, informed them that a helicopter was on its way up from Whitefish.

  Stevens and Windermere had kept Mila warm as they waited for the helicopter. Mila told them her story, about her friendship with Ashlyn Southernwood and Ronda Sixkill, how Mila had risked the High Line even though she knew better, how Mila had leaned on her network of train hoppers to track down Leland Hurley.

  “He was wearing Ash’s knife when he came into the store,” Mila had told them. “Back in Anchor Falls. Ash always carried that knife. She loved it. It belonged to her grandmother.”

  “And you saw it and decided you had to hunt this guy down,” Windermere said.

  Mila hadn’t answered right away. Avoided Windermere’s eyes. “No offense, but it’s not like the cops ever did anything,” she said. “Leland Hurley’s been riding forever, and nobody cares. I don’t even know how many women he got before Ash.”

  “At least twenty-five,” Stevens told her. “But we don’t have an exact number.”

  “See? Everyone just takes it for granted that the cops don’t give a shit. We have to solve these problems on our own.”

  “We give a shit,” Windermere said. “I don’t know about the local law enforcement, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation takes killers like Leland Hurley serious as cancer.”

  Mila didn’t say anything. Stevens wondered if she was trying to reconcile the FBI’s definition of justice with her own. Or maybe she was just in shock, or simply scared. Leland Hurley was still out there, after all, somewhere in the forest. It was an eerie feeling. The woods were dark now, visibility minimal, and Stevens kept his gun handy. Windermere did the same.

  The sound of helicopter rotors had filled the valley. To the west, down toward Anchor Falls, the lights of a police chopper swung up out of the darkness. Stevens and Windermere watched it approach. Mila, too.

  “He had a little box hidden under the floorboards,” Mila said. She kept her eye on the approaching helicopter. “That’s where I found the gun, under the rug. He had the gun and some money, and his creepy little box.”

  She’d pulled her coat around herself. She was still watching the sky, and her eyes were inscrutable. “He kept mementos in the box. Like, he took Ash’s knife, but I guess he kept other things, too.” She dug around in her pocket. “Some of them fell out of my coat in the forest, but I kept this.” She held something out to them. Stevens shined his flashlight on it: an asthma inhaler. “It belonged to someone named Pamela Moody.”

  There it was. If Stevens and Windermere had been looking for conclusive proof that Leland Hurley was their killer, the inhaler in Mila’s hands sealed the deal.

  “Pamela Moody,” Mila repeated. She pursed her lips. “I guess she’s dead
now, whoever she was.”

  Stevens met Windermere’s eyes. There was a hint of a smile on his partner’s face, just a little. Leland Hurley was still at large, sure, but Mila Scott was safe. Pamela Moody was safe. The tide was starting to turn.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” Windermere told Mila as the helicopter descended into a hover above the cliff. “We can talk more when we’ve all warmed up a little.”

  They’d flown back to Anchor Falls and commandeered Norma’s Diner, fashioning it into a base of operations, county deputies everywhere—Flathead, Lincoln—even Judd Parsons, sheriff of Lincoln County, had showed up to pitch in. Agents from the Bureau’s Kalispell resident agency were en route, too, another helicopter. Until Leland Hurley was captured, Anchor Falls was in manhunt mode.

  Stevens and Windermere had taken a corner booth, a couple cups of coffee and two slices of damn good cherry pie. They sat across from each other and watched county SUVs and pickups jockey for space in the parking lot, watched Northwestern Railroad trains stack up on the tracks on the other side of the highway. All traffic was halted, both rail and road, at least for the time being, though just how long that would last nobody was quite sure. Given Leland Hurley’s seeming ability to vanish into the snow, it was imperative that they pick up his trail quickly.

  But it was too dark for any hunting now. The mountains were a black void against a black sky, the only light in the Anchor Valley coming from helicopter spotlights. Mila Scott hadn’t been sure where Hurley had gone; he’d been up on the cliff, the last she’d seen him.

  “You didn’t hear anyone come down before us?” Windermere had asked while they waited for the helicopter. “No way he beat us down?”

  “If he did, he would have found me,” Mila replied. “Sure seemed easy enough for you guys.”

  Stevens mulled this over as he finished his pie. He remembered hearing the sounds of the deputies’ engines as they raced up the logging road toward Hurley’s cabin. The sound had come clear as he stood on the cliff. Hurley would have heard Kerry Finley’s truck if he’d been in the same place. Maybe he’d realized it was time to start running.