Chapter Twenty-Six
It takes more than fifteen minutes to get a sleeping baby up and relocated, complete with diaper bag and bottles.
But we make up the time by moving fast through the forest, and we’re there within forty-five minutes.
If someone’s still around, they’ll see our flashlight.
We aren’t concerned about drawing attention until we get close.
When we do approach, we douse the light and pause to let our eyes adjust. It’s a quarter moon and a clear night. We can see well enough to stay on the path without light.
There’s a rise to the east of the cabin, and we silently climb it, being careful not to scrape rock underfoot.
Once we’re in position, we can see the cabin and the open land in front of it.
Open and empty land. We keep scanning until I spot a dark shape, hunkered in the woods.
When I point it out to Dalton, he grimaces, as if I’m seeing a bush.
I take out the binoculars and look. Yes, I am seeing a bush, but it has a dark hood protruding over the top.
I don’t pass the binoculars to Dalton yet.
I focus on the man’s face. He’s looking toward the cabin, which means I’m on an angle, but I should be able to make out the guy’s profile. Instead, all I see is black.
Is he looking the other way? I don’t think so. I can see a hood, but where there should be a face, there’s a dark nothingness.
Gretchen said her stalker seemed dark-skinned. What I’m seeing is blackness—the kind that comes from fabric … like a balaclava. We certainly have plenty in town, and so would anyone up here in winter. I should see eyeholes, with surrounding skin or light eyes, but I don’t. Dark skin and dark eyes?
No, there’s an odd bulge where his eyes would be, the profile going out where it should dip in.
He’s wearing goggles.
I hadn’t really processed that part of Gretchen’s story.
She said she couldn’t even see her attacker’s eye color because he was wearing goggles.
That’s not why he wore them, though. It would be hard to see with goggles at night, where any impediment is a problem.
Unless the goggles are the opposite of an impediment.
“Night vision,” I murmur under my breath.
Dalton grunts in question, but I only pass him the binoculars. He takes them, and I wait until he focuses on the head peeking above the bush. Another grunt tells me Dalton sees him.
I lean in and whisper, “Balaclava and goggles, probably night-vision.”
He nods and then returns the binoculars, takes out the phone, and motions that he’s stepping away to call the cabin. He needs to let Anders know we’re about to move in.
I keep my binoculars trained on the man. I’m going to presume it’s a man. Gretchen thought so, and Yolanda’s line about hearing someone peeing on a tree suggests Gretchen was right.
He stands there, just watching the cabin. There’s a light on inside. Is that why he isn’t making any moves? Is he waiting for that light to go out?
Lilith said her intruder tried the door and then seemed to be taunting her. If he couldn’t get in, maybe he could lure her out.
A blip sounds as someone inside answers the phone. Then Anders’s voice, low and steady. I can’t hear what he’s saying. It’s just a low male voice. But at the sound, the stalker’s head jerks up. He creeps toward the cabin, head tilted to listen.
Then he takes off.
“Eric!” I whisper-hiss as I start after the guy. Dalton catches up as I reach the cabin.
“He bolted,” I whisper.
“I can hear him. Wait here.”
I don’t like that, but Dalton’s already running. We can hear the rustle and thump of the man’s flight, and I’m about to run faster when I then remember Anders. I bang on the door, saying, “It’s me!”
He opens it.
“Guy took off,” I say quickly. “Something you said sent him running.”
Anders comes out after me, telling Yolanda to lock the door. As we run, he says, “I didn’t say anything that would tip him off.”
“Then I guess the sound of a male voice was enough.”
“Damn it. Right. He thought there was a woman inside—Lilith or Gretchen. A lone woman.”
“When he realized his mistake, he bolted.”
We keep running, easily following the sound of Dalton and his target.
“Go ahead,” I say to Anders. “You know I can’t keep up.”
“Yeah, and if he circles back?”
“Uh, armed law-enforcement professional here? But yes, good point. He may have been hoping to lure you out and circle back. I’ll stand guard at the—”
A shot rings out. Then another in quick succession. My heart leaps into my throat, and I bear down, running full out, ignoring the screaming pain in my leg.
Dalton would not have fired unless he had to, which means that first shot wasn’t his. Another shot comes, and I run faster even as Anders takes the lead. He’s racing in the direction of the blast, me right behind him, my leg on fire, both of us ducking and dodging around trees until—
“Hold!” a voice calls ahead of us.
Dalton’s voice.
We both stop and listen, and I can barely breathe, picturing Dalton in a standoff with an armed man. When a figure appears in the moonlight, my hand goes to my jacket, but it’s only Dalton.
I run to him. “Are you okay?” I say, as my gaze sweeps over him.
“Yeah, he didn’t hit me.”
“That was his gunfire? All his?”
Dalton nods. “He shot my way once, and I hit the ground. He kept running and fired two more shots.”
“Backing you off,” Anders says, his own gun in hand.
“Yeah. I didn’t see where the shots hit, which means they were wild. A ploy to stop me from chasing him, and I hate that it worked but…”
“You had an armed man shooting at you. In the forest. At night,” I say. “Backing off was the right thing to do.”
Dalton exhales. “Well, now we know he’s armed. I don’t think I would have caught up anyway. He was pulling away. Same as yesterday. He’s faster than me.”
“He’s wearing night-vision goggles, which gives him the advantage.”
“Yeah. He was dodging trees much faster than I could.”
I look toward the cabin. “We should get back in case this was all about luring Will away.”
Anders snorts. “I almost wish it was. I’d love to see his face if he opened the door and found Yolanda with her gun pointed at his crotch.”
I shake my head, and we return to the cabin.
We will eventually try to track our escaped stalker. But we’re giving him room—lots of room. Let him flee to wherever he feels safe. The problem is that we don’t have Storm to follow him. Still, Dalton can give it a try. With the guy running full out, he wasn’t exactly hiding his trail.
We poke around the bush where he was hiding. The only thing we find is footprints, which match the ones left by Lilith’s stalker.
The mask and goggles also tell me this is the same guy who attacked Gretchen, the one she presumes killed Blake. If so, he could have thought it was Gretchen inside, having found an abandoned cabin to shelter in.
But why not just break in and kill her?
Because he wasn’t sure it was her. Or that she was alone. He hoped to lure her into peeking out, so he could confirm his target and act. Then he returned tonight, only to hear Anders and know he’s not getting his chance.
There are other theories, of course, but this is the one that best fits all the parameters. It also means that Gretchen’s story seems to be correct. She was being stalked, which means she’s almost certainly not Blake’s killer.
After searching, I ask Anders to come out and walk with me. We need to plan our next move, and I don’t want to talk too much in front of Gretchen. Dalton and I murmured ideas while we were searching, and now he’s going inside to stand guard with Yolanda.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” I say, once we’re far enough from the cabin. Then I tell Anders my theory.
“Sounds reasonable. I know nothing I said on the phone would spook the guy, so hearing a male voice must have been enough.”
“So next steps…” I say with a slow exhale. “We have two options here. Well, three, if you include taking Gretchen to Haven’s Rock, but I’d rather not consider that.”
“Agreed. If we need to bring her, she’d have to be blindfolded and confined to the guarded and windowless apartment, so she sees nothing, especially our residents. And we’d need her consent for that—we don’t want residents thinking we’d kidnap someone.”
“Yes, but that’s a last resort. For now the options are to leave her here under guard or have émilie come and pick her up.
Personally, I’d rather postpone the émilie option—I want access to Gretchen so I can continue questioning her.
The problem is that I don’t want to ask you and Yolanda to stay where it might be unsafe. ”
Anders shrugs. “If the guy ran after hearing my voice, I’m not too worried. I’d be more concerned about an ambush if we take Gretchen out of the cabin. We’re going to need to stay inside, though, so we’ll have to check with Yolanda. She’ll tell me if she wants to leave.”
“Thank you.” I turn to look back at the distant glow of the cabin. “We have a forty-eight-hour maximum. If we haven’t solved this by then, we need to rethink this. Someone is coming to pick her up, and we have to deal with that.”
“Yep.”
“We’ll also move her out if there’s any clear threat to her. She’s not bait.”
“Unless you want her to be,” he says, with a knowing look.
“I’ll think about it, but again, I’d want consent, and I’m not sure she can give it rationally.”
He nods. “She might agree to anything to find her husband’s killer.”
“There’s something else.”
I tell him about the potential link between Blake and Mark.
“Shit,” he says. “You going to confront her about that?”
“I don’t know enough yet, and she can just make something up. I need to find out more.”
“Then go in hard. Because she might not be her husband’s killer but she may know why he was killed.”
“Yep.”
We start back toward the cabin. Then Anders says, “And hey, worst case, if she’s confined to this cabin long enough, with someone stalking her, she may break down and tell us the truth about what they were doing up here.”
I smile over at him. “That’s my backup plan.”
Yolanda wants to stay. She advises us to notify émilie about the pick-up window, get her advice. If we can resolve this quickly and win Gretchen’s confidence, she can cancel that and émilie can have the plane ready to extract her ourselves.
Back in Haven’s Rock, we retrieve our daughter.
Once she’s fed and cuddled, it’s seven in the morning, which is late enough to call on my sister.
We go to the front door and then stay in the waiting room after calling April.
Five minutes later, I’m pretty sure we hear someone sneak out the back door.
April cracks open the door and pokes her head through. “Your dog is fine. I gave her something to help her sleep, and she is doing exactly that, while drooling all over my floor, I might add.”
“It’s not about Storm,” I say. “Yes, we want to see her, but we’re here early because I need to reexamine the man we found buried.”
She checks her watch. “At seven in the morning?”
“You can go back to bed. I’m not asking you to help or to watch Rory. Eric and I have been out half the night dealing with a threat, and since we’re up, I want to move on this. The sooner I can resolve it, the sooner Will and Yolanda can return.”
“Where are they?”
“At Lilith’s cabin. Guarding our dead hiker’s wife. I think our other dead man is from the mining camp, and I need to examine him.”
“We have already determined he is not.”
“April,” Dalton says behind me, “Casey doesn’t need to explain why she requires access to a victim. We just need you to know that we’re here, and if you have appointments this morning, we can work in the adjoining room.”
April flushes. A mild rebuke from Dalton cuts deeper than the sharpest from her little sister.
She backs up. “Of course. Come in. I have nothing scheduled until eleven. You may use the main examination room, and I will assist.”