No sooner had the cashier picked up his phone than Jordan realized he was wasting his time. The TikTok was the security video. It gave a better close-up than the ceiling-mounted camera would provide.
Think.
Campbell tried to buy supplies, got recognized, and ran. Where would she run? If she was smart, she wouldn’t risk going back on the road. And she had survived a good number of cross-country miles already.
In the video, it had looked like she was headed for the motion-activated front doors, where the pack of rubberneckers was now looking in.
Jordan didn’t want to go out the front.
The cashier was bargaining with his manager: “Look, if you give me the code, I can show him the video, and you can change the code tonight. This is a police investigation... Yes, he’s the sheriff. He has the hat and everything.”
Jordan pushed through a swinging door at the back of the store. He made his way past an unused kitchen and food-prep area, through a crowded stockroom, to the back doors. Outside, on the other side of an asphalt pad for delivery trucks, a tree-studded hill sloped steeply upward.
A red-and-white scrap of something at its base. He moved closer.
A Slim Jim wrapper.
Jordan walked back and forth until he found disturbed earth. Her feet had slid as she climbed.
He radioed it in and started to follow.
SIXTEEN
CARA
Jail is NOT kind to women with fine, brittle hair. Announcing my GoFundMe for @carasloveisgold’s haircare commissary account.
—@JamiesCuts4LessOKC
The shadows had lengthened, and the air held the last warm breath of afternoon heat as Cara continued moving uphill, deeper into the woods and farther from the little town. As she ran, she found herself thinking about Sanjay and Devin. Sanjay would be distraught when he learned he had aided and abetted a fugitive. While she suspected Devin would find the whole encounter amusing (and be consoled by the fact that he hadn’t lost his favorite black shirt to a convicted murderer) she hated what the shock might do to sweet Sanjay’s trust in humanity.
She could practically hear Devin telling him,I told you so.
Cara hoped she hadn’t given them anything but nice things to say about her and that they were telling everyone who would listen:Yes, she stole from us, but she was so apologetic. Shereally looked beaten and bruised. It never occurred to us that she was Cara Campbell.
Devin’s voice continued to echo in her earas she continued on into the middle of nowhere. At least, that’s where she thought she had arrived—until she spotted a cluster of dilapidated buildings in a nearby clearing. It was a fenced compound consisting of two or three old trailers that had been welded together, as well as a Quonset barn and just enough rusty car parts and farm equipment to convince her the rutted, weedy dirt track leading to the compound wasn’t a creek bed but a road. The gates were padlocked and the whole place looked abandoned.
Creeping forward for a better look, she spotted a watering trough with a spigot inside the open-sided Quonset barn.
The need for water trumped her fear.
She hung back until she was sure there was no movement inside any of the buildings or the Frankensteined mobile-home mansion. The two trailers in the front were identical except for their colors, one a faded orange-and-white, the other flat gray. The small opaque slider windows on each side were probably bathrooms. One large window was boarded up and another had closed curtains. A rough-hewn deck wrapped around the entire front.
Cara sprinted over to a patch of tall grass bordering the back of the barn and crawled on her hands and knees to the gate. She waited, listening, hearing only the chuckling clucks of chickens somewhere on the property. Then she climbed over the rusty fence, stepped around some cow or whatever pies, and crept into the barn.
She approached the trough, turned the spigot, and gulped water as fast as she could.
Two brownish, fuzzy sheep were peering at her from the far side of the trough.
“Are you guys thirsty?” she asked, only slightly terrified. Did sheep bite?
She sensed movement behind her and turned. A large black goat with white eyebrows and a chin beard had appeared in the doorway to the open barn, blocking the exit.
She’d done goat yoga, but with adorable baby pygmy goats, not a full-sized goat with yellow teeth and knobby horns.
He gave her a nudge.
“How about a little drink for you, too?” she asked nervously, hoping that was all he wanted.
