CHAPTER 68
“This is crazy,” Anne Jeffers said. She had no idea where they were—they hadn’t seen a sign for miles, and except for them, the narrow highway winding along the river was utterly deserted. Beyond the confínes of Mark Blakemoor’s car a dense blackness seemed to absorb the glow of the headlights, the slashing rain cutting visibility to no more than a few yards. Mark had been forced by the intensity of the storm to slow to little more than a crawl, and Anne’s feeling that it was a mistake to have come up here was growing by the second. A flash of lightning burst above them, instantly followed by a crack of thunder so sharp it made Anne jump in her seat. “We’ve got to go back, Mark! This is insane! We don’t even know where we are!”
“We’re almost to the campground where they found Edna Kraven this morning,” Mark replied. “Kevin said the place they were fishing wasn’t very much farther up the road. We’ll check those, then—”
The police radio crackled to life, and Mark snatched up the microphone.
“Go ahead.”
“Turns out your R.V. has a cell phone, and we got a trace on it,” a barely audible voice, almost lost in the static caused by the storm, said.
Anne seemed about to speak, but Mark shook his head, leaning toward the radio’s speaker as he strained to catch the crackling words. But only some garbled static came through the speaker.
“Say again!” Mark shouted into the microphone. “We’ve got a lot of static!”
The radio’s speaker crackled again, and from somewhere in the cacophony of background noise a single word emerged.
Snoqualmie.
There was more, but again it was drowned out by static, and when the next transmission came through, nothing was audible at all. “Doesn’t matter,” Mark muttered. “They’re up here.” His eyes barely left the road as he quickly told Anne what had happened: “Cellular phones are almost like a homing device—they always stay in contact with the system. You can’t pin them down exactly, but you can get the general area they’re operating out of.” Without thinking, he reached out and took Anne’s hand, squeezing it gently. “We’ll find them. Just hang on. We’ll find them.”
The car continued creeping up the grade, and finally they came to the campground, but when Mark saw that not only was the police tape still hanging across the road leading into it, but that the gate was closed and locked as well, he didn’t even try to turn in. A mile and a half farther up the road, just as he was starting to wonder if Kevin had remembered where he’d been as well as he thought he had, the small sign for the turnoff to the right appeared out of the blackness. When he came to the entrance to the narrow lane a few moments later, he brought the car to a stop. The dirt track, already deeply rutted by a stream of water, was impassable by anything but a four-wheel drive. Mark might get the sedan down, but he would never get it up again, at least not tonight.
But how long had it been like this? What if the motor home was already down there?
He reached into the glove compartment, took out his gun, then got out of the car.
Anne, immediately understanding what he was about to do, scrambled out the passenger door.
“Get back in the car!” Mark shouted over the wind that was screaming through the trees, driving the rain almost horizontally. “You can’t—”
“If you can go down there, so can I,” Anne shouted back. “It’s my daughter, remember?” Before Mark could protest further, she started picking her way down the muddy road, steadying herself against the trunks of trees, grabbing at the shrubbery when she felt her feet skid on the slippery mud.
It wasn’t until she was halfway down the twisting lane that she realized she hadn’t even thought about the possibility that she might be wrong; that Glen—the real, loving Glen—might be with Heather, rather than merely the body of her husband, now fully controlled by a monstrous, vengeful Richard Kraven.
An image of the monogram Kraven had carved into the flesh of each of his victims leapt into her mind, and she visualized Heather, her chest cut open, her lungs and heart—
No!
Not Heather! It couldn’t happen to Heather—she wouldn’t let it happen to Heather!
A strangled sound of fear, fury, and frustration rose in her throat, and she bolted ahead, terrified that even now the motor home might be parked at the foot of the lane.
Terrified that Richard Kraven might already have begun his work.