30

They sifted through Kerry Finley’s cold cases at the Gold Spike, and when Hank kicked them out—with undisguised relish—they took their act back to the Northwestern Hotel.

Outside, the snow fell thick, the wind bitterly cold and fierce, rocking the windowpanes. Windermere took the bed by the door, spreading her files out on the bedspread and forcing herself not to speculate about the last time the innkeeper changed the sheets. She had other things to think about.

Deputy Finley had brought an encyclopedia of unsolved cases. Every dead or missing woman from the Cascades to the Rockies, suspected foul play or not, for the last decade. Windermere counted sixty-five different files.

“Of course, not all of these are going to be murders,” Finley said. “And not every homicide is going to be the work of the same guy. People kill each other up here: domestic disputes, robberies—heck, people come here to escape. It stands to reason you’d have a few bad apples.”

“So how do we pare this list down?” Windermere asked.

“Proximity to the railroad, for starters.” This was Stevens, who had a map open on his bed of Butcher’s Creek and the surrounding environs. He’d been studying it for a while.

“Sheriff Truman’s Jane Doe was barely ten feet from the tracks when they found her,” Stevens said. “And look here.” He held up the map, pointed. “That’s the Benson ranch. Behind it, that line there is the forestry road where Kelly-Anne Clairmont was discovered.”

Windermere looked at the map, got the point quickly. The forestry road curved away from the Benson ranch, dropped down toward the creek itself—and the Northwestern main line. “I remember,” she said. “You think the tracks are the connection?”

“It’s not just the tracks. There’s a passing siding there, see? It’s like a stoplight; trains wait there to let other trains by. Mila’s friend Warren mentioned stories about a ghost rider up here, remember?”

“Yeah,” Windermere said. “He also said the killer wasn’t human.”

“Human or ghost, if our unsub is a rider, he could have ditched Kelly-Anne Clairmont’s car and her body, made it look like she’d wandered off into the woods, and he could have hiked down to the tracks, waited for a train to stop, and climbed aboard and vanished. The storm would have covered up his trail.”

“It also would have killed him,” Finley said. “Riding a train in that blizzard? There’s not much protection on those freight cars. You’re exposed to the elements. Below-zero temperatures, and that wind? You wouldn’t survive a mile.”

Windermere looked at Stevens for an answer. She could tell by his expression he didn’t have one. “Sure,” he said, “but humor me here. We have sixty-odd cold cases and all night on our hands. If this pattern doesn’t fit, we’ll look for another.”

The wind gusted and the lights flickered momentarily. “What do we have to lose?” Stevens said. “From the looks of that storm, we’re going to be here awhile.”