Known (10 page)

“Trust me. I haven’t thought of anyone who’d come three thousand miles to burn down a cabin in the woods.”
Truth
. “Frisco said that the county sheriff’s department had their hands full with that big pileup on the highway. Maybe that’s where we should go, to be near some police. We need to let them know what’s happened, and we can’t just leave Frisco out there.”

Indecision briefly flashed in his eyes.

He stepped over to a window and pushed the curtain to the side with one finger to see out. Gianna held her breath, trying to be as silent as possible as he listened. “We’ll be leaving a glowing trail of where we went. Anyone will be able to see our tracks.”

“They can already see our tracks. If they’re on foot, they can follow the path the three of us made yesterday. If they drive, the snowmobile tracks are pretty clear.”

“You said you didn’t see a vehicle, right? Did you see any other tracks in the road when you rode over with Frisco?”

She shook her head. “Some snowmobile tracks, but I assumed they were the ones Frisco made while coming here. No vehicles.”

“How bad were the roads?”

“Bad. If not for those extra-tall markers, I wouldn’t have known where the sides of the road were.” It was the last thing she wanted to tell him, but he needed the truth. Only he knew the area well enough to decide if leaving the cabin was worth the risk. She had only a hazy idea of where they were located. “How far to that big wreck?”

“Frisco said ten miles to the west. But first it’s a good eight miles out to the main highway, where he said the plows had done some clearing.”

What if we try to drive out and get stuck?

“That many miles isn’t horrible if we get stuck,” Gianna said slowly. “We walked a mile yesterday. We could manage if we had to come back to the cabin on foot.”

“I don’t want to get stuck and have the wrong type of help show up either. Or have a new storm suddenly dump another foot of snow. The forecast we heard is days old. It could have been updated and completely changed.”

Gianna’s head was about to explode.
“What are we supposed to do?”

“I think we need to wait, Mom,” Violet said quietly. “I know you feel you need to take action—you’re always like that—but Chris is right. We need to sit tight. I know he can face anything that comes.”

A surprised and thankful expression lit Chris’s face as he looked at her daughter. Violet was right. Gianna was an action person. She always thought things through first, but she usually leaned in the direction of taking quick action. “Damn it.” She gave Chris a side-eye. “We’ll hole up for now.”

He nodded. “I think it’s the right thing to do. We can always leave later if we have to.”

If we’re able to.

“Do you think someone will come?” she asked softly, not clarifying that she meant someone who meant to do them harm.

He nodded again, his eyes stating he knew what she meant. “I do.”

Her stomach churned.

“But we’re ready. No one’s getting past me.”

“Do you think those shots we heard yesterday are related?”

“I have no idea. Could have been someone fooling around.”

“Oh!” Her hand slipped into the back pocket of her ski pants. “I grabbed Frisco’s camera. He took some shots of my Suburban and the cabin. Do you want to take a look?”

Chris took the camera and popped out the memory card. He moved to the rear of the cabin and grabbed a laptop off a small desk against the wall. He set it up on the island and placed the card into a port. They waited.

“You had the presence of mind to grab his camera
and
his gun?”

“Taking his gun was my first thought, since someone was firing at me. The camera was right next to him on the porch.”

The pictures opened and Chris rapidly scrolled through them. He sped past images of a fender bender, a dead buck, and a garbage-strewn campsite. Sunny weather was present in the first pictures on the card, and then clouds and rain took over. When snow started to show up, Chris scrolled more slowly. He stopped on a number of pictures of a birthday party. Frisco was front and center, a yellow-and-red party hat on his head and other rangers in uniform making goofy faces beside him. A photo of a cake with his name.

“Shit,” muttered Chris. He continued scrolling.

He paused at more snowy background pictures. Another dead deer, its red blood splattered on the snow. A shot of Gianna’s Suburban from the rear, her New York State license plate easy to read. Gianna leaned closer to the screen.

“He took that picture before he drove over here. Look . . . you can see the glass of the driver’s window. It’s solid.”

Chris nodded. The next image was the note he’d written with his name and address.
Where did Frisco put the note?
A chill shot through him; the note with his personal information was probably in Frisco’s pocket—available to anyone who examined the body.
Fuck.

Then there were two images of the burned cabin and an image of the Suburban’s broken window. “Did he shoot those cabin pictures when you went back or did he take them before he came here?”

Gianna thought hard. “I can’t remember. I was focused on the broken window.”

More shots showed the broken trails and boot prints from the Suburban to the cabin. The pictures abruptly changed to the darker interior of the burned cabin.

“Violet, don’t look at these.” Gianna looked over her shoulder at her daughter’s wide eyes. “Just for a minute.”

Violet nodded and turned away, crouching down to pet the dog.

Frisco had taken three shots of the dead man. The last one was a clear shot of the holes in his skull. Chris pressed his lips together in a tight line but said nothing. Gianna studied the body with a professional eye.

“Did you recognize him?” Chris asked almost soundlessly.

Gianna shook her head, but her mind raced.
Do I know him? But can’t tell?
She reached out and scrolled back to the first picture of the body, seeking something familiar. “I don’t think I know him,” she whispered back. She didn’t explain that his face was unrecognizable—Chris would know she was going by his clothing, his build, and what was left of his hair.

Again she searched the body for something to trigger a memory.

“We need to get to the police,” she said again.

Chris didn’t answer. He scrolled through more pictures of footprints in the ash on the cabin floor and then stopped at wintry photos that’d been clearly taken from the porch. A few shots focused on the mystery path Chris had spotted.

They were the final photos on the memory card.

He died seconds after taking those pictures.

Chris was still silent.

Violet asked, “How long were you there?”

“Not long,” admitted Gianna. “I wonder if we scared someone away from the cabin when we arrived.”

“And they shot at you to get you to leave? Maybe there’s something else in there they didn’t want you to see? So they won’t come here,” Violet stated firmly. “They just wanted you to go away.”

“I can’t put any weight in that theory, Violet. They murdered a ranger, there’s a dead body in the cabin, and they shot at your mother,” said Chris. “They have to assume we’ll tell someone about that.”

“Maybe the fire was also started to get us to leave,” added Violet. “I’m sure they know someone will come to investigate, but perhaps they just needed us gone for a little while . . . I don’t know why . . . but maybe they needed a window of time to do something over there without us present. You know . . . dig up the buried treasure under the floorboards. Or to get the body out of the cabin before anyone got a good look at him.”

Violet’s theory spun in Gianna’s brain as she picked it apart and studied it from every angle. She didn’t see a reason it couldn’t be true. A small sense of hope went through her.
Maybe no one will follow us here.

A glance at Chris’s determined face told her he disagreed with what Violet had said.

And no way in hell would he let down his guard.

Gianna silently watched as Chris paced the cabin a few times and then turned to face her and Violet, a decision clear on his face. “We need to be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. I want to get the truck ready and packed. If it looks feasible, we’ll go.”

She and Violet glanced at each other and then nodded at him.

Gianna followed Chris across the deep snow to the detached garage, struggling to balance the two snow shovels on her shoulders and stay upright as she stepped in his tracks. To call the building a garage was probably a compliment. It appeared to be a large, long shed on the verge of tipping over. As they drew closer, she saw that parts of the roof had been replaced and a series of solid locks placed on the vehicle-size door. The paint job looked like it’d been finished in 1970.

Chris constantly scanned their surroundings, the rifle in his hands. Gianna tried not to breathe too hard, worried he couldn’t hear the sounds of the forest over her pants as she followed him through the deep snow. Nonstop flurries had fallen for hours and now there was nearly another foot of powder on top of the ice crust. So much for their predicted weather warm-up.

Packing the food had been assigned to Violet. While listening to Chris’s directions to her daughter, Gianna had had the impression he was preparing for four nights in the woods instead of a simple drive out to the highway.

Nothing wrong with being overprepared.

Or else he believes we’re going to get stuck.

Chris worked on the series of locks, and Giana dug into the snowdrifts that were deep against the door. He finished the locks and plunged his shovel into the snow after carefully studying the woods. He heaved aside a giant scoop of powder. “We just need to move enough snow to slide up the door,” he grunted.

“Are you sure we can drive your truck in this?” she asked.

“No.”

Shit.
“We need to rethink taking the snowmobile.”

“It’s too tiny. There’s no room for three of us and there’s Oro to think of. I was surprised Frisco got the two of you on it.”

“Could the snowmobile pull something? Would it have enough power if we rig something behind it?”

Chris stopped shoveling and stared at her. “You’re brilliant. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” He tackled the snow with a renewed vigor. “I have two plastic sleds we could pull behind the snowmobile. Brian and I use them all the time.”

“If we get out to the highway on just a snowmobile and sleds, we might not be able to go much farther,” Gianna pointed out.

“That’s why I want to try the truck first. If we can make it out to a plowed road in the truck, we should be able to get to town on our own. You can drive the snowmobile, and I’ll drive the truck with Violet and Oro. That way we’ll all stay together. We’ll pack a bunch of rope and put the sleds in the bed of the truck, and we’ll use them if we need to.” He grinned as he tossed aside a shovelful of snow. “Now we’ve got two options to get us out of here. Nice thinking, Gianna. Eight miles. All we have to cover is eight miles to get to the main highway.”

“Towing us on sleds could be a strain on the snowmobile engine,” Gianna said.

“I don’t think it will be too bad. Think of how easily things glide on top of the snow. Once we get moving, it shouldn’t take too much. There’re a few uphill sections of road going out to the highway . . . that might be a different story, and we might have to do some walking, but most of it is downhill or flat. My fingers are still crossed we can get pretty far with the truck.” He hurled another load of snow. “But pulling something behind the snowmobile is the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

They worked silently for a few moments. “One of my cases made me think of it,” Gianna said quietly. She’d hadn’t been able to get the old images out of her mind for the last two minutes. “A ten-year-old girl. A snow day off from school. Her dad was towing her and her brothers behind his quad on sleds in the snow, but he was going too fast and took his corners too sharp. The centrifugal force during a sharp turn slammed her and her sled against a small stone wall.”

Chris had stopped shoveling and was watching her intently. “She didn’t survive?”

“None of my cases survive.”

“How do you work on kids?” His gaze bored into her. She had a well-rehearsed answer for his common question.

“I care about them. I know that when they’re on my table, they’ll get the tenderness and compassion a child deserves. I want their parents to know that their children are handled with sensitivity. Just as I’d want Violet handled, so I give my best.”

He held her gaze for a few seconds. “You do, don’t you?”

“Every time. I’m human and I’m a mom. The tragedy of some of the cases kills something inside of me, but I counteract it by giving back to the child and family with my actions. Not all of us can do it. Usually within an office you know which cases are not good for certain people to work on. I have a type of case I don’t care to work on and they keep them away from me. It’s not uncommon for examiners to struggle with child autopsies, but I take pride in doing them. An abused child needs someone to speak for him.”