“If they’re driving,” he said, “we’ll beat them to Wyoming.”
“They’ll be driving. They pay cash and they drive. They stay away from airports. So, yes, we’ll be ahead of them.”
“I wonder where they are now,” Mark said, picturing the red truck headed northwest on the interstate, slicing through an oblivious nation, at least one murdered woman left in their wake already.
“I’ve been wondering that every day for months,” Lynn said. “This is the first time I might have an idea.”
24
On his way home, Jay passed a police car and had the overwhelming urge to pull a U-turn and chase after him, screaming for help.
But he couldn’t. He understood the way it had to work now; he understood the power dynamics, and it required patience.
At home, he paced the lower level of the house, the tracking chip clutched in his hand, and waited for the hours of the night that belonged to emergency workers and insomniacs. Occasionally he stopped and stretched out on the couch, setting alarms each time to prevent sleep, but sleep never came.
Mostly, he thought of the things he had never said to Sabrina.
Things like the truth about why they were here. Why he’d led them to Red Lodge, to this house from which she’d been taken. Now that he was alone in the dark, still-foreign house, the things he had told her appalled him. They’d all sounded good at the time, sure. The move would keep him on the ground. That part was always honest. What he’d allowed her to believe in the silence that followed it, though, was unforgivable. In the silence, he’d allowed her to believe that the decision was for her. Never had he confessed to freezing on a climb. Never had he described her brother’s face, the smoke that left his mouth like a final attempt at words, some last message that dissolved into the dark sky, unheard.
You’re next, the smoke seemed to promise Jay then.
But he hadn’t been next. Sabrina was next. And he’d led her here. Would Eli Pate have found him in Billings? Possibly. It didn’t feel that way, though. It felt like the result of Jay’s own deceit, his own secrets. He’d hidden the truth, had fled from the truth, and in so doing he’d guided them here.
What if you’d told her? Where would you go then? What if you’d just told the truth? Maybe you’d never have ended up in this place. You’d take another job. Work for her, work side by side with her, never let her out of your sight. All of this was possible if you’d just told the truth.
He rose and walked again. Paced in anguish. Every step recorded.
At four in the morning, with a few hours left before dawn and his movement patterns well established, he crawled on the floor, following the wall into the kitchen, then fumbled with the drawers until he found the duct tape. Then he crawled back through the dark living room to the entryway closet, where an all-time failure of a Christmas gift waited, a reason you had to stay away from late-night television advertising. The robotic vacuum cleaner, two feet in diameter and with the look of a large hockey puck, was useless when it came to cleaning floors, and Sabrina hated the sound of it as well as its inefficiency. Jay’s intrigue in the gadget had earned it a place in the closet instead of the garbage can, but he had to admit it wasn’t effective. All it did, Sabrina had pointed out, was circle the house in confused patterns, bouncing off the walls like a drunk man.
Or like an anxious man pacing away a sleepless night.
Jay taped the tracking chip to the top of the vacuum, turned it on, and released it. The device spun away. It bounced from wall to wall, and, just like Jay had, remained on the ground floor.
He had an hour, at least. He listened for a few minutes to make sure the device was running problem-free, and then he crawled to the front door and slipped out into the cold night.
25
Mark worked on Eli Pate late into the night, gathering intelligence on him before they flew out of Miami to try to find him. Lynn Deschaine already had plenty of knowledge about Pate, but that didn’t keep Mark from digging and, maybe, truth be told, digging a little competitively. She had resources that he didn’t, but he didn’t want to have to rely on those resources to do his job. There was another cloud on the horizon with Lynn, and that was the collision of goals. She thought that they were both looking for Janell Cole and company, and that much was accurate. What Mark intended to do once he found them-found Garland, at least-was another matter.
He suppressed that and focused on Eli Pate. When they arrived in Billings, Mark wanted to know everything about him that he could.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much out there-except for the surprising discovery that he seemed to be operating under his own name. What that suggested-the fact that he kept his own name, and people like Doug Oriel renamed themselves to match it-was both interesting and alarming.
Eli Pate was forty-one, his Social Security number had been issued in Kentucky, and his address history painted the portrait of a nomad, with short stints in seventeen states. There was no record of Eli having a phone in the past three years. He also had no active driver’s license. The last one Mark could find was more than a decade old, issued by the state of Idaho. In the photo, he looked whip-thin and mean, with brown hair that hung down around his shoulders and hostile eyes like flint chips. The last address on record in any of Mark’s databases was the same one that Lynn had, a PO box in Lovell.
He didn’t like seeing the name of the town. He knew it was the memories he connected to it that were to blame for that, but still, it troubled him. Lynn’s recognition of the phrase rise the dark troubled him too. When Ridley Barnes had vanished in Indiana, wading off into the unknown depths of an elaborate cave system, he’d left Mark with a strange set of promises. One of them had lingered in Mark’s mind ever since, Ridley’s last words: She doesn’t want you yet.
He’d meant the cave. Everyone knew that in Ridley’s disturbed mind, the place had a personality, and Mark understood that. Still, he often found himself thinking about Lauren, some small, absurd part of him always wondering, What do you mean, she doesn’t want me yet, Ridley? What’s left for me to do?
That question had made sense, though. Mark was already focused on Lauren’s unfinished business-Garland Webb. It was natural that he’d bridge Ridley’s final, raving words to that mission. He could bridge anything to that mission. The other words had been easier to discard, because they’d had no such connection. In fact, Mark hadn’t thought of them much at all until today.
When things go dark, Ridley had told Mark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.
Madness, of course. Ridley had left his rational mind somewhere in that cave years earlier, and by the time he’d said that to Mark, he was also wounded and hypothermic. He’d had no idea what he was saying.
Still, his words rose in Mark’s mind tonight.
It was deep into the night, and the flight to Billings, with a layover in Minneapolis, left at seven in the morning, but still Mark kept searching. Even after he’d taken a second Ambien and knew that he didn’t have the focus for the work, he kept at it. At first he drifted into searches involving Eli’s name and terms related to electricity and energy. Nothing. Then he tried Janell Cole and Doug Oriel, and eventually, half asleep, without any real consideration, he ran a search for recent news using the words Wyoming and power grid.
Most of the first-page results were related to efforts to bring enough power to the oil fields to keep up with the drilling needs, but there was one floater from the Billings Gazette with a two-day-old date.