Elaina checked her watch. “Just after five,” she said.
“I figure we got three hours.” He scanned the horizon. “Keep your gun handy.”
“You think he’s out here?” Elaina asked. She’d thought of that, too. Maybe this was some sort of ambush.
“I’m more worried about gators,” he said.
“Gators?”
“And keep an eye out for snakes.”
He set off to the south. Elaina adjusted her weapon and fell into step behind him.
Laguna Madre National Wildlife Refuge
N 26° 13.681 W 097° 20.005
6:25 P.M. CST
She mostly watched her feet as she tromped over the uneven terrain. The ground was sandy, with sharp blades of grass jutting through. Sticker burrs were everywhere, and she kept stopping to pluck them from between her toes.
Troy had set a brisk pace. She discovered the footing was easiest if she stepped into the big impressions made by his boots. She had to stretch her legs to do it, though, and after the first half hour, her breath was coming in shallow pants.
In. Out. Slow. Down. She forced her lungs into a rhythm that matched his footsteps.
Sweat and sunscreen seeped into her eyes. She ignored the weeds clawing at her calves. She ignored the mosquitoes buzzing around her ears and nose. She kept her gaze on the ground, and whenever possible, stole a glimpse of her surroundings.
“You see anything?” she asked.
“Nope.”
She didn’t, either. But, then, she hadn’t had as much opportunity to look.
Perspiration streamed down her back and legs. Her shirt glued itself to her body. The grass became taller. The sand became damper. Eventually, it wasn’t sand at all, but mud, thick and warm, that oozed between her toes. With every step, she fought the suction that tried to hold on to her shoes. The plastic straps chafed against her skin.
She glanced backward. The bushes where they’d parked were a dark green dot now. They were in a sea of grass and muck.
“Need a drink?” Troy glanced over his shoulder at her.
“I’m good.”
But she wasn’t good. She was winded. Breathless. As if the air was too heavy to enter her lungs. It didn’t make sense, because ever since her college days at Georgetown, she’d been an avid runner. She’d handled the jogging trail through Rock Creek Park with all its rises and dips—no problem. And since moving to Texas, she’d run nearly every day in an ongoing effort to keep up with all the jocks surrounding her. She should be able to handle a zero-grade hike without breaking a sweat.
In. Out. In. Out.
Of course, she always ran in the mornings, before seven. She wasn’t used to this oppressive heat, to this hot, pungent air that was almost too thick to breathe.
She blinked the sweat from her eyes and glanced around. She was supposed to be investigating here. But she saw nothing out of place—nothing besides herself and Troy and their two long shadows tromping across the marsh.
Another gust of hot air. Another cloud of mosquitoes. She tried not to think about it. She concentrated instead on Troy’s footprints. She listened to his breathing. It was steady. Even. If he could do this, so could she.
He checked his phone again. “Not much farther,” he said. “Keep your eyes peeled.”
Grass. Mud. Sun. The occasional long-legged heron picking its way through the marsh. Troy saw no sign of a human, either living or dead. Only endless acres of cordgrass and brackish water.
He glanced over his shoulder. Elaina’s cheeks were bright pink. Her shirt was soaked through. Her calves were covered with scratches and slime.
“Water break.” He slung the pack off his back and unzipped it.
“I’m fine. Let’s go. We’re running out of daylight.”
“Drink, Elaina.” He shoved a water bottle at her and dared her to argue. She didn’t. Instead, she tipped her head back and chugged, and he got his first good look at all the welts on her neck. He fished the sunscreen from the bag and handed it to her.
“I don’t think it’s working,” she said.
“
It’s better than nothing. And you’re getting eaten alive. This place is a breeding ground.”
She passed him the water, and he guzzled the rest, then stuffed the empty bottle back in his pack. Elaina slathered lotion on her neck and face. Troy scanned the horizon. They’d reached their destination an hour ago and had been searching the area in a spiral pattern ever since.
They’d found zilch.
“Maybe you were right,” she said, and wiped her brow with her cuff. She’d rolled her sleeves down after the first hour, probably to guard against mosquitoes. “He’s probably just some loser trying to jerk my chain. I’m sorry I dragged you out here.”
He flashed a look at her. “I’m not.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Look around you. Tell me what you see.”
She did a slow three-sixty. They stood ankle-deep in water, surrounded by marsh. Crabs scuttled around their feet. The sky was orange on the horizon, darkening to bloodred, then purple. A V-formation of pelicans soared, toward the setting sun.
Troy watched her eyes and waited for the spark of recognition.
“It’s the same as the others,” she said. “It’s the type of place he’d pick—a scenic nature area that’s a pain in the butt to get to.”
“Yep.”
“And it’s federal land, which means if he
did
put her here, the FBI takes over the case. More gamesmanship.”
Troy nodded. “That’s what I think, too. This isn’t a prank. We’re just too late. Valerie’s been missing almost
a week. Whatever was left of her has been scavenged and scattered by now.”
He consulted his phone again. It was running low on juice, so he powered it off and shoved it in his pocket. “We’d better head back,” he said. “We’ve been out here too long already. We’ll be hiking in by penlight if we don’t get a move on.”
Elaina glanced around, and he could tell she wasn’t ready to give up. “Fifteen more minutes.”
Somehow he’d known she would say that.
She trekked west, toward the sunset, her gaze intent on the ground in front of her. Troy followed, ignoring the blisters covering his feet. Water-filled cowboy boots weren’t his top pick for hiking.
She stopped short, and he bumped into her.
“Look there,” she said.
“Where?”
She pointed up ahead, to something shiny that caught the light. They both moved toward it at the same instant. It was a plastic box. Olive green. Not much bigger than a shoebox. The sun glinted off the hooks of a bungee chord that someone had wrapped around it, probably to hold it shut.
“What do you think’s inside?” Elaina asked, and he heard the dread in her voice.
“Only one way to find out.” He crouched down beside it.
“But crime-scene protocol—”
“This isn’t a crime scene,” he pointed out. Not yet, anyway. But he didn’t want to waste time on formalities. The box could be full of fishing tackle, for all they knew. He unhooked the bungee chord and pulled on the lid.
“It’s stuck,” he said.
“Want me to try?”
He glowered up at her. Then he shifted to the other side and tried a different angle. Elaina knelt down next to him. She smelled like sweat and sun block, and her hair blew against his forearm as he gripped the plastic top.
A soft sucking noise. The gentle
pop
of a seal breaking. He pulled the lid back—
“Toys?”
Elaina gazed down into the box.
Troy lifted up a plastic bag that looked like it contained something from a kid’s Happy Meal. A plastic puppy dog. “Looks like it.”
“Is that cereal?” She pulled out a mini-sized box of cereal, the kind sold at convenience stores. “Special K,” she said, and picked up something else. “And beef jerky. What’s all this stuff doing in the middle of a swamp?”
Troy lifted a plastic Baggie containing half a dozen white pills. “Now, this looks a little more interesting.” He read the typewritten label.
“What is it?”
“Esteroides,”
he said. “Steroids.”
“Those are illegal.”
“Here, yeah. But not at your friendly neighborhood pharmacy just south of the border. Drugstores in Matamoros do a booming business in controlled substances.” He picked up another Baggie, this one containing a hand-rolled cigarette.
“Is that a joint?”
“Yep.” He opened the bag and sniffed. “Smells good, too.”
Elaina rolled her eyes. “Terrific. We’ve stumbled into
some kid’s secret stash. Another great lead.” She stalked away from the box and scanned the horizon. She turned around and plunked her hands on her hips. “This sucks. It’s almost dark and we haven’t found—”
“Stop.”
Troy’s gaze homed in on the long black ribbon gliding between her ankles. “Don’t move.”
“What?”
“Water moccasin.”
Her gaze dropped. She yelped. But to her credit, she didn’t move a muscle. Troy crouched there, motionless, as the snake eased close to him with its head out of the water, then veered away.
“Omigod. Omigod. Omigod. I hate snakes.”
“Good thing he’s leaving.”
“Is it poisonous?”
“Yep,” he said. “Cottonmouth.”
She clasped her hand to her stomach and stepped backward. “Omigod, I nearly—
Ah!
”
She fell backward and landed on her butt with a splash. She glanced around, looking dazed. She lifted her hands up, and they were coated in muck.
Troy dropped the lid back on the plastic box and trudged over to help her.
“
Damn
it!” She got a panicked look on her face and started flailing around.
“You okay?”
“No!” she wailed. “My phone!”
She fished her BlackBerry out of the water. It was covered in sludge. She fumbled with it and jabbed at the buttons.
“It’s dead!”
“
So get a new one.” Troy stepped closer to her and spied something tangled around her shoe.
“This had evidence on it! I needed that telephone number to trace in case that phone call wasn’t a hoax.”
“It wasn’t,” Troy said grimly.
She glanced up from the muddy phone. “How do you know?”
“Because.” He crouched down and untangled the yellow twine from her flip-flop. “You just tripped over the killer’s calling card.”
Elaina picked her way through the mud almost totally by feel. Troy’s penlight cast a thin beam on the ground before him. She focused on the light and the tiny strip of grass and water it illuminated. She would have given anything for one of those huge Maglites her father had always admonished her to keep in her car, but that, like dry feet and a gallon of Gatorade, was a fantasy.
The air smelled like rotting vegetation. It hummed with mosquitoes and who knew what other insects. The sun was long gone, and they hadn’t found Valerie or any sign of her since the yellow twine. With nothing but a penlight, they had little hope of finding anything unless they literally tripped over it.
“You took some forensic science classes up there at Quantico, right?”
She followed close behind him. “Yeah.”
“Any idea how long it takes for a body to decompose in this kind of marsh?”
She’d been working it out in her head. “Well, most of the cases I studied were from the Body Farm in Tennessee. But I’ve been reading up on the Delphi Center.
They’ve got a farm up there, too, and their findings are more applicable to this sort of climate. According to—
Ouch!
” She shook her foot, and Troy turned the light on it. He snatched a baby crab off her toe and tossed it away.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Here, hold on to me.” He took her hand and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans, just inches away from the pistol he’d put there. They continued their trek.
“You were saying? The Delphi Center?”
“They did an interesting comparative study,” she said.
“Do tell.”
“Are you making fun of me again?”
“No.” He stopped briefly and glanced around. The moon hadn’t risen yet, and they were using the distant arc of lights on the Lito Island Causeway to navigate by.
“Well, in Tennessee, it can take days or even weeks for scavengers to skeletonize a sixty-pound hog. A few hours north of here, an animal that size can be picked clean in just twenty-four hours by the native bird species. Add in the effects of water and increased humidity, and I’d say we could be looking for mostly bones at this point.”
“A canine unit would help.”
“Yes.” Elaina let the word hang there without adding the rest.
“That’s assuming you can get anyone to understand the significance of the yellow twine,” Troy added.
“Yes.”
Elaina curled her fingers inside his jeans. His body felt warm against her hand, and his T-shirt was saturated with sweat. She knew his boots couldn’t be comfortable,
and despite his silence on the subject, she was pretty sure he’d suffered about as many bug bites as she had.
“Water break?” he asked.
“Let’s just get there. You want to try that phone again?”
“No use. Once it’s dead, it’s dead. I have a charger in my car, though. We can juice it up and call your boss again.”
Elaina had tried him earlier and only gotten voice mail. She glanced around at the inky blackness. Fireflies twinkled here and there, providing an interesting show, but not much in the way of guidance.
“This is so weird,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Being out here. No lights. No phones. Just the marsh and the sky.”
“That’s the way God made it.”
She hiked in silence for a while, digesting that. Did he believe in God? After studying and writing about some of the most depraved murderers of the last two decades? Elaina had grown up believing in God, but she hadn’t given it much thought lately. She believed in the opposite, though. She believed in evil. She knew monsters were real. She’d seen their handiwork up close. She’d heard their voices as she’d pored over the transcripts of their jailhouse interviews with her father. She knew there were people out there—walking, breathing, stalking people—who were capable of unspeakable cruelty. People who simply had no soul.
She wondered what it felt like to spend your last moments with a person like that. What had Mary Beth Cooper felt? And Whitney Bensen and Valerie Monroe and this new woman from Houston? A lump rose in her throat, and she tightened her grip on Troy’s belt.