A Dark Lure (36 page)

“Tori? Is . . . is Myron okay? Who’s here?” He pushed the door open past her and stepped inside. He started up the stairs. “Dad!”

“In here, son. Library.”

Tori rushed up the stairs and into the library after him.

“I just saw Olivia’s horse! Where is she?” He stalled dead in his tracks as he registered the look on his father’s face. “Where’s Olivia?”

“She went on her horse to find Ace. In the otter marsh.”

“What?”

“Ace fell down a bank in the marsh,” Tori said. “The man from the campsite saw him go in there and came to tell us. He’s helping Olivia find him.”

Cole dropped to his haunches, grabbed her shoulders. Her jacket was sodden, her hair wet. “
What
man?!”

“Algor,” said Tori. “The one with the wife.”

Panic struck like a hatchet. Adrenaline exploded into his system.

Olivia came around and coughed blood and saliva out her mouth. It pooled, slimy and sticky under the side of her face, which was pressing into something soft. A mattress. Her body was being rocked about. Fading in and out of blackness, she realized she lay trussed up in the back of a moving camper—hands bound behind her, feet tied at the ankles. Her head was swallowed in pain. The mattress beneath the side of her face was hot and wet with her own blood.

Confusion swirled around and around in her brain. She tried to recall what had happened. She’d ridden into some kind of ambush. He’d tied a rope across the trail. She tried to recall his words as he’d dragged her by the hair through the snow to the waiting camper, which he must have driven into the marshlands via the cut fencing and deactivated track.

You weren’t searching the Internet for your child, were you? It was the cop who brought me to you. Sublime, don’t you think? Design. There is a pattern to all things in nature. What do you think of her—rather beautiful child we made
. . .

She gagged again, spitting out more blood. He’d been in disguise. A chameleon. She hadn’t seen it. But she could now—he was older and had grown gaunt. He’d dyed his hair white-blond and shaved it into a buzz. He’d shaped the Balbo beard and goatee. Blue contact lenses had disguised his pale eyes. The sociopath in him had smiled and conned them all.

But it was him. She knew it now. His smell. Those eyes that had haunted her darkest nightmares for over a decade. But how? How could it be him, when he was dead in that prison cell? She’d identified him in the lineup. It had been him without a doubt—the man who’d tortured her throughout an entire winter. His DNA matched the child in her stomach.

Oh, God, how could this be happening again? It was not possible.

It was him, and it wasn’t.

It struck her suddenly.

The wife
.

Her gaze darted around the interior of the camper. Did this belong to the dead woman? Had he assumed the identity of a dead husband? The credit card—it had read Algor Sorenson. What had happened to the real Algor Sorenson?

A true predator knows how to melt into his environment, Sarah. He knows how to blend, how to fashion a lure. Nature designs things this way. Even prey can camouflage itself in order to try and hide, isn’t that so, Sarah?

The camper lurched and rolled. She was securely strapped to the bed. She felt the truck tires skidding. They fishtailed. The engine revved. They were going uphill. Along a rugged, unpaved road. He must have turned north along the logging road at the back end of the marsh. He was taking her north. Away from civilization. Storm closing in. Like last time. Tracks being wiped clean.

On the anniversary.

All over again. Back to the beginning.

Tears burned in her eyes. Pain rolled over her in suffocating waves. For over a decade she’d been running. She’d thought she was finally safe.

She’d thought it was over, but it was only just part of a continuum still playing out.

Tori, her child. Gage Burton, a cop who’d adopted her baby, a killer’s baby. Why? Melody had said that she and her husband had been trying to conceive. She never knew Melody’s husband was a cop. Melody had kept that from her. She felt betrayed. Consciousness faded in and out. She was unable to pull pieces of logic together.

She ran through events leading up to her attack in the marsh. He’d lured her with Ace. Her eyes burned and adrenaline surged. Had he killed her dog? Had he taken from her the most precious thing in her life? Olivia struggled wildly against her bonds in a spurt of frustrated panic. She tried to reach her belt with her bound hand, before recalling he’d taken her sat phone. He’d put it in his own pocket. He’d taken her knife.

Olivia rolled in and out of consciousness with the sickening, yawing, nauseating sway and skid of the truck.

Would he keep her for another winter? Would he put her out for another spring hunt?

She just didn’t have the strength to fight it all over again . . .

Cole grabbed a shotgun from the gun safe, along with several boxes of ammunition. Mind racing, he busted out the front door and ran around the side of the house to the garage that housed the snowmobiles—he’d seen them in there when he’d found his father’s Dodge earlier. As he neared the garage, he caught sight of the severed wires leading up the side of the wall behind the kitchen. He stalled. His gaze shot up, following t
he cables to the roof. They led to the sat dish. A sinister chill snaked through him. This had been done purposefully. Had the same thing happened to the phone lines?

The phones had gone dead around the same time as the television set when they were having dinner. Around the same time someone had entered Olivia’s cabin and scrawled that note onto her sheets.

The entire ranch had been cut off on the cusp of a major storm.

He slung the shotgun across his back and swung the garage doors open wide. He’d seen several jerry cans of fuel on the back shelves.

Hurriedly he gassed up one of the snow machines, tested the engine. It roared to life. He swung his leg astride the seat and released the throttle, feeding the machine juice. The tracks rumbled and scraped over concrete as he squeezed past a tractor, sending up sparks as he bumped along a metal frame and shot out of the doors and into the snow. He goosed the machine, kicking up speed, blinking into blizzard-like flakes as he raced toward the otter marsh—he hadn’t had time to search for helmet and visor.

As he neared the narrow trailhead to the marsh where he and Jimmie used to play, time curved and warped and doubled back on itself. He swung the machine into the narrow trail and bombed along the dense, twisting track. Snow was thick here. It had covered whatever trace Olivia might have left. Then he caught sight of indentations that could have been made by hooves. He slowed to a stop, and cut the engine. He tried to control his breathing as he listened for a sound—anything that might show him direction.

He heard nothing.

Restarting the engine, he traveled a little farther into the densely wooded marsh, following what he believed could be horse tracks.

He cut the engine again, listened. This time he heard a sound. His heart jumped. He slowed his breathing further, waited. He heard it again, a yap—it came from the west, from a ravine tucked behind dense growth.

He dismounted and scrambled through the scrub to where the ground dropped down a sheer bank. He got onto his stomach, peered over.

Ace
.

“Hey, buddy! Hang on. I’m coming!”

The dog barked.

He scrambled down the bank backward, using branches for support, dislodging small stones from beneath his boots, sliding through snow. He dropped down beside Ace. The dog licked him all over. Cole ran his hands over his fur, checked his legs, paws. He didn’t seem hurt. Then he saw the bone lying in the snow with bits of raw meat still attached. He’d been lured here with food.

To trap Olivia?

“Where is she, boy? Can you help me find her? Can you show me her trail?” Cole glanced up the snowy bank, trying to figure out how to get Ace back up. He unhooked the shotgun from his back and removed his jacket before resecuring the gun.

He wrapped his jacket under Ace’s belly, tying the sleeves around his body to fashion a harness.

“Okay, you ready, big guy? All you’ve got to do is hold steady while I haul you up, bit by bit.”

Cole reached up for a branch and pulled himself up the angled slope, kicking the toes of his boots into the bank for leverage as he carefully lugged Ace up, bit by bit, with his other hand.

He scrambled over the lip of the slope, muscles burning, sweat mixing with melting snowflakes in his eyes. He helped edge Ace over. The dog scrambled wildly, then licked Cole’s face as he untied the makeshift harness. The animal was stressed, panting.

“Okay, where’s Olivia, boy? Find her!” he said as he shrugged back into his jacket and once again secured his shotgun across his back. “Find Olivia!”

Ace snuffled the air, nose held high, nostrils waffling as he tested air currents. His head jerked sideways, as if he’d been yanked by a bull ring in his nose. He scrambled through bushes, making a snorting sound.
He was on her trail.

Cole ducked and pushed scrub and branches aside, going on hands and knees at times in order to clamber over roots and under deadfall. The dog was following scent wafting through air, not tracks, and scent didn’t care about accessibility. Twigs snared in Cole’s hair and slashed across his face. Dislodged snow dumped down his neck.

“Go, boy! Keep at it!” He was breathing hard now, bare hands frozen.

They popped out onto a trail. Ace stilled, then gave a weird whimper and lay down in the snow.

Horror filled Cole as he stepped out of the dense scrub into the trail.

Blood—great big gouts of it—covered the snow. It was surrounded by depressions, broken branches, drag marks. His heart beat a tattoo against his ribs, anxiety almost blinding him. He ran through the snow to the end of the trail, following what appeared to be deep prints and drag marks, more blood. Along the way were clumps of hair. Olivia’s hair. Roots attached.

He reached the edge of the trail and burst out onto a wider track. It was the deactivated road that led from the cut fencing they’d seen earlier. Whoever had taken Olivia had been plotting this a while. Her assailant must have surveyed the scene, cut the fence, and driven a vehicle in here, parked it to wait while she was enticed into the marsh using the most treasured thing in her life as a lure—Ace.

The drag marks ended where fresh tire tracks gouged into snow and showed black dirt.

She’d been taken.

Where?

He knew that this disused track popped out at the back end of the
marshland. From there a driver could either turn south on the log
ging road and head back toward Clinton. Or north onto lesser-used
dirt roads that would eventually come out onto the interior highway to the north.

He ran back and mounted the snowmobile, calling Ace to heel. He helped Ace up onto the seat, where he wedged the dog between his legs and arms. “Hang on, buddy. I’m going to need you.”

And if he found Liv, she would need her dog.

Cole goosed the throttle and bombed along the trail to where he’d seen the tire tracks. He followed the tire marks up to the logging road and stopped.

The vehicle with Olivia had turned north. He swore, overcome by a moment of indecision. He could chase those tracks for miles and miles through wilderness and ranch land, but he’d run out of gas long before a four-wheel-drive truck did. And then what? He had no form of communication on him, no way to call for help. He’d lose her.

There was only one option. He revved the gas, released the throttle, and gunned back around the lake toward the lodge.