Two days later, he’d received a call from a friendly senior officer who’d told him to watch his back. Daniel, it turned out, had tried to get Will fired. “Just be careful,” the older man had said. “May might live in Golden Cove, but he has connections everywhere.”
Now the self-professed Lord of Golden Cove grimaced. “I’ll take up the chopper.” A pause before he added, “I’ll need a spotter. Might as well be you if you’re ready to go up.”
Will looked at the horizon through the breaks in the trees, saw the first blazing edge of daybreak. “I’ll call, inform the rest of the search party.” While he did that, Daniel went back inside the house to tell his wife his plans and to inform his secretary that he’d be late.
“Nik,” Will said when the call was answered, “I need you to run the entire ground operation for the time being. Go back over all the areas we did last night, search deeper where you can, and don’t forget the dump and other outlying areas.”
“No problem.”
Will stared out at the trees backlit in orange flame by the rising sun. “And spread the word that I want to know if people saw anything even vaguely related yesterday afternoon.” Will needed a starting point to begin the investigation—a piece of Miriama’s clothing, a description of a stranger in town, a report of a local seen with Miriama, something.
“Where are you?”
“I’m going up with Daniel.”
A taut silence, followed by, “I’ll make sure the others know, so they can signal if they spot something on the ground that could do with a bird’s-eye view.”
“I’m not sure what the cellular reception will be like in the chopper,” Will said, “but if you have a major discovery, get the people on the beach to all wave. It’ll be easy to spot that with how low we’ll be flying.”
“You’ll have a signal.”
It was only after the other man hung up that Will wondered why Nikau was so certain about the cell signal. He knew damn well that Nik wouldn’t have gone up with Daniel, and since Daniel was the only one who flew the sleek black machine…
Right.
It had to be Keira who’d contacted her ex-husband from the chopper. Either she’d done it at Daniel’s behest, or she’d sneakily messaged Nikau while her husband was busy at the controls. Neither sounded particularly good for Nikau’s already screwed-up head.
Daniel reappeared, having changed into jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt that was probably worth five times the monthly salary of most of the people in town. Neither one of them said a word as they headed to the chopper. Will had already grabbed the binoculars he kept in the SUV—in a place with terrain this rugged, it paid to have them handy.
Once inside the helicopter, he pulled on the headset that would allow him to talk to Daniel, then asked the other man to skim along the coastline first, before going inland and over the areas where Miriama was most likely to have run.
The sun’s rays broke completely through the last of the mist as they rose into the air. Will glimpsed a small and curvy woman with blonde-streaked brown hair on the verandah of the estate house, her elegantly boned face lifted to watch the chopper and her hands gripping the railing. She was wearing a red negligee and, despite their distance from the house, the wind from the chopper blades pasted the silk and lace of it against her body, outlining a shape that had driven many a man to his knees.
Then the chopper was up and at an angle that made it impossible to see Keira May any longer. Dismissing Daniel’s wife and Nikau’s obsession, Will raised the binoculars to his eyes and began to scan the landscape. It looked even more unforgiving from up here. Serrated black rocks that thrust up from the sand in huge broken shards, foaming water that took no prisoners, and a wilderness so tangled and thick that it was difficult to see beneath the canopy.
Daniel went down low without prompting, low enough to give Will the best possible chance of spotting a woman lying injured below. The one thing in their favor was Miriama’s bright choice of running gear.
“Did you try on the other side of the whirlpool?”
Will didn’t look away from the trees below, intent on spotting even a hint of hot pink or orange. “What’s on the other side of the whirlpool?”
“A kind of cave formed by the way the rocks fell there,” the other man said, his voice echoing through the headphones. “We used to hang out in it as teenagers—it’s safe at low tide.”
Daniel angled the chopper back over a particularly dense patch of trees so Will could take a second look. “There’s a running trail right above the cave that hardly anyone uses. It was totally overgrown the last time I overflew it, but Miriama likes to run and she’s good at it. Maybe she went there—it’s definitely a more challenging track.”
Will calculated how long Miriama would’ve had to run to get to that spot, knew it was far too long, but they had to check every possible option. Could be she’d been enjoying the run so much she’d gone far beyond her normal distance. “Let’s go.”
From above, the whirlpool looked like the mouth of hell, spilling and crashing and so dark that it felt as if its depths went on forever. Bones cold with the knowledge that if Miriama had fallen anywhere near the dangerous spot, she was gone, Will continued to scan through the binoculars.
But if he hadn’t known to look for the rock formation that formed a cave, he’d have missed it, it was so well camouflaged to match the neighboring rocks. A second later, he realized Daniel wasn’t the only one who’d thought of the spot. A male body stood in front of the stone archway, one hand on the rock.
Nikau.
Though he looked up at the sound of the chopper, Nikau didn’t wave. Instead, he ducked under the stone to disappear inside. “We should focus on the cliffs above,” Will said to Daniel. “Nikau can check out the cave.”
Fine lines bracketing his mouth, Daniel didn’t argue for once. They skimmed along the top edge of the cliffs back to the other side of the whirlpool and, while most of it was tangled growth that hadn’t been disturbed for years, Will did spot what might’ve been a disturbance in one small section. Using his phone, he asked one of the nearby searchers to have a look.
“Definite signs someone stood or walked through here,” the man confirmed. “But it’s not churned up like if Miriama went over the edge.” A small pause. “Almost as if a pig hunter maybe walked out of the trees behind me and came to stand here, look at the view.”
“Okay, leave it as it is,” Will said. “I want to have a look myself.”
Hanging up, Will considered the cave again and frowned. That cave was exactly the kind of secretive and private spot teenagers loved. It should’ve passed from teenage group to teenage group in a town like this, but for whatever reason, it had been abandoned. Forgotten.
It made him wonder what secrets lay within, what secrets tied Daniel to Nikau, Nikau to Anahera.
16
Anahera trudged through the forested track beside Vincent, conscious of the sound of the chopper fading into the distance. Nikau had designated her and Vincent a search team after they were two of the earliest people to turn up at the fire station. Peter Jacobs had also turned up around the same time, but thankfully, Nikau had matched the garage owner with one of the more experienced hunters.