Chapter 46
Wyatt reached Refuge Cove and parked beside the house.
He, Kori, and Thunder climbed out into the cold.
The side door opened before they reached it. Caleb stood in the frame, one hand on the door. His eyes immediately went to Wyatt.
“You’re later than I expected,” Caleb said.
“Had a detour.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.” Caleb’s eyes moved to Kori then back to Wyatt. He stepped aside to let them in.
The mudroom was warm. The smell of coffee reached him immediately—recent coffee, not the remnants of an earlier pot. Caleb had been up waiting.
Wyatt heard voices from the kitchen. Millie’s low and quick. Naomi’s steadier. Max’s rumble underneath both of them. They must have all caught wind of what was happening, and they’d been waiting.
Wyatt waited until he was in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in hand before starting. With everyone gathered around, he gave him the short version.
The compound empty and rigged. The explosion. Two officers down. The truck on the highway.
Then he told them about the snowstorm.
They had forty-eight hours to enact some sort of plan.
Maybe less now.
He couldn’t help but feel time was running out.
Kori sat on the edge of her bed and listened to the house settle around her.
The murmur of voices from the kitchen had faded twenty minutes ago. A door had closed somewhere down the hall. The dogs had stopped moving—or she didn’t hear the clicking of their paws, at least.
It appeared everyone had gone to sleep.
She should too.
She knew that. Her body had been telling her that for hours. There was an insistent heaviness behind her eyes. Her thoughts kept losing their edges and blurring together.
Yet she was still alert.
She lay back on the quilt and stared at the ceiling.
Her mind immediately filled with things she didn’t want to see.
The woman they’d found with scarred wrists and ankles. The orange glow in the forest. The truck pulling alongside them on the highway.
She sat back up again.
She couldn’t sleep. Not yet. So she might as well be productive.
Kori grabbed her laptop from her bag and settled back against the headboard. The only light in the room came from the screen, pale and cool against the darkness.
She found the folder of trail camera files she’d saved from Mackenzie’s laptop and opened it.
There were more videos than she remembered. Dozens of them, sorted by date and time, going back seven months.
The earliest ones were short—ten, fifteen seconds of empty trail. The wind moving through branches. Nothing.
As the months progressed the files got longer and more frequent.
Mackenzie had been collecting this footage for a long time. Was this for her job?
Kori didn’t even have any contact information for someone at Mackenzie’s work that she could ask.
The footage was all she had to work with right now. If she looked hard enough, she could probably find something.
Kori selected the oldest file and pressed Play.
It showed an empty trail. Nothing moved for eight seconds. Then a squirrel crossed the frame before disappearing.
She clicked to the next one.
It was the same trail but a slightly different angle. Two people walked through the frame without stopping. Hikers, by the look of them. They had day packs and trekking poles. They didn’t look up at the camera.
She kept going.
File after file. Hours of footage compressed into short clips—the camera triggered by motion, capturing whatever moved through its frame and then going still again.
She watched a deer pick its way along the trail edge.
She watched leaves fall.
She watched the light change from morning gray to afternoon white and back to gray again across a dozen different days.
Then she watched three men walk through the frame in single file.
She sat up straighter.
They moved differently than hikers. They didn’t have packs or poles. Instead, they carried large boxes with them.
The last one in the line glanced up. As he did, Kori caught a half second of his face before he moved out of frame.
She rewound it and watched it again.
The face told her nothing. The man was middle-aged and bearded, wearing a dark jacket with the hood pushed back. She didn’t recognize him.
But the jacket . . .
She leaned forward and squinted at the screen.
On the sleeve of his jacket, there was a circle. Something was inside it that she couldn’t quite make out at this resolution.
She pressed Pause and stared at the frozen frame.
Her pulse ticked faster.
It was the symbol, the one she’d seen time and time again.
She clicked to the next file. And the next. She moved faster now, her exhaustion forgotten and her instincts fully awake.
More hikers. More empty trail. A fox. Two women hiking.
Then a file from six weeks ago.
She almost missed it.
The camera had triggered on a bird landing in the branches above the trail, and the movement in the lower left corner of the frame was easy to overlook.
She rewound and watched again.
A figure stood at the edge of the frame, partially obscured by a tree trunk. The person was as still as stone, watching something off camera to the right.
Why did she know that posture?
Kori’s lungs froze.
No . . . it couldn’t be.
But was it?
She rewound the video and watched the person again.
It was him.
It was Bartholomew Beekman.
The man she’d sent to prison.
What was he doing out there?
Her breath left her entirely.