Chapter Forty-One

The snow had melted, the earth soft and spongy beneath her feet. In the distance, she heard the occasional yap of a dog as she and Agent Gallagher made their way through the wooded area.

She'd been surprised when he'd called her that morning, asking for a ride to Isaac Driscoll's place, even though the roads were markedly better than they'd been the week before. Harper had assumed her less-than-prestigious police consultant career had officially come to an end. But Agent Gallagher had told her he not only needed a ride but he could also use her help "poking around in the woods," as he put it.

Harper had suggested that Jak come along and help too—or even instead of her. After all, no one knew those particular woods better than he did. But Agent Gallagher had said no, and she thought he'd acted cagey about it, and so there she was, stepping over a decayed log as she studied the piece of paper Isaac Driscoll had drawn and apparently kept in his bedside drawer.

"Boss?" came a voice from behind them.

"Yes," Agent Gallagher called, moving past her to the edge of the woods where the other man stood. She recognized him as one of the men who'd been holding a dog when they'd arrived half an hour before.

Harper looked away, studying the map again. Agent Gallagher had told her the word at the bottom— obedient —had something to do with the Spartans. Apparently, Driscoll was obsessed with them. Harper released a frustrated breath. Without any specific starting point, she had no idea what to look for. There was nothing that looked like anything she'd seen on a traditional map before.

"Two bodies, sir," the man's voice carried to her. She froze, her eyes widening. Two bodies?

She heard Agent Gallagher blow out a slow breath. "Children?" he asked, and there was something in his voice that made her think he already knew the answer.

"Appears so, yes. One very young, the other older. The lab will tell us more."

"Okay. Thank you, David. Did the dogs hit on anything else?"

"Not yet. We're going to widen the search, come back tomorrow if necessary."

"Thank you. Let me know right away if you find anything else."

"Will do."

Harper heard the man named David walking away, heard Agent Gallagher approach her from behind, and turned slowly to meet his eyes. He must have seen by her face that she'd overheard their conversation because he blew out a breath and said, almost to himself, "I hoped I wasn't right."

"Two children?" Harper whispered, the horror of that coursing through her. There were two children buried out there. Whose children?

Agent Gallagher nodded solemnly.

"They found two," Harper said. "Do you…do you think this third marker is another one?" And if he did, why did he have her out there? The dogs seemed to be up to the task.

"I don't know. I hope not. There are two red ones and one black." If the red ones are the location of the two bodies, then the black one might be something different. "This wavy line here that looks like a stream or a river. Think we can find it now that some of the snow is gone?"

She swallowed, gathering her strength, feeling a…responsibility to those children. If there was something out there that would provide a clue how to get them back home to those they belonged to, then she would do anything she could to help.

She was supposed to pick Jak up in a little while, and as far as she knew, he didn't yet have a phone, nor would she necessarily get service out there anyway, but…he would understand. When she told him what she'd been doing, he would understand her delay.

"Can we go back out and see the location of the graves?" she asked. She hated even contemplating the word graves , but what else could she say?

Agent Gallagher nodded, and they exited the heavily wooded area, walking to the back of Driscoll's house. The dog handlers had moved farther away, letting the dogs lead the way apparently, and from where she and Mark stood, she could see the locations of the two areas that had been dug up, men and women in white suits and masks bent over both spots. A wash of sadness moved through Harper, and she did her best to ignore it. For now. She knew the value—the relief—of finally having answers, and two families were going to get those now. She would focus on that while she was out there. She could cry for those children later.

No wonder Jak had hated Driscoll, gotten a bad feeling from him. The things he'd been doing and why…she shivered. It was unthinkable. Monstrous.

And for the first time, she wondered if Jak wasn't telling the whole truth about his relationship with Driscoll, wondered if he'd left some of the story out. Wondered if he'd not only been lied to but used in some more heinous way he was too ashamed to talk about.

Oh, Jak.

She held up the map, lining up the two graves. They did seem to be positioned in the same way the two red boxes were drawn on the map. Her gaze moved to the place beyond, the place where the dogs were now searching.

"There's a river in that direction and a few small streams as well," she told Agent Gallagher. If the wavy line in fact indicated water. She thought about it for a minute. "I could take you to each of them, but they're miles away. Whatever Driscoll marked could be anywhere. Although"—she studied the map again for a second—"the marker is drawn right on the edge of the wavy line." Not that anything was to scale. Harper blew out a breath. This felt like hunting for a needle in a haystack.

"I know," he said. "It's frustrating. But we might have a couple of starting points now, and it's more than we had. I'll tell the searchers we're taking the truck to drive closer to those rivers."

She nodded. They couldn't drive straight to any of those bodies of water. But they could get closer and then walk. A few times she'd taken fishermen to one of those streams that had an excellent fishing hole. "I'll wait here."

He walked away, stepping carefully over the soggy ground. Harper looked at the map again, wondering why she was even bothering. It was so simply drawn, with four shapes and a word. She already had it memorized.

Agent Gallagher was talking to one of the men now, and she looked briefly up at the blue sky, filled with fluffy white clouds, soaking in the peace of the place. Terrible things had happened there, but those terrible things had all been done by humans. She wished it would be left to the animals—and only the animals—once more.

As she turned in the direction of Jak's old cabin, the one she'd barged into not once but twice, a small smile curved her lips. She recalled sitting at his table, their heads bent close together, reading with him, kissing him… The memory brought a twinge of melancholy. That wonderful simplicity would never be fully recaptured.

As she began turning back in the direction of the graves and Agent Gallagher, her gaze snagged on the mountains, low-lying clouds softening their peaks, making them look more like a wavy line in the sky than sharp spikes. She turned back. What if… She held up the map. The graves—the two markers—were behind her now, but what if the wavy lines indicated the mountains instead of any number of various water sources in the opposite direction?

The same problem remained though. The mountains were far off in the distance—miles—the third marker could be anywhere between the graves and the base.

Unless… Her eyes moved from the exact wave of the lines to the mostly cloud-obscured peaks. They matched in a very simplistic way. Because it was the most simplistically drawn map possible. So, with that in mind, what if the square drawn underneath the mountain simply indicated a visual sense of where the mountains touched the earth from exactly where she was standing?

Agent Gallagher was still talking with the other men, so she walked around Driscoll's house, heading toward the copse of trees in front of her, focused on that dark area. A good hiding spot for…anything really. But what? If the two red markers had indicated the bodies of dead children, what other horrors might be lurking out there? She decided to turn back. She'd wait for Agent Gallagher.

Just as she began to turn, the sun hit the side of the forest, and she spotted a large grouping of rocks beyond a couple of sparse trees. She walked toward it, entering the trees, her eyes adjusting to the dim light. She'd seen other areas like this, other… yes. It was an old mine shaft, a door set in the side of the rock. Her heart started hammering. Was this what Isaac Driscoll had marked? And why?

She pulled on the door, expecting it to be locked, but with a rusty squeak, it opened, light flooding the space. She leaned inside, the air colder in there, the smell metallic and dank. Her heart rate increasing, she turned on her phone's flashlight and shone it into the room.

She sucked in a breath. The small room, an entrance to a deeper portion of the mine at the far side blocked off, had a table and a monitor and pictures tacked up to every portion of the walls.

Jak.

In all of them.

Oh God.

What is this?

Harper swallowed, cold dread seeping through her.

Several kerosene lanterns hung from rafters, and she stepped slowly toward the closest one, switching it on, brightening the space. She felt like she was in a dream, a nightmare, as she looked from one photo to another, her throat closing.

One was of Jak—for it had to be him, all of them seemed to be—as a small child, tears streaked down his dirty face, sitting on the snowy riverbank, his arms wrapped around his skinny legs. He was shivering. She could tell just by looking at it, and her heart cried out. She couldn't save him. He'd already saved himself. Had no choice even though a man had sat photographing his misery, not lifting a hand. The evil nearly brought her to her knees. What sort of person could do this? How?

There were other photos, hundreds, pictures of Jak biting into a bloody, fur-covered rabbit, his face gaunt, no more than ten. She cringed, looking away. How hungry, how desperate, had he been to bite into a fur-covered animal?

On the back wall were a series of pictures, and she stopped in front of them. Hot tears were streaking down her cheeks. Her heart leapt with horror when she saw that Jak wasn't alone in this series of photos. He was fighting a blond boy, who was skinny and obviously starving, sickly, and…deranged looking. There was a dead deer in the middle of them, and she wondered if that's why they had battled. Each photo was worse than the one before it, each scene like a movie she wanted to look away from but could not. And the end…she sobbed when she looked upon the photo of Jak, a wolf— was it his beloved Pup? —over his shoulder, the deer being dragged behind him, the dead boy lying in a pool of blood in the snow. The expression on Jak's face…utter devastation.

Oh God. It was too awful to bear. Had Jak killed the two children in those graves? Another sob came up her throat, and now she was outright crying.

She turned away, in a fog, spotting a bow and arrows leaning against the wall in the corner, one arrow clearly missing from its spot. She shook her head. Too much, too much. This was Driscoll's secret place. Those were Driscoll' s bow and arrows. Had Driscoll killed the woman? Jak's mother? Her mind spun.

There was a laptop on the desk, but, of course, the battery was dead. She wondered what horrors were contained on that small device and shuddered. A recorder lay next to the laptop, and she pressed the button, expecting that to be dead too, and startled when a man's voice began speaking.

"The possum is out today, crying in the snow, snot all over his face, eating clumps of grass and then throwing them up." Her chest tightened with sorrow. She pressed fast-forward, in a daze, a horror-filled daze. "The young buck seems to have made an appearance, gaining confidence yet still wary. He was wearing a new coat today. He's learning. Adapting. Although I still see the possum far more than I'd like."

Her finger pressed fast-forward again.

"That's it. There's the wolf," the man's voice said excitedly, and Harper could only imagine what he was watching. She clenched her eyes shut. "There's the Spartan. The soldier. The beast of all beasts." He whooped softly, and she could hear the pride contained in that sound. It disgusted her.

She pressed stop on the recorder, unable to hear anymore. Her heart was shattered. How had Jak survived this? How was he so gentle and warm and loving…despite this? He was no "savage." Far from it. He was the one who had been savaged by cruelty and evil.

When Agent Gallagher stepped inside, his eyes darting around, his face etched in shock, she was sobbing.