Headlights(64)

And Josie telling Jack about my past. I should have told him long before now, but … The connection to the case and repeated lies about it—the FBI ethics code is strict. Beyond strict. And then the DNA match.

It’s bad. Really bad. And Josie and Daphne are distrustful enough of me to have submitted them. These two people who used to be two of my closest friends on earth.

“Find anything good?”

I jump at the voice behind me. Hannah stands at the entrance with a small plastic bin.

I clear my throat, close the drawer. I don’t know how she got in without me hearing her. I need to be sharper, need to pull myself together. So much is happening so fast.

Hannah steps over to the other side of the cabinet wall and starts to prep the coffee. I watch her, try to glean any piece of information. There’s an intensity about her movements, her gaze. This same girl who drew those sketches, who took the photographs back in her cabin near Denver. Who maybe orchestrated all these deaths. She moves comfortably in silence, is used to it. It’s me she’s not comfortable with, a fact reinforced when she steps over to give me my coffee in an earthenware mug and sets it on the floor feet from me instead of getting close enough to hand it over.

She sits on the other side of the firepit, on the floor. I lower myself down to do the same, opposite her. Look out over the aspen trees. A chipmunk runs up and down the nearest one to us. Hannah adjusts her nose plug. With the sun now beginning to cast light in the sky, I can see the Aspen leaves are all orange, yellow, and red. I would think they’d have fallen by now, but maybe it’s been a warm fall. All of this, so surreal. I look at her.

“You gotta give me something,” I say.

Please tell me I am not making the worst mistake of my life. While I’m running from my friends, who also happen to be FBI agents. While I’m with a woman who very well might have killed all these people.

I bring the coffee to my nose, hesitate, then take a sip. I don’t think she’d poison me. If she did want to kill me, she wouldn’t do it in such a quiet way after all this spectacle. Anyway, I need the caffeine.

“The last time I was at the trailhead before the motel was three weeks ago,” Hannah says, looking down into her cup. “And I just passed through and into town to buy food. That’s it. I couldn’t have taken a photo of someone.”

“You’d never been to that motel before?”

She looks up at me now, indignation in her eyes. “Look. I’ll answer your questions, and I get that you’re skeptical, but I already told you all, I don’t know anything about that motel, and I don’t have any idea why I am a part of this. Okay? Not a clue. And I would really rather go the rest of my life never thinking about that motel again. Someone broke into my home. I’ve asked you, a stranger, someone I shouldn’t trust at all, for help. Please. Just … I don’t know what else to do.”

That look in her eyes. So much fear, so much pain. But fight too.

Fuck, do I believe her?

“Okay,” I say. I rub my forehead. “So someone broke into your cabin at some point, took your camera down the mountain, took a photo of someone else, put the camera back, then kidnapped you and the person they took a photo of a week later. Then took you both to the motel, killed him, put his tongue in your mouth, kept you alive, and then came back days after and put the knife on your bed. Right after we’d been there.”

She looks at me with fury in her eyes. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” she says quietly. “I didn’t do, or ask for, any of this. And yeah. Right after you all were there. For all I know, it could have been one of you who broke in and left the knife.”

“We all went down the trail together. It wasn’t us. Was there any other sign of forced entry at any point in the last month? Any other clues that someone might have been there without you knowing?”

She thinks, watches the chipmunk. “I have these … drawings. In my cabin in Pikes Forest,” she says. “Just little sketches that I do, on playing cards. One of them is missing. It was after the motel, after I was taken. When I came back it was gone.”

I keep my eyes on the coffee cup, my heart pounding again. Yeah, because it’s in my pocket is probably not the best answer right now. I take another sip.

“If we’re alone out here,” I ask after a minute, “why aren’t we inside the house?”

She hesitates, then says, “I can’t be indoors with people. Or … I don’t like to be. It’s … hard.”

“Since the motel?” I ask. This girl with this three-sided shelter. Again, that prickling.

She stares at me, then gives a slow nod, and I know it’s a lie. She takes a sip of her coffee. My eyes catch on her mouth for half a second. I pull them away.

“If you want to go in the house, you can,” she says. “There are showers and bathrooms, heat, all that.”

“I’m good,” I say. “So the guy who owns this property let you build this structure and offered you the land it’s on?”

She says, exasperated, “Look, you and I could have gone to the backcountry anywhere today, but Parks law enforcement are always on the lookout for people on the run. And your car would be parked in a public lot, with that murder knife in the trunk of it. This seemed like the best option I could think of, but if you don’t want—”