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
