by Jen Blood
He felt a surge of hope. “So you must be close.”
She frowned. He’d seen that look on people’s faces before—the day they found Lucia. Pity. “The dogs ran up and down that area, but there was no sign of them. We tracked them to the river. My guess is they traveled that way.”
“So it would be harder to follow them,” he said.
“That’s my guess, yes.” She hesitated. “I’ve gotta retire the dogs for the night, but we’ll be back at first light tomorrow.”
Her four dogs were just as dirty as she was. They lay down on the ground panting quietly while she and Juarez talked. One of them—the one who looked like a pit bull—sat close to him, resting his big block head on Juarez’s shoe. They were hauling the Jeep out of the ravine now; it was totaled. He zeroed in on the windshield and saw more blood there—on the driver’s side. Probably Diggs, while Erin hit the dashboard. And now God only knew where she might be.
He thought suddenly of Lucia. Lucia, with the dark hair and the olive skin, with that smile that melted everything. Broken and bloody on the side of an unknown road in a country he hadn’t even wanted her to visit.
“Agent Juarez?” Jamie said.
He realized she’d been trying to get his attention. He shook his head, trying to clear it of memories that he was convinced would never fade.
“I just asked if there’s anything else we can do? Me and my crew were gonna grab some grub in town. You could join us if you’d like.”
“I thought I’d just stay here. Maybe follow—”
She touched his arm. When she looked at him, her blue eyes burned with an intensity he found difficult to look away from. “You should get away from it for a couple of hours, okay?” she said. “Trust me on that. We’ll find them come morning. When’s the last time you ate?”
He had to think before he could answer. “I had a sandwich at lunch, I think.”
The teenage boy Juarez had noticed earlier came over and said something to the dogs—a single word Juarez couldn’t make out. All four got up.
“Bear, why don’t you get these guys settled in,” Jamie said to the boy. “Ride back in with Cheyenne. I’ll catch a ride with Agent Juarez.”
He didn’t bother to argue. It seemed all he did these days was lose arguments with willful women.
Chapter Twenty-Four
An alarm went off at four-thirty the next morning, but Diggs and I had already been up for an hour, trying to prepare for whatever we were in for in the coming day. We’d raided the fridge and re-checked injuries and changed into the clothes provided: river pants for both of us, new boots, lots of layers. Neither of us had our backpacks anymore, which meant whatever we took with us had to either fit in our pockets or be strapped to strategically selected body parts some way or other.
We were both sitting on the bed when the alarm went off, going over our plans for getting through this whole nightmare. As soon as the bell sounded, my insides tightened into a sailor’s knot—the kind nearly impossible to untie without expert assistance. Diggs’ hands fisted around our down-filled comforter. The full night’s sleep had done us both good, as had the food, but now all I could think about was being forced back into the forest. Rainier had gone easy on me yesterday, but I couldn’t imagine that trend would last long.
“The goal should be to get as far as we can as fast as we can,” Diggs said. We’d already talked about this exhaustively, but I nodded all the same. “Even if we get separated. Head to the river, and just keep moving. We can’t help each other without reinforcements.”
That was the part of the plan that bothered me—leaving Diggs. In theory, it sounded perfectly logical: Separately, we stood a better chance of at least one of us going in the right direction and finding someone out there who could help us. In practice, however, that meant striking out on my own, without a clue of how Diggs was faring; whether he’d even made it out alive. I thought of the bodies found in Canada, and everything those girls had been through. Diggs and I had put on a brave face through most of the night, but that faltered as our final hour together was sped past.
We’d made a half-assed plan to take Rainier on when he came for us that morning, but I think we both knew that would fail. Now, Diggs held my hand, staring at it while he ran his index finger over my knuckles and veins, the lines on my palm. I kept thinking that we should say something important: tell each other everything we hadn’t said. I couldn’t figure out how to do that, though—where to begin, even. I stayed quiet.
When we heard someone unlocking the door, Diggs pulled me back into his arms. He kissed me and I kissed him back, fast and hard and silent. We separated before the door opened, and then stood holding hands when Rainier came in.
He wore camouflage. Lots and lots of camouflage—from the top of his billed hat to his camo combat boots, with a camouflage survival knife strapped to his camouflaged leg. He was freshly shaved and showered and bright-eyed. Clearly a man who loved his job.
“You,” he said, looking straight at me. “Come with me. You stay,” he ordered Diggs.
To my surprise, Diggs’ hand tightened around mine. I thought we’d reconciled ourselves to this eventuality, but apparently he hadn’t quite come to terms. “If you take her, you take me, too.”
Rainier smiled, that sadistic light in his eyes burning a shade brighter. “I think you might be wrong on that one.”
He took a single step inside and grabbed me by my broken wrist. I yelped as he yanked me toward him. I kicked him in the shin with all the strength and pure pissed-off fury I could muster. Meanwhile, Diggs got down low and drove into Rainier with the kind of power that had earned him a reputation as one of the best defensive tackles in the state way back when. Unfortunately, Rainier never let go of me while he was being tackled. When he went down, he brought me with him—wrenching my hand so hard I nearly passed out.
He got up before Diggs could do anymore damage, but Rainier kept me on my knees with my wrist twisted. He looked at Diggs with a surprising lack of anger.
“Get back inside,” he said. My stomach rolled. Diggs’ eyes were wild, his hands clenched, his breath coming hard.
“Go,” I said, fighting to stay strong. No tears. I waited until he’d look me in the eye, then nodded. “I’ll be okay.”
Diggs took a step back into our room; Rainier shut and locked both doors. He pulled me to my feet, his hand still locked around my wrist.
“It’s just you and me now, Red,” he said. “We’re gonna have a little fun.”
Rainier took me straight through the main apartment to the front door. He smiled at me when his hand touched the doorknob—the rattlesnake smile that made everything in me that might have warmed overnight run cold again.
“Ready?” he asked. “Rules change outside these walls. Just so you know.”
“Maybe we should just stay here, then,” I said. “I mean, it looks nice here for you, too. You could take it easy. Raping and pillaging has to take it out of a man after a while.”
He licked his lips. “Yeah. Rules change outside these walls.”
He opened the door and shoved me outside, then closed and locked it behind us.
It was a cool morning, the sun already lightening the horizon. We walked for maybe a mile, my blistered feet already sore, when he stopped at an olive-green truck parked under the trees. He came around to the passenger side. Before I even knew what was happening, he was holding me still with one arm around my middle while he dropped a dark pillowcase over my head. The second the lights went out, I couldn’t breathe. I fought until Rainier wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me so hard I thought he’d break something.
“Knock it off,” he growled in my ear. His hands ran over my body possessively. In the darkness, it felt like he was everywhere. I kicked out again, but only hit air. While I fought, Rainier tied my hands in front of me. He shoved me into the truck cab, hitting my head so hard on the way in that I saw stars. Then, he buckled my seatbelt—death by exposure or shock, blood loss or strangul
ation was fine, but apparently vehicular manslaughter was not on J.’s agenda. Good to know.
It was impossible to tell how long we drove. I heard water nearby, but otherwise the only sound was the roar of the truck engine. The air was warm and fetid inside my hood, the smell of gasoline from the truck overwhelming in the close space. When I was sure I’d be sick, I reminded myself of that conversation with Juarez: Mind over matter.
I thought of Kat. Did she know anything about what was happening? Did she even care? If J. really was the hooded man from the island, why in hell had she been protecting him?
How much of this insanity were my parents a part of?
I took a breath and closed my eyes, trying to find some way to calm myself. To get clear. All the thoughts that had been swirling got more swirly for a split second before I imagined myself swimming past them. Diving down to a quieter place. I wet my lips. Found my voice.
“So, now that we’re here…” I began. Trapped in the hood as I was, my voice sounded like it was underwater. Like I was locked inside my own head. Rainier laughed.
“Now that we’re here what?” he prompted. He hadn’t told me to shut up, though, so I counted that on the plus side.
“I wondered if you could answer some questions for me.”
Another laugh. Because nothing says comedy like a woman with her head in a pillowcase. “Go ahead,” he said. “Got nothing better to do. J. said you’d try this.”
“This J. —So, that’s not you?”
“Nope.”
“Is J. my father?”
“Your father’s a pantywaist, not fit to shine our shoes. Sure as hell not fit to set foot near the Sanctuary. He never had what it took for this. He thought he did; thought his fuckin’ game with the little girls of Black Falls made him tough.”
I slumped back in my seat as relief washed over me. J. wasn’t him. Never had been.
“So, if my father isn’t J., what happened on Eagle Lake?” I asked.
We traveled a long way before he answered, bouncing over potholes, traveling occasionally off-road, fording more than one stream. I fought a growing sense of hopelessness. No one would find us out here. I thought of Diggs: the way his body fit with mine, the way he knew me. I couldn’t imagine us ever finding each other out here. What would they do to him, once they’d dumped me in the middle of nowhere?
Rainier didn’t answer my question until he’d stopped the truck, slamming on the brakes so abruptly that I would have hit the windshield if I hadn’t been buckled in.
“That night,” Rainier said, “Your old man got what was coming to him. And J. was born.”
He would say no more on the subject.
Instead, he got out of the truck. I was left alone for a couple of minutes before he returned and opened my door. He unbuckled my seatbelt, pressing his body unnecessarily close to mine as he did so, then pulled me outside. When he pulled my hood off, I stood there for a second blinking in the sunlight, gulping in fresh air. We were still in the woods. It could have been an entirely new spot, or Diggs and I could have traveled through this place sixteen times in the past two days.
Rainier pulled me to him by the front of my shirt. His eyes had that crazy shine I was rapidly getting used to. Rapidly coming to dread.
“Here we are,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. I turned my head away, leaning my body as far from him as possible. “And where is that again, exactly?”
He snaked his arms around me, pressing his body to mine while his lips fell to my neck. I closed my eyes against a surge of panic that dwarfed anything I’d felt up to that point. I was alone now. Whatever he wanted to do, I had absolutely no say. No power.
“What are you doing?” I ground out. He bit into my neck, hard enough to make me yelp in pain. I brought my knee up and got him in the groin before he could block me.
He stepped away from me—but only far enough to allow space to backhand me. The world spun. My head exploded in bright white pain. I fell backward, then scrambled up before he could pin me to the forest floor. When I could see again, he was smiling at me.
“That was just a taste,” he said. He took the survival knife from the sheath at his leg, pulled me close again, and held the blade to my face. He stroked my skin, laying open a thin stinging line on my right cheek.
“Now,” he breathed in my ear. “You run. And every time I catch you, I get a little more. That’s the game.”
He pushed me hard enough that I fell again, but I was on my feet an instant later. I ran away from the truck and up to higher ground, stumbling along the way. I didn’t know where the hell I was or where the hell I was going.
I just ran.
Chapter Twenty-Five
After a fitful night’s sleep, in which Juarez chased Erin and Lucia through deep woods and city streets and a jungle without end, he woke by four a.m. and was at the police station by four-fifteen. Jamie and her dogs and the odd crew she ran with were already back out searching. Juarez tended to paperwork and checked through files and then arranged to meet with Hank Gendreau one more time before the man was returned to the Warren prison.
Mandy wasn’t in yet at the DC office. As of last night, there still hadn’t been any progress getting a photo of Jeff Lincoln from the Lansing asylum. Juarez had been trying to get in touch with Red Grivois to re-interview him about finding Bonnie and whatever it was she’d said about her dream, but so far no one had been able to locate the former sheriff.
At six a.m., just before the guards led Gendreau into Sheriff Cyr’s office, Juarez got an e-mail from DC. He opened the attachment and sat there for a long moment, studying the face that stared back at him: a gangly teenage boy with lank hair and glasses stared straight into the camera. His thin lips were quirked up in a cold smile. Juarez had never seen him before. One thing he knew with certainty, however: this sure as hell was not Erin’s father.
A guard knocked on his door, now standing ajar. Juarez waved him in. Gendreau was behind him. He didn’t look good, his eyes shadowed and rimmed with red.
Juarez got him a cup of coffee and told the guard to wait for them outside.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” he began. “I know this isn’t an easy time to be doing this.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gendreau said. “I’ve lost my whole family to this, one way or another. I’ll do whatever you need to track down Jeff Lincoln and make him pay. Whatever it takes.”
Juarez nodded understandingly. He picked up a copy of the photo from Lansing and slid it toward Gendreau.
“Can you tell me who that is, Hank?” he asked.
Gendreau barely had to glimpse at the photo. “Yeah, of course. That’s Eliot—a friend of Jeff’s. He stayed with them that last summer.”
Juarez made a concerted effort not to show his excitement. “Eliot what?” he pressed. “Do you have a full name for him?”
He had to think about it for a minute. “I don’t think so, no. We always called him Eliot. Or Mr. E. Why?”
“And when was the last time you saw Eliot?”
“He was with us that last night in Quebec—we all went out drinking together.”
“Did he come with you that night, to go after Erin Lincoln?”
Gendreau shook his head. “He wouldn’t. Said it wasn’t his scene; he’d catch a ride back with Red.”
Juarez did a double take. “Red Grivois?”
“That’s right,” Gendreau said. He hesitated. “I don’t want to get him in trouble now. He was always good to us. Used to buy us beer sometimes. Take us across the border with him. He always said if we were gonna party anyway, he wanted to make sure we were doing it right.”
Grivois was the last one to see Bonnie alive. The one who found the body. He was the one who’d found Erin Lincoln, as well. The first one on the scene when Ashley Gendreau was murdered. He was friends with Will Rainier. Juarez thought of Rosie’s words that afternoon: When he was out wandering in the woods with Sheriff Grivois, drinking and shooting and drinking some m
ore…
“Did Red know Bonnie?” Juarez asked, forcing himself to finish the interview.
“Of course,” Gendreau said. “Everybody knew Bonnie. My sister was the prettiest girl in the County back then. Red wasn’t much older than us, you know? Early twenties—not sheriff yet, just a deputy. He liked her, I think.”
Juarez stood abruptly and went to his briefcase, hauling out most of the files inside. Then he opened the office door and called for the guard. “You can take him back to his cell. I won’t need him again.”
Gendreau stood without any prompting from the guards. “My case—Ashley dying. Do you think whoever did all these other girls is the same one who killed Ashley?”
Normally, Juarez tried not to answer that kind of question directly—there were too many repercussions if it turned out he was wrong. This time, however, he didn’t hesitate.
“I do. And I’ll do everything in my power to convince the judge of that.”
“I know that everything that happened with Erin Lincoln…what Will did—I can’t ever make up for that. I’ll never forget it. Never be able to change what we did to that girl. But if there’s some way I can get out of prison now, maybe I can make things up to my other kids, try to rebuild things with them. That’s all I can ask for right now.”
Juarez shook the man’s hand. He was reminded of all the bad decisions the universe seemed to just let slide by, until that one fateful miscalculation that invariably turned the world on its head. He thought of the four boys: Jeff, Hank, Will, and Eliot. Teenage boys who got caught up in a game more serious than they ever could have imagined, when Jeff Lincoln first came up with the monumentally bad idea to ply thirteen-year-old girls with beer and sweet nothings. And two of those boys took the game a step further.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” Juarez said. “I hope you get that second chance.”
After he was gone, Juarez spread the files out on his desk, looking at each and every victim for the link he was sure he would find. Within minutes, he had his answer.
