pilot, Kevin Faust, said. “I don’t want to crash.”
“And I’m just saying when you’ve flown as many flights as I have, you know what you can get away with,” Detective Warren Scott shot back.
“As a hobby pilot,” Kevin said. “Not a professional with Search and Rescue.”
Jacob focused on the black-and-white screen ahead of him, searching for the bright glare of a human heat signature.
Wherever the escaped convicts are, Lord, and whoever ultimately finds them, please may those killers be recaptured tonight.
Authorities were scrambling across Ontario to find three convicted killers who’d overpowered their guards and forced the prison van transporting them to crash on the Trans-Canada Highway almost twenty miles north of the maze of trees and towering rocks that made up Algonquin Provincial Park. While local police searched nearby towns and buildings, and provincial police checked the roads, Jacob and Warren had volunteered for the aerial search of the almost three-thousand-square mile provincial park. Home to over two thousand lakes and seven-hundred-and-fifty miles of river, it was a haven for the kind of off-the-grid campers who enjoyed hiking and canoeing for days into the middle of nowhere.
They might as well have been searching for a quarter in a cornfield.
“They’re probably not even out here,” Kevin argued, speaking into his headset microphone to be heard over the sound of the rotors. “If I’d just escaped a concrete box, the last place I’d be hiding out is somewhere with no running water or electricity.”
Maybe not. But moments ago, there’d been a blip, a heat signature, that had lit up the screen for a fleeting moment like a beacon. They just had to find it again.
Jacob focused on the infrared monitor. “Just give me five.”
“You can have a whole twenty,” Kevin said, “if the rain doesn’t get worse before then. But in twenty minutes I’m turning around, one way or another, because otherwise we’re running out of fuel.”
“Heard that.” Jacob’s eyes didn’t flicker from the screen.
Lord, help me see what I need to see.
Nothing but his own pale face reflected back at him, reminding him of an entire summer spent indoors, reading evidence on screens. The light brown scruff that brushed his jaw was more from lack of shaving than intention and tinged with a bit more white than he liked admitting.
“I just don’t want to head back with nothing,” Warren said, then muttered, almost as if to himself, “I gave up a date for this.”
Jacob cut his eyes in the detective’s direction. He’d vaguely known Warren from their large regional high school, before the other man had moved out east for college, so he knew he was also getting close to forty. Warren had only transferred back to Ontario in the spring and already he was dating? How did people even date now? Where did they even meet? Jacob couldn’t remember the last time he himself had so much as gone out with anyone for coffee. At two years away from the big four-oh himself, Jacob had been in the business of stopping killers long enough to know that saving other people’s lives and having a life of your own didn’t mesh. Despite the fact that Jacob’s three younger brothers had recently all decided to prove him wrong.
“I gave up bowling with my league,” Kevin offered, with a grin that implied the twentysomething was trying to lighten the mood in their hovering box. “Canadian-style. Five pin.”
Well, guys, I’ve risked missing something way more important than that.
The words crossed his mind, but he had enough self-control not to say them out loud. He didn’t know either man well enough to confide in them and some things just cut too deep to say without thinking. It had been just over twenty-four years since his little sister, Faith, had been snatched off the side of a rural road at the age of twelve and died fighting off her attacker. Jacob had been fourteen, the eldest child and the one who was supposed to look out for his siblings. And while, over the years, his brothers had each found their own ways to make peace with the memory of their sister, for Jacob, Faith’s face was always there, like a picture he’d taped to the corner of his mind’s eye, reminding him of the one killer he had yet to catch. Then recently a fellow detective under very deep cover, named Liam Bearsmith, had reached out to say he’d found a fresh lead in Faith’s case and was willing to risk both his cover and his life to pass that information onto Jacob. They were supposed to meet at a highway coffee shop at midnight, after Jacob went to his brother Trent’s bachelor party.
And I’m here with you two scanning trees. But he caught his griping before it could grow and instead channeled it into prayer. Lord, please resolve this soon. May the three convicts be caught, help me get back to base in time to meet up with Liam and help me get the information I need to put my sister’s killer away for good.
“It takes days to walk or canoe across the park,” Warren said. “I know they shut the park down, but it’s possible there could still be campers out there who have no idea there are convicts on the loose. Let alone a serial predator like Barry Cutter who murdered five women, including two ex-girlfriends. Or Victor Driver who went around starting bar fights that put people into the hospital before beating his ex’s new husband to death and her brother into a coma. Or Hal Turner.”
Kevin shuttered. Jacob noted Warren didn’t bother to give Hal Turner’s crime résumé. There was no need. The dirty cop turned cop killer was notorious in law enforcement for having killed both his partner and an informant. He’d then tried to burn down a building to destroy the evidence of his thriving drug business and claimed he’d been set up by rogue cops.
Even though Jacob had been a teenager at the time, he’d known even then that God was calling him to a life in law enforcement. Here Turner had achieved everything professionally that Jacob was both hoping and striving for, only to then turn around and betray his brothers and sisters in blue, damage their reputation and give dozens of criminals grounds for appeal.
“I get it, we’re hunting bad guys,” Kevin said. “But that doesn’t change the weather or how much fuel we’ve got.”
A small building passed through the frame. It was a ranger cabin by the looks of it. There were a handful of small and very rustic cabins dotted around the expansive park that had been build back in the 1930s to serve some long-abandoned purpose like storage or lookout. Bare bones, with no electricity or running water, they still wouldn’t make for a half-bad hideout, if a person were able to find one.
A bright patch blinked onto the screen near the building. Jacob sat up straight, as he felt the sudden jolt of shock, surprise and relief combined. “We have a heat signature!”
“Please tell me it’s not another bear—” Warren started.
“No, it’s a person,” Jacob said. He heard Kevin whistle, but his eyes stayed locked on the screen. The figure was definitely human and female by the looks of it, willowy and slender with long hair and just the hint of curves visible through her jeans and survival jacket. “A woman.”
“Out there alone?” Kevin asked. Jacob glanced at him just long enough to see the flicker of worry cross his face. “In the middle of nowhere? Why didn’t we see her earlier?”
Jacob watched as she crept along a tall rock face that ran like a jagged uneven wall between thick trees on one side and a raging river on the other.
“Camera
