“Satanic rite,” Pescoli added.
“Could be ‘WART SCIENCE.’” Although his face was red from the cold, Pete Watershed wasn’t about to give up. “Or ‘WAR OF THE SCIENTISTS’ or even ‘WARY OF THIS COIN.’”
“Then where would Jillian Rivers’s initials fit in?” Alvarez asked. “I mean, assuming she’s next.” She glanced up at Pescoli. “The psycho must still have her.”
“Son of a bitch,” Pescoli whispered. “This guy just won’t give up.”
“Or…‘WAR OF THE SCHOOL INSTITUTIONS’…Hell, if that’s the case, we got a whole lot more victims.” Watershed was worried, scratching his jaw.
“Of course he won’t give up.” Stephanie Chandler walked the perimeter of the crime scene. “He can’t. He lives for this.” She read the note at a distance. “If anything, he’ll escalate. We need to be looking for a missing person with the initials AR or RA in her early twenties. Who found this body again?” She turned her attention to Sheriff Grayson, who was standing twenty feet from the lone fir tree, hands stuffed in his pockets, lips flat against his teeth, as he eyed the dead woman.
“Eldon and Mischa York, who were out hiking. They have a summer cabin out here and came for a week. Their story is that they’d been cooped up with the storm and took advantage of the break in the weather to get a little exercise. The good news is that they saw the scene and all the footprints and hightailed it back to their cabin, climbed in their four-wheel-drive and drove to a spot where they had cell phone service, then called 911.” Grayson finally turned his attention to the FBI agent. “Both of ’em are waiting in their rig, if you want to talk to them.” He motioned a gloved hand toward the access road, where all the vehicles from the sheriff’s department and crime lab were clustered around the Yorks’ SUV.
“We will,” Chandler said as the noise from the helicopter rotors sliced through the silence.
“Looks like we got lucky this time. We might get an actual cast out of the boot prints, something we can use,” Alvarez said.
“Not lucky enough for the victim,” Grayson muttered, and walked away, his gloved hands fisted, his jaw rock-hard. “Whoever the hell she is, she didn’t make it.” He glanced up at the sky as a helicopter appeared above the timberline, hovering over a sheer, rocky ridge covered with ice and snow.
The chopper moved in, coming in low, skimming the tops of trees surrounding the open space. It wasn’t the police search-and-rescue chopper they’d all expected. A blue call sign announced that it belonged to a local news station, and a cameraman, his huge lens trained on the clearing, was leaning as far as he dared out of the noisy aircraft.
Pescoli wanted to wave the news copter away. “Looks like we’ve got company.”
“Wouldn’t ya know?” Grayson muttered between tight teeth. “Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, the damned press decides to show up.”
“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Agent Chandler said, squinting up at the chopper. “Maybe we can use the footage to our advantage. See what else they locate and make a public statement. Use the news crew, rather than be used by them.”
“Did you just say screw the news crew?” Brewster asked, an amused glint in his eye.
Chandler nodded. “Close enough.”
Pescoli glanced up at the helicopter hanging in the crisp mountain air. Chandler had a point; the news copter would give them free aerial support.
“Go for it,” Grayson told the FBI agent. “KBIT is all yours.”
Jillian thought she would go out of her ever-lovin’ mind. She stared out at the expanse of snow sparkling in the sunlight and knew this was her chance to finally get out of here.
And go where?
How?
She had to wait for him. MacGregor had talked about it and had left with a chain saw hours before. She’d watched as he’d driven off on the snowmobile, hearing the big engine roar, but once the sound from the Arctic Cat faded, she’d waited, hoping to hear the grind of saw teeth biting through wood.
No such luck.
The dog, having finally accepted her, was curled up near the door again, the fire stoked. Jillian had tried to get into several of the books she’d found but couldn’t. She was too jangled. Too wired. Too anxious to get out of here. Time was moving along, and if she wanted to find out if Aaron were really alive—or just get back to her real life!—she couldn’t be waylaid any longer.
So what about MacGregor? Are you just going to leave him here?
“Of course,” she bit out. The man was nothing to her. Yeah, she found him a little bit intriguing, but she chalked that up to being alone with him in this isolated canyon. She knew of Stockholm Syndrome, how a hostage came to trust, even depend upon, her abductor; how once rescued she wouldn’t turn on the very person who kidnapped her.
Was that what this was? The root of all her fantasizing?
She remembered his lips brushing her cheek.
So he kissed her. Big deal.
So he was attractive. Who cared?
So he was mysterious. Then run the other way!
Adding wood to the fire, she listened hard, hoping to hear the roar of the snowmobile, but no sound broke the silence of the cabin. She dug in her bag and fiddled with her cell phone, trying it in every corner of the house, but just when she thought she might get a signal, the screen would flash and show “no service.”
“Great,” she muttered to the dog, walking to the windows and wishing MacGregor would return. She still didn’t hear the growl of a chain saw ripping through fallen trees, nor the buzz of an approaching snowmobile.
As she gazed out the window she wondered exactly where she was. He had a stack of maps on the table, so she flipped through them before selecting one that she thought encompassed the area.
She saw roads and rivers and towns, including Grizzly Falls and Spruce Creek, both of which rang bells in her mind. She noticed Missoula and stared at the letters, thinking of Mason and how she was certain he was the one who had lured her to Montana.
But did that make sense?
Why would Mason want her to come here?
Why would he want to kill her?
There had, at one time, been life insurance, of course. A policy worth several hundred thousand dollars that Mason had insisted upon, but she didn’t even know if the policy was in existence any longer.
And the voice on the phone. Had it been Mason, disguising himself? Whispering so that she couldn’t identify him?
Why now?
As far as she knew, he was happily married to his new trophy wife. So why dredge up Aaron now? He’d been presumed dead so long Jillian barely remembered what he looked like. She searched a stack of astrological charts and maps on the table and found the envelope with the pictures that were supposedly of her dead husband. Holding the images under the light of a kerosene lantern, she studied the man carefully, trying to remember.
Was he Aaron?
Maybe. There was the beard and sunglasses and baseball cap pulled low over his eyes partially obscuring his face. And the extra weight, while Aaron had always been trim.
But ten years had passed. A decade. She’d remarried and divorced in that time. And now, if he were alive, Aaron would be just a few months shy of forty.
Frowning, she wondered if the man in the photo was Aaron or an imposter. Even more likely, was he an unsuspecting target? A man whose resemblance to her