Chapter 14 #2
The ground drops away steeply as I move down the ridge.
My boots find purchase on roots and rock ledges that I can't see but my body remembers from the satellite imagery I studied in the truck.
The quarry is deeper than it looked from above the walls, sheer in places, crumbling in others, the floor a maze of abandoned equipment and standing water.
I pause at the tree line and listen.
Wind in the pines. The distant call of an owl. Water dripping somewhere to my left, rhythmic and steady. No footsteps. No breath that doesn't belong to the mountain.
I pull my phone and text Trenton: South approach clear to quarry edge. Moving to lower level.
His reply comes back: Copy. North approach same. Coming around east wall.
I pocket the phone and move.
The quarry floor is colder than the ridge.
The stone walls trap the night air and hold it close, and my breath comes out in pale clouds that dissipate almost immediately.
I keep my weapon low and ready, sweeping each section of ground before I commit to it.
An overturned dump truck sits to my left, its bed rusted through and weeds growing through the floor.
Beyond it, a stack of timber that's been rotting for years.
The smell is mineral and wet and faintly chemical.
There's movement behind the timber.
I go still. Every muscle locks. My finger finds the trigger guard without thinking.
The sound comes again, a scrape, then nothing. Not an animal. Animals don't stop moving when they've made noise. Animals freeze or they bolt. This was a man adjusting his weight and then catching himself.
I signal Trenton with three short taps on my phone, our backup comms for when we need to be silent. The response is immediate: two taps. He's heard it too, and he's close.
I move left, keeping the dump truck between me and the timber stack.
The ground is uneven here, broken concrete, rebar stubs jutting up like fractured bones.
I place each foot with the kind of care that only comes from years of doing this in places where one wrong step means you don't get to go home.
Morgan's face when we left the cabin. Charlie asleep with her unicorn. The note impaled on the deer's antlers.
Your time is running out.
I round the back of the dump truck and stop.
Harris is standing in the gap between the timber stack and the quarry wall.
He's smaller than I remember, maybe five-ten, lean, the kind of build that's all tendon and wire.
The beard the men described is there, patchy and dark.
He's wearing a dark jacket and baseball cap.
In his right hand, angled down but not holstered, is a hunting knife.
The same one, probably, that he used on the deer. On the women.
Our eyes meet.
For a half second, nothing happens. He's calculating, I can see it in the way his weight shifts, the way his gaze flicks left, then right, then back to me. He's looking for a way out, for a weapon on me. He's looking at the distance between us and doing the math.
Then he moves.
He turns and bolts for the quarry wall, not the way we came down but a narrow cut in the stone that I didn't see from above. A fissure, barely wide enough for a man, which opens onto a game trail on the other side of the ridge.
I'm already running.
The ground is treacherous and I'm moving too fast for it, but the alternative is letting him reach that cut, and if he reaches it, he's gone.
The trail on the other side connects to a network of logging roads that spiderweb through these mountains for fifty miles.
If he disappears into that, we won't find him for days. Maybe weeks.
I fire once into the air. The report cracks across the quarry like a thunderclap, echoing off the stone walls, and Harris flinches, I see it in the hitch of his shoulders, but he doesn't stop. He's ten feet from the cut. Eight. Six.
I holster the weapon. I'm not going to shoot him in the back. Not yet. Not until I've looked him in the eye and made sure he understands exactly who's ending this.
I close the last five feet and launch.
My shoulder drives into the small of his back and we go down together, hard, into the broken concrete.
His knife skitters away, and I hear it, but I don't see it, and Harris makes a sound that's half grunt, half scream as the breath leaves his body.
He's trying to roll, trying to get his hands up, and I'm already on top of him, my knee driving into his spine and my hand fisting in the back of his jacket.
"Don't," I say. One word. Quiet.
He stops moving. Not because he's decided to comply.
I can feel the tension still running through him, the fight-or-flight system working at full capacity, but because my knee is positioned in a way that makes every movement hurt, he's just smart enough to understand that struggling will make it worse.
Trenton's boots hit the ground beside us. I don't look up. I keep my eyes on the back of Harris's head, on the way his breathing is coming in short, shallow pulls, on the tremor running through his shoulders.
"On his feet," Trenton says. Low. Controlled. That voice.
I stand and haul Harris up with me. He's lighter than he looks, the kind of weight that comes from running, from not eating right, from the constant pressure of being hunted.
His face, when I spin him to face us, is pale and sharp and angry.
Not scared. But angry. His eyes are those of a man who believes he's been wronged.
"You took my daughter," he says. His voice is steady, which surprises me. I expected more panic and pleading.
"We rescued her," I say.
His jaw works. There's a shift behind his eyes, a flash of something that looks almost like confusion, then it's gone, replaced by that cold, righteous anger. "She's mine. Her mother—"
"Her mother is dead," Trenton says. He's standing two feet to my left, his weapon holstered but his hand resting on it. "Like the others."
Harris's face doesn't change. He heard the words. I watch him process them, and the processing doesn't look like guilt.
"They weren't right," he says. And his voice has gone quieter, almost thoughtful, like he's explaining something to a child. "None of them were right. They were weak. They needed to be made pure."
The words land in my chest with a heaviness. I think about the women. Four confirmed, maybe more. Women who looked like Morgan. Women who looked like Charlie's biological mother. Women this man decided weren't "right" and took it upon himself to fix.
Trenton steps closer. "Where are the others?"
Harris looks at him, really looks. Studies his face the way a man studies a problem he hasn't figured out yet. "You won't find them. Not without me."
"That's not what I asked."
A smile. Small. Tight. The kind of smile that doesn't reach the eyes. "I know it's not."
I'm watching his hands. They're at his sides, palms open, fingers slightly curled. The posture of a man who's decided he's going to talk his way out of this.
"Hands where I can see them," I say.
He lifts them slowly. Palms out. The universal gesture of I'm not a threat.
Trenton moves to pat him down. I keep my distance, my hand on my weapon and my eyes on Harris's face. The smile hasn't left. It's gotten smaller, more precise, like he's narrowed it down to exactly the shape he wants.
Trenton finds the second knife in Harris's boot, a folding blade, small, the kind you'd use for field dressing.
He pockets it without comment and continues the search.
Phone. Wallet. A folded piece of paper that turns out to be another map, this one hand-drawn, with dates and times written in the margins.
Harris watches Trenton take the map.
"That's where they are," he says. "All of them. The ones who weren't right."
Trenton unfolds the map and holds it so I can see. The locations are marked with small crosses, several of them, spread across three counties. Each one has a date beside it. The latest is eight years ago, and the most recent a few days ago.
I look at Harris's face and I'm hit with a realization.
The women weren't the point. The killing wasn't the point.
The point was the process: the finding, the watching, the deciding they weren't right, the making them pure.
Charlie's mother was part of it. The other women were part of it. Morgan was going to be part of it.
Harris reads my face. I can see him doing it, watching the pieces click into place, watching me understand the scope of what he's done.
"You see it now," he says, almost gently. "You see what I've been building."
"You're not building anything," I tell him. My voice is steady but something is happening behind my ribs, something hot and dark and barely contained. "You're killing women because they won't be what you want them to be."
His smile wavers. The first crack appears in that carefully maintained facade of calm.
"They're supposed to be better," he says. "They're supposed to be pure. I help them become what they're meant to be."
Trenton's hand finds my shoulder, a touch that says, Wait. A touch that says, I'm here. A touch that reminds me we're in this together.
"Morgan isn't part of your fantasy," Trenton says. His voice is low, even, the kind of tone that could talk a man down from a ledge or push him over it. "Charlie isn't part of your fantasy. They're real people who belong to themselves."
Harris's face hardens. "Charlie is mine. I created her. Her mother—"
I'm moving closer without meaning to, closing the space between us until I can smell him. "She chose to leave you. Just like Morgan would choose to stay with us. You don't get to decide who belongs to who."
His eyes find mine. They're dark, not just brown, but deep, the kind of dark that swallows light. The kind of dark that's been growing for a long time.
"You think you know her," he says. "You think because she lets you touch her that she's yours. But she's not. She's waiting for someone who can make her what she's supposed to be."