Chapter Four #2
The woman in the photo didn’t carry herself like the woman who’d tried to run through underbrush and then dared me to take off the cuffs.
The woman in the photo looked scared.
The woman I’d brought to Pine Shadow had looked scared too, once or twice, but she’d turned it into something sharp before I could reach it.
I scrolled lower.
The known-associates section sat under an old address and a phone number that had been disconnected.
Jade Kemp — sister.
The packet gave me no photo, no warning, and no note that the two women shared a face. It gave me no useful identifiers except a line that said sister and a last known city outside the county.
I stopped scrolling on the name.
Jade.
I went back to the tattoo section. Left leg. Right shoulder. Nothing behind the right ear. The intake notes didn’t mention a tiny black ink drop. The body identifiers didn’t mention any mark there.
I could still feel it under my thumb.
A drop. Black ink. Hidden by pale hair until her head turned on my pillow.
Occupational hazard, she’d said.
Crystal Kemp was a bookkeeper.
Jade Kemp was a sister with no photo.
It wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t proof yet.
But it was enough to change where I looked next.
Rudy pulled in fifteen minutes later in an old white recovery rig with a winch on the front, a dent in the passenger door, and a pine-tree air freshener swinging from the mirror.
He was built narrow and wiry, with a sun-lined face, a red ball cap, and the calm expression of a man who had seen bad ideas in every weather pattern Idaho offered.
He lowered the passenger window. “You look like you lost a fight with a motel.”
“I lost a truck.”
“That’s what Annette said.” He leaned over and shoved the door open. “She also said I wasn’t supposed to ask about the woman.”
“Annette is wise.”
“Annette scares me. Get in.”
I got in.
Rudy looked at my boots, my jaw, and the motel room key still in my hand. He didn’t ask.
That was why Annette used him.
We drove out of Pine Shadow with the heater off and the windows cracked. The July morning warmed by the minute, but the air still held the night from the pines. Mist hung low in the ditch grass. The highway cut pale through the timber.
“She turned right,” I said. “Likely headed toward Bearclaw. She needed distance before I woke and a place to ditch the truck. She wouldn’t keep it.”
Rudy nodded. “Closed trailhead. Gravel pullout. Service road. Somewhere she can leave keys if she doesn’t want the truck stolen by somebody else.”
I looked at him.
He shrugged. “Annette said she took the truck, not that she was dumb.”
“She isn’t.”
The answer came too fast.
Rudy gave me one sidelong look and then kept his mouth shut.
We checked the first pullout. Nothing but beer cans, tire tracks from the weekend, and a damp fire ring someone had tried to hide under dirt.
The second held a Forest Service sign, a chain across a logging road, and no heavy truck impressions fresher than last week.
The third sat where Bearclaw Mountain Pass narrowed and a gravel service road bent behind a line of pines.
I saw my tire marks before Rudy stopped.
“Pull over.”
He did.
My pickup sat forty yards down the service road under a stand of firs, black paint dull with dust, nose angled toward a locked metal gate. The front right tire had a key ring resting on top of it.
Relief came so fast it made my ribs hurt.
She’d left it where I’d find it.
She’d known I’d find it.
I got out before Rudy killed the engine.
Gravel crunched under my boots as I walked to the truck.
The body was intact. No broken glass. No blood.
No dent except the old one in the rear bumper.
The driver’s seat had been pulled forward.
My jacket lay over the passenger seat. My map was still wedged beside the console. My water bottle sat in the cup holder.
She’d left everything she didn’t need.
My paper packet sat on the dash, still closed.
I took the keys from the tire and wrapped my hand around them until the metal bit into my palm.
Rudy came up beside me and looked down the service road. “She didn’t go on foot from here. Not far.”
I looked at the ground.
My boot prints from the truck would ruin anything close, so I stayed back and worked the edges.
The dirt near the driver’s side had one set of smaller boot prints, not much depth, pointed toward the main road.
At the shoulder, where the service road met the pavement, a second set of tires had stopped at an angle.
Narrower. Smaller. A car, not a truck. It hadn’t stayed long.
Dust sat over part of the pattern, but the turn mark was fresh enough.
“She had help,” Rudy said.
“She had help before she left the motel.”
“Second vehicle picked her up here.”
“Yes.”
Rudy shifted his cap back. “Want me to call Annette?”
“No.”
He looked at me again.
This time, I gave him the stare before he decided whether to say anything.
He raised one hand. “I can take the rig back toward Old Quarry and sit on the sedan until Annette decides what to do with it.”
“That’s what I need.”
“You want me to come with you first?”
“I’ve got my truck.”
“That didn’t stop you from losing it once today.”
The words should’ve hit wrong.
They didn’t. They were just true.
I unlocked the pickup and opened the door. “Handle the sedan, Rudy.”
“Your call.” He took two steps back, then stopped. “Dex.”
I looked over my shoulder.
“If this is turning into something that isn’t a simple skip recovery, you might want to let somebody know before you’re standing in the middle of it alone.”
The key ring pressed into my palm.
“I’ll call North Fork when I know what I’m looking at.”
Rudy nodded once. “Try not to make Annette louder than she already is.”
He headed back to his rig.
I got behind the wheel of my truck.
The seat was too close. I shoved it back hard enough to make the track slam. The cab smelled like her now, faint under leather and dust. Cheap motel soap. Warm skin. A trace of whatever she used in that pale hair.
I noticed too fast.
Worse, my first breath inside the truck wasn’t only anger.
The second vehicle had turned back toward the road.
From here, there were only a few practical choices before full daylight: down toward the highway, back toward Pine Shadow, deeper over Bearclaw, or into the short-term rental roads tucked along the pass.
She wouldn’t pick the highway unless she wanted cameras, gas stations, and witnesses.
She wouldn’t go back toward Pine Shadow.
She’d picked this trailhead because it was close enough for a prearranged pickup and hidden enough to buy time.
Bearclaw cabin roads sat less than three miles up the slope.
I started the truck.
The engine turned over clean, like it hadn’t just betrayed me with my own keys.
The pass climbed into sun.
Morning pulled color back into the world one ridge at a time. Gold caught on the tops of the pines. Fog clung low in the drainage ditches and thinned where the road rose. I drove slowly, watching shoulders, driveways, gravel spurs, and places where a small car could hide under trees.
The first cabin road held a row of old vacation places with tin roofs, empty firewood racks, and no fresh tire marks worth stopping for.
The second had a locked gate and two mailboxes stuffed with old flyers.
The third road was marked with a faded plank sign: BEARCLAW RIDGE RENTALS. PRIVATE ROAD. NO TURNAROUND.
A narrow tire track cut through the dust on the shoulder.
Small car.
Recent track.
I turned in.
The road climbed between thick pines and granite outcrops.
Cabins sat tucked back from the gravel, each with a number burned into a wood plaque.
Some were empty, curtains drawn, porches clean.
One had mountain bikes leaning against a railing and a cooler by the door.
Another had a rental company sign and a trash bag tied too neatly on the steps.
Cabin seven sat half-hidden behind a bend.
A small silver car was parked behind it, nose-in, mostly concealed by a sagging carport and a screen of young firs.
I didn’t stop in the open.
I pulled past the cabin, parked behind a stand of trees, and cut the engine.
The sudden quiet inside the truck felt too loud.
I took my phone, and the cuffs stayed on my belt. My hands stayed empty. This wasn’t the moment to come in like a man ready to punish two cornered women.
I approached from the road side, boots quiet on pine needles and packed dirt.
Cabin seven was a small A-frame with weathered siding, a screened porch, and curtains pulled across the front windows.
A plastic grocery bag sat near the door.
Two water bottles rested on the porch rail.
Someone had opened and closed that door recently enough for the screen to be swinging slightly in the light breeze.
Voices came through the cracked window on the side.
A woman said, “We can’t stay here.”
Another woman answered, “I know.”
I knew the second voice before I had the sense to step back.
It belonged to the woman from the motel.
I moved to the edge of the porch where I could see through the side window without giving them my whole body in the glass.
Two pale blonde women stood in the cabin’s small front room.
The world narrowed the same way the motel lot had narrowed around the missing truck.
Same hair. Same blue eyes. Same face.
One woman stood near a round table with her arms wrapped around herself, wearing soft gray shorts, a pale blue tank, and a thin cream cardigan that hung off one shoulder.
She held herself softer than the woman I’d chased.
Curvier through the hips. Smaller in the way she held herself, like she was trying to make less room for danger to find her.
The other stood between her and the door in cutoffs, a black tank, and my trouble all over her posture.
The woman from the motel had been right there, three miles up the pass, guarding the woman I’d been sent to recover.