He touched Maya’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
She stared at him, eyes wide, red rimmed from crying. She didn’t look quite as young as she had when she had first walked into his office. The blue-tipped hair and dangling earrings had him thinking she was a teenager then. He saw the maturity in her eyes now, and the desperate struggle to keep hope alive. “We can’t just leave her out there all night—alone,” she said.
“We’re going to have someone here all night,” he said. “I’ll have them build a fire and keep it going. Maybe Casey will see it.”
“I should be the one waiting,” she said.
“No. You should go back to your hotel room and try to get some sleep.” She started to argue, but he cut her off. “We’re going to need you in the morning. Once it’s light out here and we can see, we’re going to need you close in case someone spots Casey. She’ll recognize you and want to come to you.”
She looked out into the darkness again. “Do you really think she’s all right?”
“We haven’t found evidence to the contrary,” he said. “No signs of struggle, no other signs of blood at the scene. I think she got away from the killers.” Whoever shot Angela and Greg Hood might have taken the child with them, but that didn’t make sense to him. The parents’ deaths had been cold and efficient—for whatever reason, someone had wanted them eliminated. Why then burden yourself with a five-year-old child? “I think Casey saw what was happening, became frightened and ran away. Tomorrow, we’re going to find her.” He touched her shoulder again. “Come on. I’ll take you back to your hotel.”
“I don’t have a hotel room. I mean, I didn’t call and make a reservation. I didn’t even think of it.”
“Then we’ll find you one. Come on.”
She made one last glance into the darkness beyond the camp, then followed Gage to his SUV. “I’m going to speak to the sheriff,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
He found Travis with a group of search and rescue volunteers who were packing up to head back to town. “I got some more information about the little girl we’re looking for,” Gage told them. “Seems she’s deaf. So shouting her name isn’t going to do any good. We’ll need to make eye contact.”
“I know a little American Sign Language,” one of the SAR volunteers, a middle-aged woman, said.
“That might come in handy,” Gage said. “Can you come back to help with the search tomorrow?”
“I’ll be here.”
They said good-night. Travis waited until he and Gage were alone before he spoke. “Does the sister have any idea what the Hoods were doing up here that got them killed?” he asked.
Gage glanced back toward his SUV. He could see the shadowed figure of Maya as she sat in the passenger seat. “Greg Hood was an engineer who had developed some new equipment he thought could make these old mines profitable. He purchased these old claims to create a kind of demonstration project. He and his wife and the kid were camping up here, checking out their new acquisition.”
“Any enemies, threats, anything like that?” Travis asked.
“She says no, and she thinks she would know. Sounds like she and the sister were close.”
“All right. Maybe we’ll turn up something when we have a chance to go over the evidence from the scene. And I’m going to talk to Ed Roberts.”
Gage thought of the old man who was as close as Eagle Mountain came to a hermit. He lived in an apartment above the hardware store, but spent most of his time working an old gold mining claim in the area. “Is his claim around here?” he asked.
“Behind this property.” Travis gestured toward the north.
“You think he might have seen or heard something?”
Travis’s expression grew more grim. “And he’s a registered sex offender.”
Gage stared. He knew the department received regular updates from the sex offender registry, but he didn’t remember Roberts’s name being on there. Maybe it dated from before his time with the department. Now he felt a little sick to his stomach. “Did he molest some kid or something?”
“He was convicted of exposing himself to women—flashing them. It happened years ago, in another state, but still...”
“Yeah,” Gage said. “Still worth questioning him.”
“In the meantime,” Travis said, “we’ll have someone up here overnight and we’ll start the search again at first light.”
“That little kid must be scared to death, out there in the dark by herself,” Gage said.
“At least if she’s scared, it means she’s still alive,” Travis said. He clapped his brother on the shoulder. “Go home. Try to get some rest. Pray that in the morning we get lucky.”
“I’m going to find a place for Maya to stay. I’ll probably pick her up in the morning and bring her up here with me. She’s the person the kid is most liable to run to on sight.”
“Good idea.”
Maya sat hunched in the front seat, hugging herself. “I should have started the engine so you could get warm,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. “Even in summer, it can get chilly up here at night.”
“I keep thinking about Casey, cold and alone out there in the dark,” she said.
“Most of the time, with little kids like this, they get tired and lie down somewhere,” Gage said. “We’re hoping she’ll see the fire at camp and come back there. A husband-and-wife team with the search and rescue squad have volunteered to stay there. They’ve got kids of their own, so they shouldn’t be too scary to Casey.”
“If she comes to them, you’ll call me.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course,” Gage said. “As soon as we hear anything.”
They drove back toward town in silence. Full darkness had descended like a cloak, the sky a sweep of black in the windshield. When he had a cell signal, Gage pulled out his phone and made a call. “Hello?” The woman on the other end of the line sounded cautious, and maybe a little annoyed.
“Paige, this is Gage Walker. Sorry to bother you so late, but I’ve got a lady here who needs a room for the night—probably several nights. She’s the aunt of the little girl we’re searching for.”
“I heard about that,” Paige said. “Poor thing. And I do have a room. It’s my smallest one, but I doubt she’ll care about that.”
“Great. I’m going to take her to get something to eat, then we’ll stop by.”
“Sure thing, Deputy.”
“When was the last time you ate?” he asked Maya as they neared town.
“I had a sandwich at lunch,” she said. “That seems like days ago.”
“And now it’s almost ten. I know you probably don’t feel like eating, but you should. And I’m starving. Let me buy you dinner, then I’ll take you over to the Bear’s Den.”
“The Bear’s Den?”
“It’s a bed-and-breakfast. You should get along great with the woman who runs it.”
“Why do you say that?”
He glanced at her, but it was too dark for him to read her expression.