Unknown Rider полностью

She swept her light across the ground around her, looking for anything that might indicate a human had been there. Boot prints. Litter. Anything that hadn’t been made by the Almighty and worn down by the weather. But she only saw a bit of scat and a few paw prints hinting at the presence of an island fox. Slowly, she fanned her light outward, scanning in concentric rings around the center of the GPS coordinates.

“Tiffany, anything yet?” Chief Romero called over the radio.

“Negative, Chief. The first two locations were a bust. No evidence of human presence at either.”

“You’re at number three?”

She looked at the notepad again, confirming she had indeed trekked to the right spot. “Yeah, not much here either. I’m…”

She stopped when her flashlight illuminated a bush that looked… odd.

“You broke up,” the Blacktip chief said.

“Hold on,” Tiffany replied, carefully making her way up the steep slope to get a closer look at what had caught her attention. At a distance, she saw what looked like splintered light-colored sapwood, as if a thick branch had been ripped from a tree and tossed aside. She shone her light on the ground and placed her feet carefully, then lifted the beam back to the clump of irregular brush to make sure she was on the right track.

“Do you see something?” Chief Romero asked.

She stopped halfway to her destination and brought the radio to her mouth. “Give me a second.”

Click. Click.

The chief had finally gotten the hint and remained quiet while she took her time traversing the uneven terrain. As she drew closer, she felt an uneasy feeling wash over her and squeeze her stomach in a viselike grip. Under her flashlight’s weak beam, she saw a disheveled clump of blond hair tinged red, and she quickly turned her head and dry-heaved on the ground at her feet. She spat thick strings of sour saliva while trying to force the image from her mind and regain her composure. Slowly, she turned back to the gruesome scene and scanned the area around the bush.

Boot print. Drag marks. Loose leaves. Broken branches.

As her analytical side supplanted the emotional, she moved around the shrub while piecing together what might have happened. One thing was for certain, though. This woman…

Carrie. Her name was Carrie.

…had been moved there, and the branches had been placed on top of her body to hide it from view.

Somebody had murdered her.

“Chief,” Tiffany whispered into the radio. “I found one of them.”

His reply was equally somber. “Copy, Tiffany. Break. Raptor Two Four, can you proceed to location three and recover the body?”

Punky sat on a seat against the bulkhead at the rear of the helicopter, listening to the pilot coordinate recovery efforts with the Coast Guard personnel aboard the Blacktip. She had been right, but it gave her no joy that the missing hikers had fallen prey to the same woman who had murdered her Uncle Rick. Instead, it gave her even more motivation.

“We’re moving overhead location three,” the pilot said from the right seat. “Rose, stay on that fifty and keep your eyes peeled. We’ll use the searchlight to look for the second body. It has to be nearby.”

Punky looked over at the aircrewman as he prepared the swivel-mounted heavy-machine gun, thankful they had something more powerful than her SIG Sauer pistol if they came under fire again. But she thought they were focused on the wrong thing. “We need to put off searching for the other body until the threat’s been neutralized,” she said.

The pilot looked over his shoulder at her. “Ma’am, you heard our orders. We’re to identify the threat, and we intend to do that. But if these hikers were killed by the same person you’re looking for, then finding the second body might give us a place to start.”

She bit her tongue and leaned forward to look through the open door opposite Rose. She still wore the night vision goggles on the bracket Jug had made for her and couldn’t help scanning the island’s terrain for a sign that might lead her to TANDY. She knew the Chinese operative was down there somewhere, and she didn’t have the patience for a methodical search like the pilot was suggesting.

“Ranger Reid,” the other pilot said over the radio. “We’re coming overhead your position now.”

“I see you,” the park ranger replied.

“Copy, shine your light up at us, then close your eyes. We’ll put a searchlight down on your position.”

Punky craned her neck to look down at the ground beneath them, studying the green-hued terrain as if it were the surface of an alien planet. Suddenly, a bright light clicked on and blinded her, and she recoiled back into the darkened recess of the helicopter’s interior.

“Raptor Two Four has visual,” the left-seater said.

That makes one of us.