Lisa Gardner - The killing hour

Mac stopped abruptly. He looked at the map again, then his compass. “Hang on. Yep. We head off here.”

Kimberly came to a halt beside him and he could feel her uneasiness immediately increase tenfold. There was no clearly marked trail in front of them. Instead, the earth opened up, then plummeted down, a tumbling mass of boulders, bushes, and grass. Fallen trees lay directly in their way, overgrown with shaggy moss and brilliant ferns. Jagged branches stuck out dangerously low, while some kind of thick green vine covered half the trees in sight.

The woods were dense, dark. Kathy Levine was right: they held secrets that were both beautiful and deadly.

“If we get separated,” Mac said quietly, “just stay in one place and blow your whistle. I’ll find you.”

All the search-and-rescue operatives had been given shrill plastic whistles. One blow was to communicate between partners. Two blows meant a team had found the girl. Three shrills was the international call for distress.

Kimberly’s gaze had gone to the ground. Mac could practically see her eyes scouring each rock and thicket for signs of rattlesnakes or hornets. Her hand now rested on the top of her left thigh. Where she had the knife strapped, he guessed, and immediately felt his gut tighten with a shot of good, old-fashioned male lust. He did not know why an armed woman should be so arousing, but man oh man, this one was.

“We’re going to be fine,” he said.

Kimberly finally looked at him. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said. Then she stepped off the path into the wild underbrush.

Footing quickly grew rough. Twice Kimberly slipped and tumbled halfway down a steep slope. Long, thick grass offered little traction, even for her hiking boots, and rocks and tree roots stuck up in the damnedest places. If she looked down for obstacles, then a stray tree limb would catch her up high. If she looked up high, she risked taking a fallen log in the shin. If she tried looking everywhere at once, she fell, a lot, regularly, and with generally painful, bloody results.

Within two hours, her legs wore a crisscross of scratches to match the ones still healing on her face. She avoided hornets, but blundered into a patch of poison ivy. She stopped running into dead logs, but twice twisted her ankles on slippery rocks.

All in all, she wasn’t enjoying the woods much. She supposed it should be beautiful, but to her it wasn’t. She felt the loneliness of this place, where the sound of your companion’s footsteps was swallowed up by moss-covered rocks, and even knowing there was another search party within three miles, she didn’t hear a peep. She felt the disorientation of the towering trees that blocked out the sun and made it difficult to get a sense of direction. The rough, undulating landscape meant they were often walking down to go up, or walking up to go down. Which way was north, south, east, west? Kimberly didn’t know anymore, and that left her feeling anxious in a way she couldn’t fully explain.

The immense size of the woods swallowed her up as effectively as any ocean. Now she was drowning in greenness, not sure how to get her head up, or which way to head for shore. She was a city girl who was way out of her league. And in a place like this, so much could go wrong without anyone ever finding your body.

She tried to focus on the missing woman to distract herself. If the girl had started the night at a bar, then she was probably wearing sandals. Had she gotten smart and ditched them right away? Kimberly had already slipped several times in hiking boots. Sandals would be impossible. Bare feet not great, but at least more manageable.

Where would she strike out for first? Head down is what Kathy Levine had said; lost hikers seek the easier path. In Kimberly’s mind, this path wasn’t that easy. Having to pick and choose for footing required slow, laborious work. Maybe it wasn’t as aerobic as hiking up, but the muscles in her legs and butt were already screaming while her heart beat furiously.

Would the girl try to seek shelter? Someplace she could stay cool and not wear herself out? Mac had implied that staying put was the key. Be calm, in control, don’t just wander around in a daze.

Kimberly looked around her, at the arching trees, the looming shadows, and the deep crevices with all their unknown inhabitants.

She bet the girl had started out at a dead run. She bet she’d torn through these bushes and trees, desperately seeking some sign of civilization. She’d probably screamed for hours, wearing herself hoarse with the need for human contact. And when night had fallen, when the woods had filled with the louder sounds of bigger beasts and buzzing insects…

The girl had probably run again. Tripped. Fallen. Maybe gone headfirst into a poison ivy patch or into a hornets’ nest. And what would have happened to her then? Stung, terrorized, half-dressed, and lost in the dark?

She’d seek water, anything to cool her wounds. And because whatever lurked in the streams had to be less dangerous than the creatures that stalked the woods.

Kimberly halted abruptly, holding up a hand. “Do you hear it?” she asked Mac sharply.

“Water,” Mac agreed. From his backpack, he retrieved his map. “There’s a stream directly to the west.”

“We should follow it. That’s what Levine said, right? Hikers are drawn to water.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

Kimberly stepped left…

And her foot went totally out from under her. One moment she was on solid ground. The next, her leg shot out and she went careening butt-first down the slippery slope of grass. Her hip bounded over a rock. Her thigh scraped by a fallen log. Desperately she tried to get her hands beneath her, while vaguely she was aware of Mac shouting her name behind her.

“Kimberly!!!”

“Ahhhhhhhhhh.” Thump. Thunk. Another dead log reared up ahead, and she slammed into it with all the grace of a rhino. Stars burst in front of her eyes. A buzzing roared through her ears. She was acutely aware of the rusty taste of blood in her mouth where she had bitten her tongue. And then, all at once, her body caught fire.

“Shit. Damn. Oh, what the hell!” She was on her feet, slapping at her arms and legs. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, like a million little fire ants biting her skin again and again and again. She bolted out of the weeds and went scrambling back up the hillside, grabbing at tree limbs with her hands while churning up the grass with her feet.

She made it fifteen feet back up and not a single inch of it helped. Her skin burned. Her blood roared. She watched helplessly as her body suddenly bloomed with a bright red rash.

Mac finally came crashing to a halt in front of her. “Don’t scratch, don’t scratch, don’t scratch.”

“What the hell is it?” she cried frantically.

“Congratulations, honey, I think you just found the stinging nettles.”

Quantico, Virginia

8:05 P . M .

Temperature: 98 degrees

“SO WHAT DO WE HAVE?” Quincy asked. It was after eight o’clock now. He, Rainie, Special Agent Kaplan, and Supervisor Watson had taken over an unused classroom for their ad hoc meeting. No one looked particularly cheerful. For one thing, half of them were still wrung out from working the crime scene in this heat. For another, they had nothing to show for their fourteen-hour day.

“I think we still have to look harder at McCormack,” Kaplan insisted. “In this business, you know there is no such thing as coincidence. And him being here at the same time one of his old cases heats up… That’s too much coincidence for me.”

“It was not coincidental, it was planned.” Rainie spoke up in exasperation. Her opinion on this matter was clear, and now she shook her head in disgust at Kaplan. “You spoke to his boss. You know what McCormack said was true.”