45

We had six trains through Hungry Horse last night,” the Northwestern dispatcher told Stevens over the phone. “Four eastbound and two westbound.”

Stevens wrote this down in his notebook. “How many stopped in town?”

“At the siding? Let’s see.” The dispatcher hummed to herself. “One of the eastbounds and both westbounds. The eastbound didn’t stop for long; it was a hotshot, containers to Chicago.”

“And the westbounds?”

“Coal trains. Headed for the coast.”

Stevens wrote this down, too. “Remote-controlled engines?”

“Yessir, on both of them. We can pack on more tonnage if we cut them into the middle of the train.”

“Sure.” Stevens drummed his pen on the desktop, thinking. Windermere had called the Northwestern Railroad from Eureka that morning, as soon as word of Pam Moody’s disappearance had reached them. The railroad had checked all trains running through Hungry Horse. They hadn’t found any riders.

“What time did those westbounds come through?” he asked the dispatcher.

More humming. “Um,” she replied, “the first one was around midnight, the next at four in the morning. Stopped for about an hour, both of them.”

Stevens underlined the second train in his notebook. Underlined it again, for good measure. “That’s our train,” he said. “If our rider’s involved in this thing, he left on one of those engines.”

“You want to stop it again?” The dispatcher sounded skeptical. “My boss said we can’t just keep stopping trains without any proof—”

“Don’t sweat it,” Stevens told her. “He’s long gone anyhow. Can you get me a list of where else that train stopped last night and this morning?”

“I could, but it might take a little time.”

“That’s no problem.” Stevens read off the sheriff’s detachment’s phone number. “Call me back, would you please?”

He ended the call. Turned to where Kerry Finley was leaning over a topographical map of the region, spread out on Deputy Renner’s desk. Finley looked up as Stevens hung up the phone. “So what are we looking for?”

Stevens joined her at the desk. “Hiding places,” he said, studying the map. “Anywhere the ghost rider could have dumped Pamela Moody.”

There were two roads heading north out of Hungry Horse, across the Flathead River and the Northwestern main line. They were forestry roads, twisting and winding up into the mountains, rough gravel at the best of times—and in January, unplowed snow.

One of the roads crossed the tracks near the Northwestern passing siding, where the coal train would have been sitting at four o’clock that morning. The second crossed the tracks just before the tracks crossed the river; there was only the main line and the long, narrow bridge.

“We’ll start with this one,” Stevens told Finley, pointing at the road nearest to the passing track. “Easier to hop a train when it’s standing still, right?”

—

They took Finley’s SUV across the Flathead River. The bridge was low, and the river was mostly snow and ice, but in the middle, where the current was strongest, the water hadn’t frozen over. It ran deadly black, cold just to look at it, and Stevens felt a chill as Finley piloted the truck toward the north shore.

If Pam Moody wound up in that river, she’s a Popsicle. No chance she’d survive. And that current could take her body anywhere.

No sense worrying about that now. For all Stevens knew, Windermere had stumbled onto Pam Moody, alive and in chains in Reg Winter’s basement. He checked his phone: one bar, and flickering. If they went any farther, he’d be out of contact again.

The road bisected the Northwestern main line at the west end of the siding. There was a path to the switch and an equipment locker, and then the road branched off and split away from the tracks, climbing into the mountains from two different directions, curving up the undulating terrain before disappearing around curves of thick stands of fir trees. Finley stopped the truck. “Which way?” she asked.

Stevens scanned the two roads. The snow had fallen thick here, and apparently uniformly; he couldn’t see any telltale tire tracks in either direction.

“He can’t have gone far,” Stevens told Finley. “He had to dump Moody’s truck and then hike back to the siding—”

“In a hell of a blizzard,” Finley said.

“Exactly. He wouldn’t need to do a big expedition. Just get deep enough that it’ll look like she got herself stuck. That truck’s going to be close, if it’s out here.”

“It’d better be.” Finley gestured out the window, gestured up, where the sun was already closing in on the tops of the western mountains, a lonely bright patch against the lifeless gray sky. “We’re losing light already. Night comes on quick this time of year.”

“I don’t want to be out here at night,” Stevens said, pulling open the passenger door and stepping down into the snow. “But I sure as hell don’t want to go to bed without knowing, either. Let’s split up.”

—

So they split. Finley took the west road, Stevens the east, slogging up the grade, searching the snow for any sign of human life. It was cold in the forest, bitterly cold; he’d grabbed a spare winter coat from the Hungry Horse detachment, bundled it tight around himself. The Hungry Horse deputies couldn’t do anything about Stevens’s boots, though; his socks were soaked through, his toes numb, before he’d made it thirty feet from the truck.

It was quiet in the forest, too, nearly silent. Stevens breathed hard as he plowed ahead, every breath sounding like an avalanche in the stillness. He scanned the trees, the road ahead, searching for the gleam of metal, the glint of light reflected against glass, that would signal he’d found what he was looking for.

But Stevens didn’t see anything. And when he’d walked five minutes or so, the sun setting at his back, he stopped to catch his breath and turned around and couldn’t see the SUV anymore, couldn’t see Finley, could see only forest and snow and the gray sky above, the shadows growing long all around him.

The stillness was eerie. This was not a friendly place, not now, with the light fading and the temperature dropping. This was a place that didn’t need help to kill you. But the rider was out here, somewhere in these mountains. And that made it eerier still.

Stevens drew his service pistol from its holster, gripped it through his gloves. Knew he was being silly, knew the rider was long gone, if he’d been here at all. Knew any other predator in these woods would require significantly more stopping power than his .40 Smith & Wesson could provide.

The pistol made him feel better, though, so he kept it drawn as he pushed ahead, searching the darkness in between the trees, watching the shadows grow longer. He wasn’t scared, exactly; Stevens was a rational man, an experienced outdoorsman and a competent cop, and he wasn’t going to freak out over a walk in the woods.

All the same, Stevens felt a definite surge of relief when Finley’s voice broke the stillness, hollering out from behind him, down the western road somewhere, calling Stevens to come take a look at what she’d found.