Nowhere to Run

“Shut up, Dave,” Parnell said, shooting Smith a punishing look.

FARKUS STOOD off to the side with the horses, thinking Cline? Where had he heard that name? Something about Michigan . . .

When Parnell’s tracker chirped again, he read it and appeared startled. His scalp twitched above his forehead even though his face was a mask.

“What?” Smith asked.

“He’s on top of us,” Parnell whispered. “He’s coming up the rim right at us. He’s running up the side of the cirque.”

Farkus quickly dropped down to his hands and knees, wishing he could make himself even less of a target.

Parnell and Smith raised the barrels of their AR-15s, pointing them through the trees toward the lip of the rim. Campbell quickly slung his scoped rifle over his shoulder, because his scoped weapon wasn’t useful at close range, pulled his Sig Sauer, and steadied it out in front of him with two hands.

Farkus heard the rapid thumping of footfalls and saw a flash of spindly movement from the other side of the rim and then a full set of antlers. The big five-point buck mule deer with a satellite phone wired to its antlers came lurching up over the side in a dead run.

Parnell and Smith turned it into hamburger.

21

“WE DIDN’T KNOW DIANE WAS MISSING UNTIL SHE’D BEEN gone for four days,” Jenna Shober said in a low, soft voice rubbed raw with sandpaper from two years of crying. “Can you imagine that?”

“No,” Joe said.

They were in the living room. He assumed she’d head back to his office but she only made it as far as the couch. She’d folded into the far corner of it with her back against the armrest and her hands clamped tightly between her legs. Her head was tilted slightly forward, so when she talked to Joe she had to look up. But she spent most of the time staring at her knees, recalling what happened from a script so obviously seared into her being that at times she seemed to be reading from it.

“If we’d known right away—even a day after—we could have done something,” she said. “Brent would have done everything in the world to find her. She couldn’t have been that far from the trailhead in just one day—only as far as she could run. So at least we would have had a known radius where to look. She usually ran four miles in and four miles out—eight total. Sometimes when she was in hard training, she’d double that. But because the trials were just a month away, her training schedule was pretty regular and eight miles total would have been about right. She loved to run in the mountains. She’d rather run in the mountains than in the best facilities in the world.

“She started her last run on a Tuesday. We didn’t find out she was missing until Friday night, when her fiance finally called.”

“Tell me about him,” Joe said.

She looked up. “His name is Justin LeForge. He’s a triathlete, one of the best. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him or not. He’s placed in the top three at the Hawaiian Ironman, and he won a big race in Nice, France, and the Wildflower in California.”

Joe shook his head. “I’m not familiar with triathlons, sorry.”

She continued, “Anyway, Justin and Diane seemed like the perfect couple. They were beautiful—thin, fit, athletic, attractive. Ken and Barbie in track clothes, one of my friends said. A little odd when it came to politics and worldview, but young people can be like that. They met down in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center. Brent thought Justin was the greatest, and he bragged constantly about his future son-in-law. But everything wasn’t as it seemed.”

Joe said, “What do you mean when you say they had odd political beliefs?”

She laughed a dry laugh. “They were certainly counter to her father’s, for one. Brent has always been very involved politically. We give a lot of money to candidates, and as a big developer he is used to being, um, close with them. There’s a lot of federal money these days, you know. It has to go to somebody, is the way Brent puts it, so it might as well be him. Anyway, Justin was a big fan of that writer Ayn Rand. You know her?”

Joe said, “I read Atlas Shrugged in college. It was pretty good until that last speech. I never could finish it because of that ninety-page speech at the end.”

“Justin said he was an Objectivist, like Ayn Rand. You know, staunch capitalism, anti-big government. Lots of kids go through that.”

Joe nodded, urging her on.

“Justin and Brent butted heads a few times, and Diane was right there in the thick of it. I always wondered how much of her new philosophy she truly held and how much was because of Justin. And how much of it was simple rebellion, mainly against her dad. They’re both strong-willed people, Brent and Diane. The funny thing is Justin is just as bullheaded as Brent, but Diane never seemed to see the similarity.

“They were selfish, both of them. Part of it came from Objectivism, I guess. I’ve never been around two people more self-absorbed than my daughter and her fiance. They lived in the same house but they never really lived together, if you know what I mean. She did her thing and he did his. It was all about running, working out, eating food as fuel. It was all about their bodies—how they looked, how they could trim a second off their best time. They looked at their friends, relatives, families—and the rest of the world—as their support team. I used to complain about it, how Diane would only talk about herself when she called and never ask about her brother or sister or me, but Brent just sloughed it off and said that’s how athletes had to be when they reached a certain level. And as you could see, Brent is a little like that.”

Joe said, “Back to the four days between her disappearance and you finding out about it.”

“Oh,” she said, squirming farther back into the couch, making herself smaller. “I’m sorry. I went on a tangent.”

“It’s okay,” he said, stealing a look at his wristwatch and deciding: Pizza tonight. Delivered.

“Well, as I said, we didn’t hear from Justin until Friday night. It was a maddening conversation. He said he