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Almost sagging with relief, she watched the car make its slow, winding way toward her. To her surprise, the car stopped fifty yards downhill from her. She started to yell at the driver as he stepped out of the car into the bright moonlight. For some reason her breath caught in her throat and held her silent.
Why is he stopping there?
As she watched, he slid a small, slender body out of the backseat and hefted it over his shoulder. A very long striped, light-and-dark scarf was draped around his neck. The woman’s long blond hair hung almost to his butt, nearly even with the length of his scarf.
Morgan instinctively stepped back into the shadows a moment before the stranger looked in her direction. Her heart was racketing in her chest, and she held her hands over her mouth to keep him from seeing her breath in the cold air.
She stared hard at the license plate of the car, so she could identify this probable killer to the police. But it was too far away to make out the numbers. She had no idea of the make or model. To her, it was simply a dark-colored, four-door car.
The man disappeared into the undergrowth at the side of the road. He came back empty-handed five minutes later, got into his car and drove away.
Morgan realized what a narrow escape she’d had. What if she’d shouted out to the man? What if she’d become his next victim? No one-not Nash, not Carter-would have known what had become of her. She chastised herself for naming Nash first.
You’ve been spending time with Nash. That’s all. You miss Carter. You love Carter. In six months you will marry Carter.
If she survived the night.
When the car disappeared from sight, she struggled back onto the road and began hobbling in the opposite direction the killer had taken. Even with her makeshift cane, her ankle hurt. Her chest hurt. And she was very, very cold.
Morgan saw the headlights appear over her shoulder before she heard the car wheels on the stone-and-gravel road. She turned and saw a dark-colored car. For an instant, she was afraid it was the killer. She glanced at her watch. Ten minutes had passed.
Surely this was someone else. Just in case, she would stay closer to the forest than the road. If the driver was wearing that distinctive scarf, she’d fade into the forest and hide.
She cried out in agony when she raised her arm to flag down the dark-colored car. She saw it had four doors and felt a shiver run down her spine.
When the car stopped, the power window slid down on the passenger’s side. Morgan held a hand to her aching chest as she leaned to peer inside. And nearly cried out with relief. The driver was a woman. There was no sign of a scarf, dark-and-light-striped or any other color.
“You need a ride?” the woman asked.
“Yes. Thank you,” Morgan said as she opened the door and slid into the amazing warmth of the car. “I nearly hit a deer. I ended up driving off the road.”
“You’re bleeding.”
Morgan touched her chin where the blood had dried. “I think I bit my lip when my car flipped.”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Don’t I know it! I was starting to think I’d have to walk home. This road doesn’t seem to get much traffic.”
“No, it doesn’t,” the woman said.
As Morgan pulled the door closed and reached carefully for the seat beat, she saw the fringe of a navy-and-white-striped scarf on the floor of the backseat. And hissed in a tortured, terrified breath.
“I didn’t see your car,” the woman said as she put her car in gear and continued in the direction she’d been driving.
Morgan hesitated, then said, “It’s back a ways, off in the bushes.”
“My husband just got home from work,” the woman said. “I asked him to pick me up some cigarettes on his way home, but he forgot-lucky for you.”
Morgan was very much afraid that she was riding in a murderer’s car-with his wife. Did the woman know what her husband had done? Was she an accomplice? Morgan realized she might have made a mistake getting into the car. “Do you have a cell phone I could use?”
“Sorry,” the woman said, shaking her head. “There’s a pay phone at the convenience store where we’re headed.”
The woman’s cell phone rang.
Morgan’s neck hurt when she jerked it toward the woman, who reached into the pocket of her fur-trimmed coat and retrieved a cell phone, flipped it open and said, “You were right. There was someone on the road. Yeah, she’s in the car with me now.”
Morgan didn’t think, she simply grabbed the wheel and yanked it hard. And found herself headed for another large tree trunk.
“Let go of the wheel!” the woman cried.
Morgan heard the shriek of tearing metal. And a woman’s scream.
The police would eventually have checked out the GPS on Morgan’s cell phone, but Nash was able to access the information immediately. Thank God she’d left it on. If she was still in possession of her phone, she was about an hour north of Chevy Chase, somewhere along Route 40 northwest of Frederick, Maryland.
Nash made good time on I-270 north and merged onto US-40. The coordinates he’d put into his GPS sent him to Hamburg Road. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and the sudden chill had created patches of fog, making visibility iffy.
He stopped at a convenience store before he headed up the mountain and showed a picture of Morgan and described her vehicle to the clerk.
The man shook his head. “I’d have remembered a woman like that.”
He showed the picture to another man in the store and said, “Have you seen this woman?”
The man shook his head.
There would be no moonlight for hours, and even then, Nash wondered if it would penetrate the thick undergrowth on the sides of the road. The pavement ended and he found himself driving on a rough rock-and-gravel road. Except where humans had carved hiking trails, the mountain terrain seemed impenetrable.
What the hell had she been doing up here? It seemed impossible he could find a lone woman in this vast wilderness. Except he had precise GPS coordinates that told him where to find her cell phone.
Nash stopped when his headlights picked out the torn-up grass where Morgan’s Jeep had apparently left the road. His heart was in his throat as he grabbed a flashlight and headed off into the undergrowth.
The trail of destruction left a clear path to follow. He found Morgan’s cell phone near a crushed elderberry tree. He hurried forward, but when he reached her car, it was empty.
“Morgan!” he shouted, feeling frantic. “Morgan! Are you out here?”
He was greeted by an eerie silence.
He turned in a circle and saw a light down the hill in the distance, on the opposite side of the road, moving through the underbrush. That must be her! He ran back to his SUV and raced down the winding road, despite the fog that had gathered in the hollows, afraid the moving light wouldn’t be visible when he got to where he’d seen it from above.
When he reached the bottom of the hill, he found a rusted-out Chevy pickup parked where he’d seen the light. But the light he’d seen from above had disappeared.
He heard the engine ticking on the pickup, so he knew it hadn’t been there long. He shined his flashlight in the front seat of the truck. When he tried the doors, they were locked. Then he checked the truck bed and saw blood. Dried blood. Had Morgan been lying in the bed of that truck sometime during the past eighteen hours?
Nash swore in frustration as he tried to find a way through the thick undergrowth on the side of the road. There was a lot of blood in the bed of that truck. Was he too late?
“Is anybody out there?” he shouted. There was no sound, not even a breath of wind to rustle the trees. He fought back his fear and shouted again, “Morgan! It’s Nash. Are you out there?”
He heard branches crackling as though someone was moving through the underbrush. He shined his flashlight toward the sound but couldn’t see much beyond the first colorful layer of bushes. As he was lowering the light, he caught sight of a broken branch. More than a few broken branches. And realized the swath of destruction was wide enough to have been made by a vehicle.