The footing was slick, and the creek thinned in places, hollowing into little currents that Annie splashed through with her soaked shoes—but it never shrank to the size of impassability.
The deeper into the briars she walked, the more certain Annie became that this was it. This was the path by which the killer had carried Jamie’s body from the lake to the woods.
Everywhere she looked were tracks and signs left by someone passing through with a hundred and thirty pounds of deadweight in their arms. The slender, thorny shoots encroaching on the path had been stomped down and broken, and though any shoe prints had been washed out, there were plenty of indents in the distinct pattern of human step, leading straight on toward the dark woods beyond the briars.
Annie stopped suddenly. Something gleamed in the mud beneath her feet, right in the center of the path, a quick flash of silver that caught the beam of her headlamp.
She reached for it, fingers sliding through the muck before closing around something small and solid.
Holding it up in the light, Annie’s stomach plummeted.
It was a lighter. Cheap and ordinary, made of orange plastic—the exact type and color that she’d seen in Daniel’s hand countless times as he ignited the edges of newspaper pages balled up for bonfire tinder.
Annie shoved the implication aside, even as her mind connected the dots. After all, lighters like this were a dime a dozen. It could belong to someone else. Some other man who had struggled to carry a body up the slick, wet trail—the shuffling of his feet causing enough jostling to wriggle a lighter loose from his back pocket and drop it to the ground, unnoticed.
It was coated in slippery mud, and any hope of fingerprints was surely lost, but she’d bet a year’s salary on it. This lighter belonged to the person who had killed Jamie Boyd.
Annie slid the lighter into the narrow pocket of her leggings, and forced herself to walk on.
Just keep moving. Just keep tracking.
A minute later, the briars fell away all at once, and she stepped past them into the dark forest beyond, open and stark in contrast to the claustrophobic tunnel she had just passed through.
Annie’s eyes jumped from giant to giant of the pines standing tall beyond her weak circle of light. The woods were hauntingly still by night, and far too quiet. This was where Jamie’s killer had brought her, and with the shortcut through the briars, it would not be a long walk to where her body had been left.
Annie started forward again, but a small, chirping sound in the trees above stopped her in her tracks.
Slowly, she raised her chin, and, one foot at a time, the circle of light from her headlamp illuminated the lower half of a sprawling Oregon ash—and a sight that made her blood run cold.
Peering down at her from the lower arms of the ash was a cougar.Thecougar, his limbs draped languidly over the branches, one paw still bandaged and both eyes gleaming like lanterns.
A muted cry passed Annie’s lips, and she took a backward step.
The cougar blinked once, its head tilting as though assessing what sort of creature this was, what sort of threat. What sort of meal.
Annie’s hand slid automatically to her waist, but she was not wearing her belt. She had no bear spray with her, and no gun, tranquilizer or otherwise.
Don’t run,came the voice in her head.Make yourself bigger. You are not prey.
Fear wrapped itself around her, but Annie raised her arms high and puffed up her chest. She needed to make noise, to yell at the top of her lungs, but there seemed to be no connection between her brain and her vocal cords, and silently, she backed away without taking her eyes from the cat’s jeweled gaze.
The briars were at her back now, the tunnel through which she’demerged opening to her, and Annie retreated into it slowly. When the thornbushes cloaked her again and she could no longer see the lamp eyes in the dark, she turned and fled, racing as quickly as she could down the path, stumbling twice and catching herself in the dark, the encroaching brambles tearing at her arms and face as she half ran, half slid back down to the lake.
When she emerged through the other side of the briars, she sprinted for the canoe, shoving the vessel back into the water, and climbing aboard.
Still blanketed in terror, Annie paddled hard toward the western shore, the blade dipping beneath the surface and rising again. In less than half an hour, she’d be safe in her bed. In less than thirty minutes, she’d be home.
Just once, she turned to look back over her shoulder at the briars, and when she did, dragging the paddle through the water for a split second too long, the canoe wavered in its course, dipping precariously to the left. Too fast, she overcompensated, leaning hard to the right and thrusting the paddle into the water as the cedar log rolled beneath her.
Annie flew out with her arms splayed, hitting the cool surface of the lake with a splash that echoed through the night. Water shot up her nose, filled her ears and shoes, and for three panicked seconds, she didn’t know which way was up. She floundered in the darkness, and her shin slammed into the canoe.
Annie cried out, bubbles escaping her mouth as her body contracted around the pain.
She kicked instinctively downward with her legs, and as she shot up, the top of her head struck wood with a crack that ignited silver sparks behind her eyes. The pain was instant and blinding, and for one horrible second, she felt her consciousness wavering on the edge of blacking out. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She had to get out from under the canoe before she drowned.
She thrashed wildly, kicking sideways, out and away from the log as the pain in her head dulled. Then a long-forgotten lesson from asurvival course kicked in and she went limp as a rag doll, trusting that the remaining air in her lungs would send her bobbing up to the surface if she just stopped struggling.
Her body stilled and rose, and fresh night air broke across her back. Annie threw her head up and gulped in oxygen, coughing and sputtering as she filled her lungs. The burning in her chest eased, but her head and shin throbbed as she swam back to the canoe.
