Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(27)

One piece of the puzzle. Only one.

What did you find, Matilda? What did you want to tell me? Why did they throw you down the stairs? What did you know?

This was going nowhere, so he tried to put it aside. He choked down a protein bar from his dwindling stash. His stomach was cramping with hunger, but cranky about actually dealing with any food that he put into it.

He flung himself onto the bed, which stank of dust, smoke, and mold. Pulled the pillow over his head to block out light and sound, but that left him choked with detergent, dead skin flakes, and dust mites. Plus toxic exhalations from cleaning solvents, paint, wood paneling.

He placed Lara in the center of his mind, and let everything else fade back, like Connor had taught him. To let his mind become wide and soft behind the shield. A net, asking a question. Waiting, soft and quiet and receptive, for an answer. No matter how fleeting or small.

Lara. Matilda. Give me something. Throw me a bone. Anything.

Logic demanded he get some rest, sleep. But logic had been the lowest * on the totem pole of his life for a while, and he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, not with this smell assaulting his nose, and this quantity of freak-out hormones in his system. He zinged like a tuning fork, in spite of his shield. In fact, this excitement seemed to be generated from deep inside the shield. A weird new development.

He sat crosslegged on the bed, staring at the horned hill in Matilda’s photograph. Then he pulled up topographical maps for the area that the geospatial data had indicated. He measured the actual distance between the two horns, for scale. Calculated the probable distance that Matilda had been from the hill when she took the photograph. Then he did the same thing with Edie’s drawing.

His best estimate was that Matilda had been about ten miles closer to the horned hill than the chain-link–covered window in the drawing, and about twelve degrees off to the left.

Back to the map. He superimposed the map over a satellite photograph of the mountains in questions. Used the cursor to block out the most likely wedge to study. In Edie’s drawing, tree tops waved at the exact level of the window, with hills rising up on both sides. There weren’t a lot of skyscrapers out that way, in the rugged foothills of the Cascades, so that building had to be perched on a hill with a clear, unobstructed view, maybe looking up a river valley. He studied everything in that range, and a good distance outside it as well.

There were only a few roads. Any structure would necessitate a road. Maybe that was a dangerous assumption, but he’d make it anyway, not having access to a helicopter. That narrowed it down.

He committed the whole damn area on the map to memory. Not hard, with his senses souped up. His capacity for photographic memory was ratcheted up to maximum capacity. Information organized itself in his mind—every bend and curve of streams, roads, hills. Every bridge, house, barn, indelibly marked onto his brain and fixed on a three-dimensional mental grid.

She could be in one of them. And that electrifying possibility just did a colossal humdinger on his long-suffering glands.

A vague preliminary plan was forming in his head as he left the hotel and crossed the highway to the big cheap clothing chain that was opposite. The Big & Tall hadn’t had much in the way of sporting gear, but at the store he found black jeans, a black-pile sweatshirt, and a forest camo jacket. It was too green for the dry side of the Cascade mountains, desert camo might be better, but it was better than nothing. He bought an olive drab ski mask, too. Who knew.

He bought his gear, and donned it in the store restroom. The new-clothes stiffness and starch galled him, since his skin was still hyper-sensitive, but tough shit. He couldn’t go around naked.

Out in his truck, he got out the waist holster for the Glock, and buckled it on. The black sweatshirt and camo jacket covered it nicely. Carrying concealed, no Oregon permit. So he was an outlaw, too.

He gassed up the truck, and got on the road. The eastbound highway down the Gorge was dark and empty at this late hour, and the stress chemicals his body had cooked up kept his foot heavy on the gas.

Something had changed in his head. He was feeling again, but it wasn’t shorting him out, as it had done earlier at the wedding, or even at Matilda’s funeral. He was cautiously encouraged by this. His shield stayed firm, but there was more room inside of it. It no longer felt like being locked in a Port-O-San. It breathed, and he breathed with it.

He spent the hours it took to drive to Kolita Springs lecturing himself about not getting his hopes up. This lead could dead-end into a brick wall anytime, just like all his other leads had done.

But Jesus, if she were still alive? And talking to him?

That, of course, opened up a whole new can of worms. Frivolous and irrelevant, compared to the issues of life and death facing him, but bonehead that he was, he wanked on about it anyway. Those hot erotic dreams in which he’d freely indulged every horny whim his overheated imagination could cook up with the red-hot dream girl. Thinking he was just fantasizing, in blessed privacy.

But if he hadn’t been? If she’d participated, somehow, in all of that, even telepathically? It wasn’t like he’d given her any choice.

Thinking of it made his face eggplant purple and his cock strain in his jeans. For God’s sake. He would never be able to look the woman in the face. If she still existed.

So much for the new, chill Miles. He was returning to his old more-or-less overwrought self.

Once he left the larger highway, he got onto a country route that led up into the mountains, taking note of every bend in the road and structure he passed, and comparing it to the aerial view in his memory. The road turned to gravel. He crossed a narrow bridge over a dried-out river bed, a wide plain of bleached, scattered, fist-sized rocks. Easy offroading, for a tough vehicle like his own, if he could find a good access point. He wound steadily up the hill, and spied a chain link fence with security cameras, mounted at regular intervals.