He let her take the wheel, disappeared below, and then returned with two glasses of white wine.
They passed a small fishing boat.
“See that guy over there, baiting that hook?” Blake asked. “I’ve known him for years. At one time he was just an amateur baiter. Now he’s a master baiter.”
She laughed.
They sailed for over an hour, long enough for her to learn how to work the lines. Then they dropped the sails and bobbed. A flock of eight or ten geese floated over looking for a handout. Blake went below and returned with a loaf of bread. Aspen threw pieces into the water and decided that this was as good a time as any to get to the point of the meeting.
“I had some information fall into my lap today,” she said. “The long and short of it is, Rachel was sexually assaulted in her office on March 14th. It happened late, after nine o’clock or thereabouts. It wasn’t rape but it was definitely an assault.”
Blake frowned.
“What makes you think so?”
“Rachel’s sister told me.”
“Sarah?”
“Right.”
He took a long swallow of wine. “I already know about it,” he said. “She reported it to me back when it happened.”
“She did?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Who did it to her?”
He looked blank. “She wouldn’t say. I told her to take it to the police but she didn’t want to. She was embarrassed and felt it would hurt her career if the word got out. She didn’t want me to press it so, out of respect for her and against my better judgment, I didn’t.”
“She disappeared just two weeks after that,” Aspen said.
“I know.”
“There’s got to be a connection.”
He didn’t seem convinced.
“Maybe, in theory. But keep in mind that she got killed by some psycho maniac who cut her head off,” he said. “That’s a guy in a totally different league.”
She stopped throwing bread.
Every goose on the water watched her, waiting.
She wasn’t sure whether she should bring up what she was about to, but couldn’t hold back any longer.
“I followed Derek Bennett the other night,” she said. “He goes to a place called Tops amp; Bottoms, which is an S amp;M place, and sticks pins into women.”
Blake looked shocked and studied her face, as if trying to decide if she was messing with him.
She wasn’t.
“That’s the kind of guy who could saw someone’s head off,” she said.
Blake didn’t disagree.
“Assume he’s the one who sexually assaulted Rachel,” she said. “Two weeks pass and she hasn’t reported it to the police yet, but then he finds out that she’s in the process of leaving the firm. He starts to get nervous about whether she’ll change her mind after he doesn’t have so much of a grip on her any more.”
“So he takes her out,” Blake said, finishing the concept.
“Exactly. And has fun doing it.”
D raven frantically searched the mountainside for Mia Avila, gripping the knife so tight that his fingers hurt, already planning what he’d do to her for putting him through this.
“Get back here, you bitch!”
No response.
“All you’re doing is making me mad!”
Silence.
There were too many trees, too many boulders, too many goddamn places to hide. He ran from one to the next, hoping beyond hope to find her cowering on the ground and scared out of her mind.
His lungs burned from the mad dashing but he didn’t care.
She couldn’t have gone far, not in those shoeless little feet of hers. The whole mountain was covered in rocks and twigs and pine needles and other pointy things. She might start out with enough feet to go for a ways, but before long they’d be raw and bloody and stuck full of needles. She’d have to stop no matter how desperate she might be.
She was here somewhere.
Where?
He covered ground as quickly as he could, no longer shouting now that he realized he was only giving his position away.
He hunted quietly, quickly, trying to remain confident that sooner or later he’d spring around the corner and grab her by the hair.
His legs grew increasingly heavy.
His lungs no longer got enough oxygen.
He was no longer just tired.
He was slipping into a deeper and deeper state of exhaustion.
He stopped and sat on a boulder, just to catch his breath for a second. Bad thoughts pounded his brain. He might not catch her. She might actually escape.
He knew he should stand up and continue the search.
He was too tired to move.
But muscled himself up anyway.
He searched every nook and cranny that she could have possibly made it to without being seen, found her nowhere, and then finally gave up and went back to the cabin.
Time to get the hell out of there.
Then, shit!
A large puddle of green antifreeze sat under the car. He kicked the side of the door, giving it a huge dent while sending a bone-compressing shockwave up his leg, all the way up to his hip.
“Goddamn it!”
He’d have to get the hood up to fill the radiator with water.
He opened the driver’s door, reached under the dash and activated the hood release, and then tried to muscle the hood up. It didn’t budge.
“Son of a bitch!”
He picked up a rock and threw it at the vehicle, shattering the windshield.