THEY PAUSED TO

take a compass reading, as they’d been doing every quarter mile or so.

The routine was that Brynn and Michelle would kneel down, rest the alcohol bottle on its side and tease their magnetic vessel into the center of its tiny ocean, where it would nose out north for them. The compass was a lifesaver. Brynn was astonished at how easily they would start to veer in the wrong direction, though she’d been absolutely convinced they were on course.

Michelle asked, “How did you know how to make that?” Nodding at the compass as Brynn slipped it back into her pocket. “You have children? A school project?”

“A course I took through the State Police. But I do have a son.” She tried to imagine skateboarding fiend Joey sitting still long enough for a science fair project. The idea was amusing.

“How old is he?” Michelle was suddenly animated.

“Twelve.”

“I love children,” she said. Then she smiled. “What’s his name?”

“Joseph.”

“Biblical.”

“I guess so. We named him after his father’s uncle.”

“Is he a good boy?”

“He sure is.” Hesitated. “Though he gets into things sometimes.” She told Michelle about the skateboarding incident today, some of his scrapes at school. The woman listened with interest—and sympathy. Brynn asked, “You and your husband have kids?”

Michelle glanced at her. “Not yet. We lead pretty busy lifestyles.”

“And you’re an actress, you were saying?”

A shy smile. “Just little things now. TV commercials, community theater. But I’m going to get into Second City. The improv comedy troupe. I’ve had a couple of callbacks. And I’m auditioning for the touring company of Wicked.”

Brynn listened attentively as the young woman told her about some parts she was pursuing. Brynn’s opinion, though, was that she was a dilettante. It sounded like she jumped from medium to medium, hoping to find one she was talented at. Or one that was easier than others. She wasn’t surprised to learn that Michelle also tried her hand at writing plays, but had recently decided that independent films were the way to go. And was thinking of getting a job in L.A. to meet people in the movie industry.

They were walking uphill now and, breathless, fell silent as they slogged their way over another quarter mile.

She’d thought they’d have come across the Joliet Trail by now. It couldn’t be that far away. But with all this dense brush, she had no realistic sense of how fast they were traveling. Like treading through water; a lot of effort didn’t lead to a long distance covered.

After fifteen minutes they paused in a clearing surrounded by briars to take another compass reading. The lighter flared and Brynn saw they were on track. “Okay, shut it out.”

According to the routine they’d fallen into, they now sat for a moment or two, eyes squeezed shut to help them adjust to the dark.

A snap sounded behind them.

Loud.

Michelle gasped.

Both women tensed, rising to a crouch from their knees. Brynn slipped the compass away and grabbed the spear.

Another snap and a rustle of footsteps.

Brynn squinted until her cheek screamed in pain. But she couldn’t see anything.

Was it the killers?

“What? Do you—?”

“Shhh.”

Something was moving, circling them. Then stopped. Moved again.

Snap…

Then it vanished.

A moment later, from their right, came another snap, a shuffle of leaves. They spun suddenly in that direction. Brynn could vaguely make out a shadowy form, rocking back and forth.

It wasn’t the men. In fact it wasn’t a human. Brynn observed that it was an animal, about the size of a German shepherd.

Brynn believed it was staring at them with shoulders tensed and hackles high.

Michelle gasped and gripped Brynn’s arm.

Was it a mountain lion? The last one in Wisconsin had reportedly been shot a hundred years ago. But every year there were supposed sightings. You’d see coyotes from time to time. They were timid, but rabid ones, their minds melting, had strolled right into tents and attacked campers. Lynx weren’t unheard of either.

But this seemed too big for that. She decided it was a gray wolf, which were being reintroduced into the state. She didn’t know if they’d attack humans but the eerie, probing face—almost human—was unsettling.

Had Michelle and Brynn come close to the creature’s lair? Were there pups to be protected? A crazed mother was the worst of enemies, Keith, an avid hunter, had told her.

A flash of anger burned within her. They didn’t need another enemy tonight. She gripped the spear firmly and stood up. She strode forward, between Michelle and the creature.

“What’re you doing? Don’t leave me.”

Brynn thought: Don’t hesitate. Keep going.

The animal’s head cocked and its eyes caught light from the lopped-off moon.

Brynn kept walking, moving faster, hunched over.

Still staring their way, the animal backed up then turned and receded into the night. Brynn stopped and returned to the young woman, who was staring at her. “Jesus,” Michelle said.

“It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t the animal she was referring to. “Are you all right?” she asked uncertainly.

“Me?” the deputy asked. “Sure. Why?”

“You were…you were making this noise. I thought you couldn’t breathe or something.”

“Noise?”

“Like, growling. It was scary.”

“Growling?” Brynn was aware of breathing hard, teeth set tightly together. She wasn’t aware that she’d made a noise.

Queen of the Jungle…

She gave an awkward laugh and they continued on. Their route led them into a ravine, the rocks and trees along the side ensnared with vines, and the floor covered with patches of poison ivy and vinca. Boggy pools too, surrounded by mushrooms and fungus. They pushed through it all, exhausted, and struggled up the other side, using saplings and sandstone outcroppings for hand-and footholds.

At the top they stumbled onto a trail.

It wasn’t wide—about four feet—and was overgrown from disuse during the winter months but it was heaven compared with what they’d been slogging through since fleeing the Feldmans’ house.

“Is this it?” Michelle asked.

They found their answer only thirty feet away, a large wooden sign:

 

PERKINSTOWN 64 MILES.
DULUTH, MN 187 MILES

 

CAMP RESPONSIBLY ON THE JOLIET TRAIL
ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES

 

“HOW MUCH TIME

do you think it bought us?” Lewis asked.

Referring to the conversation with Graham Boyd, Brynn’s husband.

“Hard to say.”

They’d come miles through the underbrush, adjusting their course occasionally after consulting the GPS, Google Earth and the paper map as they made their way north.

“So that was why you turned it on, her phone?”

“Right.” Though just after the conversation he’d removed the battery so the police couldn’t trace it. “I’ve been waiting for that. Wanted to hold out for as long as we could. Now we put him at ease. He’ll go to sleep and won’t worry until three or four when he wakes up in an empty bed. By then they’ll both be dead and buried.”

“He believed you?”

“Pretty sure.”

As they walked on, Hart was wondering about her husband, somebody married to a woman like Brynn…what would he be like? Low voice, seemed smart, well-spoken, wasn’t drunk. He wondered if the man’s words had contained clues that might help him find and kill her more efficiently.

Not really.

Still, he kept replaying the conversation. It fascinated him.

Two different last names. Didn’t surprise him that Brynn had kept her maiden name.

Graham…The man she slept with, the man she shared a life with. Unusual name. Where did it come from? Was he conservative, liberal? Religious? What did he do for a living? Hart was interested in the relief that had filled his voice. Something seemed a bit off about it. Hart didn’t know what to make of that. Yeah, relieved…but another emotion too.

He wished he’d gotten a better look at her in the Feldmans’ driveway. Pretty enough, he recalled. Brownish hair, pulled back. A nice figure. Hadn’t let herself go. Picturing her eyes. Brows furrowed as she registered his presence when he rose from the bushes.

Hart had killed six people. Three had looked at him as he did it. Seeing their eyes meant nothing to him. He didn’t prefer that they look away. He didn’t look away either. The only one who hadn’t cried was the one woman he’d killed, a drug dealer.

Yo, you gonna do this?

He hadn’t answered.

You and me, we work something out?

She’d stolen money, or hadn’t, skimmed the drugs, or hadn’t. Wasn’t Hart’s issue. He’d made an agreement with the man who wanted her dead. And so he, a craftsman, made her dead, staring into her face as he did so to make sure she wasn’t going to leap aside or pull a hidden weapon.

Brynn had looked him in the eye too as she fired.

A craftswoman.

“Hart?”

Lewis’s voice shook him out of his reflection. He tensed, looking around. “Yeah?”

“You’re a Milwaukee boy, I’m one too. How come we never worked together before?”

“Don’t know.”

“You work in the city much?”

“Not much, no. Safer that way.”

“Where you live?”

“South of town.”

“Toward Kenosha?”

“Not that far.”

“Lotta building going on in those parts.”

Lewis stopped suddenly. “Look up there, a post or something. A sign.”

“Where?”

“See it? On the right.”

They moved forward carefully, Hart putting aside his thoughts about Brynn with some reluctance, and stopped at the sign.

Hart consulted the GPS on his BlackBerry and the paper map.

“Which way’d those girls get?”

“Has to be to the right. That’s the ranger station, few miles away.”

Lewis looked up and down the trail, which, little traveled this time of year, was overgrown and tangled with branches and dotted with stubborn saplings rising through the sludge of leaves.

“What’s wrong?”

“You ask me, this ain’t no trail at all. It’s just less forest.”

Hart smiled at that. Which made Lewis smile too.

 

HERE THEY WERE,

two women moving relentlessly forward on a tourists’ trail. One with an inlaid rosewood cane, one with a matching spear. Bolos and knives in their pockets and grim faces both.

The trail reminded Brynn of the last time she’d been horseback riding—one spring several years ago. She’d loved cantering along the bridle path in some woods near Humboldt. Years ago, before she’d become a deputy, she’d been an amateur competitive jumper and loved the sport. In fact, it was at a competition that she’d seen an exhibition by some mounted police from Milwaukee. The eighteen-year-old had spent time talking to an officer, which had ignited a fascination, ironically, not in the art of dressage riding but in police work.

Which, a few years later, provided the same thrill she’d experienced hurtling over jumps atop a half ton of animal.

Now, she realized how much she missed riding and wondered if she’d ever have the chance to get back into the saddle.

As they continued along the trail they’d see poignant evidence that the park was usually a far more innocent place than tonight, signs dispensing bits of history and information. The most troubling dangers had to do with fires, steep drop-offs and ecological risks.

One tree—a massive oak—earned a sign all its own. Maybe the biggest or oldest (tourists loved their superlatives). Brynn, though, thought of it simply as a source of cover. Around here the trail wound through patches of bare fields, exposing them to pursuers. To move off the trail, into the lowland brush, though, would slow them down way too much.

The flying squirrels were plentiful and bats flitted by silently, owls noisier. Several times they’d hear a beat of wing and a final squeak from a predator’s successful strike.

Michelle kept up pretty well but Brynn was growing concerned about her. Her ankle wasn’t bad—from the job and from Joey’s many mishaps, she knew about serious injuries; when to dole out sympathy and when to call medics. Rather, it was the young woman’s resignation. She was lagging behind. Once, she paused and looked up a steep incline, grimaced.

“Let’s go,” Brynn urged.

“I need to rest.”

“Let’s cover a little more ground.” She smiled. “Let’s earn a break.”

“I’m tired now. I’m so tired. My blood sugar, I told you.” Then she gasped and jerked back as a small animal scampered past. “What was that?”

A vole or mouse, Brynn told her. “Harmless.”

“It could crawl up your pants.”

Not yours, Brynn thought, considering Michelle’s tight jeans.

The younger woman’s good mood from earlier had faded. She was like a child who’d missed her afternoon nap. Patiently Brynn said, “Come on, Michelle. The more we walk, the closer to getting back home. And we can’t stop here.” They were in a clearing, very visible in the moonlight.

Her lips tight, almost in a pout, she complied and they climbed the steep hill. At the top Brynn suddenly smelled rosemary and wanted to cry, thinking back to the Easter lamb she’d struggled to roast for her family just weeks ago.

They slipped through a copse of wiry trees, eerie, something out of Lord of the Rings.

Her face was now throbbing with every step. She touched her cheek and inhaled as the ache flowed through her head and neck. The swelling was worse. She wondered if the wound would get infected. Would there be terrible scarring? The thought of plastic surgery came to mind, and she actually smiled, thinking, You vain girl. Maybe you should concentrate on staying alive before you worry about making yourself presentable for the multiplex on Saturday night.

Graham had caught her once in the habit of stroking the dip in her crooked chin. She’d blushed and he’d smiled, then whispered, “It’s sexy. Don’t fret.”

She grew irritated at how persistently thoughts of her past kept intruding tonight. She hadn’t thought about Keith so much in years. And Graham and Joey kept making regular appearances—while her only goal was getting to safety.

Like that old cliché, memories flashing through her thoughts at the end of her life.

Damnit, concentrate.

They followed the trail around a bend to the left. Brynn looked back. A clear panorama was behind them and she could see, a hundred yards away, the crest of a rolling hill.

There was movement along it, going from tree to tree.

She gripped Michelle’s arm. “What’s that?”

It was as if a sniper were crawling into position to take a shot.

“Get down,” Brynn ordered. They both crouched. She surveyed the ridge and the trail. No clouds now and the half-moon cast light bright enough to shoot by. At this distance they were probably safe from a shotgun but Hart had fired at her with a Glock. A 9mm slug could easily make it here, and he obviously was skilled.

She squinted at the ridge.

Then she laughed. “It’s just our friend.” She pointed, standing up. “Or maybe one of his friends.”

The pursuer was of the four-legged variety, loping from tree to tree. The gray wolf, she assumed. They usually hung in packs, Brynn believed. But this one was clearly solo. Was he following them? Maybe her growl hadn’t scared him off completely.

Then the creature stiffened, looked back. Was gone in a fraction of a second.

“You see that? Like he vanished…” Brynn’s smile faded. “No…Oh, no!”

In the distance two men were moving quickly along the Joliet Trail, headed in their direction. A half mile away, moving doggedly. No doubt that they were Hart and his partner; one carried a shotgun. The men disappeared, where the trail dipped beneath the cover of trees.

“No!”

“It’s them,” Michelle whispered. “How did they find us?”

“Bad luck. There were a dozen ways we could’ve gone. They gambled and won. Come on. Move!” The women began jogging, and hobbling, as quickly as they could, their breath coming fast.

Go, go, go…

“I didn’t think they’d really follow us,” Michelle’s rasping voice whimpered. It was a pathetic sound. “Why?”

Hart, Brynn thought. The answer is Hart.

The trail turned to the right, due east, and when they broke from the trees the ground opened up with a moonlit view of rocky terrain: tall hills rising above the path and deep ravines falling away below. Gashes in the trees revealed rugged sandstone bluffs.

“Look. There.”

They saw an intersection. Another path, narrower than the Joliet, branched off to the left and rose up a hillside, skirting a steep cliff into a dim valley. Brynn motioned her companion along. Michelle followed, glancing back from time to time, her hand in her jacket, where the Chicago Cutlery knife rested in her waistband. She seemed to find solace in making sure the weapon hadn’t vanished.

At the juncture they paused. There was an open shelter with a bench—no phone, Brynn noted immediately. A trash can, which was empty. The area was trampled down, courtesy of a hard Wisconsin winter. The Joliet Trail continued on into the inky night, descending to the right—northeast. The small path was marked with a sign.

 

APEX LAKE 1.1 MILES.
TRAPPER GROVE 1.9 MILES.
UMSTEAD RANGER STATION 2.2 MILES.

 

Brynn walked to the fence marking the edge of the cliff and looked into the valley. She pointed to the left. “Down there. Can you see it? That building? It’s the ranger station.”

“Oh. Way over there. I don’t see any lights.”

“No, I’m sure it’s closed.”

The place was less than a mile away—as the crow flew—through a deep valley, though hiking via this path would take them on a much longer trip: more than two miles, according to the sign. The path would meander, leading to Apex Lake, the grove and finally to the station.

Brynn had a vague memory of the station, which had served as a staging area for one of the searches she’d been on. It had been closed then too—the time of year was winter—but she could picture it clearly.

“I remember phones there. But I don’t know if they’re working now. And a gun cabinet, I think. But we can’t take the path.” Nodding toward the sign. “It’s too long. We’d never make it in time.”

“They might not go that way. Just keep going on the Joliet Trail.”

Brynn considered. “I think they’d be inclined to figure that we headed for the station.” She was staring at the dark void beyond the cliff and stepped even closer to the edge. She paused by a Danger sign. Looked down.

Climb it, or not?

Whatever they did they’d have to choose soon. The men could be here in ten or fifteen minutes.

“Is it straight down?” Michelle asked.

Still gazing down into the murkiness, Brynn saw a narrow ledge maybe twenty feet below them; below that the cliff face descended for another fifty or sixty feet.

Brynn whispered, “I think it’s climbable. Tough, but it can be done.”

If they could make it to the forest floor they’d have an easy direct walk to the ranger station.

The odds of a working phone and gun and ammunition?

Brynn couldn’t say. A roll of the dice.

She decided that breaking in wouldn’t be a problem. If they could get to the building, even the strongest lock in the world wouldn’t keep her out.

“I hate heights,” Michelle whispered.

I’m with you there, baby….

“Are we going to try it?” the young woman asked in a shaky voice.

Brynn grabbed a birch sapling and leaned out into space, studying the rocks below.

 

THEY’D MANAGED A

fast walk, breaking into a jog occasionally.

Lewis pulled up, gripping his side. He leaned against a tree.

“You all right?”

“Yeah. I quit smoking last week.” He inhaled deeply. “Well, pretty much a month ago but I had one last week. Then stopped for good. But it catches up with you. You smoke?”

Wincing at a pang from his shot arm, Hart kept looking from side to side. “Nope.” He’d grown convinced that the women weren’t armed but he didn’t like that damn dog or wolf or whatever it was nosing around. People were predictable. He’d made a study of human nature in the extremes and he was comfortable taking them on, however dangerous they were. Animals, though, operated with a different mind-set. He recalled the paw print near the Feldman house.

This is my world. You don’t belong here. You’ll see things that aren’t there and miss things that’re coming up right behind you.

But then he inhaled hard and leaned against another tree. The men’s eyes met and they shared a smile. Hart said, “I haven’t run like this in years. I thought I was in shape. Man.”

“You work out?”

He did, regularly—his line of work required strength and stamina—but it was mostly weight-lifting, not aerobic. That wouldn’t’ve been helpful; Hart rarely chased anyone, and he didn’t think he’d ever run from anybody, not once in his life. He told Lewis, “I don’t do much jogging.”

“Nope. Health clubs don’t figure much in the Lewis family. But I work construction some. Was working for Gaston on that tower near the lake.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Gaston Construction? The big tower? Other side of the expressway. The glass is up now. I hired out with the concrete sub. That’ll keep you in shape. You handy?”

Hart said, “Some. I’ve done plumbing. No patience for painting. And electricity I stay away from.”

“I hear that.”

“Carpentry’s my favorite.”

“Framing?”

“More furniture,” Hart explained.

“You make furniture?”

“Simple things.”

Measure twice, cut once….

“Like tables and chairs?”

“Yeah. Cabinets. It’s relaxing.”

Lewis said, “I built my grandmother a bed once.”

“A bed? Come on, let’s keep going.” They started walking again. “How’d you happen to build her a bed?”

Lewis explained, “She started going crazy, getting older. Maybe that Alzheimer’s thing, I don’t know. Or maybe she just got old. She’d walk around the house singing Christmas carols all year round. All the time. And she’d start putting up decorations and my mother’d take them down and then she’d be putting them up again.”

Hart picked up the pace.

“So she’s pretty flaky. And she starts looking for her bed. The bed she had with my grandfather. It musta got thrown out years ago. But she thought it was somewhere in the house. Walking all over the place trying to find it. I felt bad for her. So I found some pictures of it and made her one. Wasn’t all that good but it looked close enough. I think it gave her a good couple of months. I don’t know.”

Hart said, “Like ‘making’ a bed. Only you really did make one, not with sheets and blankets.”

“Yeah, I guess I did.” He gave a laugh.

“Why’re you in this line, Comp? You could be making union scale.”

“Oh, I’m in it for the money. How can you score big at sweat labor?”

“You score big doing this?”

“I score bigger. Now my mother’s in a home too. And my brothers, they contribute. I can’t do less than them.”

Hart felt Lewis’s eyes on him, like he wanted to ask about his family but remembered the story about the brother and the parents being dead.

“Anyway, I’m good at this. What I do. Hell, you heard my rep. You checked, right? People vouched for me.”

“They did. That’s why I called you.”

“Banks, payroll offices. Collection work, protection…I’ve got a talent for it. I got contacts all over the lakefront. How ’bout you, Hart? Why’re you in this fucked-up business?”

He shrugged. “I don’t do well working for other people. And I don’t do well sitting. I do well doing. Got that itchy gene.”

It suits me….

Lewis looked around. “You think they’re hiding?”

Hart wasn’t sure. But he didn’t think so. He had a feeling that Brynn was somehow like him. And he would rather move any day, keep moving, however dangerous it was. Anything rather than hiding. But he didn’t tell Lewis this. “No, I don’t. They’ll keep going. Besides, I saw some patches of mud back there. Prints in them.”

Lewis gave a crisp laugh. The sound had irritated Hart at first. Now he didn’t mind so much. The man said, “You’re the last of the Mohicans. That movie rocked…. You hunt, I’ll bet.”

Hart said, “Nope. Never been.”

“Bullshit. Really?”

“Truth. You?”

Lewis said he hadn’t for a while but he used to. A lot. He liked it. “I think you would too. You seem like you know your way around here.”

“This isn’t the North Woods. That’d be different. We’re in Wisconsin. A state park. Just using logic.”

“Naw, I think you’re a natural.”

Hart was about to ask, “Natural what?” But froze. A shout, a woman’s voice, came to them on the wind. A shout for help. She was trying to keep it quiet, he got the impression, but he heard alarm, if not desperation. It was in the distance but not too far, maybe a quarter, a half mile up the Joliet Trail, the direction they were headed.

Another call, the words ambiguous.

“Same person calling?” Hart asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s go.”

Staying low, they moved forward as quickly as they dared.

“Keep a lookout. I don’t trust her. One of ’em screamed fake before, at the lake, don’t forget. Maybe they’re trying to sucker us in, wanting a fight. Maybe no guns. But they’ve got knives.”

Ten minutes later the men, keeping low and scanning the greenery around them, paused. Ahead of them the trail broadened and a smaller trail branched off to the left. The intersection was marked by a wooden sign, visible in the moonlight. An arrow pointed out a path that Hart had seen on GPS. It went west and north and, after circling a small lake, ended at a ranger station. From there a two-lane road led to the highway.

Hart gestured Lewis down into the bushes beside him. Scanning the surroundings. “You see anything?”

“Nope.”

Hart listened carefully. No more cries, no voices. Just the breeze, which hissed through the branches and made the leaves scuttle along like crabs.

Then Lewis touched his arm, pointed. Fifteen feet past the intersection was a dark wood fence with a sign that said, Danger. Black space behind it, where cliff dropped into ravine. “That tree there, Hart.”

“Where?” Finally he spotted it: A branch had broken off the tree beside the cliff. You could see the white wood below the bark.

“I don’t know if it’s a trick or not,” Hart whispered. “You go round there to the right. That bunch of bushes.”

“Got it.”

“I’m going to the edge and look around. I’ll be making some noise to give ’em a chance to make a move.”

“If I see anybody I’ll take her out. Shoot high, then low.” Lewis grinned. “And I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

For the first time that night Lewis looked confident. Hart, finally at ease with his partner on this difficult night, decided the man would do fine. “Go on. Stay clear of the leaves.”

Silently Lewis, crouching, crossed the path and slipped behind a stand of brush. When Hart saw he was in a good position to cover the area, he started forward, also low. Head swiveling back and forth.

He noticed in the distance, at the bottom of the ravine, what appeared to be the ranger station.

Holding his own weapon pointed forward, he moved to the sign. He examined the broken branch. Then peered over the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t see anyone. Took out his flashlight and shone it down into the night.

Jesus.

He stood, put the gun away. Called Lewis over.

“What is it?”

“Look. They tried to climb down. But it didn’t work.”

Peering over the edge of the cliff, they could see in the faint moonlight a ledge twenty feet below, at the bottom of a steep, rocky wall. One of the women, or maybe both, had fallen. On the ledge was a four-foot-long branch—the one that had broken off the tree beside them. And around it was a large smear of bright red blood, glistening under the flashlight.

“Man,” Lewis said, “she hit hard.” He tried to peer farther into the ravine. “Broke her leg, I’ll bet. Bleeding plenty.”

“They had to’ve kept going down. They couldn’t get back up, hurt like that. Or maybe there’s a cave. Behind the ledge. They’re trying to hide in.”

“Well, we gotta go after ’em,” Lewis announced. “Like hunting. You follow a wounded animal till you find it. No matter what. You want, I’ll go down first.”

Hart lifted an eyebrow. “Bit of a climb.”

“I told you—construction on the lakefront. Thirty stories up and I’m strolling around on the ironwork like it’s a sidewalk.”

 

NO. SOMETHING’S WRONG.

Graham Boyd rose from the couch, walked past Anna, who had switched from knitting to a large needlepoint sampler—the woman found peace and pleasure in transforming cloth of all kinds—and walked into the kitchen. His eyes glanced at a picture of his wife as a teenager, sitting atop the horse she’d later ride to win the Mid-Wisconsin Junior Horse Jumping Competition years ago. She was leaning down, her cheek against the horse’s neck, patting him, though her eyes were focused elsewhere, presumably on one of her competitors.

He found the county phone book and looked at the map. The nearest towns to Lake Mondac were Clausen and Point of Rocks. Clausen had a town magistrate’s office, Point of Rocks a public safety office. He tried the magistrate first. No answer, and the message referred callers to City Hall, which turned out to be just a voice mail. The public safety office in Point of Rocks was closed, and the outgoing message said that anyone with an emergency should call either the county sheriff’s office or the State Police.

“And thank you for calling,” it concluded politely. “Have a nice day.”

How can a fucking police department be closed?

He heard Joey’s bedroom door open and close. The toilet flushed.

A moment later: “When’s mom coming home?” The boy, still not in his pajamas, was at the top of the stairs.

“Soon.”

“You called her?”

“She’s busy. She can’t be disturbed. Put your pajamas on and go to bed. Lights out.”

The boy turned around. The bedroom door closed.

Graham thought that he heard the video game again. He wasn’t sure.

Anna asked, “Where is she? I’m worried, Graham.”

“I don’t know. That deputy I talked to said it was just routine. But it didn’t feel right.”

“How do you mean?”

“Her phone. Giving it to somebody else? No way.” He could talk to Anna without worrying that she’d become defensive. When it came to serious topics, he had trouble talking to Brynn and to her son—hell, that was tonight’s theme, apparently—but he could talk to his mother-in-law. “She’s too much of a control person for that.”

He had, however, pulled back from “control freak.”

Anna’s frown morphed into a smile, as if she’d caught on. “That’s my daughter. You’re right.”

Graham picked up the landline. Made a call.

“Deputy Munce.”

“Eric, it’s Graham.”

“Hey. What’s up?”

“The sheriff in?”

“Now? Nope. He goes home about six, seven most nights.”

“Look, Brynn went out on something tonight. Up at Lake Mondac.”

“Right. Heard about that.”

“Well, she’s not back yet.”

Silence. “Not back? Forty minutes from there to your place. You’re north of town. Forty minutes tops. I’ve drove it in a half hour.”

“I called and got some other deputy. Said there was a domestic. And that Brynn was handling it. Child Services or something.”

A pause. “That doesn’t sound familiar, Graham. Who were you talking to?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe Billings.”

“Well, that’s nobody from our office. Hold on….” Muted sounds of conversation.

Graham rubbed his eyes. Brynn had been up at five. He’d been up at five-thirty.

The deputy came back on. “All right, Graham. Story is the guy who made that nine-one-one call called back and said it was a mistake. Brynn was going to turn around. That was close to seven, seven-thirty.”

“I know. But this deputy said it wasn’t a mistake. It was some domestic dispute, and they wanted Brynn to handle it. Could she have run into some State Police up there, town cops?”

“Could happen but that’s not the sort of thing the troopers’d handle.”

Graham’s skin chilled at this. “Eric, something’s wrong.”

“Let me call the sheriff. He’ll get back to you.”

Graham hung up. He paced the kitchen. Surveyed the new tiles on the floor. Organized a stack of bills. Drew a line in the dust on top of the small, rabbit-ear TV. Listened to the computer game upstairs.

Goddamnit. Why wasn’t the boy listening to him? He decided to ban Joey from skateboards for the rest of the school year.

Anger or instinct?

The phone rang.

“’Lo?”

“Graham, it’s Tom Dahl. Eric just called. We checked with the State Police. Nobody got any calls up at Lake Mondac. Clausen, Point of Rocks, even as far as Henderson.”

Graham explained what he’d told Eric Munce, irritated that the man hadn’t filled the sheriff in. “The deputy was named Billings.”

Silence for a moment. “Billings’s the name of a road between Clausen and the state park.”

So it might’ve been fresh in the mind of somebody trying to make up a name. Graham’s hands were sweating.

“Her phone keeps going to voice mail again, Tom. I’m plenty worried.”

“What’s wrong?” a voice called. Joey’s.

Graham looked up. The boy was standing halfway down the stairs. He’d been listening. “What’s wrong with Mom?”

“Nothing. Go back to bed. Everything’ll be fine.”

“No. Something’s wrong.”

“Joey,” Graham snapped. “Now.”

Joey held his eye for a moment, the chill look sending a shiver through Graham’s back, then turned and stomped up the stairs.

Anna appeared in the door, glanced at Graham’s grimacing face. “What?” she whispered.

He shook his head, said, “I’m talking to the sheriff.” Then: “Tom, whatta we do?”

“I’ll send some people up there. Look, relax. Her car probably broke down and she hasn’t got cell phone reception.”

“Then who was Billings?”

Another pause. “We’ll get up there right away, Graham.”

 

GASPING, FACE DOTTED

with cold sweat, Michelle crouched, leaning against her pool cue cane, Brynn beside her. They were still on the Joliet Trail, hiding in a tangle of juniper and boxwood, which smelled to Brynn of urine.

They’d come a half mile from the cliff top intersection with the Danger sign and shelter, running as best they could the entire distance.

They now watched the beam from a flashlight, pointed downward, slowly sweeping the ledge and cliff face as Hart and his partner climbed down. They continued walking along the trail, moving quickly.

The men had bought the sham Brynn had orchestrated: the shouting, the broken branch, the blood—her own—spattered on the ledge. The men would continue to the bottom now, either on the cliff or the path around Apex Lake, and make for the ranger station. Which would give Brynn and Michelle an extra hour to get to safety before Hart and his partner realized that they’d been tricked.

In the end it hadn’t been Michelle’s fear of heights—or Brynn’s—that decided the matter. Brynn had concluded that even climbing down the cliff and hiking through the tangled brush in the ravine would take too much time. The men would have caught up with them before they were halfway to the ranger station. But the cliff was a good chance to mislead their pursuers. Brynn had broken the branch to make it look like an accident, then carefully climbed down the cliff to the ledge. There she’d taken a deep breath, and cut her scalp with the kitchen knife. As a deputy she knew a lot about head injuries, and that lacerations on the head didn’t hurt badly but bled copiously. (She knew this from Joey as much as from auto accident calls.) After smearing the blood on the stone, she’d climbed back up to the cliff top and they’d fled down the Joliet Trail.

She now looked back. The sweeping flashlight beam was still visible through the bones of trees. Then the path turned and the women lost sight of the killers.

“How does it feel?” Michelle nodded at Brynn’s head. She apparently thought Brynn had made her decision not to climb down the cliff face because of the young woman’s fear of heights. She glowed with gratitude. Brynn said it was fine.

Michelle began rambling, telling a story about how she’d been hit on the head by a schoolgirl on the playground, and had bled all over a new dress, which had upset her more than the fight. “Girls’re worse than boys.”

Brynn didn’t disagree. She did antigang campaigns at the high schools. Gangs…even in modest Humboldt.

An image of Joey, panting and bloody, after one of his fights at school also came to mind. She pushed it away.

Michelle kept up the manic banter and Brynn tuned her out. She paused and looked around. “I think we should go off the trail now, find the river.”

“We have to? We’re making good time.”

But the trail, Brynn told her, didn’t lead them anywhere except deeper into the woods. The closest town that way was fifteen miles.

“I need to use the compass.” She knelt to the side of the trail and set the alcohol bottle on the ground. With some prodding the needle finally swung north. “We go that way. It’s not far. A couple of miles, I’d guess. Probably less.” She put the bottle in her pocket.

They were on higher ground here and, looking back, they could still see a flashlight slowly probing for the pathway down the cliff face that would lead the killers into the valley and to the ranger station. They’d eventually learn that the women weren’t going that way but every minute they delayed on the cliff was a minute more Brynn and Michelle had to escape.

Brynn found a section of the woods that was less ensnarled than others and she stepped off the trail. Michelle, somber again, gazed at the rocky, boggy ground and started forward with a look of distaste, like a girl reluctantly climbing into her date’s filthy car.

 

THEY WERE DOING

eighty, without the light bar going or the throaty siren. Didn’t need them. There was hardly any traffic out here, this time of night. And none of the retrofit accessories in the Dodge would have any inhibiting effect on suicidal wildlife. Sheriff Tom Dahl’s feeling was that deer were born without brains.

He was sitting in the passenger seat and a young deputy, Peter Gibbs, was driving. Behind them was another car, Eric Munce at the wheel and, beside him, Howie Prescott, a massive, shaved-headed deputy who got good respect during traffic stops.

Dahl had called his deputies and found no shortage of volunteers to help find out what had happened to their colleague Brynn McKenzie. They all stood ready to go, but four, he figured, was plenty.

The sheriff was on the phone with an FBI agent in Milwaukee. His name was Brindle, which Dahl thought was a coloring of a horse or dog. The agent had been getting ready for bed but didn’t hesitate to help out. He sounded genuinely concerned.

The subject of the conversation was the woman lawyer, Emma Feldman.

“Well, Sheriff, started out as a little thing. She’s handling this corporate deal. She’s doing her homework and finds out that a lot of the companies on the lakefront have more than their fair share of documented aliens. Next thing a CI…that’s a—”

“Confidential informant?” Dahl asked, but Brindle missed the irony.

“Right. He says that Stanley Mankewitz, head of some local union, is selling forged green cards to illegals.”

“How much could he make doing that?”

“No, that’s not what it’s about. He doesn’t even charge ’em. What he does is gets them to guarantee that they’ll get jobs in open shops then unionize the workers. The union gets bigger, Mankewitz gets richer.”

Hmm, Dahl thought. Clever idea.

“That’s what we’re investigating right now.”

“And this Mankewitz? He done it?”

“Up in the air so far. He’s smart, he’s old school and he only hires people who keep their mouths shut. He’s a prick too, pardon my French, so, yeah, he did it. But the case’s weak. It takes just one witness having an accident or getting killed in a, quote, random house invasion and the whole case could fall apart.”

“And here she is, out in the wilderness, this lawyer. A lot of accidents could happen there.”

“Exactly. Milwaukee PD should’ve had somebody on her. They dropped the ball there.”

This was offered a little too fast, Dahl thought. The finger-pointing’d already started up, it seemed. Policing wasn’t much different in Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., or Kennesha County.

Dahl said, “Go faster.”

“What?” the FBI agent asked.

“I’m talking to the driver…. When my deputy’s husband called her phone, some man answered, claiming to be a deputy. Near as we can tell, there’re no troopers or neighboring law out there. None at all.”

“I see why you’re worried. Where is this happening?”

“Lake Mondac.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Next to Marquette State Park.”

“I’ll give my man a call who runs CI’s, see if there’s any word about somebody talking to a pro—hired killer.”

So that’s what he means by pro. Dahl was getting irritated. “That’d be much appreciated, Agent Brindle.”

“You want one of our people there, on the ground?”

“Not yet, I don’t think. Let’s see what’s going on first.”

“Okay. Well, call if you need to. We’ll be totally on board, Sheriff. This Mankewitz, he’s fucking around with illegals and Homeland Security and terrorist issues.”

Not to mention putting a poor family at risk, Dahl thought. Something else he refrained from saying. He thanked the agent and they hung up.

“How soon?” he muttered to the young deputy beside him.

“Half hour…”

“Well,” Dahl began impatiently, rubbing his scarred leg.

“I know, Sheriff,” Gibbs said. “But we’re doing eighty. Any faster and all it takes is one deer. And if it doesn’t kill us coming through the windshield, Eric’ll get us from behind. That boy really oughta back off a bit.”

 

THEY’D LEFT THE

Joliet Trail twenty minutes before, with Brynn deviating only when necessary—around thickets and brambles and beds of leaves that might cover trip holes and bogs. They headed up into the hills, steep ones, and already the incline was dramatic in some places. A slip could turn into a tumble down a hillside for many yards, over sharp rocks and through thornbushes.

The men would be at the bottom of the cliff by now. She hoped that, finding no bodies, they’d continue through the ravine to the ranger station. It could be forty minutes, an hour before they realized they’d been tricked and returned to the Joliet Trail to resume the hunt.

A brief pause for another compass reading. They’d remained largely on course, due north.

For the first time tonight Brynn was beginning to feel that she and Michelle might survive.

They’d be at the river soon. And then either a trek south along the bank to Point of Rocks or the shorter but arduous—and dangerous—climb up the gorge. She couldn’t get that image out of her head: the hiker who’d fallen and been impaled on the tree limb.

The recovery team had needed a chain saw to cut the body free. They’d had to stand around waiting for an hour for an officer to arrive with the tool.

Brynn squinted at a silver flash in the distance ahead of them. Was that the river?

No, just a narrow band of grass shining in the moonlight. Otherworldly. She wondered what kind it was. Graham could have told her in a heartbeat.

But she didn’t want to think about Graham.

Then she shivered at the sound of a howl behind them. A creature baying. Was it the wolf that seemed to be following them as persistently as the men?

Michelle looked back at the sound. She froze. And then she screamed.

“Michelle, no!” Brynn whispered harshly. “It’s just the—”

“Them, it’s them!” The young woman was pointing into the darkness.

What? What did she see? All Brynn was looking at were layers of shadow, some moving, some still. Smooth or textured.

“Where?”

“There! Him!”

Finally Brynn could see: a hundred feet away a man stood behind a bush.

No! They hadn’t believed the trick at the junction. Brynn gripped her spear. “Get down!”

But whatever’d been building within the young woman now exploded in rage and madness. “You fuckers!” she screamed. “I hate you!”

“No, Michelle. Please, be quiet. We have to run. Now!”

But the younger woman seemed transfixed, as if Brynn weren’t even present. She flung aside the pool cue steadying her and pulled out a pool ball bolo.

Brynn stepped forward, gripping Michelle’s leather jacket. But, her face a mask of fury, the woman shoved Brynn away, sending her slipping down an incline of slick leaves.

The bolo in one hand, the knife in the other, Michelle charged the man, moving fast despite her limp. “I hate you, I hate you!” she screamed.

“No, Michelle, no! They have guns!”

But she seemed deaf to the pleas. When she was thirty feet away from the man she flung the bolo, which flew in a fierce arc and nearly struck his head. He stood his ground—just as Brynn herself had back in the Feldmans’ driveway.

Undaunted, Michelle continued her charge.

Brynn debated. Should she follow? It’d be suicide….

Then decided: Oh, hell. She grimaced, rose to her feet and charged after the woman, trying to keep low. “Michelle, stop!” Any minute, the man would fire. It must’ve been Hart; he remained motionless, waiting for the perfect shot.

Michelle sprinted directly toward him.

The man couldn’t miss.

But no shots came.

Slowing to a stop, Brynn could see why. It wasn’t a person at all. What the crazed young woman had been attacking was just a weird configuration of tree trunk, broken about six feet up, the branches and leaves giving the impression of a human. It was like a scarecrow.

“I hate you!” the young woman’s shrill voice echoed.

“Michelle!”

Then, when she was ten feet away, Michelle apparently realized her mistake. She stopped, gasping for breath, staring at the trunk. She dropped to her knees, lowering her head, hands over her face, sobbing. An eerie keening came from her throat, both mournful and hopeless.

The horror of the evening finally poured out; the tears up until now had been tears of confusion and pain. This was a rupture of pure sorrow.

Brynn approached and then stopped. “Michelle, it’s okay. Let’s—”

Michelle’s voice rose to another wail. “Leave me alone!”

“Please. Shhhh, Michelle. Please be quiet…. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay! It’s not okay at all.”

“Let’s keep at it. We don’t have much farther to go.”

“I don’t care. You go on….”

A faint smile. “I’m not leaving you here.”

Michelle hugged herself, rocking back and forth.

Brynn crouched next to her. She understood that something else was going on within the young woman. “What is it?”

Michelle looked absently at the knife, slipped it back in the sock scabbard. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What?” Brynn persisted.

“It’s my fault they’re dead,” she whispered, her face miserable. “Steve and Emma. It’s my fault!”

“You, why?”

She snapped, “Because I’m a spoiled little brat. Oh, God…”

Brynn looked behind them. A few minutes. This was important, she sensed. They could afford a few minutes. The men were miles away. “Tell me.”

“My husband…” She cleared her throat. “My husband’s seeing somebody else.”

“What?”

A faint, pained smile and she managed to say, “He’s cheating on me. I said he’s on a business trip. He is, but he’s not going alone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“A girlfriend of mine works for the travel agency his company uses. I made her tell me. He’s going with somebody else.”

“Maybe it’s just somebody he works with.”

“No, it’s not. And they got one hotel room.”

Oh.

“I was so mad and so hurt. I couldn’t be alone this weekend! I just couldn’t be. I talked Emma and Steve into coming up here and bringing me along. I wanted to cry on their shoulders. I wanted them to tell me it’s not my fault. That he’s a bastard, that they would be my friends after the divorce and dump him…. And now they’re dead because I couldn’t act like a grown-up.”

“That’s hardly your fault.” Brynn looked back and saw no pursuers. Nor any sign of their mascot, the wolf. She put her arm around the young woman and helped her to her feet. “Let’s walk. Tell me while we walk.”

Michelle complied. They collected her pool cue and continued toward the river.

“How long’ve you been married?”

“Six years.” Her voice caught. “Michael was like my best friend. Everything seemed so fine. He was so laid-back, generous. He took really good care of me…. And you know what’s so messed up? That’s why I lost him—being a spoiled little girl.” She gave a sour laugh. “He’s a banker. He makes all this money. When we got married I quit my job. It’s not like he wanted me to or anything. It was my idea. It was, like, my chance to go to acting school.”

Michelle winced, stepping hard and apparently jarring her ankle. She continued, “I told you I was an actress…. Bullshit. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old acting student. And not a very good one. I was an extra in two local commercials. And Second City told me no. My life is lunch with my girlfriends, tennis, my health club, my spa. The only thing I’m good at is spending money, shopping and keeping myself in shape.”

To the tune of a svelte size 4, Brynn couldn’t help but observe.

“And I became…a nobody. Michael’d come home and I couldn’t even talk about the housework—because the maids had done it all. I got boring. He fell out of love with me.”

Part of a law enforcer’s job is to recognize the psychological issues at work within the people she meets professionally—the bystanders, witnesses and victims, in addition to the criminals. Brynn didn’t know that she had any particular insights but she told Michelle her honest assessment: “It’s not all your fault. It never is.”

“I’m such a loser….”

“No, you’re not.”

Brynn believed this. A little spoiled, true, a little too pampered, a little too much in love with money and the good life. In a curious way maybe this night was teaching her there was more within her than a rich-girl dilettante.

As for the other issue, the more important one, Brynn now put her arm around Michelle’s shoulders. “There’s one thing you have to understand. Whether you asked them here or not made no difference. Whoever killed Emma and Steve was a professional, hired to murder her. If it wasn’t tonight it would’ve been next week. You had nothing to do with that.”

“You think?”

“I do, yes.”

The girl wasn’t completely convinced. Brynn knew that guilt has a complex DNA; it doesn’t need to be purebred to be virulent. But Michelle seemed to take some comfort in Brynn’s words. “I just wish I could turn back the clock.”

Isn’t that a prayer for every day? Brynn thought.

Michelle sighed. “I’m sorry I lost it. I shouldn’t’ve screamed.”

“I don’t think we have to worry. They’re miles away, in the bottom of the ravine. They couldn’t hear a thing.”

 

GRAHAM BOYD WAS

pulled from his stew of thoughts about his wife when he heard the distinctive sound of the engine in his F150 start up.

“Somebody’s stealing the truck.” He stared at his mother-in-law and instinctively slapped his pants pocket, felt his set of keys.

How? he wondered. In the shows Anna watched, Matlock and Magnum, P.I., everybody was hot-wiring cars. He didn’t think you could anymore.

But when he saw the deadbolt on the kitchen door open and that the spare keys he kept on the hook were gone, he knew. “Jesus, not this. Not now.”

“I’ll call the sheriff,” Anna said.

“No,” Graham shouted. “It’s okay.”

He ran outside.

The truck was backing up against the gardening shed to turn around so the driver could head out, hood first, down the narrow driveway. It tapped into the corrugated metal with a loud bang. Not much damage, none to the truck. The driver slammed the transmission into drive.

Waving his hands like a traffic cop, Graham walked to the passenger window, which was open. Joey looked straight at him with a fierce expression.

Graham said, “Shut off the engine. Get out of the truck.”

“No.”

“Joey. Do it now. This minute.”

“You can’t make me. I’m going to look for Mom.”

“Out of the car. Now.”

“No.”

“There are people doing that. Tom Dahl, some deputies. She’ll be fine.”

“You keep saying that!” he shouted. “But how do you know?”

True, Graham thought.

He saw the boy’s edgy eyes, his firm grip on the wheel. He wasn’t short—his father was well over six feet—but he was skinny and looked tiny in the big seat.

“I’m going.” He still couldn’t make the turn down the driveway so he eased forward, tapped a trash can and backed up again, this time judging correctly; he stopped before he hit the shed. He straightened the wheels toward the road and put the truck in forward once more.

“Joey. No. We don’t even know where she is.” Saying this seemed like a retreat. He shouldn’t be arguing from logic. He was commander-in-chief.

Instinct, remember.

“Lake Mondac.”

“Shut the engine off. Get out of the truck.” Should he reach in for the keys? What if the boy’s foot slipped off the brake? One of Graham’s workers had been badly injured reaching into a moving truck, just like this, trying to grab the shifter when the driver forgot to engage it. Our bodies are no match for two tons of steel and detonating gasoline.

He glanced at the seat. Jesus. The boy had a pellet gun—Graham recognized the powerful break-action model. At close range it was as accurate as a .22, and as deadly to squirrels and river rats. Brynn had forbidden him to have weapons. Where had he gotten it? Stolen, Graham wondered.

“Joey! Now!” Graham snapped. “You can’t do anything. Your mother’ll be home soon. And she’d be furious if you weren’t here.”

Another retreat in the be-the-parent-in-control game.

“No, she won’t. Something’s wrong. I know something’s wrong.” The boy let up on the brake and the vehicle began to roll forward.

And, not even thinking, Graham ran in front of the vehicle and stood there, hands on the hood.

“Graham!” Anna called from the porch. “No. Don’t make a war out of it.”

And he thought, no, it’s time somebody did make it a war.

“Get out of that truck!”

“I’m going to find Mom!”

The only thing keeping him alive was a twelve-year-old’s untied running shoe on the pedal of brakes that had needed servicing for a year. “No, you’re not. Shut the engine off, Joey. I’m not going to tell you again.” When Graham was a child, that was all his father had needed to say to get him to comply, though the offenses back then were things like failure to take out the trash or neglecting his homework.

“I’m going!”

The truck lurched forward a foot.

Graham gasped but didn’t move.

If you move, he told himself, you lose.

Though his mind was also running through the places he could leap if the boy floored the accelerator. He didn’t think he’d make it in time.

“You’re not going!” the boy raged. “Are you?”

He was inclined to say, It’s not our job to go. Let the police do their thing. They’re the experts. But instead he said calmly, “Get out of the truck.”

Aware that his instincts might be about to kill him.

“Are you going to go find her?” He muttered something else. Graham thought one word was “coward.”

“Joey.”

“Get out of the way!” the boy screamed. His eyes were wild.

For a moment—an eternal moment—Graham believed the boy was going to hit the gas.

Then Joey grimaced, looked down at the shifter and shoved it into park. He climbed out, reaching for the gun.

“No. Leave it.”

Graham walked up to the boy and put his arm around his shoulders. “Come on, Joey,” he said kindly. “Let’s get some—” The boy, who seemed furious at this defeat, shrugged the gesture off and stormed into the house, past his grandmother. Saying not a word.

 

AFTER A COMPASS

reading, the women continued through a portion of the park less entangled with shrubbery and ground cover than the area they’d left behind, around Lake Mondac. There were patches of clearing—grass and meadow. And, increasingly, imposing rock formations pushed up by glaciers millions of years ago.

They walked in silence now.

A quarter mile from the last compass check Brynn was about to ask Michelle how her ankle was feeling. Instead, she said, “My husband is too.”

Shocking herself.

Did I really say that? she wondered. My God, did I really?

Michelle glanced at her, frowning. “Your husband?”

“Just like yours.” Brynn inhaled the cold, fragrant air. “Graham’s having an affair.”

“Oh, God. I’m sorry. Are you separated? Getting a divorce?”

After a pause she said, “No. He doesn’t know I found out.”

Then she regretted speaking. This was absurd, Brynn thought. Just shut up and keep walking. But she wanted to tell the story. Desperately wanted to. Which was curious because she hadn’t shared it with anyone else. Not her mother, not her best friend Katie from the Fire Department or Kim from the parent-teacher organization.

In fact, she supposed it was significant that only here, in these extreme circumstances, with a complete stranger, could she talk about what had been tormenting her for months. Part of her hoped Michelle would respond with a few words of sympathy, that the subject would dwindle and they could get back to completing their trek. But the young woman responded with genuine interest: “Tell me. Please. What’s the story?”

Brynn arranged her thoughts. Finally she said, “I was married to a state trooper. Keith Marshall.” She glanced at Michelle to see if the name had registered.

It didn’t seem to. Brynn continued, “We met at a State Police training seminar in Madison.” She remembered seeing the tall, broad-shouldered man standing in front of the table that served as their desk.

Keith had glanced her way with a lingering gaze that confessed he certainly liked her looks; but she hadn’t really caught his interest until her turn to run a mock hostage negotiation, which the psychologist running the exercise said was perfect. What really got his attention, though, seemed to be the Glock field-stripping and reassembly test. She had her slide mounted and clip loaded while the runner-up was still struggling to get the locking block pin back into the frame.

“That’s pretty romantic,” Michelle offered.

What Brynn had thought too.

After the seminar they’d had coffee and discussed small-town policing, and small-town dating. He’d winced once and she’d asked if he was all right. Then he explained that he’d just gotten back from a medical; he’d been shot in a real hostage rescue, which nonetheless ended happily—for everybody but the hostage takers.

“The HT’s didn’t quite make it.”

Oh, that incident? she’d thought, recalling the bank robbery gone bad, two armed tweakers—meth heads—inside a branch of Piny Grove Savings with customers and employees. The windows were too thick for a safe sniper shot, so Keith had walked around the barricade and through the front door, holding his weapon at his side. Not even crouching to present a smaller target, he’d shot one in the head, took a round in the side and in the vest from the other one, then killed him too, through the kiosk he tried to hide behind.

The HTs didn’t quite make it.

Keith had recovered quickly from his minor injuries. He was reprimanded—it had to be done—for the Bruce Willis/ Clint Eastwood procedure. But nobody had treated his disobedience very seriously and, of course, the media had lapped it up like a kitten gorging on milk.

Brynn made him tell her the story in depth. She was fascinated. Too fascinated, she’d decided later, utterly won over by the tough, quiet man.

Their first date involved a horror movie, Mexican food and lengthy discussions of calibers, body armor and high-speed chases.

They were married eleven months after that.

“So you married a cowboy?”

Brynn nodded.

Michelle added with a grimace, “I married my father, my therapist says…. Anyway, what happened?”

Ah, what happened? Brynn managed to refrain from stroking her deformed jaw but couldn’t stop a compulsive memory: Keith, his face flipping instantly from rage to shock, stumbling back under the impact of the bullet, gripping his chest, as their brightly lit kitchen filled with the pungent smell of gun smoke from her service Glock.

“Brynn?” Michelle persisted softly. “What happened?”

Finally she whispered, “Things just didn’t work out…. So, there I was, single again. I had Joey and my job—my mother was living with us then, so there was a built-in babysitter. I loved work. Had no plans to get married again. But a couple years ago I met Graham. Bought some plants from his landscaping company. They didn’t work out too well and I came back for more. He told me what I was doing wrong and then asked me out. I said yes. He was funny, he was nice. He wanted children but his first wife hadn’t. We went out for a while. And I found it was really comfortable. He proposed. I accepted.”

“Comfortable’s nice.”

“Oh, real nice. No fights. Home every night.”

“But…?”

Now she was touching her jaw. She lowered her hand.

Brynn grimaced. “A little time goes by and suddenly I’m working more assignments, longer hours, tougher jobs. Lot of domestics. And when I wasn’t doing that I’d spend time with Joey…. He’d had some problems at school. That’s an issue, I don’t know if you heard? Children of law enforcers?”

Michelle shook her head.

“Statistically more behavior problems, psychological issues. Joey keeps getting into scrapes at school. And he can be a little reckless—he skateboards like a speed-demon. So I was focusing on my job and on Joey, and next thing I know Graham’s started going out to regular poker games.”

“But they weren’t really poker games.”

“Sometimes they were. But sometimes he wouldn’t go for the whole game. Sometimes he didn’t show up at all.”

One thing she didn’t share with Michelle was that when Tom Dahl asked her to drive to Lake Mondac earlier her first thought was: If I go, Graham can’t leave tonight. Can’t see her.

Thinking too: He didn’t answer his phone when she’d called from the car; had he gone anyway?

“You’re sure?” Michelle asked.

“Oh, there was an eyewitness. Saw them together.”

“Do you trust ’im?”

“Pretty much. It was me.” Brynn could picture the scene now. Outside of Humboldt. Driving in a detective’s car to a briefing on a meth lab situation. She’d seen Graham standing next to a blonde, tall, outside the Albemarle Motel. She was nodding, smiling. Brynn remembered it seemed like a nice smile. He was talking to her, head down, outside the motel, when he’d told Brynn that he was going to be twenty miles away on a job in Lancaster. At dinner that night he’d looked her in the eye and told her about the drive up to that idyllic vacation town, how the job had gone—offering a liar’s saturation bombing of too many details. Brynn knew all about that; she’d run plenty of traffic stops.

Seeing them at the motel, she’d wondered: Was it after or before they’d been to the room?

“What’d you say to him?”

“Nothing.”

“No?”

“I don’t know why exactly. Didn’t want to rock the boat for Joey. Splitting with Keith. Then another divorce. Couldn’t do that to him. And he’s such a good person, Graham is.”

“Aside from cheating,” Michelle said darkly.

Brynn smiled wanly. And echoed her earlier comment. “It’s not all his fault. Really…. I’m pretty good at being a deputy. I’m not so good at this family stuff.”

“I think people ought to take more than a blood test when they get married. There ought to be a two-day exam. Like the bar.”

Brynn felt like she was in a movie, a comedy in which two sisters separated young are reunited: one who’d gone to live the high life in the city, one off to the country. And then they find themselves going on some trip together and learning that at heart they’re virtually the same.

Michelle paused. Then pointed ahead and to the left. “Careful. There’s a steep drop-off that way.”

They steered the safer route. Brynn realized that for the first time that night Michelle was walking in the lead…and she was content to let her.

 

“THERE THEY ARE.”

Compton Lewis touched Hart’s good arm and pointed through a gap in the trees. Two, three hundred yards away they could just make out in the moonlight the backs of two figures dressed in dark clothes. One limping along, using what looked like a pool cue for a walking stick.

Hart nodded. His heart tapped faster, seeing their quarry in clear view at last, not quite in range but close. And completely unsuspecting.

The men began to move toward their targets.

The Trickster had been at work again.

As they’d stood at the top of the cliff, the bloody ledge below, Hart had been debating fiercely with himself: Had the women really tried to climb down the rock face and make for the ranger station?

Or had they continued along the Joliet Trail?

Finally he’d decided that Brynn was faking. If either one of them had actually fallen and been hurt she would’ve done whatever she could to hide the bloodstain with dirt or mud. Leaving it exposed was an attempt to fool them, get them to head to the station.

Hart had turned the trick against them, though. He wanted Brynn to think she’d been successful, lull them into slowing down and growing careless. He didn’t know for sure if they’d have any view of the cliff face, but in case they did, he’d decided to sacrifice one of the flashlights. He’d tied it to a rope made out of Lewis’s cut-up undershirt and dangled it from a branch. The wind eased it back and forth close to the ledge, giving the impression they were searching for a way to climb down to the forest floor and pursue the women to the station.

The craftsman had surveyed his handiwork and he was pleased.

Then he and Lewis had continued fast over the trail.

But as to where the women had actually gone—that was up for speculation. It was likely they’d continued on the trail, which according to the GPS kept northeast for a ways—through nearly fifteen miles of woods. They wouldn’t have gone that way. Somewhere north of here they’d have to make a decision: they could go left off the trail, west, bypass the ranger station and find the road that led eventually to the county highway. Or they might go north, aiming for the Snake River, which would lead them either west to the interstate or east to the town of Point of Rocks.

But thanks to the scream—the wailing voice a few minutes before—he knew that they were making for the river. The earlier shout—from the intersection by the shelter—had been faked, of course, like the screams when the men were shooting at the canoe. But the second howling was real, Hart knew, since the women believed the men had climbed down the cliff and were miles away.

Hart and Lewis had left the trail too and moved in the general direction of the sound, picking their way slowly to avoid noisy leaves and branches, as well as the knife-sharp thorns and the steep drop-offs.

As for where the women actually were in this mess of woods north of the trail, they couldn’t say—until they found a clue. Lewis stopped, pointing to something white, lying on the ground. Small but very bright in the sea of blacks.

They approached it very slowly. Hart didn’t think it was a trap—couldn’t imagine what it would be—but he didn’t trust anything about Brynn now.

The Trickster…

“Cover me. I’ll check it out. Don’t shoot unless I’m about to get shot or stuck. I don’t want to give us away.”

A nod.

Hart, crouching, moved in close until he was about three feet away from the object. It was a white tube about eighteen inches long and three inches wide. One end bulged out. He prodded the object with a branch. When nothing happened he looked around. Lewis was scanning the nearby scenery. He gave a thumbs-up to Hart.

The man bent down and picked it up. Lewis joined him.

“A sock with a billiard ball inside.”

“That was theirs?”

“Has to be. It’s clean and dry.”

“Shit. One of ’em was going to use that to clobber us. Man, that’d break some bone.”

Brynn, Hart thought.

“What’s that?” Lewis asked.

Hart looked at him, eyebrow raised.

“What’d you say? I missed it.”

“Nothing. Didn’t say a thing.” Had he said her name aloud?

They’d continued straight, going almost due north, just now their prey had come into view.

They were directly behind the women on a relatively flat stretch of forest, mostly oak and maple and birch, that seemed to end in a clearing about a quarter mile ahead. To the right the ground dropped sharply toward a small, rocky trough—a streambed feeding what seemed to be a small lake, surrounded by dense pine forest. On their left the ground rose to a series of ridges, some covered with trees, some dotted with brush and rock, some bald.

Hart crouched, motioning Lewis to join him. The man complied instantly.

“We’re going to split up here. You go way round to the left. That ridge, see it?”

A nod.

“You’ll be in grass, so you can move faster. Then come in and get close to them on their left flank. I’ll keep going straight, come up behind them. When they hit that place there—see that sweet little clearing?”

“Yeah, got it.”

“I’ll wave the sock.” He tapped his pocket where he’d stuffed the billiard ball cudgel. “You shoot. That’ll keep ’em down. I’ll come up behind and finish them.”

“Bodies?” Lewis asked. “We can’t leave ’em. The animals’ll carry the parts off all over the park. That’ll be a lot of evidence.”

“No, we’ll bury them.”

“Been cold this April. Ground’s pretty hard still. And what’ll we dig with?” Lewis looked around. He pointed at a small lake to their right. “There. We could weigh ’em down with rocks. Probably nobody comes there. It’s a pretty shitty little lake.”

Hart glanced at it. “Good.”

“Now, I’ll set the choke wide but if I don’t hit both of ’em with the first shot the other’ll go to cover right away. We’ll have to track her down. Who’d I ought to target first? Michelle or the cop?”

Hart was watching the women make their way through the forest, casual as oblivious tourists. “You get Michelle. I’ll take Brynn.”

“My pleasure.” Lewis nodded. It was clearly his preference anyway.

 

THE WHITE F150

sped out of Humboldt and onto the highway.

The pickup truck was doing close to fifty, the gassy engine accelerating hard.

Graham Boyd was driving and his only passengers were three azaleas in the truck bed, which he hadn’t bothered to untether. He’d locked away the pellet gun in the same closet that contained Joey’s skateboard.

After the confrontation with his stepson he’d gone into the boy’s room to talk to him but he was pretending to sleep. Graham had called, “Joey,” twice, in a whisper. Part of him had been relieved that the boy didn’t respond; he’d had no clue what he was going to say. He just hated that all this tension was unresolved.

He’d thought about taking the game cartridges, the computer and the whole Xbox itself and locking them in the toolshed. But he didn’t. It seemed to him that when it came to children, decisions about punishments shouldn’t be made in anger.

You’re the adult, he’s the child.

Chalk that one up to instinct.

He’d checked five minutes later and the light under the boy’s door was still out.

“I’m pretty worried, Graham,” Anna had said.

He’d stared again at the picture of his wife in her velvet helmet and riding outfit and then walked out the back door, with a full beer bottle in his hand, so cold it stung his fingers. He’d stood on the small deck, which he’d built himself, and looked up at the half-moon.

He’d fished his phone from his pocket, intending to try to reach Brynn.

But then paused. What if the man answered again? Graham knew he wouldn’t be able to stay calm. If he gave away that they were suspicious and the police were on their way then the man might hurt Brynn and flee. He’d dropped the phone into his pocket and poured the beer onto a mulch bed surrounding a Christmas azalea behind the deck.

When he’d returned to the living room he’d blinked in surprise. Joey had come downstairs, in his pajamas. He was curled up on the couch beside his grandmother, his head in her lap.

Anna was whisper-singing Joey a song.

Graham’s eyes had met his mother-in-law’s. He’d pointed to himself and then the door.

“You sure you want to do that, Graham?” she’d asked softly.

No, he’d thought. But nodded.

“I’ll hold down the fort here. Be careful. Please be careful.”

He’d fired up the temperamental engine and sped out of his driveway, tires skidding and scattering gravel.

Now he gripped his phone again, started to type in a number—Sandra, of course, wasn’t on speed dial. But he hesitated and decided not to call her. He slipped the device back into his pocket. The protocol was off; the hour was late and he’d already talked to her earlier, briefly, sneaking a call when Anna was in the bathroom, to tell her he couldn’t make it tonight. And even if she answered now, which she probably would not, what would he tell her?

He wasn’t sure.

Besides, he reasoned, it was better to concentrate on his driving. He was going just over seventy in a forty zone, defying any trooper to stop him.

What exactly he would do when he got to Lake Mondac, he had no idea.

Why he was doing this was even more of a mystery.

For his part, he longed to be lying in bed, end-of-day groggy, with his arm around his wife’s tummy and lips against her shoulder. Talk about his day at work and hers, a dinner party coming up on Friday, their child’s braces and report card, a refinancing offer on the mortgage, until they dozed off, one after the other. But that wasn’t apparently to be his fate. Would it ever be? And when? Tomorrow? Next year?

Defying the troopers further, he edged the boxy truck up to eighty, as the kidnapped azaleas shivered in the back.

 

“THERE!” BRYNN WHISPERED

excitedly. “See that?”

“What?” Michelle was following Brynn’s extended arm as they crouched behind a still-bare dogwood, the ground beneath them thick with crocus shoots and fragrant decay.

In the distance, a thin sparkling ribbon.

“The river. The Snake.” Their lifeline.

They walked for five minutes without another glimpse of the water. Brynn was looking around to orient herself and make sure they were traveling in the right direction when she froze.

“Jesus.” She crouched, a hum of fear in her chest.

It was one of the men: the one with the shotgun, Hart’s partner. He was no more than two hundred yards away, on a ridge to their left.

“It’s my fault….” Michelle’s face was grim. “I had that fucking outburst!” Her face revealed the self-disgust of earlier. “They heard me!”

Spoiled little girl…

“No,” Brynn whispered. “They couldn’t be here this fast if they’d bought our trick at the cliff. They rigged something with the flashlight. Hart did. To fool us.”

Same way I tried to fool him. Except his trick worked.

And where was he, Hart? She remembered a recent tactical training course. The instructor had lectured about pie-wedge crossfire. Never directly opposite, of course—risk of friendly fire injuries. Hart would be coming up behind them, not from the right flank.

She couldn’t see him but she knew he was back there someplace.

Which meant the men had spotted them and were moving in for the kill.

They were on flat ground here, headed for a clearing, which Brynn had been looking forward to—no dense tangles to fight through, just planes of low grass, flat. But now she steered Michelle to the right toward a steep, rocky hill, several hundred feet long, descending to a creek bed. At the bottom there was no moonlight and they’d have good cover. “There, down into the ravine. Do the best you can. Come on. Fast.”

They started down the hill, sticking to the thicker clumps of oak and dense brush, where they’d be less of a target. They half slid, half ran, scrabbling down the steep slope, Michelle in front, Brynn behind her.

They were doing well until, halfway down, Brynn tripped, her foot catching on a vine or branch. She landed hard on her butt and slid on the slick leaves right into Michelle, taking her legs out from under her. They began a long, unstoppable tumble down the hillside, Brynn desperately trying to keep a grip on the spear so it didn’t slash either of them to death.

They ended up in a shallow ravine.

The knife in Brynn’s pocket had poked through the ski parka but the blade hadn’t cut her. Michelle lay on her back, frantically patting her belly. Brynn was terrified that the younger woman’s knife had cut her deeply.

Gasping for breath, Brynn whispered, “You all right?”

Michelle’s hand found the knife inside her jacket. It hadn’t apparently done any damage. A nod.

Brynn slowly sat up, gripping the spear. She looked around and saw a depression in the dry creek bed. They headed into it. Brush and a natural line of three-and four-foot boulders gave them some cover.

“Look,” Michelle whispered and pointed.

Brynn watched Hart’s partner, holding the shotgun ready to shoot, moving east—toward them—in a jog. The breeze was busily stirring leaves but he must’ve heard something. He was looking directly at the spot where they’d fallen. Then he gazed around him and vanished into a thick copse of trees to the north.

Brynn gripped the spear handle, staring toward him. “How’s your ankle?”

“Okay. I fell on my other leg.”

Scanning the hill. Neither of the men was visible.

Brynn was estimating distances and speculating where the partner might’ve gone. Michelle whispered something. Brynn didn’t hear. She was lost in consideration. She made a decision. Then surveyed the ground. “Okay. We’re going to split up. I want you to move that way, stay in the ravine and keep your head down. Over there, see that dip? Get down into it and cover yourself up with leaves.”

“What are you going to do?” Michelle asked, her eyes wide.

“See it?” Brynn repeated firmly.

“You’re going to go after him, aren’t you?”

Times to run, times to fight…

Brynn nodded.

“I want to come with you. I can help.”

“It’ll be a bigger help to me if you just stay hid.”

Michelle looked somber for a moment. Then smiled. “I won’t worry about breaking a nail, if that’s what you mean.”

Brynn smiled too. “This is my job. Let me do it. Now go on down there, cover yourself up. If they get close and you have to run…” She looked along the dry streambed and pointed to the lake, which was really no more than a pond. “That’ll be our rallying point. The near shore, by those rocks.”

“Rallying point. What’s that?”

“Where soldiers meet when they get split up. It’s not a cop thing. I got it from Saving Private Ryan.”

Drawing another smile from Michelle.

 

CHARLES GANDY,

a lean, bearded man in his early thirties, wearing a North Face insulated windbreaker, stood beside a Winnebago camper parked in the woods of Marquette State Park, next to a ramshackle ranger station that had been abandoned years ago. The camper was nicked and dented and the butt end sported a half dozen bumper stickers extolling the importance of green energy and listing such accomplishments as mountain biking Snoqualmie Pass and hiking the Appalachian Trail.

“You hear anything else, honey?” asked Susan, a round woman with straight, light brown hair. A few years older than Gandy. She wore a necklace in the shape of an Egyptian ankh, two braided friendship bracelets and a wedding ring.

“Nope.”

“What was it?”

“Voices, I’m pretty sure. Well, sounded like a shout almost.”

“The park’s closed. And this time of night?”

“I know. When’s Rudy due back?”

“Any time.”

Her husband squinted into the night.

“Daddy?”

He turned to see his nine-year-old stepdaughter standing in the doorway, T-shirt, denim skirt and old running shoes. “Amy, it’s time for bed.”

“I’m helping Mommy. She wanted me to.”

Gandy was distracted. “All right. Whatever your mom says. But go on inside. It’s freezing out here.”

The girl disappeared with a swirl of long blond hair.

The camper had two doors, front and back. Gandy walked to the back one, stepped inside and found a battered deer rifle. He loaded the clip.

“What’re you doing, honey?”

“I’ve got to go see.”

“But the rangers—”

“Not around here and not now. You lock up tight, pull the curtains and don’t open the door for anybody ’cept me or Rudy.”

“Sure, honey. Be careful.”

Susan climbed the steps inside and closed and locked the door. Shutters closed and the camper went dark. The faint sound of the generator was pretty much covered up by the wind. Good.

Zipping up his jacket and pulling on a gray knitted hat that Susan had bought him for his birthday, Gandy started down the small path that led eventually to the Joliet Trail, the rifle held in the crook of his arm.

He made his way south and east. They’d been here for four days and he’d spent much of that time hiking nearby. He knew the place well, had found impromptu paths and trails, made by deer—trampled leaves, broken branches and pellets—and people (ditto, minus the shit).

He moved slowly, cautiously. Not afraid of getting lost, afraid of whom he might run into out here.

Had that sound been a scream or not? he wondered.

If so, human or animal?

Gandy now walked two or three hundred yards in the direction he thought he’d heard the sounds, and then knelt down, surveying the moonlit forest. He heard snaps and a crack or too, not far away, maybe branches falling, maybe deer, maybe bear.

“Or maybe my damn imagination.”

But then he tensed.

There, yes…No doubt about it. He was looking at a person—a woman, he was sure—moving from tree to tree, keeping low. She was carrying something in her hand. It seemed thin. A rifle? He gripped his own, a Savage .308, tightly.

What was this all about? Shouting and howling in a deserted, and officially closed, state park so late at night? His heart was slamming. His instinct was to get back to the camper and get the hell out of here. But the rattling diesel engine could attract unwanted attention.

As he hunkered low, spying on her, he wondered why she was acting like a soldier. Cautious, creeping from cover to cover. She was clearly no ranger. She didn’t have on a distinctive Smokey the Bear hat or a typical ranger uniform jacket. It seemed she was in a ski parka.

His instincts told him she was a threat.

The woman disappeared behind a large clump of blackberry and he didn’t see her emerge. Gandy rose and, holding the gun muzzle up, moved in her direction.

Just get the hell out of here, part of his mind shouted.

But then: No. You’ve got too much at stake. Keep going.

He stopped at a steep decline that led down to the forest floor, steadying himself with his left hand on thin birch and oak saplings and then, when the ground flattened, he moved toward the bush where the woman had disappeared.

He studied the area. No sign of her.

Then there she was, thirty or so feet away. She was in shadow but he could just make her out, lying half hidden beside the bush, her head down, like a lioness waiting for an antelope.

Very quietly he worked the bolt on the Savage, chambering a round, and started forward, picking his steps around branches and leaves, as if he were treading through a minefield.

Playing at being a soldier himself. A role he wasn’t very comfortable with at all.

 

KRISTEN BRYNN MCKENZIE

crouched behind a gnarled but stately black oak, gripping the pool cue spear hard and taking deep breaths, her mouth open wide for silence. She’d climbed back up the hill toward the spot where the man had disappeared.

Her palms sweated, though she was cold again, having slipped out of her parka and one set of sweatpants. The clothes, stuffed with leaves, now sat like a fallen scarecrow under a blackberry bush, bait to attract Hart’s partner.

The trick seemed to be working. He was now approaching cautiously.

Still no sign of Hart.

Good, she’d thought.

One on one, I can take you.

She’d risked his shooting at her from a distance and stepped into the moonlight to give him a brief view of her, then disappeared fast behind the blackberry bush, where she’d stripped off the clothes, and left them on the ground like someone hurt or hiding.

She’d slipped down the hill, circled back to this tree.

Praying that Hart’s partner would take the bait.

Which he had. Gun pointed up, the shadowy form started down the hill toward the effigy.

Brynn now huddled behind the tree, tracking his progress by his footsteps. Her hearing was sharply attuned. All her senses were, in fact. The blade of the spear, the Chicago Cutlery knife, was close to her face, deep in the shadow of the tree, so that it wouldn’t flash in the moonlight and give her position away. She reflected that it was curious that this unused knife’s first task wouldn’t be to trim a beef tenderloin or chicken cutlet but to kill a human being.

And she reflected too that this thought troubled her very little.

A faint snap, a rustle.

Then the breeze came up and blew hard. She momentarily lost track of his footfalls in the scampering of leaves and the hiss through branches.

Where? she thought in panic.

Then she could hear him again. The partner was still headed directly for the bait. His route would take him just past the tree where she was hiding.

Twenty feet.

Ten feet. The faint crunch of his steps.

She examined as much of the area as she could from her hunting blind, looking for Hart. Nothing.

Six feet, five…

Then he was even with the tree.

Finally, he walked past it.

Brynn looked out at his back. He’d swapped the combat jacket she remembered from the Feldmans’ for a North Face ski parka, which he’d probably stolen from their house or from 2 Lake View. He’d put on a cap too, covering his blond crew cut.

Okay, now’s the time, she told herself.

Her body filled with a calm, almost euphoric sensation. This had happened on other occasions but usually at the most unexpected times. A triple-combination jump with her atop a speeding chestnut mare in a horse competition. A frantic pursuit of a weapons dealer down a county road, hitting 140 mph. When she and Keith, on vacation, defused a potentially fatal fight by two teenagers in Biloxi.

Times to fight…

She now thought: Stun him with the bolo and charge in fast. Jam the spear into his back as hard as you can. Grab the shotgun.

And get ready for Hart to come. Because come he would—at the first sound of his partner’s screams.

Brynn stepped from the tree, sized up her target, then swung the bolo and let it fly.

The ball arced toward him and clipped his ear. He cried out and dropped the gun.

Brynn ignored the pain in her body and leapt forward.

She wasn’t a deputy now. Not a wife or mother.

She was the wolf, a primitive creature, survival its only thought. Running, running, toes of her boots digging into the hard earth, in her hands the spear, now gleaming bright in the cold light, and aimed directly for him. She managed to resist a fierce urge to let go a mad howl.

 

NOW THEY WERE GONE.

Hell. For ten minutes Hart had closed the distance between himself and the women, heading straight toward the clearing—the shooting zone, he thought of it—while he’d kept tabs on Lewis.

The other man had seen or heard something to the right, the east, and hurried down the hill to the flatter ground. He’d looked around but apparently it had been a false alarm. He’d returned to the woody ridge on Hart’s left. Both men had continued forward, scanning the landscape for the prey that had disappeared.

Where were they?

Had they spotted him or Lewis?

And if they had, what were their options for escape? The clearing was in front—to the north—and they obviously weren’t there. Lewis was now on a ridge to the west and Hart himself was facing due south. There was a band of trees around the clearing, which the women might be hiding in. Or they might’ve fled down a steep drop-off to the right and were making their way east into the thick of the park. That direction would take them back eventually to the Joliet but according to the GPS, the trail was a long way off now, and they’d have to cover miles of dense woods to get there.

What would Brynn do?

He decided she’d gone down the incline that led to the streambed and then continued north toward the Snake River—only avoiding the exposure of the clearing. A longer route and harder, but safer.

She was like an animal with finely tuned instincts of survival, anticipating him.

He glanced toward the ridge, where Lewis had now paused and was looking around. Then he turned to him and lifted his arms. Meaning: They’ve vanished.

Hart pointed to himself and then to Lewis, who nodded. Hart began the climb to the high ground to join his partner.

 

WHERE?

Where was Michelle?

Carrying the Savage rifle in one hand, the spear in the other, Brynn McKenzie paused and looked around her. She was disoriented. She’d been so focused on Hart’s partner that she hadn’t paid enough attention to her route after she’d left the other woman to hide under the blanket of leaves.

Had she gone to the rallying point?

Brynn hoped not. The lake was farther than she’d thought and she didn’t want to have to make any detours. She was flagging as it was.

Then she spotted a configuration of trees that looked familiar. She paused, glancing around for the pursuers. None in sight. She jogged down a short hill.

Turning the corner behind a large rock, Brynn stopped suddenly.

Startled, Michelle was reaching into her pocket to grab her knife. Her eyes were fierce, feral. Brynn stopped and blinked. The young woman sighed in relief. “Jesus, Brynn. You scared me.”

“Shhh. They’re still around here someplace.”

“What happened?” the young woman whispered. “Where’d you get that?” Looking at the rifle.

“Come on. Quick. I hurt somebody.”

“One of them?” Michelle’s eyes glowed.

Brynn grimaced. “No.”

“What?”

“Somebody else. This way.”

They climbed the hill back to the blackberry tangle, where the bearded man was sitting on the ground, head low between his legs, nursing his torn ear. He looked up at Michelle, blinked. Then nodded, wincing.

Brynn explained that she’d beaned him with the billiard ball and was charging forward to spear him when he’d glanced back, having heard her footsteps.

She’d stopped just before she stabbed him, seeing his bearded face, realizing her mistake. Not expecting to find anyone else out here, armed and stoked by adrenaline, Brynn had missed that he was carrying a deer rifle, not a shotgun, and that his build seemed different from Hart’s partner’s.

Brynn had apologized profusely. Still, she was a law officer and, after showing her ID and badge, took control of the weapon and asked to see his driver’s license.

His name was Charles Gandy, he, and his wife and some friends were camping in a Winnebago not far away.

“Are you okay to walk?” she asked him. Brynn wanted to get to the camper as soon as they could.

“Sure. It’s not bad.” He was holding the sock, from the bolo, against his injured ear. It seemed most of the bleeding had stopped.

Which didn’t mean he wasn’t going to sue the department. But that was fine with Brynn. She’d insist that the county pay whatever he wanted. She couldn’t describe the reassurance she felt having found a way to escape from the park—and with a rifle in her hands.

Control…

While Brynn kept guard, Michelle helped Gandy up.

“You’re hurt too?” he asked, nodding at the pool cue.

“It’s okay,” Michelle said absently, looking warily over the overwhelming tangle of branches, brush and trees.

“We should get moving,” Brynn said. “Lead the way.”

Charles Gandy knew the woods well, it seemed. He directed them past the dry streambed and along paths that Brynn hadn’t even seen. This was good, since they avoided entirely the noisy leaves and branches that could have given them away. They moved up an incline then he led them around a clearing, going steadily higher. The general direction was north. Michelle limped along as quickly as she could, now using the spear as her walking stick.

Brynn, gripping the rifle, followed, looking behind more often than she looked forward.

They paused, hiding behind a seven-or eight-foot outcropping of granite. Gandy touched Brynn’s arm and pointed.

Her heart jumped.

Across a long ravine was a bare ridge. Hart and his partner, holding the shotgun, stood there, scanning the ground. Frustration seemed evident in their posture.

“Is that the ones you were telling me about?” Gandy asked softly.

She nodded.

It was then that Michelle whispered, “Shoot them.”

Brynn turned toward her.

Wide-eyed, the young woman said, “Go ahead and shoot them.”

Brynn looked down at the rifle in her hands. She said nothing, didn’t move.

Michelle’s head turned toward Gandy. He said, “Hey, don’t look at me. I work in an organic grocery store for a living.”

“I’ll do it,” Michelle said. “Give me the gun.”

“No. You’re a civilian. If you killed one of them it’d be murder. You’d get off probably but you don’t want to go there.”

Then Brynn leaned over a large rock. Set the rifle on it, the muzzle in the men’s direction.

They were about one hundred yards away, and Gandy’s rifle didn’t have a telescopic sight. But Brynn was familiar with rifles—from the training courses mostly. She’d also been hunting a few times though she gave it up years ago on a trip to Minnesota; Keith had been reloading his rifle when they’d been charged by a wild boar. Brynn had killed the crazed animal with two fast shots. She’d quit the sport after that, not out of fear—she’d secretly enjoyed the rush—but because she’d killed an animal whose only crime was defending its invaded home.

She’d been prepared to kill the partner with her spear a few minutes ago. But this seemed different, shooting somebody like a sniper.

Well, are you going to do it or not? Brynn coolly asked herself. If so, now. They’re not going to be standing still forever.

Brynn decided to aim about two inches high to compensate for the arcing of the bullet over that distance. The breeze? Well, that was anybody’s guess; it whipsawed back and forth.

Have to hope for luck here.

Brynn gazed down the notch in the back of the rifle and the blade sight in the front.

Both eyes open. She flicked the safety off. She started to squeeze the trigger. The trick was to keep the sights aligned on the target and apply pressure until the gun went off; you never actually pull the trigger.

But just then the men separated. What had been a cluster of target became two distinct ones. Hart had apparently seen something and had moved forward. He was pointing.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Gandy asked. “Are you sure it’s them?”

“Yes,” Michelle snapped in a whisper. “It’s them. Shoot!”

But which one? Brynn asked herself. Assuming the one I don’t hit gets under cover, who should I target?

Choose. Now!

She aimed at the partner, the man with the shotgun. She lifted the muzzle high. Began to squeeze the trigger again.

But at that moment the men started down into the ravine. In an instant they were simply dark forms moving through the brush.

“No!” Michelle cried. “Shoot anyway!”

Then there was no target. They’d disappeared.

Brynn lowered her head. Why had she hesitated? she wondered. Why?

Gandy said, “We better go. They’re headed in this direction.”

Brynn didn’t look at Michelle. It was as if the young woman, the spoiled princess, the dilettante, had been more in control than she.

Why didn’t I take the shot?

She clicked on the safety and stared at the pool of gloom where Hart and his partner had disappeared. Then turned away to follow the others.

“The camper’s not far,” Gandy said. “A quarter mile. My friend’s got a van and he should be back now. He was getting some food and beer. We’ll all jump in it and get out of here.”

“Who’s there?” Michelle asked.

“My wife and stepdaughter, a couple of our friends.”

“Stepdaughter?”

“Amy. She’s nine.” Gandy touched his ear and examined his fingers. The bleeding had stopped.

“She’s with you tonight?” Brynn asked, frowning.

“It’s spring break.” He noted her troubled expression. “What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t know you had a child,” she said softly.

“You’re not bringing us trouble if that’s what you’re thinking. Imagine what’d happen if I hadn’t found you. Those guys might’ve stumbled onto our camper and who knows what they would’ve done.”

“You have a phone?” Michelle asked.

Brynn’s first question, after she’d made sure Gandy wasn’t badly hurt.

“I was telling your friend,” he replied, “I’m not a big fan of microwaves in the brain. But we’ve got one back at the camper.” He asked Brynn, “Say, you have a helicopter? You could get officers here pretty fast with one of them.”

Brynn said, “Just medevac. Not tactical.” She was thinking about the daughter and the man’s family. Here, she’d tried all night not to bring this horror to innocent local residents…and now she’d endangered a family with a child.

Walking fast, breathless from the largely uphill route, they’d put the ravine far behind them. Brynn shamefully thought of it as “the place where I balked.” She was furious with herself for the lapse.

Gandy said to Brynn, “You just said they were after you. You didn’t say why.”

Michelle, wincing as she limped, said, “They killed my friends. I’m a witness.”

“No! Oh, my God.”

Brynn added, “House break-in by Lake Mondac.”

“Just…you mean, tonight?”

Michelle nodded.

“I’m so sorry. I—” Gandy could think of nothing to say. He asked Brynn, “And you tried to arrest them?”

“There was a nine-one-one call. We weren’t sure what it was about. I got there afterward, lost the car and my weapon. We had to run.”

“Lake Mondac? Where’s that?”

“About five, six miles south. We were making for the Snake when they found us. We had to detour. How much farther to your camper?”

“Not far.” He paused as a sheet of high cloud slipped between earth and moon and complete darkness enveloped them. A thin wash of illumination returned and he gestured to their right. Gandy led them farther through the woods. Then pointed out the start of a smaller trail. After they began down it, he stopped and gathered some brush, using it to obscure the path.

Brynn helped him add more camouflage. Michelle pitched in too, looking over their handiwork and announcing, “Perfect. They’ll never find it.”

Brynn shivered. The adrenaline from her abortive assault—and the sniper shot—had worn off. She’d dressed once more in the parka and the second set of sweats but the chill was back in her bones. “Are you in a campground?” The search-and-rescue mission here had been limited to the Joliet Trail and the Snake River Gorge.

“No, there’s an old ranger station and a parking lot. Deserted. All overgrown. Nobody’s been there for years, looks like. Kind of spooky. Stephen King ought to write a book about it. Ghost Rangers, he could call it.”

Brynn asked, “How far to the access road from there?”

Gandy considered this for a moment. “There’s a dirt road that goes for about a mile. It takes you to the main road in the park. Then it’s about four miles to the entrance on Six eighty-two. That’s the closest.” He looked their way. “You can relax. We’ll be on the highway in twenty minutes.”

 

“WHERE?” HART MUTTERED.

The men were moving through the dry streambed where they’d seen their prey disappear.

“Look,” Lewis called softly. He was staring at a muddy patch of ground.

“What? I can’t see anything.”

Lewis pulled off his jacket and made a tent with it. He took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket and, inside the garment, flicked it. Kneeling, Hart could see a series of footprints in the mud. They came from three people. “How old you think those are?”

“Look fresh to me. Who the hell’s with them? Shit, if it’s a cop he’s got a cell phone or radio.”

The lighter clicked off. The men stood up and looked around, as Lewis tugged his jacket on. Hefted the shotgun. He shook his head. “You wouldn’t think a cop’d be around this time of night.”

“True.”

“But who else’d be here?”

“No campers this time of year. Ranger maybe. We gotta find ’em fast.” Hart walked a little farther up the streambed. He crouched and ran his hand over another patch of mud. “They’re going that way.” He pointed up the hill. “That a path?”

“Looks like it.”

Hart grabbed a fallen tree trunk to push himself to his feet. The wood was rotten and a portion of it crumbled under his grip.

In less than a second the rattlesnake nesting inside, about two and a half feet long, had launched itself silently into the back of Hart’s hand—on his good arm. Before he could even shout in horror, the dark, glistening stripe of muscle had vanished.

“Lewis!” Hart pulled off his glove and saw two puncture wounds in the back of his hand, near the wrist. Shit. Was he going to die? One of the fangs had pierced a vein. Feeling faint, he sat down.

Lewis, who’d seen the strike, flicked his lighter and examined the wound.

Hart asked, “Should I suck it out? I saw that on TV, a movie.”

“You’re going to be okay. You don’t want to suck it out. Venom gets to your heart faster under your tongue than through a vein.”

Hart noted that his breathing was suddenly coming fast.

“Stay calm. The calmer the better. Let me look.” Lewis studied the wound carefully.

“You going to burn it?” Hart’s eyes danced as he gazed at the Bic flame.

“No. Relax.”

Lewis let the lighter go dark. He took a shotgun shell out of his pocket and, with his Buck knife, carefully cut it open. He tossed aside the pellets and the plastic wad. “Hold your other hand out.”

Hart did and the man poured the gunpowder, fine little black cylinders, into his cupped palm.

Lewis told him, “Spit in it. Go ahead.”

“Spit?”

“I know what I’m doing. Go ahead.”

Hart did this.

“Again. Get it wet.”

“Okay.”

Then Lewis reached into his inner pocket and took out a pack of Camels. He smiled like a cookie-stealing schoolboy. “I meant to give up smoking last week.” Then he ripped open three cigarettes and sprinkled the tobacco into Hart’s palm. “Mix it all up.”

Hart thought this was crazy but he was feeling even more light-headed. He did what he was told. With the knife Lewis cut the tail off his shirt. “Put that mess on the wound and I’ll tie it.”

Hart pressed the black-brown wad onto the punctures and Lewis tied the cloth around them and helped him put his glove back on.

“It’ll sting. But you’ll be fine.”

“Fine? I just got bit by a rattler.”

“It was pretty much a dry bite.”

“A what?”

“Snake was a rattler, yeah, but a massasauga. They control how much venom they let go. They’re small and don’t have a lot, so they conserve it, use it on prey so they can eat. For defense they don’t use much. Just enough to scare off a threat.”

“Well, scared the shit out of me. I didn’t hear it rattle.”

“That’s only if they sense you coming. You surprised him as much as he surprised you.”

“No, not quite,” Hart muttered. “I feel faint.”

“You got a little venom and you’ll feel funny some. But if that was a wet bite your hand’d be twice its size and you’d be screaming already. Or out like a light. I know we’ve gotta move but it’s better you just sit still for five, ten minutes.”

Hart had been in fist fights, he’d faced down people with weapons when he’d had none and he’d exchanged bullets from time to time. But nothing had shocked him like that snake.

This is my world. You’ll see things that aren’t there and miss things that’re coming up right behind you.

Hart took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “That’s a rush for you.” He was almost enjoying the giddy sensation. He looked down at his hand, which had stopped stinging now. “How come you know all this, Comp?”

“My dad and me’d go hunting. Same thing happened to you happened to him. He explained it all what to do. Then he switched my bare behind for not looking where I was going and stepping on the nest.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Hart wished that Lewis had pocketed one of the vodka bottles. He wouldn’t have minded a jolt right about now.

Hart remembered that Lewis’s mother was in a home. “Your father still alive?”

“Yep.”

“You see him much?”

“Not really. You know, things happen.” Lewis grinned, looked away and said nothing more for a moment. He started to say something. But didn’t. They looked around at the wilderness, the wind shuffling leaves, the faint lapping of the lake.

“I was thinking, Hart.”

“Yeah?”

“When we take care of them and get back home? You and me, we could do a job together. I was thinking with my contacts, guys in my crew, and your, you know, the way you plan things and think, we’d be a good team. This thing tonight, we just fell into it. It happened fast.”

“Too fast,” Hart muttered. To put it mildly.

“I know some people in Kenosha. There’s money there. Illinois money, Chicago money. So how ’bout it? You and me.”

“Go on.”

“I was thinking of this place outside of town, Benton Plastics. You know it?”

“No.”

“It’s on Haversham Road? Big fucking place. Sell shit all over the world. On payday they have this big-ass check-cashing truck. The guard’s this lazy asshole. We could walk up and clear twenty, thirty thousand. If it was early on Friday morning. How ’bout that?”

Hart was nodding.

Lewis continued, “I’d get all the information. You know, like reconnaissance.” He patted his shirt, felt the cigarettes but it was like he was doing it from habit. He wasn’t about to light up out here. “I’m a good listener. Everybody talks to me, tells me all kinds of shit. One time this guy and I were bullshitting and he mentions the name of his dog, along with a bunch of other stuff. So, guess what? I boost his ATM card and the dog’s name is his PIN. I cleaned him out. I got that just by talking.”

“That was pretty slick.”

“So, whatta you say?”

“You know what, Comp? I like the idea.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ll look at the details. And put together a plan. Do it right this time.”

“A hundred ten percent.”

“One ten. Now, I’ve rested enough. We’ve got unfinished business. And our girlfriends could be calling in the cavalry right now.”

“You feeling okay?” Lewis asked.

“No, sir,” Hart whispered, laughing. “I just got shot. I just got snakebit. And let’s not leave out I nearly took a shower in ammonia. No, I’m not feeling okay at all. But what’s a man going to do?”

Lewis picked up the shotgun and they started to walk in the direction the tracks seemed to lead.

Hart flexed his snakebit hand. It felt fine. He asked, “That tobacco and gunpowder—what exactly does it do?”

“You ask me, it doesn’t do shit. Excepting, it calms you down.”

Hart inhaled deeply. “Nothing like the smell of country air. Our luck’s changing, Comp. Let’s go that way. I think I see a path. Looks like the Trickster’s on our side now.”

 

“RIGHT DOWN THERE,

in that hollow.”

Charles Gandy led them along the dim path toward the camper. It was a big one. Their escape vehicle, a long panel van, like an Econoline, sat nearby.

Gandy’s friend was back.

“I’m freezing,” Michelle muttered.

Gandy smiled. “You can sit right in front of the heater in the van if you want.”

“I want. The coldest I’ve ever been was skiing in Colorado. And you can head back to the lodge anytime. This’s a little different.”

They plunged along another path, steeply downhill. The camper was in a crumbling parking lot. An old building being reclaimed by the forest was nearby.

They were fifty feet from the lot when Brynn, inhaling the cool night air, stopped suddenly. She turned back, played her eyes up the path they’d just descended. She lifted the gun. The others stopped too.

“What is it, Brynn?” Michelle asked.

Gandy took a step forward, paused, scanning the forest. “What?” he whispered.

Brynn said to Gandy, “Get down. I heard something over there to the right. See anything?”

The man crouched and studied the trees.

Brynn pulled Michelle into a crouch on the other side of the path. She leaned close to the woman’s diamond-studded ear. Smelled sweat and very expensive perfume. She said softly, “We’re in trouble here, Michelle. Don’t ask questions and don’t say a word. You remember the rallying point?”

The young woman froze. Then nodded.

“When I tell you, run for it. Run like hell. Keep that with you.” Glancing at the spear.

“But—”

Brynn waved her hand, dismissing the young woman’s perplexed frown. Brynn turned to Gandy and in a normal voice asked, “See anything?”

“No.”

Brynn clicked the safety off on the Savage, pointed the weapon at Gandy, who blinked in shock.

“What’re you doing?”

“Now, Michelle, run!”

The man stepped back, but stopped as Brynn tensed.

“Run!” she cried. “I’ll meet you where I said.”

Michelle hesitated only a moment, then fled back up the path. She melted into the night.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Gandy stopped, eyes wide in confusion.

“Get down on your knees, hands on your head.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Now, who’s in—” Her words were cut off as a hand grabbed her collar from behind and tugged hard. Off balance, she stumbled backward. A large woman with straight hair and fury in her eyes stepped in front of her and swung a fish-killing club into her belly. Brynn dropped to her knees and vomited. The gun fell to the ground and the woman snatched it up.

“The fuck is she?” the woman muttered.

Gandy strode forward and pulled Brynn to her feet. He searched her and pulled the knife out of her pocket. He hit her in the face with a hard fist; the pellet wound opened. She cried out and shoved Gandy away hard, making a grab for the rifle in the heavy woman’s hand. But the man twisted the deputy around and got her in a neck lock. “Don’t fucking move.”

Brynn slumped, defeated. When he relaxed his grip she stomped on his foot, high and hard, and he let go a fast scream. “You fucking cunt.”

The woman aimed the rifle at her and growled, “That’s it, honey.”

Brynn looked at her pinprick eyes.

“You okay?” the woman asked Gandy.

“Do I look okay?” he spat out. He peered up the path. “Was another one. She got away.”

“Who is she? They with Fletcher?”

He grabbed Brynn by the collar and hair. “How’d you know? Goddamn it, how’d you know?”

She didn’t tell him that the distinctive smell of cooking methamphetamine—propane, chlorine and ammonia—had wafted to her on the damp night air.

The camper was a portable lab.

“Let’s get inside,” the woman said, looking around. “We’ve gotta tell Rudy. He’s not gonna be happy.”

Gandy dragged Brynn along the path. He snarled, “You scream, you say a word, you’re dead.”

“You’re the one screamed,” she couldn’t resist saying. And was rewarded with another fist in her face.

 

THE CAMPER WAS

filthy, filled with plates of old food and discarded beer cans and clothing and other trash.

And it was hot. A half dozen metal pots sat on two propane stoves. Canisters of anhydrous ammonia lined one wall; a workstation for cutting apart lithium batteries was in the corner. There were also huge piles of matches.

Gandy pushed Brynn inside and tossed her knife on a table.

“Who’s she?” said a scrawny, twitchy young man in an Aerosmith T-shirt and filthy jeans. He hadn’t shaved in some time or washed his hair. His fingernails were black crescents. A heavier man in overalls, with curly red hair, looked Brynn over.

The overweight woman who’d slugged her with the club said to a little girl, about nine or ten, in a shabby T-shirt and stained denim skirt, “Keep going. You’re not through yet.” The girl—Amy, the stepdaughter, Brynn assumed—blinked at the visitor and returned to filling larger plastic bags with smaller ones containing the finished product.

The skinny man said, “Lookit her face. It’s all swole up. What’s going—”

“Shhh,” the heavy one snapped. “What’s the story?”

Gandy grimaced. “She’s a deputy, Rudy.”

“Bullshit. Dressed like that? And she’s a fucking mess. Look at her…. She’s from Fletcher’s crew.”

“I saw her ID.”

Rudy was looking Brynn over carefully with a disgusted visage. “Well, fuck me. Police? I don’t want to burn this place too. Fuck, I don’t want to do that. After all this work.”

Brynn muttered, “There are troopers on the way—”

“Shut up,” Gandy said, though lethargically, as if it would take too much effort to hit her again.

The skinny one, obsessed with her face, picked at the speed bumps on his forearm. Gandy, the woman and Rudy didn’t seem to have been slamming their own product. Which didn’t put her at ease; it meant they’d make rational decisions about protecting their operation. And that meant killing her and finding Michelle and doing the same. She remembered how casually Gandy had offered his ID; because the man had known she’d be dead soon.

“Mommy…”

The woman slapped her own thigh twice. Apparently a command meaning: Be quiet. Amy instantly stopped speaking. This infuriated Brynn—and broke her heart.

The woman’s fingers were stained yellow. Though she probably wasn’t a tweaker herself, she clearly wanted a cigarette. But lighting up in a meth lab would be like using a match to find a gas pocket in a coal mine.

Rudy asked, “Was she alone?”

“No. Somebody was with her. She got away. They claim a couple of guys’re after them. I saw ’em. But I don’t know what’s going on. Something about a break-in in Lake Mondac. It’s about five miles—”

“I know where it is.” Rudy walked close. Examined Brynn’s wound. He announced, “’S’a setup. Fletcher called them, had that ho of his do it, I’ll bet. The skanky redhead. Said we were here. Didn’t have the balls to come up against us himself.”

Gandy said, “I don’t know. How the hell could he find us here? We covered all the tracks.”

Rudy’s eyes went mad for a moment and he leaned into Brynn’s face, raging, “Talk to me, bitch. Talk to me! What’s going on? Who the fuck are you?”

Brynn had dealt with the emotionally disturbed. Rudy was out of control, running on pure anger. Her heart beat fast, from both present fear and past memory of Keith’s fist strafing her jaw.

When she said nothing he screamed, “Who are you?” He pulled a pistol from his taut waistband and pushed it against her neck.

“No,” Brynn whispered and turned away, as if avoiding the challenging eyes of a mad dog. She managed to say evenly, “There’ll be state troopers and county deputies and tactical backup in the area anytime now.”

The woman dropped the club on the counter. “Oh, no…”

But Gandy was laughing. “No way. She had a fucking spear. She was on the run from some assholes broke into a house around here. What she told me’s the truth. No police, no troopers. Oh, and no choppers in the county. She told me they don’t use them around here for tactical work. Only medical. That answers one of our questions.” He smiled at Brynn. “Thanks for the info, by the way.”

“That’s true,” she said, speaking evenly, though still struggling to breathe after the blow to her belly. The pain was making her jaw quiver. “We weren’t part of a drug operation. But the protocol is if a deputy doesn’t report in a certain amount of time they’ll send backup.” She glared at Gandy. “Tactical backup.”

Rudy considered this, chewing his wet bottom lip. He put the gun away.

She continued, “If they’re not on their way by now, they will be soon. Don’t make this worse on yourselves. I’m way overdue.”

“This is a state park,” the woman said. “They won’t search here.”

Rudy sneered. “Well, Susan, why wouldn’t they search? Can you give me a reason? Of course not. Jesus. Don’t be stupid…. We had a good deal going and now it’s fucked up. You understand that? You understand how fucked we are?”

“Sure, Rudy. I understand.” Susan looked away from him. And angrily gestured to the child to fill the bags faster.

Gandy said, “That leaves those other two. The men after them. At least one had a gun, I could see. They could be with Fletcher.”

Rudy asked Brynn, “These men…either of them Hispanic? One of ’em black?”

She didn’t answer. Rudy looked at Gandy, who said, “Was night. They were a couple hundred yards away. I couldn’t tell.”

Brynn said, “You’re in enough trouble. We can—”

“Shut up. Do you believe her, these guys just broke in?”

Gandy replied, “I don’t know. If she was lying she was really good at it.”

“You see anybody actually shooting at her?”

“No. She tried to shoot them, with the Savage….” Then Gandy frowned. “But she didn’t take the shot. She could’ve. That seemed off to me. Maybe she was trying to trick me. I don’t know.”

“You gave her your gun?”

“What was I going to do? Say no because my family’s back in the camper cooking crystal? I could’ve taken it away from her anytime I wanted.”

“But she didn’t shoot?”

“Nope. Balked.”

“Why?” Rudy asked, moving close to Brynn.

I don’t know, she thought, and stared into the fat man’s watery eyes.

In the corner, little blond Amy was sealing bags of meth. She was working real hard for a kid who was up at this hour.

Rudy grabbed the duct tape the little girl was using, taped Brynn’s wrists behind her back and shoved her toward Gandy. “I can’t worry about her now. We’ll bring her with us. Get her out of here.” He glanced at the kettles. “Cool it down. Everything. Pack it up to travel. Fuck, what a waste.”

The woman and the skinny young man were shutting down the cooker and filling bags with the finished product. “Amy,” the mother whined. “Faster. What’s your problem?”

“I’m sleepy.”

“You can sleep when we’re on the road. No excuses.”

“Where’s Chester?” the child asked.

“He’s your doll. You should take better care of him.”

Rudy took the deer rifle and handed it to the scabby young guy. “Henry, get outside, up the path. Don’t shoot unless you can take everybody out. We don’t want any calls for backup. If fact, don’t shoot at all unless you have to. You see anybody, get your ass back here.”

“Sure, Rudy. You’re not…you’re not going to leave with me out there, are you?”

Rudy gave a guttural sound, registering his disgust. “Move.”

Gandy roughly took Brynn’s arm. Limping, he pulled her outside and dragged her to the van, pushed her inside. It was filled with clothes, suitcases, junk, magazines, toys, bottles of chemicals. He looped a rope through her bound arms, knotted it to a tie-down.

Brynn said, “There’ll be roadblocks. And the State Police does have choppers. You’re not going to get through. And don’t think about using me as a hostage. That never works. They’ll shoot you before you shoot me, or after. They’d prefer the first but they’ll do the second. It’s the way we train.”

He laughed. “Even now you’re balls out.”

“But I will cut a deal with you. You personally. Call my office. We’ll get it worked out.”

“Me personally?”

“You.”

“Why me? Because I’m the one who washes his hands? Who doesn’t say ‘him and me are going to do this’? Because I have green bumper stickers on the camper so I may actually care about the environment? Which means I’ll be reasonable?”

Yep. Exactly.

“You’ve got that little girl in there. Do it for her, at least.”

“I just fuck her momma. The kid’s not mine.” He slid the door closed with a hollow bang.

 

JAMES JASONS WAS

still some distance from Lake Mondac but figured he’d better cut off the GPS (not as easy as you’d think but he’d had a special switch installed). Those satellites and those servers…who knew what incriminating information they retained?

Good for security but bad to find restaurants. Still, he’d spotted a golden arches and went for it. He did the drive-through, going for two plain hamburgers, sliced apples and a diet cola.

He was back on the road, driving fast but not too far over the limit. He looked to all appearances like a slim, agreeable businessman. But if you got stopped, even for nothing other than an unplanned DUI roadblock—at which they’d let nondrinkers like him go immediately—your name and tag might still go into the system.

But tonight he had to make good time and was pushing the limit. He was prepared for a speed stop, of course. Presently listening to jazz, he would flip the preset selector on the steering wheel if stopped by a trooper, and a Christian inspirational sermon would come on. He also would slip a sponge-backed Jesus effigy and pro-life sticker onto the dash.

Might not save him from a ticket but it would probably prevent a car search.

And James Jasons definitely didn’t want his car searched tonight.

Eating his food, he wondered how things were going at Great Lakes Intermodal Container Services.

In 99 percent of the cases, all you have to do is find a sensitive spot and you touch it. That’s all. You don’t need to hit, you don’t need to stab.

A touch.

Only instead of sending Paulie or Chris to extort me, Mankewitz picks a scrawny little asshole like you. That the plan? You whine at me until I cave?

Jasons chuckled. His satellite phone chirped. It was an Iridium model and customized; the signal was scrambled both through a camouflage system and a multiline shifting program, impervious to any snooping, probably even to the government’s infamous Echelon, because of the dual-mode scrambling.

He swallowed the burger he was fastidiously chewing. “Yes?”

The voice said, “Your meeting seemed to go well.” Mankewitz didn’t identify himself. The key word about Echelon was “probably.”

“Good.”

“There’ve already been certain overtures of cooperation.”

So Morgan had read the note and decided to be smart. Jasons wondered if the information he was going to deliver to Mankewitz would be helpful. There was always the chance it wouldn’t and the risk had been wasted. But isn’t that the truth about life?

The union boss said, “On that other matter, your personal trip now?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve heard from a relative.”

He’d mean the round, fuzzy-haired detective in the Milwaukee PD—whom Jasons thought was cute. The cop was more than on the take; he was basically on the payroll. “And?”

“It seems there’s going to be a party up there.”

This was troubling. “Really? Did he know who’d be attending?”

“No close relatives. Mostly local but I think some folks from the East Coast might be. They’re debating coming.”

Meaning no Milwaukee police, just local officers, probably county, though the FBI—the East Coast family—was a possibility. That was very troubling.

“So it could be pretty crowded?”

“Could be.”

“Anything more about what they’ll be celebrating?”

“Nope.”

Jasons wondered what the hell was going on up there. “Still think I should go?”

He said “think,” but the real verb was “want.”

“Sure, have some fun. You’ve had a busy day. A party’ll do you good.”

Meaning: Hell, yes. Get your ass up there.

And fix whatever’s broken, whatever it takes.

Without hesitating, Jasons said, “I think I’ll go then. Like to see who shows up. Besides, I’m not that far away.”

“Have fun,” Mankewitz said, the weight of the world on his shoulders.

They disconnected.

Jasons sipped the soda, then ate some of the green apple. It was sour. They gave you a yogurt dip with it but he didn’t like the flavor. He was reflecting on Mankewitz’s deferential tone. The man always sounded like he didn’t know what planet Jasons came from, was almost afraid of him.

Stan Mankewitz, one of the most powerful men on the lakefront, from Minnesota to Michigan, and yet he was uncomfortable around the slim young man who weighed probably half what the union boss did and who walked around with a pleasant smile most of the time. Some of this might have been because Jasons, although he did have a law degree from Yale and an office in the union’s legal department, didn’t technically work for Mankewitz. A “labor relations specialist,” he was an independent contractor, powerful in his own right. He had his autonomous fiefdom—with the authority, and budget, to hire whomever he wanted. Jasons could also use money in ways that were beneficial to the union and Mankewitz but that avoided various inconvenient reporting regulations.

Then there was a lifestyle difference too. Mankewitz was not a stupid man. Nobody was going to do what Jasons did without his complete dossier—verbal at least—being delivered to the union boss. He’d know that Jasons lived alone in a nice detached house near the lakefront. That his mother lived in a nice apartment connected to her son’s house. That his boyfriend of several years, Robert, lived in an amazing townhouse near the lakefront. And he probably knew that Robert, a successful engineer and one hunky bodybuilder, shared Jasons’s interest in hockey, wine and music and that the partners had planned a civil union next year, with a honeymoon in Mexico.

But Jasons appreciated that Mankewitz did his homework. Because it was exactly how he himself worked his magic.

Alicia especially. Every day after school in that rehearsal room, three to four-thirty…. Impressive.

Mankewitz didn’t care about Jasons’s lifestyle, of course. Which was ironic, considering that the membership of Local 408 was made up of blue-collar folk, men mostly, some of whom would beat the crap out of James Jasons and Robert, given no excuse, some opportunity and a few too many beers.

Welcome to the new millennium.

A last bite of apple, sweetened by the diet soda.

He put the second hamburger back in the bag, which he twisted closed.

He passed a sign that announced it was forty-nine miles to Clausen, which he knew was about eight miles before the turnoff for Lake Mondac. Since he hadn’t seen any traffic, let alone a patrol car, on the road for miles, he edged the speed up to seventy-five.

And clicked the selector to the Christian CD, just for the fun of it.

 

HOLDING THE HEAVY

Savage rifle, Henry headed down the path toward where Rudy had directed him. He took a foil pack out of his pocket, a pipe and lighter too. Then he hesitated and put them away. He blew into his hands and continued along the path, scratching at the scars on his arm.

He stopped where the small path met the bigger one, the one that led down to the lake they got their water from. He stood there for five minutes, squinting, looking from right to left. Didn’t see a soul. He leaned the rifle against a tree. As he was reaching into his pocket again for the pack of meth and the lighter, a man stepped out of the shadows and hit him in the forehead with the butt of a shotgun, which was rubber padded but still hard enough to knock Henry off his feet. His head lolled back, eyes unfocused. A gurgling rose from his throat and his hands flailed and his knees jerked.

When the butt of the deer rifle, which wasn’t padded, crushed his windpipe Henry stopped thrashing quite so violently. After a minute he stopped moving altogether.

 

CRADLING THE DEER

rifle in his arm, Hart tensed as someone approached. But it was just Lewis, who glanced at the body on the ground, grunted and picked up the shotgun.

Hart bent down and felt the skinny man’s neck with the backs of his fingers. “Dead. You know they can lift prints from skin.”

“No. I didn’t. They can?”

“Yep.” Hart pulled his gloves back on. “What’s the story?”

Lewis said, “That girl deputy Brynn’s in the van. I saw some guy put her there. Looked like she was taped, her hands behind her, I mean.”

“So they walked right into the helpful arms of meth cookers.” Hart gave a faint laugh. “Everybody’s having a reversal of fortune tonight. We end up with a cop coming to visit in Lake Mondac, and they end up with a trailer full of slammers. Was she alone in the van?”

“I didn’t see anybody else. I wasn’t that close.”

“So where’s Michelle?”

“No idea.”

Hart pressed the catch on the bolt of the deer rifle, slipped it out of the gun, flung it away. Threw the gun itself in the opposite direction. He was a much better shot with a pistol than a rifle. Besides, a bolt action let you fire off a round only every few seconds. In that time he could have emptied the Glock’s fifteen-round clip and been halfway through reloading.

They eased silently toward the camper.

“How many people inside?” Hart whispered.

“Couldn’t see too good. Definitely one other man—and the guy who put Brynn in the van. A woman too.”

Hart was looking over Lewis carefully. The man was staring at the camper and kneading the shotgun stock. His eyes were troubled.

“Comp?”

“Yeah?” He looked up.

“We’ve gotta do it.”

“Sure.”

“I know what you’re thinking—they haven’t exactly done us harm. But they’re tweakers, Comp. They cook meth. They’ll be dead anyway in a year. OD’d or burned to death or clipped by somebody’s upset they’re peeing on his turf. This’ll be faster. This’ll be better for them. We’ll get Brynn, find Michelle, finish with them and that’s it.”

Lewis was looking at the van.

“How we handle it’s this: They’re pros and that means they’re going to have guns. Now, we bought some time when I talked to Brynn’s husband, but that’s not to say he believed me, or that they aren’t going to send a car around to the park, just for what the hell. I think we have to assume there’re cops at the house already and on a quiet night like this, sound’ll carry. They could hear the gunshots. We’ve got to finish it up fast, once the shooting starts. Real fast.”

“Sure.”

“You have that lighter of yours?”

“Always carry one. In case I meet a lady in a bar needs a light.” The crack in his voice belied the joke.

“Courteous of you, nonsmoker that you are.” Hart smiled and Lewis exhaled a brief laugh. “Okay, you go around to the right side of the camper, the one without the doors. Get some dirty leaves and see if you can find something plastic or rubber. Start a fire under the camper. Just small. We don’t want it to spread and call attention to us. I just want smoke. With all that ammonia and propane in there, they’ll freak and get the hell out, head for the van. When they come out…okay?”

He nodded.

“I’ll take the front door, you take the back. You locked and loaded?”

“Yes, I am.”

Hart checked his Glock and made sure one of the full clips was upside down in his waistband, to the right, so he could grab it easily in his left hand to reload.

“Keep your SIG handy too.”

Lewis fished his chrome-plated pistol out of his jacket pocket. And slipped the automatic into his waistband.

Hart noticed that the suggestion was greeted with none of the sarcasm or resistance of earlier.

Lewis gave an uneasy laugh. “Well, aren’t we a couple of gunslingers.”

“Move in slow, move in quiet. Get the fire going. Then come back around. Let ’em all get out before you start shooting. Last thing we want is to have to go in and get anybody. You counted three, right?”

“Yeah, but now I think about it, the woman turned her head and said something. She wasn’t looking at the two men. Maybe there’s somebody else.”

“Okay, we’ll plan on four.”

 

THE ROPE GANDY

had used to hook her to the tie-down in the back of the fourteen-foot van was thick and made of nylon—strong but slippery. Brynn finally managed to untie it. The tape on her hands, behind her, wouldn’t yield but she managed to climb to her feet. The buttons in the back doors were flush and she couldn’t lift them. She stumbled to the front of the van, tripped over the transmission shifter and hit her head on the dash. She lay stunned for a moment. Then managed to right herself and, turning her back to the glove box, got it open. Empty, except for papers.

She collapsed into the front seat of the van, catching her breath. Her stomach muscles were in agony from the navigation to the front and from the smack of the club Gandy’s wife had used on her. Brynn tried for the unlock button on the armrest but it was just out of reach of her bound hands. She surveyed the rest of the van, the junk, the boxes, the shopping bags. No knives or tools. No phones. She sat back in the seat, despairing eyes closing.

Then behind her a woman screamed.

“Michelle,” she whispered. Had she returned, had they found her at the lake and dragged her back here? Brynn spun around. But there were only two windows in the van aside from those in the front: in the rear doors. They were opaque with dirt.

Brynn looked in the side-view mirror. Smoke filled the night. Was the camper burning? Meth labs were notorious for incinerating the cookers.

The little girl was inside! she thought, panicked.

The voice called again, “No, no! Please!” The woman’s voice wasn’t Michelle’s. It was Amy’s mother’s.

Then the crack of pistol fire.

The boom of a shotgun.

Four or five more rounds. A pause, for reloading maybe. More shots.

Silence. Then a voice, high-pitched in fear or desperation. A man or woman or child?…Brynn couldn’t tell.

Another shot.

More silence.

Please, let her be all right. Please…picturing the tiny girl’s face.

Motion flickered in the side-view mirror. A figure, carrying a pistol, was walking around the camper, studying it carefully and the bushes nearby.

He then turned toward the van Brynn sat in.

She looked around for anything that would free her hands. She slipped them around the gearshift lever between the seats and began to saw. The gesture was futile.

She glanced outside. The figure was now looking directly at the van.

 

SHERIFF TOM DAHL

stood over the two bodies in the kitchen: a businesswoman in her thirties, looking like she’d kicked off her shoes after work, happily anticipating a weekend of relaxation; the other corpse was a solid man about her age, with a mop of post-college hair. He was the sort of guy you’d have a beer with at The Corner Place in Humboldt. The blood made huge stains on the floor.

Although Dahl had the edge most law enforcers develop from the job, this particular crime shook him. The majority of deaths in Kennesha County were accidental and occurred outside. Homeless people frozen, car accident victims, workers betrayed by their equipment and sportsmen by the forces of nature. Seeing these poor young folks inside their own home, gangland-killed like this, was hard.

He was staring at their pale hands; those of the typical dead around here were ruddy and calloused.

And on top of it all, his own deputy—his secret favorite in the department, the daughter he would have liked to have—was missing from a house tattooed with small-arms fire.

He exhaled slowly.

Footsteps came downstairs. “The friend?” Dahl asked Eric Munce, the man he’d chosen not to send here, picking instead Kristen Brynn McKenzie. And the man whose future presence in the department would be a constant reminder of that decision, however things turned out.

“No sign of her.”

One relief. He’d been sure that they were going to find her body upstairs in the bedroom. Murdered and maybe not right away.

Munce said, “They might have her with them. Or she’s with Brynn, hiding somewhere.”

Let’s pray for that, Dahl thought, and he did, though very briefly.

A call came in for him. The FBI, Special Agent Brindle explained, was sending several agents—now that Emma Feldman, a witness in the case against Mankewitz was dead. A State Police commander was headed here too and wouldn’t like the Feebies—he tended to squeeze hard in pissing contests—but Dahl was all for the more the merrier. No criminals ever escaped because too many talented cops were on his trail. Well, most of the time.

A crime scene unit from the State Police was en route as well, so Dahl ordered his boys to leave the evidence for collection but to look everywhere they needed in order to figure out what had happened and where Brynn and the Feldmans’ friend might be.

It didn’t take long to find significant pieces of the puzzle: gunshots through windows, gunshots inside, gunshots outside, footprints that suggested two males were probably the perps. Brynn’s Sheriff Department uniform shoes were inside, and the friend had abandoned her chic city boots beside the Feldmans’ Mercedes—both in favor of practical hiking footgear. One was injured; she was using a cane or crutch and appeared to be dragging one foot.

The Mercedes sat in front of the garage with gunshots in two tires, window smashed and hood up, a battery cable dangling. Another car had burned rubber—well, scattered gravel—as it fled. Another had limped out, dragging a flat.

But the jigsaw pieces didn’t give any sense of the big picture. Now, standing in front of the fragrant fireplace in the living room, Dahl summarized to himself: a mess. We got a mess on our hands.

And where the hell is Brynn?

Eric?

I’d rather it wasn’t him. You know how he gets.

Dahl noticed something in the woodwork. “Anybody trying to play CSI?” he asked sourly, eyes on Munce.

The deputy looked where he was pointing. It seemed like someone had dug a bullet out of the molding. “Not me.”

Why would somebody take the trouble to dig out one but not the other bullets? Why? Because it had his DNA on it?

Most likely, and that meant he was wounded.

It also meant that he was a pro. Most crimes in Kennesha County involved people who didn’t even know what DNA was, much less worried about leaving any.

A hit man.

Okay, think. The two men had been hired to kill Emma Feldman. They’d done that—and killed her husband too. Then, maybe, they’d been surprised by the friend who’d driven up with them. Maybe she’d been out for a walk or upstairs in the shower when the killers arrived.

Or maybe it was Brynn who’d surprised them.

Somebody, Brynn probably, had shot one of the men, wounding him. He’d dug the DNA-coated bullet out of the wall.

But what had happened next?

Had they ditched their car somewhere and taken Brynn’s? Were the friend and Brynn with them, captives? Had the women put on those hiking boots to run off into the woods?

Were they dead?

He called deputy Howie Prescott on his radio. The big man was near the lake in the yard between 2 and 3 Lake View, where they’d found some footprints. He was looking for any sign of a trail anybody’d left. Prescott was the best hunter in the office, though how the 280-pound man snuck up on his prey was a mystery to them all.

“Anything, Howie?”

“No, sir. But it’s dark as night here.”

Dark as night, Dahl thought. It is goddamn night.

“Keep looking.”

Dahl said to Eric Munce, who was rubbing the grip of his pistol the way a child plays with its sippy cup, “I want to get some bodies….” Dahl hesitated at the inappropriate word. “I want to get some searchers up here fast. As many as we can. But armed only. No volunteers.”

Munce hurried to his squad car to call in a search party.

Dahl stepped outside and gazed toward the lake. The moon was low, withholding most of its illumination from the surface.

Dahl’s radio crackled. “This’s Pete.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m in the driveway of Number One. Haven’t checked it out yet but wanted to tell you.” He was breathless. “There’s a truck just passed me. White pickup. Headed your way.”

A truck.

“Who’s inside?”

“Couldn’t see.”

“Okay. Check out the house. I want to know what you find.”

“Will do.”

“Got company,” the sheriff said to Munce, then called Prescott and told him to keep an eye out for the vehicle.

They saw it approach slowly and turn up the drive.

Both Dahl’s and Munce’s hands were near their weapons.

But it turned out not to be a threat.

Though it was certainly a complication.

Graham Boyd climbed out of the cab, leaving his passengers, three fuzzy bushes, in the back, and walked straight up to Dahl.

“She’s not here, Graham. We don’t know where she is.”

“Let me see,” the big man said in an unsteady voice, heading for the house.

“No, I can’t let you in. There’s some bodies. People’ve been killed, shot. It’s a crime scene.”

“Where is she?” Graham’s voice was ragged.

The sheriff put his arm around the man’s solid shoulders and led him away. “Brynn and those folks’ friend got away, we think.”

“They did? Where?”

“We don’t know anything for sure. We’re getting a search team up here now.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Look, let us do our job here. I know it’s hard. But I’m going to ask you to help us out and go on home. Please.”

The radio crackled once more. “Sheriff, it’s Howie. I was looking around the shore and found something.”

“Go ahead.”

“A car off the road. Went into the lake, looks like.”

“Looks like?” he snapped. “Or did?”

A pause. “Yeah, it did.”

“Where?”

“Can you see the flashlight? I’m signaling.”

Two or three hundred yards away a small yellow dot waved through the darkness.

Graham shouted, “What’s the debris, what color?”

A hesitation. Dahl repeated the question.

Prescott said, “There’s a bumper here. It’s dark red.”

“Oh, shit,” Graham said and started running.

“Goddamn,” Dahl spat out. He and Munce climbed into the sheriff’s car, Munce driving. They stopped and Graham climbed in the back, then they sped to the shore.

Skid marks, airbag dust, scrapes on the rocks and auto detritus—hunks of red plastic from lights, bits of glass—and an oil slick near the shore left no doubt. The car had sailed off the road, hit a rocky ledge then tumbled into the water.

“Jesus,” Graham muttered.

What did this do to the scenario? Who was in the car?

Or who is in the car still?

“Doesn’t mean it’s hers for sure, Graham. Or that she was even in it.”

“Brynn!” her husband shouted. The voice echoed across the lake. Graham scrabbled down the rocks.

“No!” Dahl said. “We don’t know where the shooters are.” Then to Munce: “Call back the State Police. We need a diver and a truck with a winch. Tell ’em Lake Mondac. Western shore. They can check the depth…. Graham that’s a crime scene too. We can’t have you fucking it up.”

Graham scooped something out of the water and dropped to his knees. His head was down. Dahl was about to shout at him again. But held back.

“I get him up here?” Munce asked.

“No. Let him be.” Dahl made his way to the water’s edge, moving carefully down the rocks, his game leg in agony.

Graham stood slowly and handed the sheriff a Hagstrom map of the county. On the soggy cover was written in marker Dep. K. B. McKenzie.

For a moment Dahl thought Graham was going to dive in after her. He was tensing to restrain him. But the big man did nothing. His shoulders were slumped, and he stared out over the black water.

A hiss and a crackle. “Sheriff, Pete. I’m at Number One Lake View. Nobody’s home and it’s sealed up. But there’s a car abandoned behind the house.”

“Abandoned?”

“I mean recent. I called it in. Stolen in Milwaukee a few days ago. According to the VIN. The plates match the same year and model but not this ID number. And there’re two bullet holes in the side and a rear tire’s shot out.”

So that’s the car that rimmed its way out of the Feldmans’ drive.

He thought of Graham and wished with all his heart the man was elsewhere. But he couldn’t waste any time. “Pop the trunk. Tell me what’s inside.”

“I did, Sheriff. Empty.”

Thank you, Lord.

“And nobody broke into the house?”

“No, I’ve been around it. They might’ve picked the lock and locked back up.”

“Forget it. Get to the closer house. Number Two.”

“Yessir.”

“You get over there too,” Dahl said to Prescott.

The big deputy nodded and he started up the dirt road.

A lengthy silence. Graham rubbed his eyes, then peered into the lake. “Don’t imagine it’s that deep. She could’ve got out.”

“I’m sure of it.”

“You don’t believe that, do you? You think she’s dead. Well, she isn’t.”

“I’m not saying that at all, Graham. She’s real tough. One of the toughest.”

“You have to search the area.”

“We will.”

“I mean now! Get state troopers here.”

“They’re on their way. I’ve already called.”

“The FBI. They’ll get involved for something like this, won’t they?”

“Yep. They’ll be here too.”

Graham turned and looked at 2 Lake View. Gibbs’s squad car was pulling up now.

Dahl had a lot on his mind but not so much that he couldn’t offer a silent prayer that his deputy and the houseguest weren’t in that house, dead as the Feldmans. “Go on home. Be with Joey. He’ll need you now.”

Then an excited clatter through the tinny speaker: “Got something here, Sheriff,” Pete Gibbs radioed.

“Go ahead.”

“Been broken into. And I think I see bullet holes in some windows upstairs.”

“Stay put till Eric gets there.” He nodded at the young hotshot of a deputy, who took off at an earnest run.

“Looks empty to me,” Gibbs said.

“Hold your position.”

“Yessir.”

“When Eric gets there, move in. But assume they’re inside. And we know they’re armed.”

Graham was examining the shore, his back to Dahl, who was staring at the house. The minutes passed, slow as could be, and Dahl found himself holding his breath, waiting for a gunshot.

Finally, the radio crackled teasingly.

No transmission.

Dahl didn’t want to call back, and have their radios squawk, giving away their position.

Nothing.

Damnation.

Finally Eric Munce called in. “House is cleared, Tom. They were here. Been a firefight. But no bodies. But we’ve got something weird.”

“Weird, Eric. I can’t use weird. Just tell me.”

“Upstairs bedroom. There’s ammonia all over the bathroom floor. Stinks like a baby’s diaper bin.”

“Ammonia.”

“And we found Brynn’s uniform. All her clothes.”

Graham tensed.

“They were soaking wet and full of mud. And the closet and dresser were open. I think she changed clothes and then took off.”

Dahl glanced at Graham, who closed his eyes in relief.

“Sheriff, it’s Howie. I’m outside. I see two sets of footprints, women’s, I’d guess, they’re smaller, running to the woods behind the house. They go to a stream heading back to the Feldmans’. Then I lose them.”

“Roger that.” Dahl put his arm around Graham’s massive shoulders, walked the man back to his squad car. “Listen, we know your wife got outa the car okay. If anybody knows how to stay alive, it’s her. I mean, I know that for a fact, Graham; I signed the payment request for her to go to all those training courses she takes. Hell, she takes so many of ’em they call her the Schoolmarm behind her back. Only don’t tell her I said that. Come on, I’ll drive you back to get your truck. You and me, we’re too old to be out jogging.”

 

THE VAN’S AUTOMATIC

lock clicked.

Brynn turned toward the passenger door as it opened.

Hart stood there, his gun forward, scanning carefully for threats. He saw her hands were taped and that the van was otherwise unoccupied. He climbed in.

The door slammed behind him.

He put his gun away and began searching through the mounds of junk on the floor and directly behind the front seats.

Brynn said, “The girl back there, in the camper? The little girl?”

“No. She’s all right.”

“The fire?”

“Diversion. The camper wasn’t burning.”

Brynn looked. The smoke had cleared. He was telling the truth.

Hart found some bleach, opened it and drenched his gloves and the keys, which were bloody. Then poured more in a tear in his leather jacket—the bullet hole from Michelle’s shot, it seemed. He exhaled slowly from the pain.

The chlorine stench rose and stung her eyes. His too. They both blinked.

“Druggies…Can’t be too safe nowadays.” It was like he was apologizing for the fumes. Hart looked her over, focusing on her vastly swollen cheek. He frowned.

“Are you telling me the truth? Is she alive?” Her eyes bored into his. He gazed back.

“The girl? Yes, I told you. The mother, if she was the mother, she’s not. The others aren’t either…. You’re interested, they left the kid in the camper when they thought it was burning. And ran outside. Maybe they just meant to fight. Or maybe they just meant to leave her to burn.”

Brynn looked him over. A solid face, gray eyes, long hair, dark and dry. Skin rough. She’d had a bout of acne as a girl; it had tormented her. But the condition had cleared up as soon as she hit college. He wasn’t handsome, not really, but he had confidence in spades, an attraction all its own.

“Brynn,” he mused.

How’d he know her name? Had Gandy told him before he died? No. The men had been in the second house along Lake View Drive, the bedroom. He would have seen the name badge on her blouse.

“Hart.”

He nodded with an exasperated smile. “My friend was talking a bit much. Giving that away.”

“What’s his name again?”

The smile lingered.

Brynn said, “Tell me where the girl is.”

“In her room in the camper.” Hart continued, “She’s in bed with some doll named Chester. I found it for her. Or a rabbit. I don’t know.”

“You left her there?” Brynn asked angrily. “She could look outside and see her mother’s body?”

“No, my friend’s moving them all into the woods. I told the girl to stay put. Come morning this park’ll have more cops per square foot than the police academy. They’ll find her.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she? You killed her too.”

His face tightened. He was upset that she doubted him. “No, I didn’t kill her. She’s in bed with Chester. I told you.”

Brynn decided that she believed him.

“So what happened?” he asked. “You met that fellow in the woods and he was going to let you use his phone here. And you walked into a meth lab.”

“I figured it out before. But not before enough.”

“Smelled it, right? The ammonia?”

“Yep. And the chlorine too. And burning propane.”

“That’s how I found it,” Hart said. “I was down by that lake and could smell it down there.”

“Wind must’ve shifted,” she said. “I didn’t smell it till we were almost here.”

Hart stretched. “Phew. Quite a night. Bet you don’t see many of ’em like this in…what’s this county again?”

“Kennesha.”

He looked again at the wound on her face. He’d be noting how infected it was, how painful. She supposed he’d be considering how long she could hold out before she told him where Michelle was.

Forever.

Wondering if that was true.

And as if he were reading her thoughts: “Where is your friend Michelle?” he said evenly.

“I don’t know.” Recalling that they’d found her purse. They knew who she was and where she lived.

Hart moved in the seat slightly and grimaced, apparently at the pain in his shot arm. “What’s that name—Brynn?”

“Norwegian.”

He nodded as he took this in. “Well, about Michelle, you’re lying to me. You do know where she is.” He actually seemed offended. Or hurt. After a moment Hart said, “I talked to somebody tonight, you know. On the phone.”

“Talked to somebody?”

“Your husband.”

She said nothing, thinking at first that he was bluffing. But then remembered that they’d taken her phone. Graham might have called and Hart might have answered.

“I pretended I was another trooper. I told him you’d been delayed. He bought it. I could tell. There’s nobody coming to save you. And before you get your hopes up I took the battery out. Can’t be traced. Now, where is she? Michelle?”

They held each other’s eyes. She was surprised at how easy it was.

“You killed her friends. Why would I tell you where she is, so you can kill her too?”

“So,” he said, nodding, “Michelle was a friend of the family? Is that how she got mixed up in this whole thing?” A laugh. “Wrong time and wrong place, you might say. A lot of that going around tonight.”

“We need to talk about making arrangements here.”

“I’ll bet this’s a first for you. Has been for me.”

“What?”

“The game we’ve been playing tonight. Like poker. Bluffing. You fool me, I fool you.”

Poker…

“My friend was telling me about this character. His mama or grandma, I forget, was talking about the Trickster. Some mythology thing, a fairy tale. He causes all kind of grief. That’s what I’ve been calling you all night, Brynn.”

Trickster, she reflected.

Hart continued, “That TV in the house at Number Two Lake View—finding a channel with women talking. That was smart. And the ammonia above the door. But now I think about it, you didn’t rig it to fall, did you? You’d worry about rescue workers or your cop friends getting blinded. Funny—knowing you didn’t come up with a cowardly trap…makes me feel better about you.”

Brynn McKenzie repressed a smile and didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response.

“Then the canoe. And the blood on the ledge.”

“And you in the three-wheeled car,” she replied.

“Didn’t fool you, though, did it?”

“I can say the same. After all, here you are. You found me.”

He looked her over. “The blood at the ledge. You cut yourself extra for that?”

“Didn’t bring any ketchup with me.” She tilted her head so he could see the coagulated blood in her hair.” Then she added, “The flashlight tricked me, on the ledge. What’d you do, make a rope out of a T-shirt?”

“Yep. My friend’s. Got to see more of his tattooed body than I wanted. I used a branch too so it’d hang out a ways and dangle in the wind.”

“But how’d you find us?”

“BlackBerry.”

She shook her head, smiling ruefully. He has satellite. I have a homemade toy compass…though one worked as good as the other, Brynn thought. “The Sheriff’s Department won’t pay for those.”

“I figured you’d make for that trail, the Joliet, and north from there. And go to the interstate or Point of Rocks.”

“I’d decided on the interstate. The climb’d be a bitch but it’s closer and by the time we got to the highway there’d be plenty of trucks on the road.”

“How come you didn’t get lost?”

“Good sense of direction.” She looked him over closely. “Why are you doing this, Hart?” she asked. “It’s hopeless.”

“Ah, Brynn, we’re both too smart for hostage negotiation one-oh-one.”

She continued nonetheless, “Less than two percent of perps get away with murder—and those’re usually drug clips where nobody cares about the victim or there’re so many suspects it’s not even worth investigating. But tonight…they won’t stop until they get you…. You’re not stupid, Hart.”

Again he seemed hurt. “That was condescending…. And what you’re trying’s cheap. I’ve been treating you with respect.”

He was right.

He stretched and massaged his shot arm. The bullet hole was near the edge of the jacket. It had apparently missed bone and vital vessel. He mused, “Crazy line of work we’re in, don’t you think, Brynn?”

“We’re not in the same line of work.” She couldn’t help but scoff.

“Sure we are…. Take tonight: We came up here to do jobs we’d agreed to do. And now we’ve still got the same goals. To stop each other and get out of this damn forest alive. Who writes your paycheck and who writes mine, that’s just a technicality. Doesn’t matter much why we’re here. The important thing is that we are.”

She had to laugh.

But he continued, as if she’d conceded his point. And looked into her eyes as he said, animated, “But don’t you think it’s what makes everything worthwhile? Even what’s gone down tonight, all this crap. I do. I wouldn’t trade the life I lead for anything. Look at most of the rest of the world—the walking dead. They’re nothing but dead bodies, Brynn. Sitting around, upset, angry about something they saw on TV doesn’t mean a single thing to them personally. Going to their jobs, coming home, talking stuff they don’t know or care about…God, doesn’t the boredom just kill them? It would me. I need more, Brynn. Don’t you?” He massaged his neck with his uninjured arm. “Tell me where she is. Please. It’s going to get bad.”

“I tell you and you let me live?”

A pause. Then: “No, I can’t hardly do that. But I have your phone number. I know you have a husband and you might have children, probably do. If you tell me, they’ll be fine.”

“What’s your full name?”

He shook his head, giving her a frown.

“Well, okay, Hart first or last name, listen: you’re under arrest.” She recited the Miranda warning, start to finish. She never used those laminated cards that bail bondsmen handed out. She’d memorized the language years ago.

“You’re arresting me?”

“Do you understand your rights?”

Amused, he said, “I know you know where she is. You had a meeting point somewhere, didn’t you? I know that. Because that’s what I would have done.”

Breaking the silence that followed he continued, “Life’s funny, isn’t it? Everything seems perfect. The plan, the background, the research, the details. You even nail that fishy human factor. Clear road, easy escape, you’ve distracted everybody who needs distracting. And then something small happens. Too many red lights, tire goes flat, an accident ties up traffic. And the psycho security guard, who just got a new forty-four Desert Eagle he’s itching to use, comes to work ten minutes early because he woke up before the alarm because a dog started barking two blocks away because a squirrel…”

His voice faded. He tented his gloved fingers, wincing slightly when he moved his left arm. “And all your plans go up in smoke. The plans that couldn’t go wrong go wrong. That’s what happened to us tonight, Brynn. You and me both.”

“Undo my hands, give me your weapon.”

“You really think you’re going to arrest me, just like that?”

“You weren’t paying attention. I already did.”

He stretched again. “Not as young as I used to be.” He massaged his left arm. “How long have you been married?”

She didn’t answer but glanced involuntarily at his gloved hand.

“Marriage doesn’t suit me. Does it suit you, Brynn?…Come on, what’s Michelle to you?”

“My job. That’s what she is.”

“How important can a job be?”

Brynn, wrinkling her brow cynically—and with pain. “You know the answer to that.”

He began to speak then stopped. Tilted his head in concession.

“You might’ve talked to my husband but you don’t know him. He’ll’ve put things in motion by now. He’s not falling asleep after the ten o’clock news.”

Again, disappointment in his face. “That’s a lie, Brynn.”

She inhaled slowly. “Maybe it is,” she found herself saying. “So. Okay. No more lies, Hart. Graham might’ve gone to sleep. But he’ll wake up about four A.M. for the bathroom. Which he does like clockwork. And when I’m not there he’ll call my boss, and his first call’ll be to mobilize the State Police. You have some time but not a lot. And not nearly enough for you to get me to tell you where she is. And that’s not a lie.”

“Okay, what we could do is…” His voice faded.

Brynn laughed. “You were going to lie to me, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, I was.” He grinned.

“Going to give me some hope, right?”

“Yep. But it felt wrong.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a map. Opened it and spread it between them. He located the faint road where they were. Flicked on the overhead light. “Where is she, Brynn?”

She noted the tiny blue dot that was the lake where Michelle waited. She said, “I’m not telling you.”

He shook his head. “Well, I won’t hurt you. That’s not dignified. And your family’s safe.”

“I know that.”

He drew his gun. Glanced at it. “But…you understand.”

He’s reluctant to shoot, she thought, surprised. But shoot he would. In a curious way, though, she felt that she’d won this part of the game. And she felt too, with a deep pang, that she’d also lost. Not because of her death. But for a dozen reasons that hovered far outside this van, this forest, this park.

The silence was awkward, like that surrounding a couple near the end of their first date.

“Hart, this is your last chance.”

He laughed.

“Call nine-one-one. I meant what I said. I’ll ask the DA to be lenient. No more lies between us, Hart. I mean it.”

His head was down, he was caressing the black gun absently.

“You going to surrender?” she persisted.

“You know I can’t.”

They exchanged rueful smiles.

Then a faint frown crossed Hart’s face as he glanced out the window. “What—?”

The van was moving, easing downhill and picking up speed.

In the moments just before he’d climbed inside she’d shifted the transmission into neutral with her bound hands, disengaged the emergency foot brake and then sat back. As they’d been talking she’d kept her foot on the main brake pedal. Finally when it was clear she couldn’t talk him into giving up she’d lifted her foot. The van, pointed downhill, surged forward. It now bounded over a railroad tie parking barrier in the lot and began careening down the steep hillside filled with brush and saplings.

“Christ,” Hart muttered. He grabbed for the wheel and transmission lever but Brynn slammed herself sideways, colliding with his bad arm. He shouted in pain.

The vehicle sped up, crashing into rocks, which made it veer to the left, then, going a good twenty miles an hour, rolled on its side, the passenger window exploding inward.

As Brynn pitched hard into Hart’s chest, the van began to tumble madly down the endless hillside.

 

BY THE TIME

Tom Dahl drove Graham Boyd back to the Feldmans’ house, two State Police cars, lights flashing, were bounding up rough Lake View Drive. They made the turn fast, churning up dust, and hurried along the driveway. The six troopers climbed out.

Graham shook Dahl’s hand solemnly and wandered off to his truck, pulling his phone from his pocket. Dahl joined the WSP’s night watch commander, Arlen Tanner, a big man with a mustache. He and the sheriff had worked together for years. Dahl briefed him and the other men.

Tanner said, “Crime Scene’ll be here in a half hour. So it’s a search and rescue?”

“That’s right, Arlen. We’ve got teams from Humboldt and a half dozen troopers from Gardener coming. Barlow County’ll send some too.”

“Woke up our two divers. They’re on the way.”

“I’m not sure we’ll need ’em. It’s likely our officer got out of the car and hooked up with a friend of the victims. They’re in the woods around here someplace. But we’re pretty sure the two shooters’re after them.”

Dahl had a phone call. The area code told him it was coming in from the Kenosha area. He frowned. Take it or not?

Hell. Better.

“Sheriff Dahl here.”

A somber voice on the other end of the line said, “Sheriff, this’s Andrew Sheridan….” He said this as if Dahl ought to know.

Uncertainly the sheriff said, “Yessir?”

“I worked with Emma Feldman. I just heard.”

Oh. That was it. After discovering the bodies, Dahl had called the law firm assistant and gotten the name of several partners Emma Feldman regularly worked with. He’d taken a deep breath and delivered the news. Word would travel fast, of course, in those circles.

“I’m sorry, sir. Sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

They talked for a moment or two, Dahl giving away what he could, which wasn’t much. Sheridan finally got down to business. “Sheriff, this is a hard time for everybody. But I have to ask you something. About Emma’s files. She had some with her, didn’t she?”

“Yessir, she did.”

“Are you going to want them for evidence?”

“Yes, they’ll have to be processed. It looks like somebody went through them.”

“What? Who?”

Dahl lifted eyebrows apologetically to Arlen Tanner. “Just be a minute,” he whispered. Then into the phone: “We aren’t sure, sir.”

“So we can’t have them back?”

“Not yet. No.”

“Do you know when we can?”

“I can’t say at this time.”

“Then can I ask that you secure them somehow?”

“As evidence, they’ll be locked up, sir.”

A hesitation. “It’s nothing critical, but we worry about trade secrets and issues like that. You understand.”

No, he didn’t. But he said, “We’ll make sure they’ll be safe.”

“Well, thank you, Sheriff. If there’s anything I can do, anything at all, just let me know.”

Yep, let me do my job.

They disconnected. Dahl was irritated but couldn’t really blame the man. The practicality of his call didn’t mean he wasn’t mourning. Like Dahl, Sheridan had a job to do.

The sheriff’s radio crackled again. Then he heard: “More company’s coming, Sheriff.”

“Rescue team, tow truck?”

“No, private car.”

“Get the tag?”

“Wisconsin. All I saw.”

“Okay.”

The sedan slowed and turned toward 3 Lake View, the house lit up like the Titanic in her last hours, Dahl decided, having just seen the movie with his wife. He waved the car to a stop with his flashlight and asked the driver to get out. The businessman, in his midthirties or so, stared at the tableau, his face etched with concern. He climbed out. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

Tanner deferred to Dahl, who said, “Could I see some ID, sir? What’s your name?”

“Ari Paskell.” He offered his driver’s license to the State Police commander, who handed it to one of his troopers to check out.

“Please, what’s going on?”

“What’s your business here?”

“Business? I was coming to spend the weekend with Emma and Steve! What’s going on? I’ve been calling them all night and can’t get through.”

“How do you know them?”

“Steve and I are friends. We used to work together. He invited me to spend the weekend. Are they all right?”

Dahl glanced at Graham, who was staring into the woods. How I hate this, the sheriff thought. He then noticed the trooper in the front seat of his squad car. He nodded, meaning that the man’s license and tag checked out. Dahl lowered his voice, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, sir. But there’s been a crime. The Feldmans were, well, they were the victims of a homicide tonight.”

“My God, no! But, no, you can’t be right…. I just talked to Steve this afternoon.”

“I’m afraid there’s no doubt.”

“No,” he gasped. “But…no. You’re wrong!” His face went even paler than it had been.

Dahl wondered if he was going to slip into hysteria. It happened pretty frequently at times like this, even with the toughest folks, which this fellow didn’t seem to be.

“I’m sorry.”

“But it can’t be.” The man’s eyes were wide, hands shaking. “I brought them their favorite beer. And I got fresh bratwurst. I mean, the kind we always have.” His voice cracked. “I got them a few hours ago. I stopped in…” He lowered his head. In a defeated voice he said, “Are you sure about this?”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Paskell leaned against his car, saying nothing, just staring at the house. He’d be reliving memories, pleasant ones, of events that there’d be no repeat of.

Munce joined them.

“What happened?” Paskell whispered. “Who did it?”

“We don’t know. Now, Mr. Paskell—”

“But they’re not rich. Who’d rob them?”

“Mr. Paskell, do you know who the other houseguest is? All we know is she’s a woman from Chicago used to work with Emma.”

He shook his head. “No, they said somebody else’d be visiting. I don’t know who.”

“I think you should head back home, sir. Or get a motel if you’re too tired or upset to drive. There’re some past Clausen on Six Eighty-two. There’s nothing you can do here now.”

He didn’t seem to hear. He was frowning.

Dahl paid a bit more attention and, like he always did with witnesses, gave him time to play the thought to the surface.

“This is probably crazy…” He cocked his head. “Just a thought.”

Usually civilians’ suggestions were crazy. But sometimes they led to the killer’s front door. Dahl said, “Go on.”

“Steven was talking to me, this was last fall?”

“Yessir?”

“And he said he’d had a run-in with a man up here. At one of the stores. A big guy. A local, Steve said. Some stupid thing, about nearly bumping cars in the lot. The guy went crazy. Followed him home, threatened him.”

“He give you any details?”

“No. Just he lived around here and he was pretty big. Three hundred pounds.”

Munce looked at Dahl, shaking his head. “Doesn’t seem like the perp. It was two of them, and nobody was that big, to judge from the footprints. Did he give you a name or description?”

“No, it was just one of those stories: this scary thing happened to me, you know. But he was shook up. No question. I mean, the man came right to the house. If there were more than one maybe the big man brought his friends and they…well, they hurt Steve and Emma. While he waited in the car.”

If Dahl had a dollar for every conflict in a parking lot that could have turned violent but didn’t, he’d be rich. He asked, “Could you give me your number, Mr. Paskell? We may want to ask you a few questions.”

Paskell was looking at the car, where the groceries bought specially for his friends sat, soon to be discarded. Would he throw them out in anger or despair? Despite his benign appearance, the man was, Dahl figured, a rager. “Mr. Paskell?”

He still wasn’t listening. Then the sheriff asked again and the friend blinked. “My number. Yeah, sure.” He recited it for Dahl.

Brawny Tanner stroked his mustache and looked at the sheriff, his expression saying, It never gets any easier, does it?

“Are you all right to drive?” Dahl asked.

“A few minutes.” He was gazing at the house. “Just a few minutes.”

“Sure. You take your time.”

The businessman, his face a mask, pulled out his phone. He rubbed it between thumb and finger, delaying making calls to friends. Dahl left him to the agonizing task.

Prescott and Gibbs were putting up crime scene tape. Munce reported that the three deputies had gotten a “ways” into the woods and had lost all trace of the women’s trail.

“Whatta you think about that big local?” Tanner asked Dahl.

“Doesn’t set off fireworks for me. But we’ll keep it in mind. Get me a map. Anybody got a map? And spotlights?”

Maps yes, spots no, so they walked up the steps to the front porch, whose overhead light was blazing and attracting the first few bugs of the season. One deputy produced the large map of the area and set it on a wooden café table on the porch, moved the chairs back. The houses here weren’t depicted but Lake View Drive was, a narrow yellow line. Lake Mondac was on one side and on the other was a vast mass of green, Marquette State Park. Elevations and trails were shown, ranger stations, parking lots and a few of the scenic highlights: Natural Bridge, Devil’s Deep, the Snake River Gorge.

Tens of thousands of acres.

Dahl looked at his battered Timex. “Give them five, six hours since the murder. How far could Brynn and the girl get? In that brush, at night, not very.” His leg hurt like the dickens.

Prescott ambled up. “Found something by the garage, Sheriff.”

The troopers eyed the deputy’s bulk. He nodded at them, as confident as any twenty-seven-year-old could be.

“What’s that?”

“Found a tarp, the sort you’d cover a canoe with. And drag marks leading to that stream. It runs into the lake.”

“Footprints?”

“Couldn’t tell. It’s grass and gravel. But the skids could be fresh. And I looked in the garage. There’s only one life vest. No paddles. I’ll bet they took the boat.”

Dahl looked over the map. “No streams or rivers flowing out of the lake. They could get as far as the opposite shore but then they’d have to hoof it.”

“They have the boots for it,” Munce pointed out. “Swapping footgear.”

Dahl noticed that Graham still hadn’t left yet, but was hanging back, eyes on the dark woods.

“Graham, you help us out here?”

He joined them and accepted various measures of sympathy from the other law enforcers after introductions were made and they learned it was his wife who was missing.

Dahl explained about the canoe.

Graham shook his head. “I don’t think it was Brynn who took it.”

“Why not?”

“She hated boats. Hated water.”

“Well,” Commander Arlen Tanner pointed out, “was a pretty extreme situation. She might’ve made an exception.”

“Only if there was no other way to go.”

Dahl asked, “Did Brynn know the state park good?”

“Some. And I saw her in the car before she left, looking over her map. She always does that. Prepares, you know. She and her ex came here a few times. She and I’ve never been.”

Munce said, “Brynn and me were on a search and recovery here a while ago.” He was frowning and tense, as if there was something he’d been meaning to bring up. “Gotta say, Tom. Don’t know why you didn’t have me come up here. I wasn’t but twenty minutes away.”

“Thought you were busy. On that grand theft case.”

“No, no. Didn’t you hear? That was a mistake. I would’ve come.”

Dahl continued to examine the map. “We know she got dry clothes and she hooked up with that friend of the Feldmans. They came back to the house here, got boots and then took off. But which way?”

Tanner liked the canoe idea, despite what Graham’d said. “Could’ve paddled across the lake and are hiding there. Or if they didn’t take the boat they could be up there.” He gestured at the steep hill behind the house; it was covered with vegetation.

Another trooper shrugged. “I’d vote for Six Eighty-two. They’d plan on flagging down a car or truck or getting to one of the houses along there. It’d take ’em a few hours but they could do it.”

Dahl felt the same.

Graham was shaking his head.

“What?” Dahl asked.

“I don’t think she’d go that way, Tom. Not if those men were still around.”

“The highway’s the closest to safety for them,” Dahl said. He was inclined to believe the men were in the area here and moving slowly toward the highway.

“Brynn wouldn’t lead them to anybody’s house. Not out here. She wouldn’t endanger anybody innocent. She’d keep running. And she wouldn’t hide either.”

“Why not?” Tanner asked.

“Because she wouldn’t.”

“I don’t know, Graham,” Dahl said. “Okay, she might not go to a house but she could flag down a car.”

“And how many did you see on the road when you drove up? I saw a hundred deer and one Chevrolet. She knows how deserted it is round here.”

“Well, whatta you think she did, Graham?” Munce asked.

“Headed into the park itself. Straight into the middle.”

“But she’d know none of the ranger stations’re open this time of year.”

“But they have phones, don’t they?”

“They’re not working if they’re closed for the season.”

“Well, pay phones.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Tapping the map. “I’m not even sure she’d go for a ranger station. I think maybe she’d make for the interstate.” His finger tapped the Snake River Gorge Bridge.

Arlen Tanner was looking over the map. “All respect, Mr. Boyd, that’s a lotta ground to cover. How’d they find their way? We’ve had people lost in this place for nearly a week. It’s thousands and thousands of acres. And it’s pretty rough, a lot of it. Caves, drop-offs, swamps.”

“That’s exactly what she’d want.” Graham countered. “The harder, the better. If those men are after them. Put her more in control.”

One of the troopers, looking like a big, buff soldier, offered, “That’s, what? Seven, eight miles from here. It’s mostly off-trail. And the gorge is one of the most dangerous places in the park.”

“All respect,” Tanner announced, “the odds are they’re going to be hiding around here somewhere. Or hiking back to the highway. That’s the logical approach.”

Dahl said, “I agree with Arlen, Graham. I know her too but nobody’d strike out in that direction. She’d never find her way, even with GPS and a map and in daylight. I think for now we’ve got to concentrate around here. And Six Eighty-two.”

“At least send a few people into the park at the Snake River Gorge, Tom,” Graham insisted.

“We just don’t have the manpower, Graham. I can’t send volunteers, not with those men out there. Has to be armed troopers or deputies. Now go on home, Graham. Joey’s going to be worried. He’s got to know you’re there for him. I’m talking as a father now. Not a cop…. I promise, your number’s the first one I call, we find anything.”

Eric Munce walked Graham back to his truck.

Dahl stood on the porch and looked out over the chaos of the front yard: the lights, the law enforcers, the police cars, an ambulance useful only as a taxi ride for two dead bodies. The victims’ friend, Paskell, had joined Graham and Munce. They shook hands and seemed to be sharing mutual sympathy.

As he turned back to the map to organize the search parties, Dahl thought a short prayer that ended with: And bring Brynn home to us, if you please.

 

STEAM OR SMOKE

or both rose from the van. But even if it was burning it wouldn’t blow up.

They never did.

Brynn McKenzie lay on her back, breathing hard, locating pain and thinking: In the movies every car that crashes blows up. In real life they never do. She’d run probably a hundred highway accidents. Including four fires that wholly immolated the vehicles. The cars or trucks burned furiously but none of them had ever actually exploded.

Which hadn’t stopped her escaping as fast as she could through the gap where the windshield had been—moving like a caterpillar with her hands taped, scrunching along painfully over glass and rocks—and putting as much distance between herself and the shattered van as possible. She’d paused only to turn her back to Hart’s map and grab it, then crumple it into a ball.

She was now about twenty feet from the vehicle, which lay on its side at the foot of the steep hill they’d tumbled down sideways—that orientation had probably saved her life. Had they kept going forward, over the drop, the airbags would have come and gone with first impact and the final drop would have fired them out through the windshield and underneath the tumbling vehicle.

As it was, Hart ironically might have saved her life. She recalled how he’d broken her fall as she’d slammed into him, smelling of aftershave, smoke and bleach.

She was hurting in various places but she tested the important appendages. They all seemed to work. It was odd not having the use of her hands, still taped behind her, to evaluate injuries. The wound in her cheek, and the gum where the tooth had been, still won the pain award. The throbbing had claimed everything north of her shoulders.

Where was Hart? She couldn’t see him.

She looked to the top of the hill—it seemed very far away—where there was a faint light from the camper. She could hear Hart’s partner calling him. He’d undoubtedly heard the crash but couldn’t see the van, which had rolled through tall stands of brush.

They hadn’t fallen all the way to the bottom of the ravine. The van was resting on a flat area about twenty feet wide, at the edge of which was another drop—about thirty feet down, she estimated—to a fast-moving stream.

She told herself: Your legs’re working fine. Get up.

Only she couldn’t. Not with her hands taped. She couldn’t find any leverage.

“Fuck.” A word she’d said perhaps only a dozen times in her life.

Finally she tucked her knees up and managed to roll onto them, facedown, and then rose, staggering upright. She slipped the map into the back waistband of her sweats and looked around quickly for Hart.

And there he was. He’d been thrown free—which is usually the way she described the demise of a crash victim who wasn’t wearing his seat belt and had rag-dolled against a tree or signpost. He lay on his back on the other side of the van. His eyes were closed but his leg was moving, his head lolling slightly.

His black Glock lay about fifteen feet from him.

She decided she could kick the weapon forward like one of Joey’s soccer balls until she was safely away then drop to her knees and pick it up, then crawl upright again.

But starting for the weapon, Brynn had heard a whimper. She spun around and saw Amy—the little blond girl, in her dirty white T-shirt and denim skirt, clutching her toy. She was running down the hill in a panic. Maybe Hart’s partner had scared her and she’d fled from the camper.

Brynn was between her and Hart, who was coming to consciousness. His eyes were closed. But his fingers were clenching and unclenching. He moaned.

The girl was nearly at the foot of the hill, running blindly, crying. In ten seconds she’d be over the edge of the ravine.

“Amy! Stop!”

She didn’t hear or if she did she paid no attention.

A glance back toward Hart. He was trying to sit up, looking around, though he hadn’t seen her yet.

The gun? Oh, how she wanted the gun!

But there was no choice. Brynn gave up on the weapon and began sprinting toward the girl. She intercepted her about three feet from the cliff edge, dropping to her knees painfully right in front of the child.

Startled, Amy pulled up fast.

“It’s okay, honey. Remember me? It’s all right. Be careful. I don’t want you to fall. Let’s get back, over there, into those bushes.”

“Where’s Mommy?”

“I’m not sure Amy. But I’m here. You’ll be okay.”

“I heard—”

“Come on with me.”

Brynn glanced back. Hart was struggling to get up. Still hadn’t seen her.

“Hart!” The voice came from the top of the cliff. Brynn saw the silhouette of Hart’s partner.

“Amy, let’s go over there. I don’t like that cliff.”

“Where’s my mommy?” A raw edge to her voice.

“Come on.” Brynn hated herself for saying it but she had to: “I’ll help you find her.”

The hysteria faded. “Okay.”

Brynn moved fast toward the base of the cliff and led the girl into a thick stand of brush and tall grass, out of sight from Hart.

“I’ll help you find your mother but I can’t do it with my hands this way. Can you help me? You know how you were taping those bags?”

She nodded.

“Well, I have tape on my hands.”

“Rudy did that.”

“That’s right. It was like a joke.”

“I don’t think it was a joke. He does lots of things like that.”

“It hurts my hands. Will you take it off?”

“I’ll take it off. Okay. I don’t like Rudy. He looks at me sometimes when he thinks I’m asleep.”

Brynn’s heart thudded. “You don’t have to worry about Rudy anymore. I’m a policewoman.”

“You are? Like Charlie’s Angels?”

“Like that, yeah, Amy.”

“You’re older than them.”

Brynn nearly smiled.

Amy was slowly tugging at the tape. “How did you know my name?”

“Your father told me.”

“He’s not my father.”

“Charlie told me.”

After a number of false starts, Amy was unwinding the tape. “Why did Rudy do that?”

“He was going to hurt me. But don’t say anything, Amy. There are other people around. We don’t want them to hear us.”

“I saw them. I think one of them hurt my mommy.”

“Don’t worry; I won’t let anybody hurt you. Just don’t say anything now. We’ll be quiet. Both of us.”

“Okay.”

At last her hands were free. Brynn rubbed them. She’d scraped an elbow but the parka had protected her pretty well and there was no other damage that hadn’t been there before the tumble down the hill. She grabbed the precious map and put it in her jacket.

“Thank you, honey. Now, let’s be quiet.”

Amy nodded.

Crouching, Brynn led her back quietly toward the clearing where the van lay. She peeked through the bushes.

Hart was gone.

So was the gun.