Chapter Thirty-Five
“Muriel has a knife?” Dalton says. We’re striding into the forest, having left Arturo and Haven’s Rock behind.
“A boning knife. So maybe six inches long. Sharp.” I hurry after him as his strides lengthen. “She might have just spotted it and thought it could come in handy, both as a weapon and a tool. But that might also be why she used the kitchen as her escape spot in the first place.”
“To get a weapon.”
After a moment, I say, “Are you following her trail or just heading for her clearing?”
“Trail,” he grunts, and points to the foliage, where he must see something I don’t. “Which seems to be heading for her clearing.”
“She might have something still stashed there.”
Another grunt. Then he says, “We’ve got our sidearms. If she wants to bring a knife to a gunfight, let her. I’m just glad we got a heads-up that she’s armed.”
He stops short, and I narrowly avoid bashing into him. When he looks north, I resist the urge to ask what he hears. He keeps looking, and then shakes his head and continues walking.
“The patrol,” he murmurs, voice lowered.
“Kendra and Gunnar? You thought you heard them?”
“Maybe. Either way, they need to be warned. They have a radio?”
“They should.”
I pause to call, and Kendra answers.
“Hey,” I whisper. “We may have a situation in the woods. Whereabouts are you guys?”
“By the lake.”
“Good. Stay over there. Get into the open if you can. Muriel’s bolted, and she has a knife, but we think she’s on the north side.”
“Got it. We’ll hang tight.”
“Whoever you heard?” I murmur to Dalton. “It’s not them.”
“Probably an animal,” he says. “It was just a twig crack.”
He continues on, but his gaze is pulled north often enough that I tap his arm.
“You don’t think it’s an animal,” I say. “Let’s change direction. It could be Muriel, if she got enough of a head start that she’s already collected whatever she left and is moving on.”
He nods and pauses to peer around, mentally marking this spot in case we need to resume tracking. Then we head north.
I fall in behind Dalton and don’t try to keep up. While I need to be aware of our surroundings, he’s doing the same, now that he doesn’t need to focus on her trail, and I can back off and give him space while I cover his back.
This time I’m the one who notices something. I’d like to think it’s a sudden growth spurt in my wilderness skills, but I suspect it’s because I fell behind a few paces. Something moves to our right, passing by after Dalton has gone past that spot.
I jog forward and tug his jacket, motioning to the east. He squints, and then he must see what I did—a dark shape moving maybe thirty feet from us, heading along one of the smaller trails. Dalton clocks the trajectory and then frowns. The figure is moving toward Muriel’s clearing.
Dalton eases out his gun. I do the same, and we make our way silently to that narrow path. He stays in front, moving carefully, sticking to the shadows.
I look up at the sky. The sun is dropping, and it’s darker in here than it was in town. At least the shadows hide Dalton, letting him move quickly. He lopes about fifty feet and then stops with one hand raised.
I reach him and peer around as he steps aside. Someone is up ahead. A male figure, dressed in black, the hood of his jacket pulled tight.
We aren’t absolutely fixed on Rutherford as our culprit.
Muriel did give us a description that matched Rogers, and while we believe she’d been fed that, in case she was caught, there’s still the chance Rogers really is her contact.
His defense was that he’s gay, which is easy to claim.
Also, we have no evidence that Muriel was actually having an affair with her spymaster.
It might have been a purely monetary transaction.
The size of the figure matches both Rogers and Rutherford, the two mining employees who don’t have GPS chips. What I do know is that whoever we see is heading for the clearing, where Muriel presumably waits—
Where Muriel waits with a knife.
Before I can speak, Muriel’s voice rings out. “There you are. I told you I was in trouble, and it took you—”
“Shh!” the man says. “They’re patrolling.”
While the speaker doesn’t have an English accent, the timbre seems to match Rutherford’s voice.
“You need to get me out of here,” she whispers. “We had a deal.”
The man mutters something and then says, “Come on then. They seem to have vacated that cabin. You can stay there while I make arrangements.”
“I need to get my bag. I hid it in our clearing.”
He sighs. While it makes sense that she only grabbed the knife in case anyone tried to stop her, I still grip my gun tight, every muscle tense.
“I think it’s a setup,” I whisper to Dalton.
His frown tells me his mind hasn’t gone in that direction, and I resist the urge to back down.
“Just follow me,” I whisper. “In case she tries—”
A scuffle up ahead, and the man saying “What the—?” before he lets out a hiss and stops short.
“You fucked me over,” Muriel says.
The man’s voice comes tight and angry. “How? You were paid. You were caught. Now I’m taking you someplace safe, exactly as I promised. Lower that knife or you will find yourself facing your mess alone.”
“My mess?” Her voice rises as we jog silently toward them. “You told me they’d never catch on. They know everything.”
Silence. Then, his voice even tighter. “What?”
“They know I broke into the Roc and Phil’s house. They found the coins, and they know I was being paid by someone in the mining camp.”
“What did you tell them, Muriel?”
“I gave them the description you fed me, which saves your ass, but it doesn’t help me, does it? You promised me a hundred grand, and you’ve given me a fraction of that.”
“I promised a hundred if you got what I needed.” His American accent begins to slip. “You didn’t. I’m not paying you for making a hash out—” A sharp intake of breath.
We’ve reached a spot where the path turns. Muriel and Rutherford are just up ahead, and we can’t barrel out and risk spooking Muriel into attacking Rutherford with that knife.
Dalton eases into the forest, placing one foot down after another, as carefully as he can. I wait until they start talking again, in hopes it’ll cover any sound of my own approach.
“What do you want me to say, Muriel?” The American accent is gone completely now. “You have me at knifepoint. Arguing with you isn’t going to help me.”
I move up alongside Dalton, and he points. It takes a moment to see Muriel and Rutherford through the thick tree cover, but then I make out their figures. Muriel has him pinned to a tree, knife at his back. He’d been wearing a balaclava, but it’s rolled onto his forehead.
“I want fifty grand,” she says. “I accept that I didn’t get what you wanted, but that wasn’t my fault. I gave you all the information I could get.”
“Which was useless. I needed to know how things were going wrong in town, and you gave me a list of penny-ante concerns. The bedrooms are small. The bathrooms are communal. The food options are limited. You’re expected to work.
You sound like a bloody tourist complaining that your three-star resort doesn’t have a spa. ”
He cuts himself short, as if realizing this won’t help.
“I needed ways to know how things are going wrong, Muriel. At the very least, I need evidence that Eric and Casey are overwhelmed, between their new town and their new baby. The fact that they caught you and figured out everything suggests even that isn’t a problem. ”
“People have complaints. I gave you those.”
“People will always have—” He stops short again. “I presume you cannot get access to your coins?”
“Yes.”
“That is your problem, and I will count them against the fifty thousand you earned. You will get twenty-five.”
“Forty.”
A long hiss of breath. “Thirty-five.”
He’s faking the negotiations. Muriel hasn’t thought this through.
Rutherford is at knifepoint. He could promise her the whole hundred grand.
He doesn’t because that would be suspicious.
He’s going to play this out until he has Muriel in Lilith’s cabin.
Then he can ship her off without paying a cent.
We need to rescue her, and we will—as soon as we can safely intervene.
“Forty thousand,” she says.
A low growl, as if she’s a shrewd negotiator driving a hard bargain. “Fine. Now will you lower the knife please?”
She backs up, and Dalton relaxes. I rock on my toes, tension thrumming through me. Do we grab her now? No, they’re relaxing. Just wait for an opening.
Muriel steps back, knife raised. “Walk. And I want to be flown out tomorrow.”
He sighs, as if he’s dealing with a difficult teenager. “I can’t promise tomorrow because it’ll be late when I get back. But I will place the call and say it’s a priority.”
“I want to be flown to Seattle. No dropping me off in the middle of nowhere.”
“I will see what I can do. At worst, I’ll provide you with options, possibly Vancouver or Anchorage.”
“Vancouver.”
“We will see. Now, I don’t suppose you have a tissue? The back of my neck is bleeding.”
“I barely nicked you.”
“I believe I have a tissue. May I tend to it, please?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. He reaches into his jacket, and my mouth opens as I lunge, ready to shout a warning.
The pfft of a silenced shot stops me short. Muriel falls back against a tree, her mouth opening and closing.
Dalton rocks forward, but I stop him, and he stares, wide-eyed, at Muriel, slumped backward but still upright, hand over her heart, blood pumping out.
I take one slow and careful step, braced for the slightest rustle underfoot. Rutherford faces Muriel, his gun still raised, but held casually, knowing that if his shot isn’t fatal, he has plenty of time to fire one that is.
Muriel has dropped the knife—forgotten about it altogether—and she’s slumped against the tree.
“You shot me,” she says finally.
He doesn’t even answer that. Just shakes his head at her naiveté.
Tears glisten in Muriel’s eyes. “I did what you asked. Everything you asked.”
Silence. He’s not even going to give her the respect of an answer. To him, she’s already dead; he’s just waiting for her body to hurry up and finish the process.
This is the man who killed Blake and stalked Gretchen. Any lingering doubt evaporates as he stands there, cold-blooded and patient while a dying woman begs for an explanation.
He could say he killed her because she threatened his life and he can’t take another chance. But I can see that he was always going to kill her in the end. Now he doesn’t even need to worry about us searching for a missing innocent resident. Given her betrayal, we’ll presume he flew her out.
Muriel is gasping, beyond speech, dying, and I know I’ll pay for this later, regretting that I didn’t move faster. I’d refrained for fear of her escalating the conflict, but I still made a mistake. Whatever Muriel has done, she did not deserve this.
I’m creeping up behind Rutherford, Dalton at my rear, our guns raised. When we round that corner, Muriel spots us, and I tense, finger moving to the trigger.
She blinks, as if we’re a mirage. And then, with her final breath, she laughs. The sound turns to a gasping snicker as her feet slide out from under her. Rutherford doesn’t even twitch. He can’t see us and he must presume her laugh is a final pathetic attempt at bravado.
Muriel hits the ground, still braced against the tree, head lolling, eyes shut. I wait for Rutherford to holster his gun, but he only lowers it and walks over to kick Muriel’s boot, making sure she’s dead.
Then he starts to turn.
“Stop,” I say.
His gun barrel swings up. I fire. He’s wheeling fast, and my bullet hits his arm, Dalton’s shot slamming into his shoulder. Rutherford fires, too, but he’s staggering back, his bullet going wild.
Rutherford tries to recover, but I’m there, kicking him hard, the gun flying from his hand.
Dalton’s fist plows into Rutherford’s jaw.
He reels, stumbles, falls, grabs for Dalton’s leg, yanking to bring Dalton down, get his gun, but Dalton jerks free and backpedals.
Then both of us aim our weapons at point-blank range.
Rutherford’s gaze lifts to ours, grinding out pure hate. He knows why he’s still alive.
“I’m not telling you anything,” he rasps, wincing as he grips his bleeding arm. “You can shoot me or you can leave me here.”
“Okay,” I say … and I shoot him in the kneecap.
He screams, head flying back.
“Other one, too?” I say.
A string of profanity and pain.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I say.
He manages a short, agonized laugh. “If you think that’s going to make me talk—”
“Nope,” I say as I holster my gun and scoop up his. “But I think a few hours in the forest with three bullet wounds might.”
I collect Muriel’s knife. “Those wounds aren’t fatal, but that blood’s going to attract predators.”
“Then I guess that’s how I’ll die. Without telling you a thing.”
I shrug. “You don’t have to. We know you work for the company behind our former town.
We know they also run the mining operation, which is actually an illegal prison camp.
Right now we have two goals. Shut down the mine, and get your employer out of our lives—permanently.
Neither has anything to do with your continued survival.
We just don’t like to kill people if we don’t need to. ”
I start to walk away, Dalton falling in beside me. Then I turn back to Rutherford. “If you hadn’t fucked up and killed an innocent hiker, we’d never have known what was going on.” I salute him. “Thank you for your service.”
“Innocent hiker?” He spits the words before gasps. “Is that what that woman told you? He was spying on us. I saw him on the ridge. Unlike you, I know how to deal with threats.”
I glance meaningfully toward Muriel. “No, you just don’t mind killing anyone who could be a threat.
Maybe that’s why the company hired you, but I suspect it was just an unexpected bonus …
that turned into a major liability. We’ll be back in a while to collect Muriel and give her a proper burial. You can make your own choice.”