CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Paige had hoped never to see this particular patch of woodland again. It was a local beauty spot, with a babbling stream and clearings filled with wildflowers, but for Paige, there could never be anything beautiful about it now. Not when every memory she had of it was bound up with the sight of her father’s corpse, there on the floor of the forest.
She and Christopher pulled up in a parking lot/picnic area that formed the starting point for a couple of the walking trails through the wood. In summer, on a holiday, the place would have been packed with people, but now it was pretty much empty.
Paige felt a thread of cold fury as she saw her mother’s car, but also a hint of satisfaction that at least they were in the right place.
“He’s here with her,” she said.
“Then we need to call in backup,” Christopher said. “I can have a tactical team here in twenty, and the local cops here in ten.”
“And what happens to my mother in the meantime?” Paige asked. She had another thought. “What happens when Adam hears that tactical team coming?”
Christopher gave her a serious look. “I don’t know, but it’s the safest way to do this, Paige.”
Paige shook her head. “Not for my mother. You’ve said all along that I’m the one who knows Adam; well, I know what he’ll do if he’s startled. He’ll kill her without a second thought, and then disappear into the woods. We’ll never find him, even with more people on the ground.”
She knew how much Christopher wanted to catch Adam, and she also guessed that he wanted to protect her mother. Neither of those things would be served by calling in backup.
She saw Christopher look away for a moment, but then nod tersely.
“Ok. It’s not procedure but protecting your mother’s life has to come first.”
“This is your best chance to catch Adam, too,” Paige said. “We know where he is at last. We can’t risk him running because he thinks something is wrong.”
Christopher seemed determined in that moment. “All right. I’m going to call backup, just in case this goes wrong, but after that, we’ll approach and try to resolve this without your mother being hurt.”
Paige knew that she couldn’t argue with that. She also knew that they couldn’t afford to waste any time with her mother’s life at stake.
Christopher made a call. “This is Agent Marriott. I’m requesting urgent backup to my location. Adam Riker is here, and he appears to have a hostage.”
He hung up. “They’re on their way. Lead the way to the spot.”
Paige hoped against hope that they would be able to save her mother before this turned into something even more deadly. She started to lead the way through the woods, her memory providing the route along the walking paths all too easily. She hadn’t walked this way in over a decade, hadn’t been able to bear being here, but the path was still burned into her brain indelibly by what had happened here.
The first part was easy, because it just meant following a couple of the trails deeper into the woods. There were markers along the route so that hikers and nature lovers could orient themselves, but Paige found herself using much older markers: a great oak that she had climbed as a girl, a twist in the path that she remembered having no reason to it, until she’d looked and found the stump of a tree, covered in undergrowth.
“Do you think that Adam will still be there?” Christopher asked. “Do you think he even knows the right spot to wait?”
Paige could hear the worry there, and it echoed some of her own worries. Every moment this took was one in which Adam might decide that he was bored of his new way of doing things, and might decide to kill her mother, then slip away. Paige had to tell herself that he wouldn’t do that, though.
“This is about me,” she said. “He took my mother to draw me in. That doesn’t work if he isn’t waiting at the end of all of this. And he’ll know the spot. He’ll have made sure that he does.”
“Yes, but what is he waiting to do?” Christopher asked.
Paige wasn’t sure about that part. She thought that Adam wanted to talk, that he’d gotten her attention, and now he wanted to show her how much he’d done for her, at least in his mind. But it was also possible that he was doing all of this to lure Paige in. It was possible that he’d seen that she was working with the FBI, and now he thought that the best way to get to her and to kill her was to take her mother from her.
For all Paige knew, she could be walking straight into a trap.
Even so, she kept walking, leading the way down the trail to a marker that she knew far too well. It had been this marker where she’d left the trail all those years ago, this marker that had eventually led to her staring down at her father’s body, at the work of a serial killer.
Was she going to find herself staring at her mother’s body the same way today? Paige hoped not, with every fiber of her being. She couldn’t stand the thought of her mother being hurt, certainly not here, like this.
Paige was so caught up in her thoughts that for a moment or two, she didn’t notice the note pinned to the trail marker. It read simply Paige, come alone.
Paige picked it up and stared at it. The demand was simple and clear, the threat implicit. If she didn’t do what Adam wanted, then there was every chance that he would murder her mother. If she did…
“No way are we doing what this psycho wants,” Christopher said.