Читать книгу The Perfect Outsider - Лорет Энн Уайт, Loreth Anne White - Страница 8

Eager was trained to alert on human scent.

And that’s exactly what his handler, June Farrow, was hoping to find as she worked her four-year-old black Lab in a zigzag pattern across the wind, the glow from her headlamp casting a pale beam into blackness. It was 4:00 a.m. Cold. The cloud cover was low, and rain lashed down through trees.

As June and her K9 worked their way up the thickly forested slope, the terrain grew treacherous, with steep gullies and hidden caves. June prayed that Lacy Matthews and her three-year-old twins, Bekka and Abby, were holed up in one of those caves, dry and safe from the storm.

Safe from Samuel Grayson’s men.

Because if Samuel’s men had found them, they were as good as dead.

Swaths of mist rolled down from the peaks and June’s hiking boots began to lose traction. More than once she had to grab onto brambles to stop from slipping down into one of the ravines hidden by the darkness and bush. Sweat prickled under her rain jacket and moisture misted her safety glasses. Water ran in a stream from the bill of her hat and it trickled uncomfortably down her neck.

While Eager was able to barrel like a tank through the increasingly dense scrub, the twigs began to tear at June’s clothes, hooking into her hair, clawing at her backpack, slowing her progress. This, she thought, as she stilled a moment to catch her breath, was why search-and-rescue teams used dogs—they could access places with ease that humans could not, especially a dog like Eager, who, with his stocky, deep-chested frame and thick coat, was impervious to the claw of brambles. And, having been bred from gundog stock, he was able to remain calm in the presence of loud rescue choppers and the big excavation machines often present in urban rescue.

June listened carefully to her surroundings, hoping to catch the faint sound of a woman’s cry on the wind. But a forest was never quiet, and in a storm like this, trees talked and groaned and squeaked as their trunks and branches rubbed together in the wind. Pine cones and broken branches bombed to the ground, and rain plopped from leaves. The pine needles in the canopy above swished with the sound of a river.

She could detect no cry for help amid the other sounds of the stormy night.

Tension coiled tight in her stomach.

Working solo was foolish, particularly for an experienced SAR tracker who knew better. But a desperation to find those three-year-old twins and their mother burned like fire in June’s chest, outweighing all caution.

Her own son had been three when he’d died.

If June had managed to dig deeper into her own reserves, search harder, faster, sooner, all those years ago, she might have arrived in time to save Aiden. Now she had to save Bekka and Abby. The reason they were lost in the woods was partly June’s fault, and they’d been missing for two nights now. The clock was ticking and guilt weighed heavy.

“Eager!” she yelled over the wind. “Go that way, boy!”

Eager more sensed than saw his handler’s directional signal, and he veered in an easterly direction, moving across the base of glistening-wet rock. All June could see of him was the pale green glow of his LED collar, and every now and then the wet reflection of his coat as he cut across the beam of her headlamp.

The moisture was actually working in Eager’s favor—it enhanced his scenting abilities, but the wind was confounding. It punched down through holes in the canopy and swirled in eddies around the forest floor, carrying any scent that might have been pooling on the ground or in gullies with it.

June saw her dog hesitate a moment, then suddenly the green collar bobbed as Eager went crashing off in a new direction across the flank of a cliff.

He had scent.

June rushed after him, heart pounding as she shouldered through bushes and skidded over wet deadfall. Then she lost sight of the fluorescent light. She stilled, catching her breath as she wiped rainwater from her face. Her hand was shaking, and June realized she was exhausted.

She was going to make a fatal error like this.

She willed herself to calm. Life depended on it, and not just hers.

But as she dug deep for self-control an image hit her hard and suddenly of a search gone wrong five years ago. A search that resulted in the dramatic deaths of her husband and son. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to shake the accompanying and familiar sense of sheer and utter desperation.

It had happened because of a cult.

Her husband, Matt, had been sucked in by a religious organization, and when June had pressured Matt to leave, he’d kidnapped Aiden from day care, planning to take him to live on the cult compound.

Thunder crashed and grumbled in the mountains and another gust of wind swished through the trees. June’s nerves jumped. She braced her hand against the trunk of a tree.

Focus. You’re doing this for them. Everything you do now is because you messed up that time.

That devastating incident was why she now worked for EXIT, a national organization quietly dedicated to aiding victims of cults. June’s life mission had become running halfway houses for cult members who wanted to “escape.” If she could rescue others, if she could get them into safe houses where they could access exit-counseling, it might give meaning, somehow, to the gaping maw of loss in her own life.

It might help assuage her guilt for not having understood how to help Matt back then.

And it was because of Samuel Grayson and his dangerous cult of Devotees that June was in Cold Plains, Wyoming, now. She’d arrived on behalf of EXIT three months ago. Right now she had five Devotees in the safe house. Lacy and her children were supposed to make the number eight.

But something had gone wrong—Lacy and her girls had failed to meet June at a designated meeting place in the woods on Monday evening, from where June was to have escorted them to the secret safe house.

June had searched the area, tracking Lacy and her twins back along the trail that led down the mountain toward the town. Around 11:00 p.m. that night, Eager had alerted on a small, sparkly red shoe belonging to one of the twins. The shoe had been lying just off the trail. From that point the footprints had gone into the forest. June and Eager had followed Lacy’s trail deeper into the woods where more footprints appeared, and it looked as though two men had started following Lacy and the twins. June put Eager on the tracks, but the storm had broken and they’d lost the scent.

Before heading back to the safe house to grab an hour or two of rest that night, June had first hiked over to the southeastern flank of the mountain where she dropped the red shoe as a decoy. She knew Cold Plains Police Chief Bo Fargo would be mounting a search party and calling for SAR volunteers as soon as Lacy was reported missing, and she didn’t want the official SAR party anywhere near the safe house or the area where Lacy had actually vanished.

Chief Fargo was bad news. He was a Devotee and one of Samuel’s main men. June needed to find Lacy and the girls before the cops did, or they’d end up right back in Samuel’s clutches.

On Tuesday morning when Lacy had failed to open up her coffee shop, she and her children were reported missing. By Tuesday afternoon, Chief Fargo had called in SAR volunteers and a search had been mounted. Fargo had asked June to see if she and her K9 could track any scent from Lacy’s house.

By Tuesday evening, June and Eager had led the search crew to the decoy shoe on the east flank. A command center had been immediately set up on the flank of the mountain and the area divided into grids. Teams had searched until dark, volunteers agreeing to regroup at first light Wednesday.

Instead of grabbing a few hours’ rest like the others, June and Eager had hiked straight back to the west flank, where they were now in the dark predawn hours of a stormy Wednesday morning. And, as the hours ticked by, June was beginning to fear the worst.

Suddenly, Eager started barking excitedly somewhere in the dark. Energy punched through June.

He’d found something!

She clambered up the slope into blackness, making for the sound of his barking. Rain beat down on her, branches snapped back against her glasses. She felt pain as something cut across her face, but she kept moving, faster. Then she heard her dog come crashing back through the woods in her direction.

He leaped up against her, his breath warm against her face, and he barked again before spinning around and bounding back to his find.

“Where is it, Eager? Show me, boy!”

June reached him standing over something in tight scrub under the cliff face. She crouched down, and with the back of her hand she edged aside dripping leaves. And there, in the halo of her headlamp, was a handgun in black loam.

Tension rippled through June.

“Good boy, Eager!” She tried to pump enthusiasm into her praise as she pulled out his bite toy and began a rough game of tug, rewarding him for his success before anything else. Eager lived for his tug game and June’s praise. It was what kept him focused for hours at a time on a search.

She let him yank his toy out of her grip. “You win, boy. You got it!”

He clamped his jaws over the bite toy and shook it wildly, mock-killing it, then he gamboled around like a puppy, as goofy in his big Labrador heart as he’d always be. While he played, June turned her attention to the weapon.

In her line of work articles found on a search could become evidence in a crime, so she was careful to preserve any prints as best she could in an environment like this, with no equipment. At the same time she knew that handing this weapon over to Chief Fargo would be as effective as throwing it into a black hole. The FBI, however, might want to see this. Special Agent Hawk Bledsoe had been watching this town for some time, and his noose was slowly closing around Samuel.

June shrugged out of her backpack and located her digital camera. She snapped several pictures of the gun—a Beretta—then recorded the location of her find on her GPS.

Using her bandanna to pick the weapon up, she aimed the muzzle to the ground, released the clip. Three rounds remained inside the eleven-round magazine. She racked back the slide, popping another round out of the gun chamber. Once she was certain it was unloaded, she wrapped it in her bandanna and secured it at the bottom of her backpack.

June carried her own handgun in a holster on her hip tonight.

Anxiety whispered through her as Eager brought his toy back, snuffling like a happy pig. June took it from him, told him to be quiet. She listened intently to the forest, and an eerie sense of a presence nearby rolled over June. With it came a sharp stab of vulnerability.

She and her dog were in the dark, surrounded by miles of Wyoming wilderness, and even if she wanted to call for help, there was no cell reception on this side of the mountain. June’s sole backup was a two-way radio connection to the safe house in the next valley. Even so, the current occupants of the safe house were ill-equipped to help her out of a pickle. And the radios were for serious emergency calls only—there remained the possibility that Samuel’s henchmen could be in the area and pick up a broadcast should they manage to tune in to the same frequency.

Inhaling deeply, June got up from her haunches. She took hold of her dog’s collar, which made him look up into the glow of her headlamp, his eyes reflecting the light like a zombie beast.

“Eager, are you ready?” she whispered. “You want work, boy?”

His muscles quivered as he waited for the release.

She let go of his collar, swinging her arm out in the direction she wanted him to work. “Search!”

And off he went sniffing the air, left to right. She followed, fighting down fatigue and despair as the first gray light of dawn fingered through the leaves and rain.

Eager suddenly got wind of fresh human scent, and his head popped sharply in a ninety-degree angle to the left. His tail wagged loosely as he zeroed in on the scent cone.

“Not too far, Eager!” June yelled, trying to keep up, but suddenly he vanished.

She stopped in her tracks, breathing hard, heart hammering. Then she heard the crash of breaking brush, followed by wild barking. Quickly, she scrambled in the direction of the barking, but as she pushed through low scrub, the ground suddenly gave out under her and she realized too late that she’d overshot the lip of a ravine hidden by a tangle of brambles. Groping wildly for purchase, June tumbled down a steep bank.

Her fall was halted as her shoulder whumped into a log. She gasped in pain and lay still for a moment, mentally regrouping as sweat and rain dribbled into her eyes. Tentatively she edged onto her side and with relief she realized she wasn’t badly hurt, just bruised. She kicked the toes of her boots into the loam on the steep slope to find purchase, and she began to inch down to the ravine floor. Eager came gamboling and crashing back up the slope, oblivious to the precariousness of her situation, and he hit her body with his front paws, as if to say, “Come, come, I found it, Mom, I found it!”

“Good boy—take it easy,” she said a little shakily. “I’m right behind you, buddy.”

It was dark at the base of the bramble-choked gulley as June pushed branches aside and saw what Eager had found.

A man lay on his side. Big. Maybe six foot two. His face was hidden from view and his dark hair glistened with rain. His denim jacket and jeans were soaked through. June noted he wore serious hiking boots, and the bottom of his left pant leg was soaked in what looked like blood.

“Good boy, Eager,” she whispered, tossing his toy to the side for him to play with as she crouched down beside the man.

June carefully rolled him over. His head flopped back, exposing a mean gash across his temple. She felt his carotid. He was alive, but unconscious, his skin cold.

Her peripheral thought was that he was devastatingly good-looking, in a rough, tanned, mountain-man kind of way, and maybe in his early thirties. She hadn’t seen him around Cold Plains before—a guy like this would be hard to miss.

Then she caught sight of the leather holster at his hip—empty. And for a nanosecond June froze. It must have been his Beretta she’d found.

Had he fired at Lacy and her children?

Sweat broke out over her body and her paramedic training warred with a need for safety. Because if this man was carrying, he could very likely be one of Samuel’s henchmen.

Samuel eschewed weapons in the hands of his Devotees, but his personal murderous militia were the exception.

Bitterness filled her mouth as she reached quickly for his leather belt, first removing a GPS handheld device so she could undo his buckle, which was engraved with the name Jesse. It sounded like a brand of Western wear. June quickly undid the buckle and the zipper of his jeans. She edged his pants down over his hip. And there it was—a small D tattoo—the branding mark Samuel Grayson personally gave each one of his true Devotees. And if this Devotee was carrying—he was most certainly a henchman.

Bastard.

But before she could think through her next move, the man’s eyes flared open and he grabbed her wrists. A hatchet of panic struck into her heart. She tried to jerk free, but his grip was like iron.

He blinked into the glow of her headlamp, and June saw his eyes were a deep and unusual shade of indigo-blue. In them she could read confusion.

“What are doing with my pants?” His voice came out hoarse, rough. Eager growled, hackles rising.

“Quiet, Eager,” June whispered, fighting to tamp down the fear swelling inside her. “I’m here to help you,” she said as calmly as she could. “I … needed to see if you had the Devotee tattoo on your hip—to see if you were a local, one of us, from Cold Plains.”

Confusion filtered deeper into his eyes. “Devotee?” he said.

“You have a D tattooed on your hip, the one Samuel Grayson personally gives his true followers,” she said.

He stared at her, features blank. Then he tried to move his head, wincing as he did. The movement caused fresh blood to flow from the gash down the side of his face. His jaw was dark with stubble. She wondered how long he’d been lying here.

“Where am I?”

“Looks like you took a tumble into the ravine,” she said. “You’ve got a pretty nasty cut on your head and your leg is bleeding. Let me go so I can look at it.”

He stared at her, refusing to relinquish his viselike grip on her wrists. His hands were big, calloused. He was impossibly strong, even in his injured state.

June’s mouth went dry. She could easily disappear down here with her dog, and no one would find her until it was too late.

“I haven’t seen you around Cold Plains,” she said as calmly as she could. “My name is June Farrow. I’m a part-time paramedic with the Cold Plains Urgent Care Center, and a SAR volunteer. This is Eager, my K9. He’s pretty friendly, but if he thinks you’re going to hurt me, he’ll attack. I’d hate for that to happen, so why don’t you let go of me and maybe I can help you?”

His gaze shifted to her dog. Slowly he let go of her hands.

June lurched up to her feet, jumped back and pulled out her gun. She aimed it at his head.

Careful, don’t blow your cover, June.

To the best of her knowledge, no one in town knew she worked against Samuel. Like most of the two thousand residents of Cold Plains, June attended his motivational seminars on Being the Best You. She pretended to hang on to his every word, painting herself as a potential Devotee on the cusp of conversion. Samuel had even suggested she come to one of his private counseling sessions, which were where he did most of his mind control. He was a master at preying on any insecurity, exposing a person’s deepest fears and then promising to make them feel safe. His message was that as long as you were a Devotee, you were safe—in turn he wanted obedience, time and money. But if you tried to escape, as Lacy just had, he wanted you dead.

“What’s your name?” she demanded. “What are you doing out here in the woods?”

His hand went to the holster at his hip.

“I have your weapon. It’s missing rounds. Did you shoot at them?”

He frowned.

“Shoot at who?”

“There’s a young mother and her two children lost in these woods. I’m looking for them. Are you chasing them? Did you hurt them?”

He tried to sit up, groaning in pain. And as he moved June caught sight of something lying in the soil behind his shoulder—a little, sparkly red shoe.

Rage arrowed through her body, obliterating any trace of fear.

“Don’t move! Or I will shoot you dead. Where did you find that shoe?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about … I can’t seem to remember … anything.” His voice faded and he touched the wound on his brow, his fingertips coming away bloody. He stared at the blood, a look of disorientation on his rugged features.

“What’s your name?” she repeated.

His gaze lifted slowly and met hers, and in his eyes June saw the beginnings of fear. “I … Jesus—I don’t know my name,” he whispered.

June swallowed.

Was he playing her?

What was she going to do with him now? Leave him out here to die—which he might if he was disoriented and lost more blood. And if hypothermia kicked in, he was finished.

June glanced at his GPS device lying near her feet.

“Where were you going when you fell down here?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“Which way is Cold Plains?” she said.

“Cold Plains?”

“You’ve never heard of Cold Plains?”

“I …” He cursed softly.

June swore to herself. She was not capable of leaving him to die out here. She was programmed to rescue, had been ever since she was a kid. June was the child who saved bugs from puddles. It was why she became a paramedic. It was why she worked for SAR—she was wired to help those in despair.

But she had not been able to help her husband. The sudden memory stab, the sharp reminder of her inadequacies, hurt.

Holding her gun on him with one hand, she reached down and picked up his GPS with the other. She pressed the menu button, saw that he’d been saving his route—and he appeared to have hiked in not from Cold Plains, but from over the mountains.

“You’ve come a long way,” she said. “You’ve saved a route into these mountains from forty miles north—where were you before that?”

He groaned, lay back. “I wish I knew.”

He needed help—he was still losing blood. He might have been lying here for hours. She had no idea how bad his leg wound was. And daylight was beginning to filter down into the ravine. She had maybe an hour to hike all the way down into Cold Plains and to head around to the search base camp on the other side of the mountain, and she’d still found no sign of Lacy and the twins.

Her only solution—if one could even call it that—was to take this stranger back to the safe house and hold him there until she could fetch FBI Agent Hawk Bledsoe. It was risky, but she didn’t have time to think further.

“I’m going to help you, okay?”

He nodded.

“I’m putting this gun away.” Please don’t let this be a mistake … “And if you hurt me, you’re going to die out here, alone, understand?”

His eyes remained locked onto hers. “I don’t hurt people.”

She holstered her Glock. “How would you know?” She shrugged out of her backpack as she spoke. “You don’t even know your name.”

Crouching down next to him, she opened her pack and removed her first-aid kit. His pulse was within range, and he was breathing okay—she’d seen that much.

“Can you move your limbs? Any numbness in your extremities?”

He grunted. “No. Just … weak.”

Blood loss was her priority now.

“I’m going to cut open the bottom of your jeans. I want to take a look at that injury on your leg,” she said as she reached for her scissors and began splitting open the base of his pants. The gash on his head was bad, but the one on his leg could be worse—she needed to see what she was dealing with.

He groaned in pain as she peeled the bloodied and rain-soaked denim off a deep gash on his calf.

He was going to need sutures.

She worked quickly to clean and dry the wound as best she could, shielding him from the rain with her body. There was no arterial damage or obvious fracture—just a big surface gash probably caused by sharp rock during his fall.

Pulling the edges of the cut together, she applied butterfly sutures from her kit. Then she wound a bandage tightly around his calf, urgency powering her movements.

“This should work as a temporary stopgap,” she said as she began to clean the cut on his temple.

His gaze caught hers and she stilled for a second—the intensity in his eyes was disturbing. He smelled faintly of wood smoke.

“You been camping?” she said.

He inhaled sharply as disinfectant touched his cut. “I—I really don’t know.” Then, as he thought deeper: “Do I have a backpack with me?”

“I can’t see one.”

He closed his eyes, clearly straining to remember. Then he swore softly again. “I feel as if I might have had a pack or something. That I was going somewhere … important.”

The cut on his head, if ugly, was also superficial. However, given his apparent memory loss, he could be suffering from some sort of intracranial hemorrhaging due to blunt-force trauma, which could become dangerous.

“I’m going to give you three words,” she said. “Radio, belt, Jesse. Can you memorize them for me? I’m going to ask you to repeat them to me in a little while, okay?”

“Radio, belt, Jesse,” he repeated. “Got it.”

His voice was beautiful, she thought, deep and husky like Matt’s used to be. Matt had been fair, but similar in stature to this man—an ace helicopter pilot she’d met on one of her very first recue missions. She’d loved going camping with Matt—loved the way fire smoke lingered in his checked lumberjack shirt, how the stubble on his cheeks grew rough in the wilderness. Emotion pricked into her eyes. June pushed it away, startled at the freshness of it all. It had been five years. She’d dealt with it.

“You sure you don’t recall firing your weapon?” she said, trying another angle as she taped more butterfly sutures to the cut on his temple. Eager was watching obediently from the side, waiting for new directions.

“No.”

“But you knew you had a gun—you went for it at your hip.”

“I … guess.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t see a young mother and her children in the woods?”

“No!” Frustration bit into his tone “I’m not the hell sure of anything.”

He was scared of what was happening to him, thought June.

“Why do you have that little red shoe?”

He was quiet a moment, then his eyes flickered as if a memory suddenly crossed before them. “I told you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

June wondered if he was lying.

“That shoe—” she jerked her chin to where it lay “—belongs to a three-year-old twin. She and her sister call them their Dorothy shoes. They like to take them everywhere so they can put them on and click their heels like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and be home safe whenever they need to be. Their names are Rebecca and Abigail. Their mother is Lacy Matthews. Lacy runs the coffee shop in town. They’ve been missing in these woods for two nights, and I’m thinking the girls will be wanting their magic shoes to take them home about now.”

His gaze went to the shoe and he stared at it as if he’d never seen it before in his life.

“There, that should tide you over,” she said as she applied a bandage over the sutures.

He pulled up his jeans zipper, buckled his belt and immediately tried to get to his feet, but he swayed and slumped heavily back to the ground.

“Easy, big guy,” she said, helping him back up by the arm. “You lost a fair bit of blood. Move too fast and you’re going down like a rock.”

“I need to go—” He started to stumble through the brush, then swayed and leaned heavily on her. “I’ve got to get to …” His voice faded, and his features twisted in frustration.

“Get to where?” she said.

“I … Jesus, I don’t know. I was going somewhere. Urgent—had to do something … important, for someone. Something … dangerous.”

A chill trickled down her spine.

“Do something for whom? Samuel Grayson?”

“I … The name feels familiar.”

“Yeah,” she said bitterly. “He’d be the one who tattooed your hip. Can you walk, if you lean on me like this?” She hooked his big arm around her neck, taking the brunt of his weight across her shoulders.

June began to help him up the bank. He was solid muscle and their progress was slow. When the bank got too steep, she let him climb in front of her while she supported him from behind. She also wanted to be in a position where she could draw her gun again if she had to.

June’s immediate goal was to get this injured stranger into the safe house, further assess his condition and administer whatever additional medical aid she could. Then she was going to press him hard on the whereabouts of Lacy and the twins—he was her only clue right now.

She’d also ask the others in the house if they’d seen him around Cold Plains. If they did recognize the stranger as one of Samuel’s cult enforcers, she’d keep him under lock and key, fetch Hawk Bledsoe and hand him over to the FBI.

Hawk was one of the few people June could totally trust in this surreal, picture-perfect and sick little town. Four months ago Hawk’s sister-in-law, Mia, had been brought to an EXIT psychologist for “deprogramming,” which is how EXIT had got wind of the cult in Cold Plains.

Mia had told EXIT there were other members who wanted to get out, but they had no resources and were afraid for their lives if they spoke out against Samuel. Mia had passed on the name of Hannah Mendes, a widow in her seventies with a ranch on the outskirts of Cold Plains. Hannah had been trying to set up a safe halfway house with the aid of her sister-in-law from Little Gulch over in the next valley. EXIT had contacted June and asked if she’d run the house and help Hannah with an evacuation program. They presently had five people in the safe house waiting to move into an EXIT program, and June had done the early stages of counseling with them. Lacy and her twins would have brought the number of occupants to eight.

As they edged up over the ravine lip, rain was coming down hard again and the wind soughed, swirling mist like wraiths through the trees. Dawn had done little to dissipate the gloomy eeriness of the forest. June paused and gave the stranger some water. His face had a pallor that worried her, and he was weakening.

“Where are we going?” he said, handing her water bottle back to her.

“Shelter. A safe place.” Hooking his arm over her neck again, supporting his weight with her shoulders, June led him through the trees toward a hidden crevasse that would lead into caves and a tunnel to Hidden Valley on the other side of the mountain. That’s where the safe house was.

As he began to lean more heavily on her, June prayed she wasn’t taking a cult enforcer, her worst kind of enemy, into the very heart of their safe house.