“I will. What happened here?” If Rachel was here waiting to grab Lucas, it reasoned that she had started the fire in the first place.
“I don’t know. They haven’t said yet.”
Regan sought out a uniformed officer, introduced herself and Lizzy. “Lizzy called in a possible kidnapping. Lucas Vega.”
“I’m aware. We put out a BOLO on the Jeep and a description of the suspect and the victim.”
“The suspect is Rachel Wagner,” Regan said. “She’s currently under investigation by your department.”
The fire chief approached. “I need you all to move farther back.”
Regan asked, “What was this? It doesn’t look like a fire.”
“An unidentified chemical created toxic smoke. The hazmat unit is on its way. We need to neutralize it, but people have to move to a safe distance.”
“What about Lucas?” Lizzy demanded.
“I’ll find him,” Regan said.
“How?”
Regan motioned for Lizzy to follow her back to her truck. She tried to think like Rachel, figure out what she would do to Lucas. If she wanted him dead, she could have killed him here during the commotion.
She does want him dead, but she also wants to get away. She’s a sociopath, not stupid.
“Rachel is smart and determined,” Regan said. “She advanced quickly through the ranks, but she still wants to hang out with college-aged kids at Sigma Rho. Be their advisor, their mentor, their friend.”
“What?” Lizzy said. “Why does that matter?”
“I’m trying to get in her head, figure out what she will do.”
“She’s going to hurt him!”
“Lizzy, you need to calm down. Rachel is predictable. Anything that happens that might jeopardize her goals, she mitigates. I don’t think Adele’s accidental death was the first time she found herself in such a situation. She didn’t panic, she came up with a plan almost immediately to protect herself but convinced Candace and the others that she did it to protect them. Smart…but predictable,” Regan muttered. “Narcissistic personality, at the very least needs to be liked, craves admiration. She was a cheerleader, check the popular box. She’s in the sciences, check the smart box. Rachel is exactly who and what she needs to be… She reads people well. Manipulates them in order to advance her goals. It’s all about her.”
“The podcast,” Lizzy said. “It uprooted her perfect life, didn’t it?”
“Yes, and that’s the sole reason she went after Lucas. He pushed and pushed until people started talking. Nia, the first caller, went to break the dam and was punished for it. But the dam still broke, and Nicole came forward. She has a lot more to say. Once that happened, Rachel knew she had to do something. She tried to kill Nicole, failed.”
“She’s going to kill him! Why are we standing here doing nothing?”
“Where do we look, Lizzy? She didn’t take Lucas because of what he knows that could hurt her, she took Lucas out of anger, as payback. But her ultimate goal is to avoid being arrested.”
Regan snapped her fingers. She pulled out her copy of Candace’s journal. “I know where she’s going—where she’s already been successful in getting rid of people.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Payson. From Payson she can go in four or five different directions, making it harder to track her. We need to study Candace’s maps. Lizzy, help me. When Lucas and I were looking at these yesterday, we really didn’t know what Candace was seeing. The maps aren’t traditional maps. Where is the mine? Where would Rachel take Lucas? Where did she take Adele’s body?”
Candace had highlighted two abandoned mines in Payson, then put a question mark on a third.
Lizzy looked, then she pulled out her phone and looked up Google Earth maps. “Okay, a mine, abandoned because no one found Adele’s body, remote, but accessible by car because you can’t really carry a body a great distance, right?”
Now she was thinking. “Exactly,” Regan said.
“Candace was off. This mark?” Lizzy pointed. “That’s an emergency exit to the mine.” She flipped through her phone and showed Regan an article about the history of mines in Payson. “I was reading this last night when I fell asleep. The entrance was barricaded after a kid got lost in the mine more than ten years ago. But I’ll bet that’s where she went. This one gets too much traffic. Not the mine itself, but there’s a road too close to it. And the one down here? That’s impossible to access except maybe on horses. The road that used to go down there got washed away in a storm more than six years ago.”