CHAPTER 39
Kori kepther voice low as she started. “Mackenzie gets a message from an unknown number.Come alone and come now.Then she goes hiking, telling her neighbor she’s going on a five-day backpacking trip starting on Lost Hollow Trail. She went willingly. At least at first.”
“We don’t know what the message means or who it was from.”
“No, we don’t. Was the sender planning to meet her? What did the trail have to do with this?”
“The sender could have been someone she trusted and not necessarily someone threatening her.”
She thought about the text. The urgency of it.Everything depends on it.“You’re right. It could have been.”
Wyatt nodded slowly.
“Then her apartment was broken into,” Kori continued. “It wasn’t necessarily a robbery. The man inside seemed to be looking for something specific. The second laptop, most likely—the one with the trail camera footage. Or the journals, which appear to be missing.”
“Why did she even have that footage on her laptop? Did you hear back from her work? Did they say anything?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Kori said. “I actually did get an email from her boss. He said he doesn’t know anything about the trail cameras, that she was working mostly for some companies out of New York and Chicago. He did mention that she requested a week off work for this hike. She used vacation time.”
Wyatt leaned forward now, his elbows on the table. “What about the symbol? The one on the necklace in her backpack?”
“It’s connected. We just don’t know how.”
Just then, Wyatt’s phone rang. “It’s that anthropology professor I emailed earlier.”
“Please, answer.”
He nodded and put the phone to his ear. She couldn’t wait to hear what this woman was telling him.
As soon as Wyatt ended the call, Kori said, “Well?”
“That was a very interesting conversation. She said the symbol is consistent with imagery used in certain anti-government survivalist movements.”
“That fits,” Kori murmured.
“It does. The burning tree represents what some people might call a purification—the old system destroyed so something new can grow in its place. The circle means self-sufficiency. Separation from the corrupt world outside.”
“Everything is starting to make sense. Thomas Paine. The right of ordinary people to reject a government they consider tyrannical.” Kori shook her head. “Whoever is running this operation built an ideology around it.”
Kori sat with that a moment. She thought about Mackenzie—grieving, unmoored, looking for meaning after their parents diedand Kori had cut her off. She thought about what Daisy had said:She was tired of working. Her life needed more meaning.
She needed to talk all of this through.
“So let’s say there is a group out in the forest,” she started. “Maybe Thomas Paine is their hero. Maybe that symbol represents their mantra of being separate from the government. Maybe Mackenzie was monitoring these trail cams when she recognized someone.”
“Then maybe she started investigating on her own,” Wyatt continued. “And by the time she realized who she was dealing with, it was too late. They grabbed her.”
“But why that text message?”
He frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
A server passed nearby, and both of them went quiet until the footsteps faded.
Kori continued. “Pete must have been selling these people supplies. They’d need them to live off grid in the mountains. But in the process, maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have.”
“You’re probably right,” Wyatt said. “But there’s also the man we found dead out there. We still don’t know for sure that he’s connected.”
“You’ve got to assume he is, right? But you didn’t get any hits back in the system from his prints? There are no missing person reports?”
