“Owww! Jesus!”
Good.
She tasted blood, then tried to bite down hard again, but she was starting to fade, the blackness pulling her under, the world spinning away . . .
Her assailant snarled, “You’re so dead, bitch.”
And it was true.
She let go, and the darkness folded over her.
Then there was nothing.
CHAPTER 28
December 8
The following day, Rivers finished the last bite of his ham-and-cheese sandwich at his desk, wadded the white takeout bag from the local deli in his fist, and lobbed it into his wastebasket. The damned thing bounced off the rim and reminded him of the final shot he’d missed in high school, right at the buzzer, with not only the game but a spot in the state championship playoffs on the line. Yeah, it had been bad.
He’d been the goat that evening, he thought, and for all the wins his team—the Hillside Hornets—had captured, that loss, to the rival Eagles, had given him teenage nightmares for weeks and still stuck in his craw two decades later.
Now, shaking off the memory, he stood and stretched, his spine popping from long hours at his desk. He rolled the kinks from his neck, checked his watch, and realized it was time to go. If they wanted to make Marysville by three, they needed to head out. He strode to the locker area, where he found Mendoza already slipping her arms through her jacket.
“Time to roll,” he said as they both checked out from the station, then stepped outside to a day that was crisp and cold, the cloudless sky a brilliant shade of blue. “I’ll drive.”
Mendoza was already heading to the passenger side of a department SUV as a cruiser with two deputies pulled into an open space. “Got the keys?” she asked.
He shot her a look over the roof of the Jeep. “Yes, Mother.”
Her lips twitched as she slid inside, and once he was behind the wheel and driving out of the lot, she asked, “Bad morning?”
“Not so much bad as fruitless,” he grumbled. “And cooped up.”
“Well, now you’re not,” she pointed out.
That much was true. They were on their way to meet with Jennifer Korpi, and he’d be away from the phone and computer screen for a good while. He’d spent hours going over reports and statements from witnesses and watched reams of footage taken by street and business cameras in the area, looking for a clue, hoping to spot Megan Travers’s black Toyota. There was a tiny bit of hope when a Tacoma couple who had been driving east at the time reported seeing what could have been Megan’s car. The timing was right, and it had happened just before the summit, on the eastern slope, where the driver had been forced to ease closer to the side of the road as the Toyota, heading west and uphill, had blown by. But so far nothing had come from the tip.
The snowplow driver who’d been cut off, Bud Frandsen, had come in and talked to Rivers. Frandsen was a big, beefy guy in a baseball cap who was looking at retirement and had been behind the wheel of a plow for nearly thirty years. When asked who was driving the car that had careened out of James Cahill’s driveway, he’d adjusted the hat on his head and replied, “I had to hit my GD brakes so hard I nearly slid. Didn’t pay attention to who was driving. But the car was a black Toyota, that much I can tell you.”
“Was there anyone else in the car, other than the driver?”
“Don’t know. Don’t think so,” he said and, when handed Megan Travers’s driver’s license picture and asked if she could be the driver, he’d swung his big head side to side and said, “Maybe. Maybe not. I was just trying to keep the rig on the road while cussin’ a blue streak.” As if to underscore that, he added, “Fuckin’ idiot. Coulda got me killed.”
Rivers hadn’t gotten much more from Olga Marsden, either, a woman near eighty who had been out walking her dog on the night Megan disappeared. Gray-haired and thin, Mrs. Marsden was a widow and sharp as a tack, her dark eyes bright behind big blue-rimmed glasses. She had taken her little Scottie dog for a walk through Riggs Crossing that night, just as, she said, she did every night. “We leave the house just after seven and get home before eight so I can catch up on my shows. I tape Wheel and Jeopardy, you know, after the news,” she’d informed Rivers. “I always walk Bitsy then. He’s a Scottie, you know, the fifth one I’ve owned, and it’s been my experience they all like their routines. Bitsy for sure. He doesn’t like his routine changed. Puts him in a bad mood.”
Though she hadn’t been sure, Olga Marsden had thought a woman was behind the wheel of the dark car. “She was driving like a bat out of hell! Just a few blocks from Main Street, if you can believe that. Oh, boy! I signaled for her to slow down, you know, patted the air like this.” She mimicked the movement. “But she didn’t even notice. Just kept right on going. In fact,” the old woman had confided, lifting a “tsking” finger, “I think she actually sped up, if you can believe that.”
When Rivers had asked if the driver had been alone in the car, Mrs. Marsden had thought hard, her face screwing up beneath her cap of gray curls. “I think so, but I couldn’t swear to it. It happened so fast. I was too concerned about Bitsy, you know. Afraid he might run out into the street. He’s a love. Name’s short for Bitterroot’s Scion; he’s registered. Purebred. We just call him Bitsy.”
That had been the end of the interview.
Later,
