by Jen Blood
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 fly by 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 fly-by 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 the hell 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 the hell were they?
Red Grivois arrived at the station at three-thirty. 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 he were 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 on the island,” 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 point 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 exactl
y 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?
“How are you doing?” I asked. I fought to keep my voice steady.
“I think I can make it. Just a second.”
I heard the shimmy and shudder of his body against the rock and then, finally, a tug on the rope at my waist.
“I’m through,” he said. There was no missing the relief in his voice. “It’s not much farther now. That should have been the tightest pass for now.”
For now.
I pulled myself forward with one arm and pushed with the toes of my sneakers hooked into every hold I could find, my mind still on the body slithering behind me. I kept moving.
Diggs was right: It wasn’t that much farther before I heard him whisper “Thank Christ,” and then call back to me. “We’re here, Sol. Just a few more feet.”
He was waiting for me at the mouth of the crevice, his hair and clothes caked with dirt. I took the hand he offered and half-stepped, half-tumbled from the crevice into a larger cavern just barely illuminated by the pale beam of his flashlight.
I sat on the hard ground and closed my eyes, able to take my first real breath since we’d started inside the cave. Diggs sank down beside me.
“You okay?”
I leaned against him and nodded. I’d never wanted sleep so badly in my life. That would have to wait, though.
“How’s your leg?” I asked.
He just grunted.
I took the first aid kit from his bag and eyed the bandage around his thigh, now stiff with dirt and blood.
“I need to wash that out again,” I said. “And get a clean dressing on it.”
He didn’t even open his eyes. “Try not to use much—I don’t have a lifetime supply in there. Otherwise, have at it. Just let me know if you’re gonna need to amputate.”
I pushed the leg of his shorts up as far as it would go, and gently unwound the bandage. When I’d finished washing and re-dressing the gash—not quite so deep as I’d thought, but already showing signs of infection—I patted his knee.
“Looks like you’ll be able to keep it. At least for now.”
“Thanks.” He opened his eyes. They were a startling blue in the darkness. “Your turn next, right?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to take a look anyway.”
We swapped places, and I sat in the darkness while he checked my fingers to make sure blood was still circulating. Even that small amount of jostling turned my stomach inside out.
“There’s a lot of swelling,” he said. “How are you feeling otherwise? Chills, nausea… Think you might pass out?”
“We were in a car crash a few hours ago, and there’s a psychotic killer on our heels. You’re telling me you don’t feel a little off?”
“I’m just worried about—”
“Shock,” I finished for him. “I know. I’m fine.”
He got out a Power Bar that we shared, and three ibuprofen for me. We washed everything down with lukewarm water.
“Is there anything you don’t have in that kit of yours?” I asked.
“When your ten-year-old brother dies in your arms because you don’t have a clue what to do to save him, you tend to start over-thinking the old emergency kit.”
“I
guess you would,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even think about that.”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. It is what it is.”
We were both quiet for a few seconds, locked in our separate—no doubt equally dark—thoughts.
“I’m sorry about this, too,” I said, finally. “About putting you in this position.” It wasn’t the kind of admission that came easy to me—I felt inexcusably bitter for having to say the words at all. Whatever I’d hoped to do differently growing up, whoever I’d hoped to become, hardly mattered now; I was officially my mother’s daughter. I couldn’t even say ‘I’m sorry’ without getting pissed off at the universe for putting me in that position. Diggs didn’t say anything for a long, long time. Decades passed. Mountains crumbled. Finally, he cleared his throat.
“I can’t pretend it’s no big deal this time,” he said quietly. He ran a hand through his hair. His eyes were shadowed in the scant light of the flashlight between us. “You push and you push and it’s like you don’t care about anyone—”
“I do, though.” I interrupted him, swallowing past the boulder lodged in my throat. “I care about you. I’ve always cared about you. I just didn’t think—”
“And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it?” he asked. His voice was strained, like it was an effort to keep from screaming bloody murder. Not that I could blame him. “You don’t think. You never think. Your mother almost dies trying to protect you from some secret monster who’s apparently had your number since birth, and you don’t even think to call her afterward. Don’t imagine that things may have changed for her. We go to Washington and you wander around hand-in-hand with another man for three days, and you don’t think at that point I might decide I missed my shot. You leave town without a word. Don’t call. Don’t visit. And you don’t think I might move on? And then this…” He stood and walked away.
I sat there in the failing light, cold and alone. “Where are you going?” I asked.