Page 26 of Light My Fire

“So’s mine,” said Hanes, one of the Zulies.

“How long have they been gone?” Seth asked. “Anyone get up in the night, see anything?”

Tucker couldn’t help but look at Stevie, who stared at Seth with a stricken expression. “I fell asleep,” she whispered, and Tucker winced.

This wasn’t her fault. Not in the least. Tucker should have known better than to let his guard down. They should have posted guards over the prisoners as well as the fire.

He rolled to his knees and nearly face planted, the stabbing pain in his swollen knee cutting off his breath. He grabbed onto the boulder and eased to his feet.Walk it off—

He spotted Stevie rounding back to him, her voice cutting low. “They’re all gone—even my dad. Do you think…” Her eyes were wide, and she swallowed. “What if March figured it out?”

It took Tucker just a second, but he did the quick math and added up her concern. “Do you think Eugene took him? As ahostage?”

She tightened her mouth, did a quick nod.

“I don’t know, Stevie. I didn’t figure out that Archer was your dad—I don’t know why March would.”

She seemed to hang on his words. “I need a map of the area.” Her hair had come loose from her ponytail, wild around her face, her pale green eyes sparking. “I knew March would run—Iknewit.”

He couldn’t stop himself from putting his hands on her shoulders. “Take a breath. We’ll find them—”

She shrugged away from him.

His expression grim, Riley came over with a map and handed it to Stevie.

“Riley, get on the horn to Skye, see if she has an update on the fire.”

He nodded and headed toward the gear.

Stevie rolled the map out on the boulder. A topo map of the area, it covered ten miles in each direction.

“We’re here,” Tucker said, pointing to the ridge.

Stevie tucked her hair behind her ears. “Okay, if I were on the run, I’d want to get to the highway. It’s about five miles due west of here, but it’s over rough country. They have to cross a river and a 1,400-foot peak. They’ll need to go around that…”

“Unless they went south, along the mountainside. There’s a couple of homesteads marked on the map, although who knows if they’re inhabited.”

“Some of them are—I know a few of these people. Not to mention the resorts and dogsled training camps, and…campgrounds.” She looked up at him. “That’s where they’re headed. To the Troublesome Creek campground. It’s about four miles southwest of here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s where Eugene March was apprehended. He was camped out there and one of the campers reported him for cannabis use. The forest service called it in, and the Copper Mountain office sent up someone to check it out. He got mad, made some threats, and they arrested him. Once he got into the system, we found him. He’d been on the run for six weeks after breaking out of an Anchorage holding cell after a pretrial hearing.”

She refolded the map. “He might have a weapons cache there. Or transportation, and if we don’t get there first…well, Alaska is a big state.”

“Just how dangerous is this guy?” Riley asked. He and the other jumpers had shadowed in for the conversation.

“Dangerous.” She drew in a breath. “I know he looks like he should be on this side of the law, a DA or something, but…well, his first crime was the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a girlfriend while he was attending the University of Chicago. We tracked him across the country to Seattle where another woman had gone missing. This time a co-worker from a bank where he worked. She was missing for three months, and every day, March went to work, processed loans, and acted like the boy next door. Her body was found in the basement of his apartment two weeks after he quit his job and moved away…to Anchorage.”

She folded up the map. “Can I keep this?”

Tucker nodded.

She pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “The last victim was a cop. Only he didn’t know that when he started dating her. She swiped right and met him for dinner. He was handsome and charming, and she had no idea that three dates later she’d wind up his prisoner. She managed to escape one cold night, walking the streets barefoot in just a T-shirt and shorts, and ran into a local convenience store. The cops stormed his apartment, but he’d already cleared out.”

She pulled a short-barreled bear gun out of her jacket pocket and opened the chamber. “They caught him on Highway 2, just before he hit the Canadian border.”

She seemed to be counting the rounds, then she closed the chamber. “He’d just picked up an eighteen-year-old female hitchhiker, backpacking to the Lower 48.”

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