by Jen Blood
“It’s not as bad as I thought,” I told him, relieved to find only a shallow cut across his left temple. “Head wounds always bleed a lot. This isn’t deep, though. Might not even leave a scar.”
“Well, I dodged a bullet there,” he said. “Chase me, torture me, kill me, but God forbid anybody scars this face.”
I wet his hair with the cloth, then smoothed it back. He closed his eyes.
“That feels good.”
“I do what I can.” And not much more, I thought silently.
The moonlight turned everything a deep, deep blue, the water black at our feet. I put some gauze over the cut on his head and then turned my attention to his leg.
“We shouldn’t waste time on that right now,” he said. “It’s not bad. We need to keep moving.”
“Humor me.”
He didn’t put up any more of a fight, but sat there silently while I checked him over. He was right, though: the gash was deep, but not nearly as bad as it could have been. I cleaned it as well and as fast as I could, then wrapped it with gauze and a bandage. He helped me up when I was through, and I sat down beside him on the fallen tree.
“I haven’t heard any sign of anyone behind us, have you?” I asked.
Diggs shook his head. “Not for a while, no.”
“Maybe we lost him.”
He looked around. The forest was thick on all sides. I hadn’t seen a trace of civilization since we went off the road. Wherever we were, J. had done one hell of a job making sure we wouldn’t be found.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “We need to keep moving.”
“Keep moving where, though? If on the off chance Juarez actually did understand what I told him—”
Before I could continue, there was a splash just up the river from us—a lot louder than what you’d hear from some old fish belly slapping the water’s surface. Then another. A flash of panic touched Diggs’ face. He held his finger to his lips, and I nodded. In an instant, my heart was racing again, my pulse pounding in my ears. He pushed me down behind the felled tree, then crouched beside me. There was another splash—this one close enough that I could see the stone when it hit the water.
Someone began to whistle, low and tuneless. I clutched Diggs’ arm, peering into the moonlit night in search of whoever was out there. The whistling stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The splashing ceased. And then, I heard it: a click, followed by the smooth slide of metal on metal. Diggs grabbed my bad arm and pulled me into the woods before I knew what was happening. We were already on the run, crashing through the underbrush so fast that I knew nothing beyond the tangled ground beneath my feet and the trees and brush that clawed at me on the way through, when we heard the shot behind us. It was loud enough to shake the ground; loud enough to make the world go silent for long seconds afterward, before the next shot cracked the world wide open once more.
“That’s your warning,” a man’s voice shouted after us. I didn’t recognize it. “That’s all you get. You won’t hear me coming again.”
We kept running.
Chapter Fifteen
It was one of the more idiotic moments of his professional career, this naïve leap of faith Juarez had made with Erin. He stood in front of a wall map of the Allagash Wilderness beside the sheriff and his deputy and half a dozen others who’d been called out for two searches now: one for Adam Solomon, and one for his daughter. It was almost three a.m. For the past three hours, Juarez had been silently chastising himself for how poorly he’d handled Erin from the start. He should have had a police escort take her straight to Montreal. Or just kept her with him.
Go back to Montreal. Wait for my call.
Right.
The problem, as he saw it, was that he didn’t have any idea how else to deal with her. He should have listened to Diggs: A stern warning was hardly enough for a woman like her. He’d be lucky if titanium handcuffs and a horse tranquilizer would be adequate. He should have known something wasn’t right when she’d gone along with his instructions so readily.
He’d received a call from border patrol shortly after the one from Erin, informing him that Erin Solomon and Daniel Diggins had already passed through the Fort Kent crossing, twenty minutes before his instructions had been received. Their documents had been in order and there had been nothing suspicious about either them or their vehicle, so they were allowed through without incident. That had been at ten-thirty.
“Considering the information we got from border patrol and the fact that Erin called me approximately thirty minutes after that, we can assume she would have been somewhere in this area when I spoke with her,” Juarez said. He circled a reasonably small area around the main highways and two of the more significant logging roads, then looked at the sheriff again. “And still no luck finding their vehicle?”
Cyr shook his head. “I’ve got some wardens out looking now. They’ll call if they spot it, but so far nobody’s seen anything on the main roads your friend should have been traveling.”
“What about the cell phone?” the deputy asked. “You can’t track that?”
“Not without cell towers to triangulate the signal,” Juarez said.
“Most folks just use satellite phones out that way,” Cyr told him. “Cell towers are few and far between, even on the main stretch there. If it turns out she was on one of those side roads…”
Juarez nodded. He didn’t need the man to finish that particular thought. “And we have people checking the highway and the logging roads, just in case they ended up out that way for some reason?”
“We do. But you say you want to start checking the woods anyway?” Cyr asked. “ ’Cause I’ve gotta tell you, trying to find people out there is worse than looking for a needle in a hay field. Especially when you don’t have any real idea where they might be. She’s only been gone what two, three hours?”
“I heard her voice,” Juarez insisted. “Something was wrong. If there wasn’t, she would have called back by now. You must have protocol for handling this kind of thing. If we were to do a grid search, how would that be organized?”
The sheriff looked at his deputy, the two of them silently calculating. “That whole section out there is pretty wild,” he said. “There are a few hunting camps, but other than that we’re talking dense woods, rough terrain, and a lot of wildlife. We can get a chopper to do a flyby once it’s daylight, but in forest that thick it doesn’t do a whole lot of good.”
Juarez rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and considered his options. Erin and Diggs were out there somewhere—he knew that much at least. As was the killer. And whoever that killer was, his intent was clear. Juarez looked at the map again.
“I want you to start with helicopters at dawn, doing a flyby of the area. Then I want men on the ground in the areas least likely to see tourist traffic this time of year—he’ll keep them as far from people as possible. Wherever the woods are thickest or the terrain least hospitable, I want people searching.”
“We don’t have much of a budget for that—” the sheriff began. He stopped at the look on Juarez’s face.
“This is a federal investigation,” Juarez said. “We’ll figure it out. We’ve got a serial killer out there somewhere; this is our best shot at catching him.”
Cyr nodded. “I’ll call in the park service, let them know. Overtime?”
“Whatever you need,” Juarez assured him. “I’ll talk to the director and get the funds approved. In the meantime, you start getting people out there. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.”
Cyr and his deputy went to make the necessary calls. Juarez sat down at the edge of the desk, staring at the map. Will Rainier still hadn’t been brought in. Juarez couldn’t stop thinking about Quebec. What had happened? He could believe Erin may have resisted, but Diggs had seemed clear on the importance of keeping her away. What the hell had he been thinking?
Even as the thought crossed his mind, Juarez realized how unfair it was: He hadn’t known Erin that long, and already he had
given in to her demands more than once. She was infuriating. Childish. Stubborn in a way he hadn’t seen in a woman since…well, since his wife.
He closed his eyes. Rubbed his throbbing temples with his thumbs, all the while trying to think this through.
Where were they?
Red Grivois arrived at the station at three-thirty that morning. Juarez had only met him in passing on Saturday night, more concerned with getting Erin out of Rainier’s way than meeting the locals. He looked oddly revitalized, considering it was deep in the night and he’d just discovered the body of an old friend and the potential of several more in the past twelve hours.
“Will’s gone,” Red said the moment he got through the door.
“What do you mean, Will’s gone?” the sheriff asked. “Where’d he go?”
“Hell if I know,” Red said. He sat behind one of the desks, put his feet up, and took a beer from his jacket pocket. “I dropped him there Saturday night, he said he was gonna sleep it off. He’s not there now, though. I checked the place. His truck’s gone.”
“Is there somewhere else he might be? A girlfriend’s? A bar?” Juarez asked.
“Bars are closed. And Will’s not much for dating—he’s kind of the solitary type,” Red told him.
Juarez thought of the oversized, sloping man he’d seen Saturday night. He couldn’t imagine anyone voluntarily going out with a man like that, but he’d been surprised more than once by the monsters women dated.
“He could have gone fishing,” the sheriff suggested to Juarez. “Maybe took off after you decked him Saturday night, nursing his pride.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Red agreed. “His guns are gone. A couple of his bear traps are missing, too. He always takes to the woods when he’s pissed about something.”
The hairs on the back of Juarez’s neck stood on end. “Where would he go?”
“He’s not the one you’re looking for,” Red said immediately. “I checked him out years ago. Will Rainier didn’t kill those girls.”
Juarez thought of the look in the man’s eye when Erin was speaking with him at the bar: the cruelty of his gaze; how intimately he took her in, as though imagining scenarios that made Juarez’s skin crawl just to think about.
“Where would he go?” he repeated.
The sheriff went to the map, ignoring the anger on Red’s face. “Most likely over here,” he said. “He likes to hunt over by the Waterway, here,” he said, pointing to a stretch of river approximately fifty miles south of them. “He’s been getting ready for bear season—getting the bait out there in a few spots he thinks nobody knows about. If he’s in the woods anywhere, that’s where he’ll be.”
Juarez put on his jacket. “Put out a BOLO for his truck,” he instructed the sheriff. “Do you have dogs who can search the area?”
The sheriff looked at Red. “You know if Jamie’s around?”
“She’s back at the base,” Red said. “I can give her a call, get her up here fast enough.”
“She has dogs?” Juarez asked.
“The best dogs in the country, according to just about every law enforcement agency out there,” the sheriff confirmed. “If that’s the route you want to take, Jamie’s the one to call.”
He hesitated for only a moment, thinking once more of the look on Will Rainier’s face when Erin confronted him.
“Call her,” he said. “I need to make a couple of phone calls. When the dogs are here and you have a search party organized, I’ll join you.”
He looked at the clock on the wall, silently calculating. If this was J. —the man who thrived on hunting young girls for days on end so many years ago—then chances were good that his methods may have evolved, but the essence of the crime would remain the same. Age would likely have slowed him down, but now he would have the benefit of experience on his side. With Diggs and Erin together, he would have two victims, but it wouldn’t be under the controlled circumstances he usually enjoyed. And Diggs was hardly his preferred prey.
Which meant J. would kill Diggs first, Juarez reasoned. Get rid of him entirely. He would keep Erin, taking her God only knew where, and seek another victim to join her later. For now, though, J. would have no interest in a man as a pawn in his game. Juarez imagined Erin out there: Possibly injured; certainly terrified. She and Diggs running for their lives in the depths of the wilderness, with no idea who was chasing them or what he had in store.
“We need to hurry,” he said, addressing everyone in the room. “They won’t last long out there.”
Chapter Sixteen
I don’t know how long we ran. I don’t know how far. I don’t even know where we went. All I know is that we ran. It was dark. There was no path. At some point, Diggs convinced me to circle back and we were at the river again, where we silently slogged through fast-moving water up to our knees, and sometimes deeper. Eventually, the world lightened as the sun started to rise. I was numb. Shivering. We were both stumbling by the time Diggs finally stopped and nodded toward the trees.
“According to the map, there should be some caves close by.” He checked his compass and looked off into the distance. All I saw was darkness and an endless expanse of trees, but I was hoping he had more vision than that. “We can’t stop before we get there,” he said regretfully. “If we do…”
I knew exactly what would happen if we stopped. “I know. Don’t worry about it—I’m fine. Let’s just go. I’m okay as long as you are.”
We didn’t talk much after that, too busy trying to forge our way through a wilderness that seemed intent on remaining unforged. We reached the cave just as the sun was coming up, casting the world around us in pale gold.
“You don’t think it would be better to stay by the river?” I whispered. The entrance to the cave was hidden beneath an overhang of not-terribly-solid-looking boulders, and it didn’t look like what I’d always known caves to be: dark and dank, sure, but still reasonably maneuverable when push came to shove.
The gaping fissure Diggs brought us to didn’t look remotely maneuverable in the best of circumstances.
“That’s what he’ll expect us to do,” Diggs said. “We’ve got enough water to get us through a day in here, and it’ll give us some time to regroup and get a few hours’ rest.”
“What if he knows about it?”
“There’s a long network of tunnels in here; not many people have been through the whole thing.” He tapped the map clutched in his left hand. “Let’s see your GPS get us through here.”
He pulled himself up the rock and into the tunnel. I watched as he was gradually swallowed by the earth, inch by inch.
I followed.
Once we got through the opening, I was surprised to find myself in what did look like a real, honest-to-god cave: a low, smooth ceiling and a wet floor, the sunlight just barely making it through the narrow entrance.
“It’ll be tight in places,” Diggs said over his shoulder.
“I know. I’ll be okay.”
“Your arm…” he began.
“I’m all right, Diggs. I can handle it.”
Within a few steps, we were plunged into a deeper kind of darkness than any I’d ever experienced before—an absence of light so profound that it felt like a physical presence. Diggs shined his flashlight along low walls and a low ceiling, stalactites hanging down far enough to brain us if we weren’t careful. I crept behind him until he found the first fissure.
“You’re sure that’s the way?” I asked as he approached the crevice.
“No,” he said. “But the map is pretty clear.” He pulled a coil of rope from his pack and tied a length around his waist, then repeated the process with me.
“So we don’t get separated,” he explained. “We won’t have far to go, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
“Agreed.”
“If you can keep your bad arm still, and just use the other hand and push off with your feet, that’ll make it easier.”
“I know.” He didn’t look convinced
. “I can do this, Diggs. I’ll be fine.”
The first leg of the journey was so narrow I had to push my pack ahead of me through fissures and winding crevices, pressed so tight against the rock that I could taste the damp limestone. I held my hand close to my body as much as possible, trying to avoid using it whenever I could. Because I was horizontal a lot of the time, crawling through the earth on my belly like some subterranean soldier, most of my weight rested on my broken wrist. A couple of times, the pain got bad enough that I had to stop and pull myself together, sure I was about to either pass out or lose my lunch. I didn’t say a word, though. We were there because of me—I wasn’t blind to that fact. As far as I was concerned, Diggs had every right to try and get as far from me as possible, and never look back.
I had no right to complain about anything.
We continued on for maybe twenty minutes. Maybe two hours. Time had become a useless construct—all that existed was darkness and pain and the knowledge of the monster on our heels. Diggs’ presence up ahead was detectable only through the occasional whisper back to me, accompanied by a tug on the rope. Otherwise, it felt like the entire world had vanished without a trace.
With the notable lack of sights and sounds, everything filtered down to my remaining senses: the feel of my body pressed to the cool rock; the smell and the taste of damp earth and crumbling limestone. At a particularly tight pass, Diggs whispered back to me.
“Hang on. I don’t know if I can get through here.” His voice was tight, something that sounded a lot like panic just under the surface. I forced myself to take as deep a breath as possible.
“Do you want me to go back?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. His breathing was labored. Now that I wasn’t moving, just lying still and belly-down between a rock and a hard place, I could hear movement in the tunnel behind us—a slither and drag that made my heart speed up and my stomach bottom out. I wet my parched lips and closed my eyes. The sound wasn’t heavy enough to be a person. A snake, then? Spiders? What the hell else gravitated to a netherworld like this?