Finding His Child
Tracy Montoya

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Contents

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

To Tom and Troy Rysavy, so you’ll quit nagging me about not dedicating—Ahem. To the coolest, sweetest, best brothers ever. Love you guys!

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Sabrina Adelante—Port Renegade National Park’s lead search-and-rescue tracker, Sabrina has long carried Rosie Donovan’s disappearance on her conscience because she had to call off the search when it reached a dead end.

Aaron Donovan—The police detective knows in his gut that his missing daughter is still alive, and he’ll do anything to find her.

Rosie Donovan—The daughter of Aaron Donovan who went missing while hiking in Renegade Ridge State Park six months ago.

Tara Fisher—When the Port Renegade High School student disappears while hiking, Sabrina and Aaron wonder if it might be connected to Rosie.

Jessie DiCosta and Alex Gray—The other two members of Sabrina’s tracking team, Jessie and Alex are also her good friends.

Skylar Jones—The liaison between the Park Rangers and the search-and-rescue trackers, Skylar is responsible for coordinating searches for people missing inside the Park.

Eddie Ventaglia—Aaron’s partner on the police force, Eddie is also Rosie’s godfather—and he holds a grudge against Sabrina for calling off the search for her.

Mary Beth Peterson—A “floating” psychiatrist who serves the Port Renegade Police department, Mary Beth won’t let Aaron disappear into his grief.

The Overman—A predator who’s behind the disappearances of at least three young women from Port Renegade State Park.

Chapter One

Sabrina Adelante’s sturdy Casio Pathfinder watch beeped once on the hour, the shrill noise causing her skin to prickle with restless anxiety.

Time was working against one very young and very lost girl, and even her watch had something to say about that.

Time, and some idiot at the Port Renegade PD. Tara Fisher had been missing for nearly two hours inside the state park. Two hours before the police had thought to call in the park search-and-rescue unit—never mind that the hiking trails on which Tara had disappeared were as familiar as breathing to every member of the SAR team. Two hours during which Tara, walking at an average pace, could cover about five miles.

Given that Tara could have traveled in any direction from point last seen, or PLS, their search area was a circle with a radius of five miles and, as any geometry student could tell you, an overall area of nearly eighty miles.

Damn the Port Renegade Police to hell.

With a snap of her wrist, Sabrina wrenched the steering wheel to the right, executing a too-quick turn into the parking area at the Black Wolf Run trailhead and sending a spray of gravel into the air. She barely registered the sound of tiny stones raining against her shiny black paint job as she stomped on the brake, bringing the car to a skidding halt.

Muttering a few Spanish curses that years ago would have had her mother stuffing a bar of soap in her mouth, Sabrina angrily kicked open the Jeep’s door. As she stepped out, Alex Gray and Jessie DiCosta, the other two members of her tracking team, jogged across the parking lot to greet her. She gave them a quick nod of acknowledgment as she hefted her bulging backpack in front of her to rummage through it.

When the two of them reached the Jeep, Alex reached inside its open back to pull her walking stick out, just as he had a hundred times before. “Here you go, beautiful.” Holding the stick out with one hand, he used the other to readjust the backward Mariners baseball cap that had already flattened his short, dark hair. He wore the thing so often, it was a wonder it hadn’t fused to his head.

She glared at him while leaning her body against the driver’s-side door until it closed with a heavy click. Normally she would have laughed or at least snorted at the “beautiful”—her mom had always said Alex would flirt with a broom in a dress if one presented himself. Today, she merely smacked the sheet of paper she’d dug out of her pack against his chest, leaving him scrambling to grab it when she let go. She tucked her stick under her arm and then handed a second sheet to Jessie, who’d been quietly waiting beside her.

And then her skin started to prickle and crawl with the peculiar kind of restlessness that her family generally referred to as “ants-in-her-pants syndrome.” Whatever they wanted to call it, all she knew was that her body needed to be in motion, because standing still in the parking lot had suddenly become unbearable. Knowing Jess and Alex would understand, Sabrina pulled her pack onto her shoulders and started off toward the trailhead without another word.

A few seconds later, Jessie came up beside her, her long, athletic legs matching Sabrina’s stride for stride and then some. She reached out with one pale, freckle-dotted hand and untwisted one of the shoulder straps of Sabrina’s backpack as they walked. “Jacket?” She motioned with her head back toward the Jeep, then caught her shoulder-length blond hair in her hands, tying it up with a rubber band into a messy knot. “Smells like rain.”

Sabrina slanted a glance at Jess and kept moving, her hiking boots crunching down hard on the gravel as she headed toward where the trailhead sat enshrouded by a thick cluster of hemlock and giant sequoias. “Screw the jacket,” she said, then immediately regretted her harsh tone. While she didn’t mean to direct her anger at Jessie, she knew her tracking partner well enough to know that her colleague’s sweet nature also came with a highly sensitive side. “But thank you,” she added.

Alex whistled as he jogged up to take his place on Sabrina’s other side. “Damn, you’re tense today. Whaddup, boss?”

“We’re looking for Tara Fisher.” All three of them were finally on the move, but that fact did little to settle the butterflies of anxiety knocking against Sabrina’s rib cage. “Senior at Port Renegade High. She’s five foot one, weighs 110 pounds, and is wearing a navy-blue zip-up sweatshirt and jeans. Her point last seen is Hot Spring Seven, which is where she and her friend Paula Rivers were soaking when she decided to try to find a sweet spot on the mountain where her cell phone might work. Paula said she waited about twenty minutes and then tried to look for Tara, but she never found her.”

Hot Spring Seven was one of at least twenty hotspring pools along Black Wolf Run, an intermediate five-mile hiking trail that wound up the first third of Renegade Ridge, through what was arguably one of Washington state’s most beautiful forests. The springs—some hidden, others out in plain view—were what made Black Wolf Run one of the more popular trails in the whole fourteen hundred square miles of Renegade Ridge State Park. Despite the unpredictable terrain in the park, visitors rarely got loston or near Black Wolf, as it was pretty straightforward—go straight up, soak in a spring, come straight down. But that’s not to say Tara couldn’t have wandered off the path or jumped onto another trail in the weblike network that wound through the park.

“Who reported her missing?” Jessie asked as they moved into the cool, damp shade of the forest canopy. Almost as if they’d choreographed it, Jessie and Alex fell back about five feet and fanned out behind her. Sabrina was the point person of their SAR team—the one who would follow the girls’ trail, step-by-step. As flank trackers, Jessie and Alex’s job was to look forward while Sabrina looked at the ground, shouting out warnings when another set of tracks was about to intersect the ones they were following, or when Sabrina might be about to run into a tree or a person.

“Paula bypassed the ranger station and called the police as soon as she came down the mountain,” Sabrina said.

To Sabrina’s left, Alex muttered a soft curse under his breath, letting her know she didn’t have to explain any further. She did anyway. “The police, in turn, bumbled around from two-thirty to four before calling us. Add twenty minutes for us all to get here and for the tracking team leaders to get briefed, and you have…”

She let the sentence trail off. All three of them knew what they had. They had a lost, undoubtedly frightened girl who’d been missing for way too long. The first few hours were critical when it came to finding a lost hiker.

Her walking stick struck packed dirt with a frustrated thump as the gravel portion of the trail ended, and the sounds of Alex’s and Jessie’s followed. It only took them seconds to reach the bend in the trail, where the ferns lining the side of the gravel path marched inward, narrowing the passage on Black Wolf Run. Tall, densely-packed coniferous trees—mostly Douglas firs, Sitka spruce and the western hemlocks that marked the area as temperate rainforest—also closed in around them, dripping with moss and blocking out much of the pale-gray light overhead.

“Two hours.” Jessie sighed. “What is the matter with these people?”

If they were lucky, Tara would be sitting on a rock somewhere, waiting for them. But as they’d all learned from experience, teenagers rarely held still, especially when caught up in a panic.

A flurry of footprints that looked like the right size caught her eye, and Sabrina stopped to examine them. Crouching near the loose dirt dusting the edge of the trail, she scanned the area, piecing together a complete print in her mind from the partials before her.

The muffled sound of thunder rumbled from the east, and she glanced upward at the fast-rolling gray clouds, the fall breeze that drove them sending a chill across her exposed face and hands. This part of the Olympic Mountain Range, in a region where southern maritime and northern outflow winds combined, was known for bad weather and heavy precipitation—both of which would undoubtedly strike before the afternoon was over.

Jessie crouched down beside her, careful to stay back out of her line of sight. “Those papers you gave us, that was Tara’s footprint, right?” She tugged the sheet out of her pants pocket and unfolded it, examining the footprint image on it once more.

“Not exactly,” Sabrina replied. “And these aren’t the ones we’re looking for.” She stood, dusting her hands off on her pants leg.

“Nope,” Alex concurred from her other side as he and Jessie rose as well. “Close, though.”

Leaning over, she traced the footprint on Jessie’s sheet of paper with her finger. “This image is actually of the friend’s boot. Paula and Tara like to shop together, so they bought the same brand of hiking boots on the same day from the same store. Tara’s are size-six Ecco brand hiking boots with a hexagonal lug print. Paula’s about your height, so….”

“So Paula has monster feet, as evidenced by what’s on this paper, and Miss 110-Pounds has the very tiny version,” the six-foot-one Jessie finished with a wry smile. As usual, Sabrina was surprised at Jessie’s self-deprecating comment. The woman was all lean muscle with a dancer’s grace, and that, coupled with her long blond hair and freckled complexion, gave her the wholesome look of an outdoor-gear model.

“You have very nice feet,” Alex said, wagging his dark eyebrows at her. “Nothing monster about them.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Jessie returned in a bored, exaggerated monotone, more than used to Alex’s flirtatious ways.

Sabrina barely registered the conversation. She could still feel Paula’s hand clutching her arm. Something’s wrong. Tara’s scared to death of hiking by herself. She’d never disappear like this.

Not that she hadn’t heard those words a hundred times before, but still…Sabrina couldn’t shake the feeling that despite her SAR team’s excellent record when it came to finding the missing, today wasn’t going to be their lucky day. Call it intuition, call it her reaction to the smell of storms in the air. It felt too much like the day Rosie Donovan went missing, the day the police started their vendetta against everyone on the park’s search-and-rescue team because of her.

Don’t think about Rosie.

The sound of a polite cough accomplished what her mind couldn’t, drawing her attention to Jessie, who shifted her lanky frame from side to side, obviously itching to get going again. She’d been a star basketball player at the University of Washington, so sometimes when she grew impatient she’d get a look about her as though she was about to swat you to the side and go for a layup.

Grabbing her radio off her belt, Sabrina pressed the talk button down with her thumb. “Base, this is Tracker One,” she said into it. “We’ve passed the trailhead and are heading to the PLS. I need someone up here to close off this trail, stat, over.” She lifted her thumb off the button.

“Tracker One, there’s a park ranger on her way. Should be there in two minutes, over.” A spectacular burst of static punctuated the end of Skylar Jones’s statement. Skylar was the site coordinator, the one who briefed tracking teams and dispatched them when someone went missing inside the park. Several months ago, Sabrina had had her job, but she’d quickly demoted herself back to lead tracker shortly thereafter. Being cooped up in the ranger station while everyone else hit the trails was not her idea of a satisfying workday.

Alex moved up next to Sabrina, squinting down the trail. Just after taking a sharp bend to the right, a series of switchbacks climbed up the steep initial portion, and then it was a fairly moderate climb to the hot springs. “You okay, Bree?”

Tara’s scared to death….

Blinking out of her thoughts, she turned to look at Alex. His close-cropped dark hair, mostly hidden today under the Mariners ball cap, held not a trace of gray, and very few lines marred skin that seemed to stay perpetually tan, despite Port Renegade’s infamous lack of sunshine. Other than not sporting the permed mullet that had been all the rage back in the day, Alex looked exactly the same as he had when they’d graduated from high school together. “I’m fine,” Sabrina said, as the ants in her pants kicked in in a big, bad way. She started walking.

“Yes, you are fine.” Alex bared his teeth at her in a vulpine grin.

Sabrina rolled her eyes and kept moving, the two flank trackers following suit.

Alex sighed. “Ah, come on, Bree. You know you want me.”

“Gross. You’re like a brother. Knock it off and get back there.”

“We’ll find her, Bree. At least, if someone can stop sexually harassing his tracking partners for two minutes and concentrate.” Jessie widened her eyes and pursed her lips at Alex, then fell back herself and moved to the outer edge of the trail on Sabrina’s right. “We always find them.”

Normally Alex would have pretended to take offense to the harassment comment, but this time, he was quiet, and Sabrina found his silence unnerving as she turned her eyes back to the ground. “Not always,” he finally murmure.

Usually, you couldn’t beat the positive out of the man with a stick, but maybe he, too, felt something was different about today’s search. Though they didn’t like to talk about the ones they found too late, they were always in their minds on every search. And six months ago, there had been one they hadn’t found at all….

They moved slowly along the edge of the trail, walking perpendicular to the footprints on the ground, searching for the sets that would signify that Paula and Tara’s Ecco hiking boots had put their stamp on the ground. They hadn’t even made it to the switchbacks before Sabrina found the telltale hexagonal lug pattern of Tara’s size-sixes, and Paula’s larger prints were right beside them. Bending down, she once again slipped out of the backpack’s shoulder straps, setting the bag on the ground and fishing out a piece of sturdy wire and some crepe paper.

“Nice work,” Jessie said, once more holding out the copy of the footprint they’d made from Paula’s boot back at the ranger station for comparison.

“Easy enough in the middle of the afternoon,” Sabrina replied, bending a piece of wire and tying a bit of crepe paper to the end to make a miniature stake to mark the tracks. Sticking the tiny flag into the ground next to one of the prints, Sabrina rose, pulling her radio to her mouth as she did so.

“Base, this is Tracker One. We’ve IDed the trail and are continuing to the PLS, over,” she said.

“Roger that, Tracker One. Over,” came the reply.

With the trail found and freshly laid, Sabrina didn’t have too much trouble following it—especially since they knew it was heading toward Hot Spring Seven. It was very rare to find non-locals who’d discovered number seven—well-hidden as it was by lush ferns and the tangled roots of an ancient moss-covered Douglas fir. The girls were local, and they knew these trails well.

But that fact didn’t make the thought of Tara leaving her friend any less strange, given that the girl was allegedly afraid of hiking alone.

Eyes on the ground, Adelante.

The three reached the spring within an hour, jogging on the flat parts of the path, walking as quickly as they could with the aid of their walking sticks on the switchbacks and steeper inclines. Because they knew where Tara had ended up, they’d had the luxury of speeding up the trail instead of searching out every last print, even though the smooth-soled prints had intersected with and rubbed out the girls’ tracks every so often. Just before they reached the spring, Sabrina slowed their pace. Fortunately, it was easy to see that no one else had been to this particular spring recently, as there were quite a few to choose from, so they wouldn’t be dealing with any other tracks on the grass.

“Looks like they stopped right here.” Jessie pointed to the cluster of telltale heel curves, smooth spots, and dislodged pebbles in a patch of dirt around the steaming waters of the spring. “They probably hung their clothes in these branches.” With an impatient flick of her hand, she brushed her ponytail behind her, then patted a low-hanging branch that hit her at waist level. “Took off their shoes here and slipped in.” She pointed to several overlapping prints, made by booted and bare feet.

All business now, Alex took off his cap and ran his hand through his hair, then jammed the hat back on his head, never taking his eyes off the ground. “We know that Tara got out of the spring before Paula did, saying she had to make a call on her cell phone. So where did she exit?”

Sabrina scanned the edges of the clear pool, the soft, mineral-packed mud at its bottom long settled after the girls’ departure. A few tiny bubbles surfaced from the bottom, as Mother Nature piped in steaming water from an underground river.

“There,” she said finally. Though it wasn’t a full print, Sabrina could clearly see a flat spot in the dirt, on the other side of the spring just behind the Douglas fir’s rough trunk. Pretty much the only things in nature that created flat spots like that were humans and hooved animals, and she didn’t think any hooved animals had decided to climb the ridge and go for a dip today.

Grabbing a low-hanging branch, Sabrina negotiated her way around the spring and moved into point once more, Jessie and Alex falling into place behind her. She marked the first print with one of her wire-and-tissue-paper stakes, and then followed Tara’s tracks, which ran along the side of the ridge.

She could see where Tara had stopped in the pine-needle-strewn dirt, obviously shifting her weight around as she’d tried to use her phone, and then, for some reason, the girl had continued forward, starting to snake upwards as well toward a break in the trees up ahead. When Sabrina and her team reached the break, they spilled out into a small, grassy clearing.

“Trail intersecting about fifteen feet ahead, coming from above,” Alex called out. Sabrina took her eyes off the ground.

With their years of experience, tracking in grass was as easy as tracking in dirt. You just had to know what to look for. And the still-flattened line in the grass practically screamed at her that another person had been here, too. But whether that person had come down the mountain at the same time Tara was wandering up remained to be seen.

Turning her attention back to the trail, Sabrina moved forward once more, finding and following every place where Tara’s feet had left a spot of bent grass or broken and bruised plants.

“Trail intersection coming up,” Jessie called.

Sure enough, the line of crushed greenery came into her field of vision with her next step.

Sabrina came to an abrupt halt. Behind her, Jessie blew out a noisy breath. “Bree? Oh, no.”

She felt the two flank trackers move in beside her, as they, too, took in and interpreted the tracks on the ground. A thick silence descended as they all studied the chaotic sign once, twice, three times. Sabrina knew they were all probably hoping that one of the team would speak up, reassuring the others with a benign interpretation of what lay before them. The reassurance never came.

In her peripheral vision, Sabrina saw Jessie bend to pick up something in the grass. Jessie held it out to her, and Sabrina’s fingers closed on a cell phone.

Not again. Please, God.

Behind her, she barely registered when Alex radioed the base and told Skylar to call 911.

“Roger that,” the staticky voice replied. “Cops are on their way.”

And all Sabrina could think was, Too late.

TARA AWOKE to a sharp pain piercing her between the shoulder blades.

Ow. Not fun.

She felt groggy, sluggish. Like she’d just stayed up studying all night for a test. And her arms hurt.

Lolling her head around to loosen the tight muscles in her neck, she tried to relax, to go back to sleep. But her body hurt all over, and her head was pounding. And she was so cold. Had Dad turned the heat down again to save money on the electric bill? Drove her nuts when he did that. She felt like she was ninety years old when she woke up freezing like this, every joint creaking and groaning in protest when she rolled out of bed.

But she wasn’t in bed. She felt like she was standing.

Weird.

Too disturbed by the unfamiliarity of her situation to go back to sleep, Tara struggled to open her eyes. But for some reason, they wouldn’t cooperate. So she flexed her shoulders and brought her arms down to her sides.

Or tried to.

A faint rattle was her only reward. Her hands stayed firmly above her head, pinned by something clinging to her wrists. She pulled her arms downward again, causing the pain in her upper back to radiate throughout her body.

What the heck?

Some kind of crust seemed to have formed on her eyes, like the kind that made your lashes stick together when you’d forgotten to take off your mascara at night. But this felt stickier, like mascara times seven, and it had gunked her eyes completely shut. And her head hurt like nobody’s business.

Once again, she tried to bring her hands down, to wipe away the crud on her face and stretch her aching muscles.

Nothing. Just that sound again.

The fuzziness of sleep left her abruptly as adrenaline shot through her system. That man.

Her arms jerked involuntarily at the memory of the figure coming down the mountain toward her, quick and stealthy, like a stalking panther. Tara’s heart started to pound, in time with the pulsing ache in her head. She jerked her arms again, once more noticing the rattle that accompanied the movement. The move itself had set her off balance, and her body twirled slightly to the left, leaving her torso twisted and balanced on her toes like some freakish ballerina. Cold metal dug into her wrists, and the pain between her shoulder blades grew more excruciating as she fought to right herself, her bare toes barely coming into contact with what felt like a cold, concrete floor. God, what was happening to her?

Her breathing quickened, and she felt the first traces of panic creeping down her spine like a pointy-legged spider. Tears leaked out of her closed eyes, loosening things enough that she was finally able to pull one open. She could feel the gunk on her lashes against her cheek every time she blinked, waiting to adjust her vision to a brightness that never came.

Pitch black.

That’s when the reality of her situation hit her.

She was alone, in a dark, dark room with her arms chained above her head.

And she was naked.

The chains rattled again as her hands involuntarily jerked down to cover her bare body, though of course, that proved impossible. Her skin prickled into painful gooseflesh from the damp, unrelenting cold that surrounded her, and try as she might, she couldn’t make out even the most indistinct shapes around her.

Alone in the dark. With only the sound of her teeth chattering to keep her company.

Mommy?

Tara was seventeen years old, far too old to address her mother that way, but she would have given anything to hear her mother’s voice calling, feel her mom’s soft arms around her, taking off the chains, rubbing the soreness from her shoulders.

A soft whimper escaped her. She thought she heard a low sigh in response. A male sound. A sound of satisfaction.

Mommy? Mommymommymommymommymoy!

She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until she heard him laughing.

Her body jolted again, sending her spinning to face the sound. “Who are you?” she cried. “What the hell are you, some kind of freak?”

He must have moved, because this time, the laughter came from behind her. She turned again to face him, her bare toes scrambling for purchase on the icy floor. She felt something warm running down her cheeks and realized that she was still crying. It was all coming back to her—the hike to the hot springs with Paula, the way the warm water had felt on her aching feet, the shadow on the rocks, the tall, thin stranger standing above her. She’d tried to speak to him, to say hello, but he’d grabbed her, she’d tried to escape, and then everything had gone black.

He was still laughing. A slow fury boiled up inside her, and she clenched her hands—still stretched above her head—until her fingernails dug painfully into her palms.

“What do you want?”

In response, she heard a small click, and then a brilliant, blinding light assaulted her eyes like an explosion. She turned her head abruptly to the side, squeezing her eyelids shut. She didn’t want to see. She wanted to wake up and find out that this was all just a dream, not real, not this. But after a few seconds of silence, she couldn’t stand it anymore and peered into the brightness, blinking rapidly as her eyesight adjusted.

He was standing in front of a spotlight—the large, portable kind the police sometimes used at crime scenes on TV—lighting a cigarette. The acrid smell of tobacco smoke wafted toward her, and she realized he could see her naked. Then, almost simultaneously, Tara realized that his seeing her was the least of her worries.

At that point, a horrible feeling prickled across her skin, causing her teeth to chatter again, making her whole body tremble and strain against the chains. She wasn’t going to see her mother, not ever again. Not Paula, not her school, not her boyfriend Todd, the captain of the soccer team in a football town. Just this horrible place, with this man whose refusal to speak terrified her more than anything.

“What do you want?” she asked, her voice a small, shaking thing, knowing as she asked that he wouldn’t answer.

He took the cigarette from his lips and smiled. They stared at each other for a long time. And then he finally moved, putting one hand on the back of her neck, the other moving to encircle her waist. Overcome by the urge to throw up, Tara still managed not to scream. Not until she felt him crush his cigarette out on the vulnerable skin at the small of her back.

Chapter Two

As they followed the teenager’s path to its conclusion, Sabrina could practically hear the giant clock in her head ticking the precious seconds away. The sad thing was that even though she was rushing her team down the mountain, she knew they’d never make up those lost hours—and it would be Tara who paid for it.

“Hold up a minute.” She stopped and braced herself with a hand against the rough bark of a pine tree. It was always a bad sign when the mixture of dry pine needles and damp dirt and grass on the ground began to blur, the images smashing together as if someone had put pieces of the forest into a kaleidoscope.

“You want me on point, Bree?” Jessie asked, crunching to a halt behind her.

Sabrina shook her head, and God bless America, her vision cleared once more. “No. No, I’m okay. Just lost the tracks for a minute.” She reached up to rub the bridge of her nose, then dropped her hand to scan the ground. It only took a few seconds to find where Tara’s trail converged with someone else’s—a male who’d left large prints, about a size eleven or so, with a thick zigzag pattern on the sole. But then something odd happened—Tara’s prints vanished, and the man’s continued, bearing telltale scuff marks at the toes, which told them he may have been carrying something heavy. Like a teenaged girl.

She didn’t even want to think about why Tara may have needed to be carried.

They pushed on, until finally, the trees started to thin to the point where the green, wet dimness that had enveloped them all the way down the mountain gave way to stretches of gray sky that provided only a little more illumination. Eventually, with an abruptness that Sabrina had always found a little shocking, nature ran into human construction as the team spilled out onto a slim, gravel-packed logging road. The trees, of course, stopped at the road’s edge.

Unfortunately, so did the tracks.

“Take a rest, Bree,” Jessie said as she moved up beside Sabrina. “You’ve been on point for a while now. Alex and I will check the roadsides, and we can switch positions once we find the trail again.”

If we find the trail again. Blowing upward so her sideswept bangs lifted slightly off her forehead, Sabrina just nodded, refusing to give a voice to her doubts. She reached up to rub the back of her neck, feeling the fatigue starting to creep into her muscles now that she wasn’t moving. Alex and Jessie spread out and started cutting for sign—searching for telltale indicators that they’d found the continuation of the trail—along the sides of the road. Sabrina let her hand drop, and she knew, she knew her flank trackers wouldn’t find anything. She’d noticed the tire tracks the minute they’d set foot on the logging road—noticed, but hadn’t wanted to confront the truth they told.

He’d parked his car here. And with the small amount of traffic that came through this way, it would be a miracle if anyone had seen it—or him. Or Tara.

Here’s a riddle for you: How can you make a girl vanish in the forest so the state’s best trackers can’t find her?

Wrap her up and get her out on a vehicle—car, four-wheeler, dirt bike. Wrap her up. Get her out. Hide until we stop looking.

Feeling a headache coming on, Sabrina rolled her head around, trying to drive out some of the tension settling at the base of her neck and smack in the middle of her right temple. The gray sky suddenly grew brighter, so bright that it almost hurt to keep her eyes open. She ducked her head, looking at the small pools of moisture that had formed in dips in the gravel. She caught one at just the right angle, and it glowed, reflecting the sky and sending a sharp bolt of pain through her right temple.

Oh, hell. Hell, hell, hell. All signs pointed to her having about an hour before the migraine really hit, and after that, she’d be more useless than a paper hat in a rainstorm. She shoved her hand into the cargo pocket on the side of her leg, checking for the bottle of ibuprofen she always carried. It didn’t always help, but sometimes, if she swallowed at least four of the little orange pills in time, she could head off the worst of it.

Sometimes.

Please, let them work this time. Tara needed her.

Or maybe Sabrina needed to look for Tara. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they not give up, that they find the man who snatched her off the mountain. That they find her.

Don’t think about what condition she’d be in when they found her. Don’t think.

Pressing the pills to her mouth, Sabrina swallowed them dry, their hard edges scraping the inside of her throat. She reached up to pull at the rubber band that was holding her hair in place. Keeping her heavy, black hair out of her eyes was always a plus on the job, but at that moment, the ponytail just made her scalp ache. As her hair fell around her shoulders, doing nothing to ease the pain in her head, she heard the slow crunch of tires on gravel. Pulling the rubber band around her wrist, she turned to see an unmarked police cruiser crawl slowly through the mist. The brown sedan slowed to a halt several yards away, and that’s when she finally noticed that a thin yet relentless drizzle had coated her arms and face—the trees had probably protected the team from it while they had been under their cover.

Though it was an unmarked vehicle, it had one of those bubble lights resting precariously on the roof, as if the driver had tossed it up there in a hurry. Her head started to throb in time with the flashing red light as it broke up the gray and green of their surroundings. She could just make out the silhouette of the lone driver behind the windshield whenever the wipers pushed the mist out of the way for a moment. The driver turned the engine off, but he didn’t get out.

Whatever.

Wrapping her arms around her body, Sabrina tried to ignore her growing discomfort. She had a job to do, and if some lazy cop was afraid of getting a little wet, so be it. After setting her bag on the damp ground, she opened it and pulled out a small piece of waterproof tarp. Crouching down next to the backpack, she used rocks to make a little tent with the tarp over a portion of the tire track. That would preserve most of the track if it started to rain hard, and the cops could cast it at their leisure—which apparently they had a lot of, since the officer behind her still hadn’t come out of his car. She got a small camera out of the pack and took a few flash pictures, just in case.

At the sound of a car door finally slamming behind her, Sabrina stood, her back still to their visitor, and tossed the camera back in her bag. Her head throbbing in time with her suddenly racing pulse, she shoved her damp hair out of her eyes, then twisted it into a loose, wet braid. God, telling the cop what they’d discovered was not going to be easy. Because someone had gone missing on Renegade Ridge, and for the second time, Sabrina had no clues left on how to find her.

“Ms. Adelante.”

She was just about to tell the speaker that Ms. Adelante was her mother and to call her Sabrina, when something about his low baritone struck her as familiar. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, wishing hard that the cop would be a stranger. Then she turned, knowing before she saw his face exactly who he was.

“Aaron.” His name came out almost on a sigh.

The drizzle was growing heavier, and it coated Aaron Donovan’s tousled, slightly too-long brown hair with shiny droplets. His eyes were set so deep, Jessie had once commented that they always seemed to either be glaring at you or using their X-ray powers to look at your bones. They were fixated on her at the moment, and she had no doubt Aaron was glaring today. The thin jacket he wore over his black dress pants and gray shirt and tie was already soaked through, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold.

“Storm coming,” he said when he reached her, and there were a thousand unspoken words contained within that one phrase. Aaron Donovan stole her breath, and not just because of his physical presence.

The detective’s deep voice sounded calm, reasonable, almost as if he were informing her that her car was parked in a disabled spot or that she’d just jay-walked across Main Street. But beneath that calm was a man ready to snap—and she knew that he’d long ago marked her as the reason. It was in the restlessness that hummed off his body, the mix of anger and steely resolve still in his expression. And to tell the truth, it scared her.

“Yes, Detective, there’s a storm coming,” she said, proud of herself for keeping her voice strong and calm, despite the fact that every muscle in her body was so tense, she thought she might break into a million pieces at the slightest touch. Not that he would ever think of touching her.

They stared at each other, the thousand unsaid words still hanging between them, a thousand accusations in Aaron Donovan’s still, gray eyes. It was Sabrina who turned away first, looking up to where wispy, almost-black clouds were rapidly rolling underneath the overcast sky, pushed along by a wind that was getting stronger by the minute.

“How long are you going to keep up the search?” he asked quietly.

The search had just started. It was an inappropriate question, and he knew it.

Don’t break down. Don’t cry. Don’t show that female weakness—you can’t afford it. Sabrina took a moment just to breathe, to get control of the swirl of emotions threatening to make her lose it completely. “As long as we can,” she finally replied, her eyes still turned up to the sky. She knew he wanted to hear the words “as long as it takes” come out of her mouth, but that was one promise she’d broken before. She’d never make it again, especially not to him. “But I need to tell you—” God, she didn’t want to tell him they’d lost another young girl. Not him. She didn’t think she could stand to see that blame in his eyes again.

I had no choice, you son of a bitch. Get out of my head.

“Your department took two hours to call us out here,” she snapped finally, looking him in the eye once more. “No one knows the parklands like we do. They should have called us in sooner.”

And that’s when he knew. He understood what she was about to tell him, and the knowledge drained the color from his face, his full, chiseled mouth growing even harder. One hand darted under his jacket, no doubt to find the gun tucked into a shoulder holster. But there was no one to threaten. No one to shoot. Tara had vanished, and so had the man who’d met her on the ridge, leaving a chilling story told in footprints behind them.

“Not again,” he finally managed, sounding as if he would choke on the words.

Without thinking, she reached for him, just to put a hand on his arm, to offer some comfort. With a barely audible hiss, he moved out of her reach, so her fingers only grazed his sleeve. And then they could only stare at each other.

Sabrina broke the silence when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Cast this tire track. I think it’s important.” His face darkened for a moment, and then he gave her a curt nod, reaching for his own radio. It only took him a minute to mobilize the department crime scene techs, asking them to come out to the ridge with some dental stone as soon as possible. The drizzle wouldn’t harm the track for a while, but full-fledged rain would.

“Bree?” Behind her, she heard Alex crunching down on the gravel road.

“Wha—?” God, she hoped she’d been wrong about the car. She hoped they had discovered something she’d missed.

“You’ll want to see what we found,” Alex continued, addressing Aaron this time. “I can show you.”

Ah, so Alex was rescuing her from the big, bad detective. And heaven help her, she wanted to be rescued.

Stealing a glance at Aaron, who’d since gotten off his radio, she saw the corner of his hard mouth twitch upward, giving a slightly mocking edge to his expression. Guess he knew just how much she wanted to run away from him. But it was important that one of them take the police up to the clearing—it was a crime scene, after all, and she well knew that looking for miniscule evidence was hardly SAR’s area of expertise.

“No, Alex, it’s okay. I’ll take him up.” She immediately wanted to kick herself for the perverse stubbornness that made her refuse Alex’s tacit offer just because of a slight challenge in the cop’s eyes that she may or may not have imagined. Trudge up the mountain alone with Aaron Donovan? Now, that was going to be a real kick in the head. But it was too late for her to back down now, and they all knew it. “See what Jessie wants and then call in the team that was dispatched along these logging roads. If the trail does pick up again, we’ll need as many bodies as we can to help us find it.”

The tire tracks flashed once more in her mind. They weren’t going to find a thing.

As Alex started to turn away, she spoke again. “Alex, make sure you protect this tire print.”

Widening his eyes, Alex scrutinized the track, then looked at her questioningly.

“Until the crime scene people get here to cast it. It might be important.” With a nod, he moved toward Jessie, leaving Sabrina alone with Aaron.

She looked him straight in the eye, refusing to flinch even though it took all she had. “Come on.” With that, Sabrina took off, darting into the trees and moving swiftly and silently up the ridge. Now that she knew where the footprints lay, she had no trouble following them back up.

Given that her job entailed a lot of hiking, not to mention rock climbing and rappelling, Sabrina was in excellent shape, despite the fact that no amount of extra sit-ups would give her the six-pack abs Jessie and Alex had. So hiking up this rather benign part of the mountain without a trail wasn’t that much of a challenge, even though it would have had most people huffing and puffing. But damn if Aaron wasn’t keeping up. Actually, he wasn’t just keeping up, he was snapping at her heels like a pack of wild dogs, pushing her farther and faster.

In less than half an hour, they reached the spot where Sabrina had seen the last of Tara’s footprints, not a word having passed between them. Careful not to disturb the trail, she motioned to the detective to follow directly behind her, leading them both to where Tara’s trail first led away from the hot spring.

“Paula said she stayed behind soaking in the pool while Tara went out to make a call on her cell phone,” Sabrina explained, even though she knew Aaron had probably learned that bit of information two hours before she had. Not that she was bitter. “You can see the lug print of her hiking boots here.” She pointed to the trail, and Aaron nodded, scanning the ground. She walked him to the clearing where Jessie and Alex had first spotted the man’s trail intersecting with Tara’s.

“So, there’s the mystery trail, made by someone we believe was on the mountain at the same time as the girls,” she continued, gesturing to the line of crushed grass that still remained, although it had grown fainter as the grass healed itself and began to stand up again. “It looks like he met up with Tara.”

Okay, now his silence was really getting to her. She stopped walking and waited for him to respond, noticing that he was staring at the ground as if he could interpret the signs himself. But she knew that wasn’t the case.

“These tracks were made at the same time as Tara’s?” he asked. He wasn’t questioning her, just asking for an explanation. For which she should probably be grateful, given their past.

She took a couple of steps to where the ground erupted in a sudden confusion of broken weeds and plants and disturbed dirt in a language that was completely foreign to him, but plain as day to her. “Look over here.” She crouched down by the prints and moved her hand above the ground to show him what she was talking about. “She stopped to talk to him. You can tell by the number of prints overlapping and shuffling here. People don’t hold still when they talk to each other—they’re always moving, shifting their weight.”

“You know the prints are male by the size?” he asked quietly, choosing to tower above her rather than join her on the ground. The jerk.

“That, and the fact that they point outward—men tend to do that, while most women turn their toes slightly inward.” It was a delaying tactic, that explanation. She didn’t want to show him what they’d seen next.

“I know there’s something you don’t want to tell me, but we’ll be up here all night unless you step it up.”

All night, alone with Aaron Donovan. Once upon a time, that might have been an appealing proposition. Now, it just made her head hurt. She reached up to rub the bridge of her nose, a soft “ahh” of pain escaping her lips before she could stop it.

He was by her side in a heartbeat, crouched before her so his too-handsome face was directly in hers. “Are you all right?” His hand curved around her bicep, as if to offer comfort, though it hovered inches above her skin.

She reared back, shocked at his question, at the notion that he might care even slightly about her answer.

“Sabrina?”

Pushing off the ground with her hands, she sprang to her feet, smacking her palms together to clean off the pine needles that had clung to her skin. “I wasn’t the one who waited for two hours before calling us in, Detective,” she replied, practically spitting out the title as she dusted her hands on the front of her pants. He rose slowly and lifted an eyebrow in response, the mocking look back on his face.

Shaken and not really knowing why, Sabrina spun away from him. She had no time for this—on that point, Donovan was right. She needed to step it up for Tara. With an impatient motion of her hand, she indicated for Aaron to follow her, not looking at him as she led the way to the next patch of dirt that had a couple of telltale hexagons embedded in it. Just ahead, she knew, were a few more complete versions of Tara’s prints. “Right here, Tara’s stride interval increases,” she said, her tone all business now. “That’s the distance between her footprints. Basically, that means she started to run.”

Aaron swore under his breath, a ridge forming between his dark eyebrows. Overhead, the sky darkened perceptibly, and the rumble of thunder from the east seemed to be coming closer.

Sabrina gestured with her chin to a spot up ahead, the quick movement reverberating throughout her skull. “He followed her. I think she fell.”

It had taken her team several painstaking minutes to piece together the whole grim story, but piece it together they had, and as she led him back down to where they’d left Jessie and Alex, Sabrina relayed it to the detective. Someone had been perched on a rock above Hot Spring Seven, presumably watching the girls as they’d soaked in the pool. As soon as Tara had gotten out to make her phone call, he’d started down the mountain, intercepting her as she’d made it to the clearing. There was a struggle, and Tara broke free and started to run, only to be tackled to the ground a few seconds later. Somehow, her attacker had managed to subdue her, and the heavy, scuffing partial prints they’d found as they made their way down the mountain indicated that he’d carried her down.

To the old logging road where his car had sat, waiting for them.

He didn’t say anything once she’d finished. He pulled out his radio and directed more police and the department crime scene techs up the mountain from where they stood, telling them in no uncertain terms that they needed to avoid stepping near the trail of crepe-paper stakes she’d left behind. Once the first people started arriving, he’d offered to escort her back to the logging road in a tone that she knew was more demand than request.

Back at the road, she turned to him, meeting his gaze directly—and immediately wishing she hadn’t. There was something so sad in his expression when you caught him off guard, just before he had a chance to close off again, a vulnerability that undid her more than his barely concealed hostility had.

“We have to find her,” Aaron said simply, and because she knew what frightened him, his words made her ache for him.

Without thinking, she reached for him, her hand closing around his bare wrist. “Aaron,” she said, because that’s all she could say.

Gently, firmly, he pulled his arm away, the cool, collected cop once more. “I’ll make sure someone casts that tire track,” he said. “Thanks for your help, Ms. Adelante.” Aaron turned and disappeared through the mist, heading toward his car.

As she watched him leave, the migraine hit her full force, slamming into her skull like a freight train. Her vision blurred, and she stumbled, feeling rather pathetic as she caught herself by wrapping her arms around the rough bark of a sequoia. The clouds suddenly opened, and it started raining in sheets. The cold enveloped her, seeping into her very bones and causing her teeth to chatter.

“I’m all right,” she murmured as she heard Jessie and Alex approach, willing herself to push away from the tree, to stand without support and keep looking. Her will wasn’t enough.

She felt Jessie wrap something warm around her—probably her own all-weather jacket—and felt the woman’s arms come around her. Sabrina couldn’t see a damn thing. “Shh,” Jessie said.

She heard them radio for help, and she closed her eyes, unable to deal with the piercing brightness of the sky.

“What did that man do to her?” Jessie asked Alex as she pulled the jacket’s large hood over Sabrina’s dripping hair.

“She gets migraines sometimes,” Alex said. “Bad ones.”

“Yeah, hello,” Jessie retorted. “Alex, I saw her face when that detective was talking to her. What’s his deal?”

Don’t tell her. Don’t say it. Sabrina didn’t think she could stand to hear the words. The pain in her head sharpened, and she let herself lean against Jessie’s sturdy frame.

Alex paused, probably weighing his words. “That was Detective Aaron Donovan.”

Sabrina heard Jessie gasp.

“Yeah,” Alex continued. “Rosie? That girl who went missing six months ago, around when you joined the staff? She was his daughter.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE had introduced the concept of the Übermensch, which many lesser minds had erroneously translated to mean superman.” However, some scholars, himself included, knew that the German philosopher had meant overman. In other words, every human aspired—or should aspire—to become over-and-above Man, someone who transcends the crude limitations of humanity.

“I teach you the Overman,” he pronounced to the shivering mortals in his audience, knowing that they, too, should aspire to become like him, an Übermensch. But they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. It took a rare, special individual to overcome limitations and evolve into a superior being. But still, he couldn’t give up. Still he had to try. “Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”

They scream, and they cry, and they refuse to see what lies before them.

“What have you done to overcome him?” he shouted back.

But they kept praying. And God was dead.

And in a universe where God was dead, he’d explained patiently, repeatedly, Man had to reconstruct himself, overcome the idea of himself as a fallen creature, slave to a moral code from on high. He has a responsibility to become something higher on the evolutionary scale. Ape created Man, and Man created Overman. And to get there, there could be no moral code. The Overman created his own moral code.

God was dead.

He took the whip from where it lay on a shelf, wrapped it around the waist of a member of his audience. He pulled it to him, and it whimpered, a small, pathetic thing. He laughed, knowing that he could show it and the rest of his audience what it meant to be an Overman. His mouth pressed against its open, wailing one, and he gave it the breath, the very essence of himself, feeling the first stirrings of creation in his very core.

He pulled away. First, he had to continue the lesson. “Man is not becoming better simply by virtue of the passage of time,” he told them. “We have to do something about it. Man can make himself better if he so chooses.”

He traced the whip between a pair of exquisite breasts, quivering in anticipation. Beauty was the first requirement. Beauty begat physical strength begat super-intelligence begat…

The Overman. A race of Overmen.

Only he could have spirited his audience away. Only he had the intelligence, the ability to elude the mere mortals who lived below his mountain, trapped in mediocrity by their laws and their self-imposed limits. They lived a certain way, thought a certain way, ate their dinners a certain way, never knowing what they had the potential to be, if only they would open their eyes. He would teach them, one by one. Like the Overmen before him—Magellan, Machiavelli, Napoleon, Caesar…even Hitler, in his twisted way—he would remake the world anew, into a brilliant, shining thing.

He walked behind his audience, the tremors of a new evolution taking control of him. It was his responsibility. He was the Overman. He’d won his own moral code. He would cleanse them and make them whole.

“We should be dissatisfied with ourselves,” he said, his entire body shaking with the effort. “Without this dissatisfaction, there’s no self-overcoming. No higher evolution of Man.”

He brought the whip down, again and again, cleansing the blood of the new generation.

They scream, and they cry. Because God is dead.

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