by Jen Blood
And now here she was.
She hadn’t been buried, which was surprising considering the killer’s usual M.O. The way she’d been wrapped in the sheet suggested, once again, that J. had some respect for the dead. From the admittedly cursory exam Juarez had done, it didn’t appear she had struggled while being strangled; there were no immediately obvious bruises or lacerations like the other victims, so it didn’t even appear she had been tortured beforehand. She seemed utterly at peace.
He thought of Lucia—something he did frequently at crime scenes. Lucia had not been at peace. The energy here felt much different than that Guatemalan jungle had, but it still was not a place he’d willingly stay for long. He paced the clearing again, his eyes on the ground this time, and tried to push any dark thoughts aside. The spirits were restless here; he felt them reaching up from the ground with bony fingers, heard them whispering in low voices of their sad endings. If Erin knew the tumult of his subconscious, Juarez thought ruefully, he was certain she would run for the hills.
And perhaps she should.
He stopped at the center of the circle and turned the full three hundred and sixty degrees, trying to imagine the killer. What would he be thinking? Why carve the J. on his victims’ chests? When one marked something with one’s initials, it denoted property. This is mine—no one else’s. If it wasn’t an initial, however, it could be a message to others meant to say something about the victims. But then, why not just write the word out?
No… It had to be an initial.
The clearing got very quiet suddenly, as though all the voices of the forest—in this world and beyond—had been hushed. The bony fingers of the afterlife vanished. In their place was a familiar, much more tangible force. Behind him, he heard rustling in the undergrowth.
Juarez turned, expecting to see a deer, or possibly a coyote or a fox—it was that kind of an energy. Someone accustomed to travel in darkness, skirting in the shadows. Instead of a wild thing, however, a tall, lean, bearded man peered out from the trees. Juarez stood perfectly still. The man stared at him with clear, serious eyes. Years had passed since his last photo, but Juarez recognized him regardless.
“Jeff?” he said, as quietly as if it actually had been an animal that he’d heard.
The man didn’t move. He held something in his hands, out in front of his body but too shrouded in darkness for Juarez to make out.
“I’d like to talk to you about what’s been going on out here all these years,” Juarez said, his tone still gentling. “I don’t believe you did these things; murdered these girls. Other people may, but I have a feeling they’re wrong. Your daughter doesn’t believe it, either. I know she’d like to see you.”
Erin’s father took a step forward. He looked solid and well cared for, not at all the shadow Juarez had imagined. When he emerged from the trees, Juarez could finally make out what it was that he held in his hands:
A belt.
Juarez’s certainty wavered.
“Stay right there, if you would,” he said. He kept his tone as conversational as possible. “If you could just drop that belt…”
The man did as directed. They were still dueling distance from one another—perhaps fifteen, twenty strides.
“Good,” Juarez said. “Thank you, Jeff.”
“I don’t go by that anymore,” the man said. His voice was quiet, almost musical in cadence. “I haven’t gone by that for a very long time.”
Someone was coming up the path toward them—probably the deputy coming to keep watch. Juarez resisted the urge to turn and see who it was; maybe signal them back, even.
“What would you like me to call you?” he asked, trying to cover the noise in the brush with his own voice.
The man wasn’t fooled—he tilted his head slightly, listening to the approaching footsteps. Juarez could see his body tense as he weighed his options. “You can call me Adam,” he said. “I need to go now. Please don’t tell Erin you saw me… Not until this is over.”
“Wait,” Juarez said quickly. He eased his hand toward his gun. “I’d like your help. Do you know who did this?”
“I can’t help you,” Adam said, just as quickly. He took a step backward, edging toward the trees once more. “When I help, people die. En masse.” He followed Juarez’s movement knowingly, nodding his head toward the gun still in its holster. “Please don’t do that; if you bring me in, I’ll be dead within the hour. I’ll stop this myself. I should have done it years ago. You just keep my daughter safe.”
Juarez drew his gun just as the deputy emerged from the path, turning to wave the officer back where he’d come from. In the same instant, his phone rang. When he turned back, Adam was gone—vanished like a ghost in the moonlit night. Juarez ignored the deputy, palming his gun in his left hand as he checked the phone with his right. The number on the display belonged to Erin. He made a snap decision and answered the phone as he was headed into the woods after Adam, his heart pounding.
“Where the hell are you?” he demanded.
All he got was static on the other end of the line. He stopped running a few feet in and swept his flashlight through the trees, searching for some indication of where Adam may have gone. There was nothing. He returned his attention to the phone call.
“Erin?” he asked again, his anxiety ratcheting higher at the lack of response. There was static on the other end of the line, punctuated by a couple of barely decipherable phrases.
“Erin? I can’t hear you. Where are you?”
All he got was white noise before he heard Diggs shout something in the background. Erin screamed, and Juarez lost the signal. He called back immediately, but got a message saying the user was out of range. He’d gone cold.
“Trouble?” The deputy asked with obvious concern, when Juarez had returned to the clearing.
He took a moment to order his thoughts. “I think so,” he said. He picked up the belt Adam had dropped and deposited it in an evidence bag. This was the point when he should be reporting to someone what he’d seen: Jeff Lincoln, in these very woods. Holding the belt that had killed Bonnie Saucier. It didn’t really get any clearer than that.
If you bring me in, I’ll be dead within the hour.
He thought of Matt Perkins, the closest thing he’d ever had to a father, dying in his arms. The church on Payson Isle. Jane Bellows. Noel Hammond. Joe and Rebecca Ashmont. And now these girls…
There seemed no end to the bodies in Jeff Lincoln/Adam Solomon’s wake. “I need to get the park service and some officers out here,” he said finally. “I just spotted Jeff Lincoln.”
The deputy couldn’t have looked more alarmed if Juarez had said he spotted Satan himself. “Where did he go?”
Juarez shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s why we need the team.” He thought of Erin’s voice on the phone. Adam’s words: Just keep my daughter safe. Diggs’ panicked shout echoed in his mind.
He dialed her again, but hung up in frustration when he got the same message saying she was out of range. When he called Diggs, he got the same result.
“Agent?” the deputy prompted.
Juarez hung up his phone and focused on the deputy. Every cell in his body was screaming to get out of there; go find Erin. He ordered himself to stay calm. Do his job. “I don’t think he’s coming back here,” he said. “But I don’t want you alone out here, all right? Two guards on duty at all times throughout the night.”
“You think we’re in danger?”
Juarez shook his head as he headed back up the path toward the house, Erin’s desperate cry still ringing in his ears.
“I wish I knew.”
Chapter Fourteen
For two hours, Diggs and I ran north through thick brush and brambles. There were no trails but the ones we forged, no light but the moon overhead, no sounds but the wild ones that hadn’t been part of my world since I was a kid: bats and deer and frogs whose low warbling voices sounded creepily human in the stillness. Diggs wouldn’t let me stop, even to tend the gas
h in his leg, still oozing blood. I held my arm as close to my body as possible, trying not to jar it—something that’s technically impossible when you’re running for your life in the dark woods, incidentally.
We stopped when he tripped on a root and lay gasping on the forest floor. I knelt beside him.
“I think this is the part where I tell you to go on without me,” he said. “Save yourself.” We’d been moving too fast for me to get a good look at the cut in his temple. Now that I had, my stomach turned. I shook my head.
“We’re not there yet,” I said. “I’ll let you know. We need to find a place to stop, though.”
“I know,” he agreed. He held up his hand to let me know he needed a second. He crawled away a few feet. I closed my eyes while he puked in the bushes, then stood and limped back to me. I handed him the water. He took a single gulp before he handed it back.
“You can have more,” I said.
“Not ‘til we get to the river.”
Based on sound alone, it couldn’t be far—somewhere to our right I heard rushing water. “How far behind us do you think he is?”
Diggs shrugged. He was leaning against a birch tree, his head resting against the trunk. I didn’t like the way his eyes looked: glassy, the pupils too large. I touched his forehead.
“You think you can make it a little longer?”
“I should be asking you that,” he said, nodding toward my mangled wrist. “What about your hand?”
“It’s fine,” I lied.
“It’s broken.”
I glanced at it, bent at a weird angle and already about twice its normal size. So much for the stiff upper lip. “Well... Yeah, I think so. But other than that, it’s fine.”
He shook his head. “Sure. Other than that.” He took a SAM splint—a roll of soft aluminum I’d seen my mother use innumerable times when she was doctoring the locals of Littlehope—from his bag, then started to shape the splint.
“A T-curve would probably be better out here,” I said.
He glared at me. I shut up.
He silently unrolled the aluminum, folded it over itself, strengthened it with a series of strategically placed curves, and then molded it to his own wrist. Then, he gently eased my wrist into the finished split and secured it with a waterproof wrap. Even with that small amount of movement, the pain rocked me to the bone. The world swam. Diggs held my other hand, searching my face.
“You still with me?”
I pushed past the pain and nodded, resolute. “I’m okay. We need to get moving again.”
“Just tell me if it gets too bad, or you don’t think you can keep going.”
I didn’t know what he planned to do if that happened, but I assured him I would. Behind us, a branch snapped.
We ran.
◊◊◊◊◊
Half an hour later, we found the river. The water was ice cold and running fast, the rocks slick under our feet. I wanted to stop to check Diggs out, but he insisted we keep moving. We waded in the shallows because it was easier to avoid leaving a trail behind us for J. to follow, but that meant we were more exposed than we would have been traveling in the woods, and progress was slower because now we were battling injuries, fatigue, and the current. Diggs walked behind me the whole way—picking me up when I stumbled, pushing me onward when I slowed. We didn’t talk. Diggs had his compass and seemed to have a destination—something I was admittedly lacking. I let him lead for a change, and kept my mouth shut.
I don’t know how long we’d been moving when we reached a section of the river where the water moved slower and the moonlight shone pure white on the surface. However long it had been, we’d heard no sign of someone behind us—no snapping branches, no rustling through the brush… Nothing. Diggs and I had both slowed, and two or three times when I looked over my shoulder, it seemed he was having trouble keeping up. I stopped beside a fallen tree where the water was shallow and we were more concealed than we had been.
“I want to take a look at your head,” I said to Diggs when he caught up. “Have a seat.”
“We don’t have time.”
“If you drop dead from blood loss or shock, I’m thinking that’ll slow me down a lot more. Just sit.”
He sat. I searched through his industrial first aid kit until I found a cloth and soaked it with river water, then gently cleaned away the blood on his forehead.
“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
Juarez
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, he 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…”