Megan opened her eyes just as a flashlight beam passed over her. Her head began to ache.
The voices again, still searching for her. Who were they? Why were they chasing her?
Her head tilted back and she gazed upside down at the lights zigzagging down the embankment — first one, then two more — like fireflies jinking toward their prey.
She rolled onto her side and a groan came out of her.
She staggered to her knees and stared up the hill. Her senses slowly awakened and she turned back to the sound of rushing water. The wash of her pursuers’ flashlights painted a tall thicket of jungle that stood like a barricade in front of the pulsing watercourse.
Dropping to her stomach, she belly-crawled toward the wet sounds.
More voices behind her — hunters trying to reacquire their target.
The rushing water grew louder.
A massive tree stopped her progress. Megan ran her hand over the gnarled surface of an enormous root cap that stretched upward from the tree’s base like a rocket fin. She edged around the tree and propped her back against an inset between two root fins.
“Behind the tree,” a voice shouted in Spanish.
The wet grass on either side of her glimmered with patches of light. The wall of jungle growth that stood between her and the water was only a few feet away, but it was so thick, it might as well have been made of stone. She was trapped.
Megan looked up. The shadow of a root fin disappeared into black sky above her. She grabbed hold, straddled the root, and began to climb using its bulbous edging as a handhold.
She had climbed about fifteen feet when the root started to disappear into the tree trunk like a pleat. She couldn’t go any farther.
Her arms burned. In another minute she’d fall back to the ground.
She craned her head, glanced down. Something thin and sinewy brushed up against her head but she couldn’t make it out. Everything was a mass of dark shadows.
Her right foot slipped. She clawed at the tree to regain her purchase but the noise brought to it a beam of light from below. To her left, a tangle of hanging vines glistened.
“She’s going up the tree!” a man yelled.
Megan launched herself at the vines with everything she had left in her legs. She clutched at them, slipped, then caught hold with one hand. Her body spun slowly around the ropy plants, and them around her, but the force of her leap sent the twisted bundle into a lazy arc.
She struck a tree branch, grabbed hold, and curled herself up and onto the bulky limb.
Below her a faint click, then metal sliding against metal. She looked down just as an orange flash broke through the darkness. With it came a loud bang.
She had to get to the river. She rolled into a standing position, arms outstretched, and moved out onto the limb. The shouted voices pushed her into a slow trot. With each step the sound of churning water swelled. The branch narrowed and eventually started to bow under her weight.
When the second gunshot sounded, she ducked into a crouch. The limb wobbled. She joggled right, then left, and nearly recovered her balance before falling again into the darkness.
29
Luke spent the second half of the night in his living room, sitting in front of his computer and searching the medical Internet site, Medline. He had cross-referenced a stew of medical terms — lung diseases, sudden death, cystic fibrosis, tropical infections, lymphocytosis, leukemia — hoping to tease out some fragment of information that explained the deaths of two children whose only apparent link were some arcane microscopic findings.
He had come up empty, but at least he’d burned through three hours of night’s darkness without having to relive torments from long ago, or roil in the nascent nightmare of Erickson’s murder.
Even before a cab delivered Luke home from his session at LAPD headquarters yesterday, homicide detectives had interviewed his father and Ben about their dinner meeting at Kolter’s. After debriefing both of them and satisfying himself that their recollections and answers had coincided with his, Luke had called an old acquaintance from the Naval Academy who lived in Seattle — the only criminal defense attorney he knew. The lawyer agreed to help him find a defense attorney in L.A. only after berating him for talking with homicide detectives.
Luke expected to hear back from the guy this morning, but he was more eager to talk to Ben. The pathologist had promised to call no later than 9:00 A.M. with a progress report on his probe into Jane Doe’s death.
The clock in the bottom corner of Luke’s computer screen read 6:12 A.M.
He glanced out the front window and took in the L.A. basin — streetlights were still burning across the darkened city — then hefted himself from the chair and made his way out the front door. He was about to start down the stairway for his newspaper when he spotted it in the corner of the landing. On a good day, the L.A. Times landed on his driveway. It had never made it to his doorstep before. He scanned the street before picking up the paper.
Underneath the paper was a large manila envelope.
He looked back at the street, then scooped up the unmarked package.
Once inside, he tossed the paper onto a table and tore open one end of the envelope. Inside were two letter-size sheets of paper. The first page was printed and read:
From:
ktartaglia@simcast.net
Sent:
Friday, January 30 @ 5:12 PM
To:
LukeMcKenna@uch.university.edu
Subject:
[None]
Luke,
Look at the attached, then call me ASAP.
Please, we need to talk.
Kate
He threw the envelope aside and turned to the second page.
It was a color photograph, and its images tightened his throat like a wire ligature.
Two men and a woman with bronze skin and round faces were sitting on a crude wooden bench in front of a thatched hut. In front of them, on the ground, were a boy and a girl. The children were naked from the waist up — he guessed their ages at about two and four years — and they were leaning heavily against one another, as if barely able to sit upright.
The five faces stared at the camera lens with vacant expressions. They were physically wasted. His first thought might have been malnutrition — caloric deprivation would explain their hollow cheeks, protruding ribs, and wasted limbs — but this wasn’t malnutrition. Of that, he was certain. The tattoos on their skin told him so. The men and boy had a crescent-shaped mark on their chests, just like Josue Chaca’s. The girl had three blue circles on her lower abdomen; they looked identical to those he’d seen in the postmortem pictures of Jane Doe.
The photo’s background showed forested peaks rising into an incongruously beautiful sapphire sky streaked with gauzy clouds. In the distance behind the hut, a slender waterfall streamed down the center of a massive cup-shaped rock formation at the convergence of two mountains.
Luke glanced at the footer on the bottom of the page: MAYAKITAL.JPG. He was looking at a print of a digital photograph.
Amid the avalanche of questions and puzzles that bombarded him at that moment, two inescapable facts emerged. The photograph in his hand confirmed the link between Josue Chaca and Jane Doe, and Kate’s e-mail established her connection to both children.
Luke thought back to the lethal precision of Kate’s bullet wounds. What had been a nagging suspicion suddenly wailed like a klaxon. Someone had killed her before she could unravel the mystery of those children’s deaths for him.
And somewhere out there was a person who had made certain that he knew the truth.