Chapter 26
LEV
The call comes in while we cut across Midtown. It’s Halloran. He has county scanners open and NYSP feeds piped into his laptop. His voice is tight and fast.
That’s her. I feel it in my gut.
“Pin the mile marker,” I say. “Drop it to Yuri and me. Keep the line open. Patch us to county if they move her.”
The pin lands on both our phones.
I point at the driver. “Get us upstate. Now.”
He floors it. We slip out of the city and let the lights fall behind us. I call Pavel.
“I think we’ve got her. Route 214 outside Phoenicia. We’ll need a med kit, trauma bag, fluids, and heat blankets. Bring ground recovery. Pull two K9s that owe us. You’ve got thirty minutes.”
“On it,” he says. I hear him start yelling before the line clicks off.
I call our Bratva IT. Not Levcon’s. Mine. He’s faster, and he doesn’t worry about paperwork.
“If any unknown device pings the Levcon authorization code from a Catskills IP, you alert me. Don’t block it. I want to watch him if he tries to move money.”
“Understood,” he says.
We take the bridge and follow I-87. Kingston slides past. We cut west. The road tightens. Trees close in on all sides. It’s dark now, and I can feel the temperature dropping even through the glass. It does nothing to ease my worries.
Halloran calls back.
“Airbags were deployed. Driver not ambulatory. The female fled on foot. Troopers are en route. Volunteer firefighters are rolling. Stay off their radar.”
“Copy,” I say, and hang up.
“What’s our ETA?” I ask the driver.
“Seven minutes.”
“Make it five.”
We hit a bend and see strobes through the trees.
The SUV sits nose-first in a ditch, the grille shoved into a tree.
Smoke billows from the hood. The passenger door hangs open, and the driver’s side is caved in.
One trooper waves cars past. A chief barks at a kid trying to film the crash.
We stop nose-to-nose with a county car. I’m out before we’re fully stopped.
A trooper steps in to block me, hand up.
“Back it up. The scene’s closed.”
Yuri folds a thick card into the trooper’s hand and keeps walking.
“We were never here,” he says without looking at him.
I circle to the driver’s side. The man behind the wheel is dead. His neck is twisted at an unnatural angle, and his eyes are still open. I don’t recognize him, but that doesn’t matter. Marcus clearly had a network I knew nothing about.
“Marcus?” I yell without looking.
“He’s not here,” Yuri answers. He’s already on the shoulder, scanning. “It looks like he ran after her.”
Of course he did. I cross to the open passenger door.
The airbag is blown and streaked with blood.
Not a lot, but still fresh. I crouch and study the shattered glass.
There’s a drag in the scatter where someone slid out.
Small prints lead to the guardrail, then drop into the ditch, tight and small. She ran hard.
“Here,” Yuri says. He holds up a white band, cut short and nicked gray. A zip-tie. “Five million says this is hers.”
I take it. The edge is rough. She did it without a blade. I assess the scene again, and it occurs to me that she might have caused this. Her fight-or-flight kicked in and she fought hard. Hopefully she’s still fighting, still running.
“Build a grid,” I say. “Now.”
Our second SUV rolls in behind us. Then a third and a fourth.
Doors pop. Our medic hauls bags to the tailgate.
A K9 handler clips leads. My men fan out with rifles low, vests under jackets.
I cut to the county sergeant and meet his eyes.
He’s not happy, but he’s also not stupid enough to argue with me.
“No one touches that line except my people and the dogs I authorize,” I say. “Hold your guys on pavement. You’ll get what you need for your report.”
He looks at my face. He looks at my men. He looks at the wad of hundreds now sitting in his palm. He nods once.
“Ground’s slick and rocks are worse,” he says. “If your guys get turned around, I’m not sending mine in after them.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
Back at the SUV, Pavel passes out radios. We go to the hood for a map. I draw with a dry-erase marker and my finger.
“We slice it four ways off the shoulder. Creek. Ridge. North. South. Two-man teams. Radios open. Flag blood, fabric, fresh breaks. Police rules, no contamination. We’re not adding our DNA to this murder board. If you see Marcus, you don’t chase. You call me and hold your position.”
No one argues. They move. They’ve been training for something like this for years.
Yuri walks to the place where the guardrail breaks. He crouches and points.
“Looks like she cut off her zip-tie here,” he says. The rail edge is sharp and red with blood. “The blood is still pretty fresh.”
We flag it. Creek noise rises. One man finds a bit of torn gray fleece on a thorn. Another points out a heel slide where she lost footing and caught herself. We mark it and keep moving.
“Ridge team,” the radio crackles, “broken branch waist-high, direction east-northeast.”
“Hold and mark,” I say. “We’re thirty seconds out.”
We step around a blown-down tree limb and climb a short shelf. The creek opens in a run. The lip is slick. A log lies across like a low bridge. There’s a handprint in the near-side mud and prints on the log. One small and tight. One longer, sloppy, trying to hurry.
“She crossed here,” I say. “He tried to go around.”
“Or he cut high,” Yuri says, pointing at a faint deer path angling into scrub. “He could be trying to get in front of her. He’d have the advantage of sight.”
I radio to my teams.
“Ridge, you’re on me up the deer path. Creek team crosses and stays with the dog on the lower. North floats ten off creek right. South holds our six at the last good cover. Everyone calls if you find fresh blood.”
We move. The deer line is narrow and rough, the soil loose.
We watch our footing; we could easily slip and fall.
My Italian loafers weren’t made for this kind of work.
I keep my eyes on the ground, my head on a swivel.
I listen for anything, for screams or heavy breathing.
I say a silent prayer to whatever gods are listening that I find her before Marcus does.
Two minutes in, the K9 barks once and goes quiet on command.
“We’ve got blood on this stone,” the handler says.
“Mark it,” I say. The dog tugs forward.
My phone vibrates. It’s IT.
“Nothing on a Catskills IP yet. I did see a cell phone pinging near where you are before it went dead a few minutes ago. I think it’s his.”
“Flag the last tower,” I say. “Send to Yuri.”
I hang up and force my breathing to steady. We could be closing in on Marcus, but where the hell is Mari? The forest is so deep and dense, we could be looking for days.
We crest a bare shoulder. The ridge breaks, and I can see the road through the trees in a gray slash. Troopers have set out cones. Volunteers hold flashlights and talk.
I drop to a knee behind a stump and take ten seconds to breathe. I rub a hand over my face, and it comes away cold and damp. For a second, the edges blur, then snap back sharp. I hate it. Yuri drops beside me and says nothing. He can read me without words.
“She’s ahead of him,” I say.
“Looks that way,” he says. He doesn’t add the part I’m dreading. How long can she stay ahead of him? How far behind are we? For all we know, he’s found her and killed her already.
“She’s tough,” he says after a minute. “She’s not going down without a fight. She might take care of him before we can.”
I nod and stand, knowing we don’t have the luxury of time to contemplate her possible fate. All we have is hope.
“North to base. We’ve got fibers on a thorn, gray knit, and a fresh scrape on bark at shoulder height. Direction holds east.”
“Copy,” I say. “All teams hold verbal. Call clicks only unless you have eyes. Marcus has ears. He’ll be listening for us the same way we’re listening for him.”
We tighten the circle and keep moving.
We climb into a boulder field. The stones are slick and black.
The cracks hold leaves and water. It smells like iron, cold dirt, and crushed fern.
I’m reminded of the survival-skills classes my father forced me to take.
He would always say, “You never know when you’ll need them.
” For once, I’m glad for his harsh instruction.
The deer line forks. One path goes high to a rocky lip and a better view. The other cuts low toward a run of saplings where you can move faster. I split us again with hand signs. I take high with Yuri. It gives me an angle and a chance to see over.
At the lip, I drop and crawl the last four feet. I look over the edge. The woods open to a shallow bowl and then lift. I see a shape move between two trunks and then stop. It’s a lone man. It’s got to be Marcus.
I flatten and breathe. I could shoot from here, but I probably wouldn’t hit him. It would only give him the advantage of knowing where I am. It would take me five minutes to get down to where he is, and by then he’ll be long gone.
I look at Yuri. He looks at me. He can see I’m split down the middle, and he puts his hand on the back of my neck and presses once, like he wants to push the rage back into the box.
“We’re going to get her,” he says. “Stay with me.”
I nod, and we take off in the direction I saw Marcus.
We move along the line as fast as we dare, picking our way down the slippery slope.
I catch sight of a dark figure below, moving closer to me but not seeing me.
He must see something, though, because he takes off running.
I train my eyes where he’s going and catch a smaller figure in the distance.
It’s her. It has to be her. And she’s too far for me to reach her. Safety be damned, I take off running down the hill as fast as my feet can carry me. He’s not going to get to her before I do.
He doesn’t get to decide how this story ends.
I do.