CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Starr started down the ridgeline, deeper into the wilderness area. The temperature, which had been dropping by the minute, was the only thing that kept her from crawling right out of her skin. If she could, she would unzip it and step out into the air as a new thing. But here she was, the weight of all that she carried wearing on her like concrete boots.

As she neared what looked like a game trail veering toward Manitou, she realized she was the only living creature not hunkered down. Every little thing knew the weather was bad.

She could see her breath, and she thought briefly about finding a place to take shelter, but from what? She couldn’t hide from the storm that posed the real threat, the storm that enveloped her heart and mind and memories. It had been a mistake to come here, and a bigger mistake to think she could stay. It was time to move on to some other life. The expectation that she could make a difference was too much to bear.

She had waited too long to look—really look—for Chenoa. Was she too late? One more woman doubted, ignored. She was as bad as the rest. As bad as all of them. Worse, because she should have known better.

There was never enough time for both the job and Quinn. Starr had been so preoccupied, always preoccupied, with her work. Truth was, it had been wrong between them for a long time, like a door was being slowly pushed shut.

Quinn had been a wild girl with a big laugh and rowdy hair; then, little by little, she had begun to disappear in ways Starr didn’t want to notice. If she came home late from working a case, Quinn would be in her bed in the dark, huddled over a dim screen. She stayed with friends more and more, but that was, in a way, a relief. It meant Starr was able to get the hours in.

They’d fought too. Loud shouting matches and long silences. There was an inevitability about it. That’s not to say I didn’t check up on her, thought Starr. But how does any parent ever really know? The little secrets move too fast, until one of them bumps against something big.

The game trail widened, taking Starr into a clearing where there wasn’t shelter from the wind. It tore at her collar and burned her skin. From what she remembered of the map, she would reach a series of ravines that led into Manitou. The terrain was growing rougher and she’d need to watch her step. She was now miles from where she’d started.

That the blood from the abandoned house was human and not animal was a surprise, but she was relieved she’d had the foresight to collect it and have it analyzed. Even if she’d fallen under the detective’s curse of not seeing what was right in front of her, at least her training had kicked in.

Starr pulled out her cell phone, checked for service. The line she’d cut through the grass, its seedy heads bent against the wind, closed behind her as she pulled a glove from one hand to dial. Silence, then two beeps in quick succession. Dropped call. She redialed. Nothing. Redialed again. Shit. She’d stopped trying to reach Winnie and gone straight to 9-1-1, ready to rouse Dexter Springs police, the county sheriff, anyone.

Starr tapped the cell phone against the twill of her uniform pants while she looked at the game trail she’d traveled. If she went back to where she’d had reception she’d lose valuable time. Starr looked at the sky, where the roiling clouds were becoming lower and heavier by the moment. She thought of the weather alerts she’d ignored, thinking she’d find Chenoa at the van and be back at the marshal’s office before the storm rolled in.

Bulletins had ticked through the old fax machine at the office, where they’d floated to the floor, drifting into a pile of warnings. A fax machine, of all things. She shook her head and tucked her hands in her armpits. Even with her insulated winter gloves, her fingers ached from the cold.

She’d been a fool to go out in this weather. But she’d been a fool to take this job in the first place. A fool to think she’d ever been a good mother, a fool to think she could make it right and, most of all, a fool to think she’d ever recover from losing her little girl.

Starr started to sob, hot tears searing across her freezing lashes. She would have done, would do, anything—literally anything—to change it. She was overwhelmed with thoughts of Quinn and revenge and killing, not anyone else but herself, in that slow suicide she crawled into every night.

Despite her years of training—and experience—she’d made a rookie mistake. She should have gone back and figured out a different way to traverse the miles into the hinterland, where the granite and shale rose harsh as the weather.

Starr imagined borrowing a four-wheeler, but she’d had to walk only a few feet into the woods to know the underbrush was too thick for anything on wheels. A horse, maybe. But where would she have gotten one? There were horses grazing on everything from front yards to pastureland, but to ride one? She’d only ever ridden the L train and the occasional city bus. And she couldn’t have spared the time to wait anyway. She knew now, with certainty, that Chenoa faced death—or worse—and that every single second mattered in the bid to save her.

Holder.

She set one foot in front of the other, crunching through the frost glazing every dead and living thing around her.

She’d killed Quinn’s killer. Overkilled. She’d never pretended that she’d track him down and only rough him up, never fooled herself in that way. She knew she’d kill him. Knew it from the beginning, as surely and steadily as she leaned into the sleet and wind now. When she pulled the trigger, when she felt the kick of the Glock again and again, she had been ready to get caught. She wouldn’t even stand trial. They’d bring her in and she would confess everything. The confessional. A sacred telling of sins.

Starr didn’t care who heard the shots that night. She was glad there was one less monster who could kill his prey in a thousand different ways, not all of them physical.

She’d tracked him to a long stretch between buildings, near the L’s elevated tracks but remote enough that even the beat cops didn’t care who took a piss against the bricks. It was a slim cut between tenements cleared of their working poor as part of an initiative to clean up the area by declaring it a PID—a public improvement district—which came with earmarked funds. Columnists called the initiative what it was, gentrification. She didn’t give a shit either way. The building was stripped of anything useful and slated for demolition, but this created a cover for vermin—animal and human. An out-of-the-way place to get a fix, or sell a fix, sell anything, even oneself. To scratch the never-ending itch.

He’d been easy enough to tail. Easier to hate. The way he ran the girls, pulled new ones in, got them hooked or hooking, or both. It was a world away from her daughter’s, or so she’d thought. A world away. A universe. A life her daughter would never see, save in a movie or maybe on the internet. Yet here she’d been, a little lamb like all those other girls. A victim.

A victim! If Starr had done one thing right, it had been to warn her daughter off sketchy situations, people, places. Never to be a victim. To know she had power. To listen to that small voice that said Danger ahead. Starr had coached her, educated her, shared with her how to avoid the things that could make her vulnerable: candy laced with drugs on playgrounds, some new scheme every few years; strangers good at grooming on social media, in real life; powders slipped into drinks; helpers who were wolves in sheep’s clothing. Trust the fear, she’d told her. It will save your life.

Except it hadn’t. Her daughter had gone and done it anyway. The parties, the lies, the friends her daughter ditched for a more exciting time. How had she failed her own daughter so deeply? So ultimately?

Starr wouldn’t fail her that night, not with the man in her sights. Not with her daughter’s precious little body, polish still on her toes, lying in the morgue, awaiting her turn for an autopsy. It didn’t really matter to Starr what story it told. It was an ending, nothing more.

An ending.

And that’s what she’d sought that night in Chicago. An ending. She was a raw nerve. She wanted to set herself on fire. To shave the hair off her head. To stick a knife into her belly, the blade so sharp she wouldn’t feel the slice of skin and organ until the blood ran down to her softest places.

From her partner, Starr knew the circumstances, the who. She’d already discovered the terrible how. Discovered it like her own death when, after all that searching, and pinging of cell phones, she’d run down that alley in a panic. When she’d found Quinn lying against the building, she’d pulled her body to her, felt the weight of her only child slump against her chest. Starr had become a wild thing then, a howling creature; felt her eyeteeth elongate into fangs, her jaw pop and dislocate. She was venom and pain. She was a killer.

An autopsy confirmed the overdose, the damage behind the blood. When the bereavement cards piled up, when the funeral happened, when her daughter’s little body was lowered into the dark grave—Starr still worrying that she’d be cold—she’d been on administrative leave. Take some time, department officials had said. They knew she wasn’t normal anymore, could smell it on her.

Their instincts were right.

She was a predator—then and now. She wasn’t going to let this happen again, not to Chenoa. She wouldn’t be too late this time. Chenoa wasn’t her daughter—but weren’t they all her daughters after all?

Chenoa was alive, she was out here and Starr was going to find her. She felt the sleet hit her cheeks and decided to walk on, no matter the cost.