Wherever he’d gone, Hurley was still out there, somewhere in the millions of square acres of forest and rock. He was armed, he had snowshoes, and he knew the terrain. Stevens knew he wasn’t going to go down easy.
The thump thump thump of an approaching helicopter rattled the diner’s windows. Stevens looked out across the parking lot in time to watch the Flathead County’s Bell 429 Search and Rescue chopper touch down on a blocked-off stretch of highway. The helicopter was equipped with night vision, 3-D terrain mapping, and the rescue hoist that had already lifted Mila Scott to safety. It would be a valuable tool in the hunt for Leland Hurley—but it hadn’t found him yet.
A Flathead County deputy climbed from the rear of the chopper and, ducking away from the rotor wash, hurried across the parking lot to the diner. Stevens turned as he burst in through the front doors, watched the man’s eyes search the room, settle on him and Windermere.
“Just heard from the Lincoln County deputy up at the cabin,” he called across the diner. “She found something she thinks you should see.”
81
Five minutes later, they were back in the helicopter, lifting off from the chopper’s makeshift landing pad and speeding back through the night toward the eastern end of the Trail Valley. Kerry Finley was riding herd on more deputies up there, jurisdictional issues be damned, locking down the cabin and looking for any evidence they could use against Hurley—or any indication of where he might want to escape to.
Stevens leaned in between the front seats of the helicopter. Watched the ground pass below on the night-vision screen, courtesy of the infrared camera mounted underneath the chopper’s nose. If Hurley was down there, he would show up as a heat signature, a beacon of light against the murky terrain. But the ground was as dark on the infrared screen as it was through the windows. They were going to have to look harder to find their fugitive.
The helicopter touched down in the center of the clearing in front of Hurley’s cabin. The deputies who’d arrived as backup had moved Mila’s stolen pickup truck from the logging road below, and the fringes of the clearing were lined with more law enforcement vehicles. Someone had set up portable lights; they illuminated the cabin and the surrounding forest as if it were midday. The scene bustled with deputies, none of whom seemed concerned by the sudden arrival of a noisy SAR helicopter.
Finley was standing beside her Explorer, a pensive look on her face. She hustled over to the helicopter, climbed in beside Stevens, slammed the door.
“This might be something, it might not,” she told the agents as the helicopter lifted off again. “But I think we should have a look regardless.”
She gestured out the side window, down to Hurley’s cabin, and Stevens looked where he was told, saw a couple smaller buildings behind the main cabin, a shed and an outhouse, Hurley’s Suburban parked nearby.
“He keeps his generator in there,” Finley said. “Hookup for his vehicle, too, keep the battery charged when the weather drops. The truck’s still there, as you can see. But I found something else, too.”
Beside the shed was a cut through the trees, a winding path farther into the wilderness. From above, it looked narrow, hardly wide enough for a vehicle, but Stevens could see tracks in the snow.
“Snowmobile,” Finley told the agents. “Can’t have been recent, or the deputies would have heard.”
“But someone’s been down there,” Windermere said.
“Yup,” Finley said. “I believe they have been.”
The pilot switched on his spotlight. Traced the narrow road up the side of the mountain until it leveled off and skirted around the back. They flew ten minutes at low altitude, barely above the treetops, the narrow road getting narrower as it wound deeper into the backcountry, almost invisible through the trees.
“I couldn’t make it a hundred feet from camp in my Explorer,” Finley told the agents. “Trail was just too damned rough.”
Stevens couldn’t tell from the air, but it sure looked like he’d have his hands full in his old Jeep, even. Figured even a Ski-Doo would have a rough ride.
“He would have to know the road like he built it himself,” Finley said, reading Stevens’s mind. “Which he probably did. It’s no logging road, isn’t on any maps. Looks like he cut it through the forest by hand.”
“My god,” Windermere said. “That would take forever.”
“He’s had the place for ten years. Guess he had enough time.”
“So how far does it go?” Stevens asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Finley said. “I was waiting on the helicopter.”
Stevens stared down at the road, lit bright in the chopper’s spotlight, the forest a suffocating dark on all sides. If Finley’s instincts were right and Hurley had indeed escaped this way, he would have had to turn back toward the cabin at precisely the same time Stevens and Windermere were heading to intercept him. It was an unsettling notion, the thought of Hurley passing them, unseen, in the forest.
To this point, the searchers had focused their efforts on the Anchor Valley, to the south, where Mila Scott had been found. But if Hurley had come this way . . .
“What’s back here?” Stevens asked Finley. “Where could Hurley be going?”
Finley looked through the front seats and out the helicopter’s windshield. “Out there? Heck, a whole lot of nothing. You got the Whitefish Range, then the north fork of the Flathead River, then Glacier Park, the Lewis Range of the Rockies. No settlements for fifty miles, barely any people at all. Canada to the north, and nothing there, either. Nothing but the park to the south.”
“A whole lot of nothing,” Windermere said. “And our man wandered into it.”
“It’s nothing for us,” Finley replied. “You and me. The way this guy Hurley moves, I’m guessing he sees all that empty space as his God-given backyard.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Windermere said. “We still don’t know he came this way.”
But even as she was speaking, the helicopter banked and slowed. The pilot pointed through the windshield, angled his spotlight down to where the road petered out, ending unceremoniously at a wall of fir trees. And at the edge of the tree line sat a snowmobile, parked facing the forest like a car at a stoplight. It had been abandoned.
The pilot swiveled in his seat. “You want to drop down, check it out?”
Stevens met Windermere’s eyes. “Guess we have to make sure,” Windermere said, but from the tone of her voice, Stevens knew she was thinking the same thoughts he was: Hurley’s gone. He’s somewhere in that backcountry. And whether he dies out there or not, we may never find him.
82
Hurley could hear the helicopters in the distance. They were far away, still out of sight. No cause for concern. He would have plenty of time to hide, if they did turn his way.
The local newspaper had made a big deal when the sheriff’s department bought their helicopter. State-of-the-art, the articles gushed. Took more than a year to construct. Every toy and gadget that search and rescue could ever need. Law enforcement, too.
Hurley had read with interest. He’d made a note of the helicopter’s features, the infrared camera most of all. If the helicopter flew over him, the occupants would spy his heat signature easily. He would have to find cover before the choppers approached.
The odds were slim they would find him. This was the backcountry, thousands of square miles of nothing but forest and rock. The FBI would find the snowmobile, realize he’d gone east into the Whitefish Range and not south, the way the girl had been leading him. They would focus their search efforts into the mountains, but Hurley wasn’t concerned. He was one man in a vast expanse of wilderness. He knew these mountains like nobody else.
It was late now. Early morning. Hurley estimated he’d covered five miles since he’d abandoned the snowmobile. The going was slow. The snow was soft, and the forest dense with fallen t
rees and thick underbrush. The mountain rose and fell beneath him. He’d been moving almost continuously since he’d heard the girl approach and his muscles ached for rest. But there was no time.
The first night would be the most important. The more ground Hurley could cover before dawn, the better his chances at escape. He didn’t doubt he could survive in these woods. He didn’t doubt he could outwit the FBI. He’d been a ghost for the better part of a decade. He could disappear again, with a little bit of work, and the law would never find him.
Hurley trudged on. Picked his trail through the forest, brushing back snowy branches, climbing over broken trunks, the environment ghostly green through his night-vision lenses. He’d been waiting for this day, he realized, even looking forward to it. He’d preyed on the weak and the stupid for a long time. He relished the opportunity to test his skills against a tougher adversary.
Time would tell whether the FBI agents would prove to be any match. In the meantime, Hurley would test his wits against the mountain.
83
Stevens and Windermere rode the Flathead County’s SAR chopper through the night, flying a grid pattern over the mountains until the pilot glanced back at them, pointing at the fuel gauges.
“Gotta head back,” he told the agents through their headsets. “Otherwise, we’re going to need rescuing ourselves.”
Hurley’s snowmobile hadn’t provided them much. They’d found a mess of dead animals, a couple rabbits and a fox. A couple empty boxes of Golden Bear rounds for a .30-06 in a cargo box on the back, a wholesale-sized carton of Mayday survival bars stacked up alongside. Some cold-weather gear, army stuff, folded up neat. But Leland Hurley was gone, somewhere in the forest. Even his snowshoe trail was indistinct, impossible to follow with any semblance of speed.
“He’d be in Aruba before we made it out of the woods,” Windermere had said. “What about dogs? Can we bring K9s out here?”
Stevens had shaken his head. “Not in wolf country. You’re only asking for trouble. Anyway, it’s a hell of a distance to track someone.”
They’d signaled for the hoist, rode back up to the chopper. Flew tracks over the Whitefish Range into the early-morning hours, searching the helicopter’s infrared screen for any kind of heat signature. They’d had a close call, something white and moving, something clearly alive, but when they’d hovered down for a closer look, whatever they were tracking had bugged out and bolted—on four legs.
“Mountain lion, maybe,” the pilot said. “They’re active at night.”
“Maybe he’s hunting Hurley,” Windermere said. “We should be so lucky.”
They’d tracked the creature for a couple miles, just to be sure, but whatever it was, it hadn’t led them to Hurley. They’d turned away, the screen dark again, and continued combing the forest for any sign of the killer.
But now the fuel reserves were running low, and the pilot needed to get back to base.
“Don’t sweat it,” he called back through his headset. “Bureau’s sending another chopper from Kalispell, right? They can take up the search where we left off.”
Stevens looked out the window, though he couldn’t see anything but night sky and the dark, undulating silhouette of the land below.
Damn it, time’s wasting, he thought. We can’t afford to take a break.
But it was either peel off or crash-land in the wilderness, so Stevens, Finley, and Windermere rode back in the chopper to Anchor Falls, had the pilot drop them off outside Norma’s Diner, the lights inside still burning bright, long after midnight.
“What do you say, partner?” Windermere asked as the helicopter took flight again. “You up for another slice of pie?”
Stevens yawned. “I could use some more coffee, at least. Maybe it’ll wake us up long enough to sort out a plan.”
He was bushed. They’d been running nonstop since the last storm had blown over—from Butcher’s Creek to Hungry Horse for the Pam Moody rescue and then back up to Anchor Falls, fast as they could, to track Mila Scott to Leland Hurley’s cabin. Two solid days, straight adrenaline, and Stevens was pretty well used up.
Can’t quit now. Hurley’s still out there. Gotta stay on this until you lock him down.
“We’ll run helicopter searches all night tonight and all day tomorrow,” Windermere was saying across the booth. “Get boots on the ground, too, as many as we can muster. Put men on every logging road on both sides of the mountain range, get Northwestern bulls checking their trains, too.”
“The Mounties as well,” Stevens said, tracing a line on the map. “And Customs. Canadian border’s only forty miles north of here. Could be he tries to make a run for it.”
“True.” Windermere wrote something in her notebook. “We’ll cover every angle. Nothing leaves the county without our say-so, right?”
Stevens sipped his coffee. Studied a topographical map—a hell of a lot of land and not much humanity, a million places a man could disappear.
“Right,” he said.
“Let’s brief the deputies on our plan. Call the Bureau office in Kalispell, get an ETA on their men. See if we can’t scrounge up a third helicopter.” Windermere rubbed her eyes. “And then let’s get some sleep, partner. It’s going to be dawn soon enough.”
84
There were no hotels in Anchor Falls. They slept in the back of Norma’s Diner instead, a couple of booths toward the rear of the restaurant, the lights turned down low.
Windermere slept fitfully, curled up on the vinyl, her coat for a pillow. Woke at dawn to someone clearing his throat, opened her eyes and saw a couple of new faces, young men in heavy black FBI winter coats. They looked apologetic as she sat up wincing, massaging the back of her neck, blinking sleep away. It was a quarter after eight and the sun just rising.
“Sorry to wake you, Agent Windermere.” The agent on the left was the taller of the two, a heavier build and close-cropped hair. “They said we should talk to you as soon as we got here.”
Their names were Mundall and Wasserman. They shook hands with Windermere, with Stevens, told them they’d brought a helicopter crew, told them the Salt Lake City office would have a team in Whitefish by lunchtime.
“This guy was killing hookers, right?” Wasserman asked as Shelly brought them four cups of coffee. He was smaller than Mundall, keen eyes and a head of red hair.
“Not just hookers.” Windermere stood, stretched. “Transients, runaways, train hoppers. Drug addicts and bar waitresses. Anyone the public wouldn’t miss.”
“How’d he get away with it for so long?”
“Were you listening? This guy chooses nobodies. People figured the victims skipped town, ran off. Got drunk in snowstorms and froze to death. Hell, even the clear-cut homicides weren’t exactly priorities. Who really cares if a junkie gets popped, right?”
Mundall and Wassermann swapped looks, like they weren’t sure if the question was rhetorical.
“We care,” Windermere told them. “We don’t like murderers no matter who’s getting killed. And we’re going to expend every ounce of energy we have in finding this guy and bringing him in, clear?”
“Of course,” Mundall said. “Yeah. But how are we going to do it?”
Stevens shifted beside Windermere. “I had an idea.” He leaned forward, spread out his topographical map. Made a mark on it with his pen.
“This is about where Hurley’s road ended.” He traced the topography east, into the mountains. “There are two chains of mountains in the Whitefish Range,” he said. “Hurley’s cabin lies on the western slope of the range. Beyond the western chain, in the general direction of his trail, there’s this plateau here”—he pointed—“and then the eastern slope. And beyond the eastern slope—”
“Roads,” Windermere said, leaning over his shoulder.
Stevens nodded. “Logging roads. Campsites. The north fork of the Flathead River, running down from Canad
a all the way to the interstate. If Hurley can get through the eastern mountains, his escape options increase dramatically.”
“Okay,” Wasserman said. “So how does he get through?”
Stevens circled an area on the map, the central plateau and the eastern slope of the Whitefish Range. “There’s water here, Nicola Creek. Seems like it runs down from the plateau all the way to the North Fork Flathead. Makes a nice pass through the mountains, wide enough to traverse, from the look of it.”
He circled the spot again. “Nicola Creek,” he said. “If I were Leland Hurley, that’s where I’d be headed.”
85
Hurley hiked until dawn. Then, as the sun rose over the eastern edge of the Whitefish Range, he dug a snow cave for himself beneath a rocky overhang, set out his bivouac sack and unrolled his sleeping bag.
The forest was silent around him, even the drone of the helicopters so far off as to be nearly inaudible. He would wake if they got close, he knew, but he wasn’t afraid. Their infrared cameras would be hard-pressed to find him under his rock, anyway.
Hurley slept fitfully, seeing the intruding girl in his dreams. It wasn’t so much that she’d lived. She hadn’t outwitted him; he’d allowed her to survive.
Still, the girl’s escape gnawed at him. She would go home, wherever home was. She would likely be famous. She wouldn’t be humbled by her experience; rather, she’d be emboldened. Her escape would give her confidence. She would poison more men.
He had failed. The notion stuck with him, stubborn, like a piece of gristle in his teeth. That stupid girl would believe she had won.
—
By midafternoon, Hurley had made it through the first barrier mountains on the west slope of the Whitefish Range. There was a plateau here, long and narrow, and then the taller eastern mountains that blocked the way to the north fork of the Flathead River. There were roads in the valley. The terrain would be easier and quicker to traverse.
The Forgotten Girls Page 22
