Page 88 of Cold as Hell

With a trail Storm could follow half-asleep—plus three pairs of eyes on alert—I don’t need to do much more than guide Storm and encourage her. When she stops to snuffle the snow, I move up alongside her and bend over as best I can.

The snow here isn’t as deep. It’s an open area with scant tree cover, and the snow has blown away, leaving it only a few inches deep. I still can’t tell what Storm’s snuffling until I spot a small hole in the snow a foot to my right and then another beyond it. Telling Storm to stay where she is, I peer into the hole.

“Blood,” Dalton says.

I glance up to find he’s walked past us and is looking at another spot.

“Blood drops in the snow,” Jacob says. “They’ve sunk in, but we can see them.”

“It’s from that,” Anders says.

He’s pointing at one of the few trees. Dalton’s already bearingdown on it. I waddle over as he takes a piece of fabric from the branches. It’s dark with blood.

“Part of a shirt,” he says, holding it up for me.

It’s the torn bottom section of a standard-issue jersey. It’s been ripped, and it’s drenched with drying blood.

“Is that Yolanda’s?” Jacob says quietly.

I shake my head. “The shirt is too big for either Yolanda or Lynn. It’s a lure.”

Jacob frowns over at me.

“Jerome said he heard something in the forest,” Anders says. “That’s how he got Yolanda to go in with him. This would have been the lure. He says it sounded like it came from this direction. Wait, is that blood in the snow? Holy shit, what’s that in the tree?”

“How the hell did he get it in the tree?” Dalton says. “These are the only tracks.”

I squint across the clearing. Then I track the blood droplets.

“Threw it.” I point to the tree line off to our left. “He’d have stood over there and thrown it. Drops fall and it gets tangled in the tree.”

“He was our snowball pitcher for a reason,” Anders mutters. “He has one hell of an arm.”

“So he comes in over there.” Dalton points. “Where Yolanda won’t later see his trail. He throws it to create a tableau guaranteed to get her attention.”

“Is anyone going to ask where the blood came from?” Jacob says. “That’s a lot of it.”

“It’s not blood.” I gesture for him to get closer to the rag and sniff it.

“Ketchup?” he says. “And something else?”

“Some mixture that looks a lot like blood, at least on a piece of fabric and some drops in the snow.”

“Uh, guys?” Anders says. “There’s something over there, too.”

I can’t see what he’s pointing at. The perils of being a short woman with tall guys. I start heading that way when a contraction hits, and I manage to hide it by glancing sharply left, as if I heard something. Then I shake my head before anyone can comment.

The footprints proceed toward whatever Anders saw, though they meander a bit, and I can imagine Yolanda in tracking mode, scanning the clearing, walking around trying to find anything else.

Then she does. There’s a red patch in the snow, as if something else had been there but is now gone. I don’t spend more than a second looking at that, though. What seizes my attention are the marks in the snow. The smaller boot prints from Yolanda, and then the spot where she crouched for a better look… and the drag marks behind it, the wild thrashing as she struggled against Jerome hauling her backward into the thick woods.

I hurry after those marks. We all do—Anders and Jacob going on ahead with Storm, while Dalton stays with me, making sure I’m not left behind.

Jerome set this all up in advance. Then he brings Yolanda and leads her along until she’s engrossed in what has happened here, worrying that someone else is missing, wanting to process the scene as best she can before alerting Anders, trusting that Marlon has her back because she might not be interested in him romantically, but she trusts him as a person, as a colleague.

She bends to examine something in the snow. He needs that distraction. She’s smart, and she’s probably armed with her own gun, but her guard is down and she’s crouched, and it’s easy to grab her and drag her off and get her gun away before she can pull it on him.

I see the signs of that final struggle in the snow, where he must have gone for the gun and she tried to get to it, but he’s so much bigger and stronger and her brain is still trying to process what is happening.

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