The Never Game

by Jeffery Deaver

  So, you de-looped me?? Is Knight in jail? Are you still alive?

  Shaw’s inclination was not to reply. But he did, texting that he was with the police. He’d be in touch.

  The forensic officers weren’t here yet. There was no such thing as a Crime Scene Unit helicopter, so the vans would be driving up the logging trail the long way around to avoid contaminating the shorter way to the highway on the assumption that the kidnapper had taken that route. Yet finding helpful tire tracks seemed an impossible task; the trail was largely covered with a thick carpet of leaves and where it was bare it was baked dry. Why would the Gamer turn careless now?

  Standish and the tactical officers were staying clear of the immediate scenes—here and in the nest of pine needles where the Gamer had originally left Thompson. They were visually perusing the site and gauging where the kidnapper might have stalked Thompson. Everyone was a pro now; whatever resentments lingered, they weren’t interfering with the mission of solving this crime to prevent others.

  “This boy’s enjoying himself,” one of the officers muttered grimly. “He ain’t going to stop.”

  A SWAT cop suggested Shaw go back to the chopper, not wanting a civilian on the scene. But Standish pointed out that he wasn’t armed and that there was at least one hostile in the vicinity—the mountain lion. It also wasn’t absolutely certain that the killer was gone. There was some logic to this, though scant; a tac cop, armed for big game, could have accompanied him. Shaw sensed that Standish wanted him here, perhaps to offer insights. Unfortunately, at the moment, he had none.

  He gazed down at Thompson’s body. There was no blessing in it but at least the man had died quickly, not thanks to the ripping teeth and claws of a wild animal. The shot was to his forehead. Thompson would have returned from setting the fire and made his way back to the nest, for the beef jerky and to rest, awaiting rescue. There, the Gamer would have been waiting. Thompson would have run. His bare feet would have slowed his escape.

  Shaw stepped away from the crime scene and walked farther along the stone ridge. He stopped a few feet from the edge. Eyeing the rock face, he noted that it would be a good climb. Lots of cracks and outcroppings. Challenging, with its nearly ninety-degree surfaces, but doable. An overhang that would take quite some strategy to surmount.

  Looking down, he didn’t plot out, as usual, a route to the bottom.

  Nor did he think about poor Henry Thompson.

  No, seeing the cliff and the creek bed below, he thought of one thing only.

  Echo Ridge.

  45.

  Colter’s eyes instantly open when the cabin floor creaks.

  He sometimes thinks his father has taught him to sleep light, though that doesn’t seem possible. Must’ve been born with the skill.

  The sixteen-year-old’s hand dips to the box beneath the bed where his revolver rests. Hand around the grip. Thumb on the trigger to cock it to single action.

  Then he sees his mother’s silhouette. Mary Dove Shaw, a lean woman, hair always braided, standing in his doorway. No religion in the Shaw household. When he’s older, Colter will come to think of his mother in saintly terms, a woman taking comfort in her husband’s good moments and sheltering her children from the bad. Protecting Ashton for himself too.

  Her nature was clothed in kindness. Underneath was iron.

  “Colter. Ash is missing. I need you.”

  Everyone awakes early on the Compound, but this hour is closer to night. Not quite 5 a.m. That it’s his mother in the doorway doesn’t stay his hand from touching the cold steel and rough grip of the .357 Python. Intruders?

  Then, swimming closer to wakefulness, he sees in her face concern, not alarm. He rises, leaving the weapon under the bed.

  “Ash went out after I fell asleep, about ten. He hasn’t come back. The Benelli’s gone.”

  His father’s favorite shotgun.

  Camping and expeditions in the Compound are always planned and, in any event, there is no reason for Ashton to go out at that hour, much less to stay out all night.

  Never hike anywhere without telling at least one person where you’ll be.

  The way his mind had been sputtering recently, Mary Dove had made sure she or one of the children accompanied him on the longer forays within the Compound. Chaperoning was especially essential when he went into White Sulphur Springs because on those outings he’d taken to carrying a weapon. Two in fact: in the car and on his person. There’d been no incidents but Mary Dove thought it best to have a family member with him. Even thirteen-year-old Dorion has the grit and intelligence to defuse what might become a confrontation.

  Only three people in the Compound tonight, apart from Ashton: Dorion, Colter and Mary Dove. Colter’s older brother, Russell, is in Los Angeles. He is starting to become a recluse, a role he will perfect in later years. Even if he had been here, though, Mary Dove would have come to her middle child for help.

  “You’re the best tracker of the family, Colter. You can find where a sparrow breathed on a blade of grass. I need you to find him. I’ll stay here with your sister.”

  “He take anything else?”

  “Nothing that I could tell.”

  In five minutes Colter is dressed for the predawn wilderness. October in eastern California can be fickle, so he wears thermals and two shirts under his canvas jacket. Jeans, thick socks and boots he broke in when he stopped growing two years ago; they feel like cotton on his feet. He has a night bag with him: clothes, flashlights, flares, food, water, sleeping bag, first aid, two hundred feet of rope, rappelling hardware, ammunition. For weapons: the Ka-Bar Army knife, ten-inch, and the Python. Ashton, who carries a .44 Magnum revolver, says that mud and water and tumbles won’t affect a revolver’s action the way they might a semiautomatic like a Glock, despite the gun manufacturer’s assertions to the contrary.

  “Wait,” Mary Dove says. She goes to the mantel and opens a box, from which wires sprout, connected to the wall outlet. She removes one of the mobile phones inside, powers it on and gives it to Colter. He hasn’t held the phone in two years and he’s never used it.

  In his hand the unit feels alien. Taboo. He places it in the bag as well.

  Colter slips on gloves and a stocking cap that can pull down to a ski mask. He steps out into the bracing, damp chill, feeling the sting of cold in his nose. As soon as he steps off the porch he catches a break. A handful of trails lead from the cabin into the fields and woods on the property and beyond. One of these paths is rarely hiked and it’s on this one that the boy sees fresh boot prints—his father’s, which he knows well. The stride is curious. It’s longer than that of a man leisurely strolling into the woods. There is urgency in it. There’s purpose in it.

  Colter continues cutting for sign in the direction his father took about five or six hours previously, to judge from the snapped grasses. It’s an easy track, since there are no forks or cross-paths. He can move quickly, stopping only sporadically to confirm that Ash came this way.

  A mile from the cabin he spots another boot print in soft earth, paralleling his father’s route. He can’t tell its age. It might have been made months ago, by one of his father’s friends who’d come to visit—friends from the old days before he fled the Bay Area. They would frequently trek out together, just the two or three of them, for the day. His mother too has colleagues from her teaching days who visit.

  But this is not a likely route for a leisurely walk with acquaintances. Being in a valley, there’s nothing to see. And here it’s a chore to hike—the angle, the rocks and pits and gravelly slopes. He continues along the trail, confirming again that his father came this way. Confirming too that the Second Person did as well.

  Onward. Until he comes to a fork and sees that his father has turned left and that means only one destination: Crescent Lake, a large body of water that resembles either a smile or a frown, depending.

  In twenty minutes
Colter comes to the mucky shore. He looks across, a half mile at the widest. The water is black now, though the sky is going to a soft glow. The surface is mirror-still. The distant shore rises in forest to ragged peaks. He assumes his father has gone there because the family’s canoe is missing.

  Why would he cross? It’s a warren of thickets and rocks on the other side.

  He looks for signs of the Second Person’s prints and can find none. Widening his search circle, he finally does locate the sign. The man stood on the shore, perhaps looking around for Ashton. He then started up the steep trail to Echo Ridge, from which he can gaze over the whole terrain and possibly spot the man.

  The ground is soft here, so Colter can see the Second Person’s prints clearly.

  And something else.

  His father’s prints. On top of the other man’s.

  Ashton knew he was being followed. He probably hid in the canoe until the man started up the trail and then followed.

  The pursuer became prey.

  The trail isn’t so very fresh—the men were here some hours ago—yet an urgency ignites within Colter and he muscles up the trail, quickly, after the two men, a thirty-degree incline through rocks and over small, sandy ledges. He has never been to Echo Ridge, a craggy rise in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. The terrain is unforgiving. Echo Ridge was one place on the Compound that the children were not allowed to go.

  Yet it was to Echo Ridge that Ashton Shaw followed someone who had been pursuing him. And Echo Ridge is the place to which his son is climbing now.

  Ten minutes later a breathless Colter crests the summit and stands against a rock face, sucking in air. In his hand is the Colt Python.

  He’s looking over the tree- and brush-covered plateau of the ridge. To his left—west—is a pelt of forest and a layered maze of rock formations and caves, where your assumption is: bears in the big ones, snakes in the small.

  To Colter’s right—east—is a cliff face, ninety degrees, a hundred feet or more straight down to a dry creek bed on the valley floor.

  The same creek bed where last year Colter had the confrontation with the hunter, who’d blindly shot into a bush and wounded the buck.

  He now looks east again, at the brightening morning sky, and sees the sharp black silhouette of the Sierra Nevada peaks, a massive jaw of broken teeth.

  As for his father’s footsteps? The other man’s? He can’t see either. The plateau is rock and gravel. No cutting for sign here.

  Now the sun rises over the mountains and pastes orangey light on the rock and the forest of Echo Ridge.

  The light also pings off a shiny object fifty yards away.

  Glass or metal? It’s not too early for ice, but the glint is coming from the floor of pine needles, where there would be no standing water to freeze.

  Colter cocks the pistol and lifts it as he walks forward. The gun is a heavy one, weighing two and a half pounds, but he hardly notices the weight. He proceeds toward the flash, eyeing the forest to his left; no threat could come from the cliff edge on his right, except from that hundred-foot drop to the creek bed below.

  When he’s still about twenty feet from the light source, he sees what it is. He stops, gazing around him. He doesn’t move for a moment, then slowly he walks in a circle, which ends at the cliff’s edge.

  Colter swaps the gun for the cell phone. He flips it open and takes a moment to remember how it works. Then he dials a number he memorized years ago.

  * * *

  —

  Now, fifteen years later, Colter Shaw was looking at a configuration of rock so very similar to Echo Ridge.

  He gazed at the crime scene tape around the place where Henry Thompson lay.

  Shaw thought about the button on the Hong-Sung goggles—the one you pushed to be resurrected.

  RESET . . .

  Over the crest of the rise, four newcomers walked slowly, carrying and wheeling large cases—like professional carpenters’ toolboxes. The Joint Major Crimes Task Force crime scene team wore blue jumpsuits, the hoods pulled low around their necks. The day was not particularly hot but the sun was relentless and wearing the contamination-proof coveralls would be unbearable after any length of time.

  Standish approached and offered Shaw a bottle of water. He took it and drank down half, surprised at how thirsty he was. “We’ll leave it to Crime Scene and the ME. No hurry to get back. I’m going to hitch a ride in the vans. Not in an airborne mood at the moment.”

  Shaw agreed.

  The detective was staring over the cliff. After a moment she asked, “You see that big cat again?”

  “No.”

  Absently she said, “You know, there were a couple of them in Palo Alto the other day. I read the story in the Examiner. Safeway parking lot. Roughhousing like kittens. Then they ran off into the woods and disappeared. They interviewed somebody. He said, ‘The mountain lion you can’t see is worse than the one you can.’ Is that the truth about life or what, Shaw?”

  His phone vibrated. He read the text.

  A moment of debate as he stared down the rock face. He typed and sent a reply.

  He slipped the phone away and said to Standish that he’d changed his mind and would take the chopper back after all.

  46.

  Six p.m., and Colter Shaw was back in the Quick Byte Café.

  He tilted the beer bottle back, drank long. It was a custom of his to drink locally brewed beer whenever he traveled. In Chicago, Goose Island. In South Africa, Umqombothi, which smelled and looked daunting but tricked you with a three percent alcohol content. In Boston, Harpoon—not that other stuff.

  And in the San Francisco Bay Area: Anchor Steam, of course. Tiffany, back on duty, had given it to him on the house, delivered with a wink.

  He set down the bottle and closed his eyes briefly, seeing Henry Thompson’s body, the gradient colors of his blood on the rock, as white and flat as that creek bed below Echo Ridge.

  In ten years of seeking rewards Shaw been successful the majority of the time. Not a landslide but respectable nonetheless.

  He might have given his success rate a percentage number. He never did. It seemed flippant, disrespectful.

  He could remember some of the victories—the tricky ones, the dangerous ones, the ones occasioned by desperation and despair on the part of loved ones whose lives crashed when their child or spouse went missing and that Shaw pieced back together—like the final scenes in time travel movies when disaster is miraculously reversed.

  Other than those, though, most jobs were just that: assignments, assignments like a plumber or an accountant might take on. They drifted down into the recesses of the brain, some lost forever, some filed away to be recalled if needed, which was rarely.

  The losses? They stayed forever.

  This one would. That there’d been no reward offered to find Henry Thompson was irrelevant. Because the truth was, for Colter Shaw it was never about the money. The reward was important mostly because it was a spotlight illuminating a challenge that no one else had yet been able to meet. What mattered was finding the child, the elderly parent addled by dementia, the fugitive. What mattered was saving the life.

  Sophie Mulliner was safe, but that was no solace at all. Kyle Butler was dead. Henry Thompson was dead. And at times like this the restlessness grew and became a person itself, following Shaw, close behind. Like the Whispering Man.

  He sipped more of the ripe, rich beer. The cold was more of a comfort than the alcohol. Neither was much of a balm.

  He walked back to the counter and asked Tiffany for the remote. He wanted to change the station on the set above the bar. She handed it to him. They had a brief conversation about TV programs, to which he couldn’t contribute much. She would have liked to continue talking to him, Shaw could tell, but an order was ready. He was relieved when she went to deliver it and he sat down at his table once more.
Shaw changed the channel from a sports game no one was watching—not a lot of jocks in the Quick Byte Café—to a local news channel.

  A minor earthquake had troubled Santa Cruz; a labor organizer was fighting cries for removal, claiming the rumors that he’d paid money under the table for a green card were false; a whale had been saved at Half Moon Bay; a Green Party congressman in L.A., running for reelection, had withdrawn after stories surfaced he’d been allied with ecoterrorists who’d burned down a ski resort at Tahoe a few years before. He vehemently denied his involvement. “A man’s career can be ruined based on lies. That’s what it’s come to . . .”

  His attention waned until finally: “And in local news, a Sunnyvale blogger and gay rights activist was found murdered today in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Police reported that Henry Thompson, fifty-two, was kidnapped on the way home from a lecture at Stanford last night, taken to the park and murdered. No motive has been established. A spokesperson for the Joint Major Crimes Task Force in Santa Clara said that the crime may be related to the kidnapping of a Mountain View woman on June fifth. Sophie Mulliner, nineteen, was rescued unharmed by the Task Force two days later.”

  The story ended with a scroll at the bottom of the screen of the hotline to call if anyone was on the block when Thompson was kidnapped or was hiking in Big Basin today.

  Behind him, in the Quick Byte, a woman’s strident voice interrupted Shaw’s thoughts.

  “Well, I didn’t message you. I don’t know you.”

  Shaw and other patrons looked toward the source of the shrill words. An attractive woman of about twenty was sitting in front of her Mac and holding a mug of coffee. Her long chestnut hair was tinted purple near the tips. She was dressed like a model or an actress: studied casual. The blue jeans were close-fitting and intentionally torn in places. The white T-shirt was baggy and off the shoulder, revealing purple undergarment straps. The nails were oceanic blue, the eye shadow autumnal shades.