Ian

The entire night, I drove around the city, seeing if I could spot the black truck. There were numerous black pickups on the road, but none of the drivers fit the description of the man in the video. I’d even parked in the hotel lot for a while, and nothing.

With no luck, I walked through my front door as the sun started to peek across the horizon. Reed was in the kitchen fixing breakfast. “Any luck?” he asked as I sat down at the bar.

“Not a fucking thing.” He set a plate of eggs and bacon in front of me. “Thanks,” I said. My stomach growled and I ate it all. Each of us Chandlers knew how to cook some delicious food.

“Has Colton called you?” Reed asked, taking the seat across from me.

I shook my head. “We passed each other on the road last night. He was probably out looking for the truck like I was.”

“Speaking of looking around, I pinpointed the locations where those three bodies were found years ago. We can get to there by the Hidden Falls trail.” He finished his food and placed his plate in the sink. “Maybe we can get an idea of how they wound up in those spots.”

Nodding, I glanced down at my watch. “Sounds good. Let’s get our backpacks filled up and we’ll head out.”

I grabbed our hiking gear out of the hall closet and packed a few bottles of water and snacks. With it being early May, there’d still be over five feet of snow at the falls. Once our bags were stocked, we hopped in my old, blue truck and headed down our gravel driveway. We didn’t get far before my phone rang. It was Colton.

“We have a problem,” he said as soon as I answered.

I stopped my truck. “What happened?”

“I need you to meet me at Old Mill road. There’s something you need to see.”

Pressing the gas, I spun out of our driveway. “Be right there.”

“What’s going on?” Reed asked.

I shrugged. “Don’t know. Colton wants us to meet him at Old Mill road.”

“Has he said anything about this same shit happening forty years ago?”

“He hasn’t,” I replied, glancing over at him. “I’m shocked the media hasn’t brought it up, especially now that word’s out about the missing people.”

It was all a huge, mysterious clusterfuck. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. If the police or the FBI couldn’t solve the case all those years ago, how the hell could I?

When we arrived at Old Mill road, there was a fire truck and multiple police cars. “What the hell happened here?” I said, pulling over to the side of the road. Colton hurried over just as the tow truck pulled a blackened sports car up from the ravine. It was burnt to a crisp, but there was no mistaking the charred body still inside. “Jesus Christ. Whose car is that?”

Colton scrubbed a hand over his face. His eyes were red and it looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “It’s Charles Beckett’s car. I’m assuming that’s him in the driver’s seat. He lives about a mile down the road.”

It only took me a second to realize why the name sounded familiar. At some point, Colton had mentioned it was Jared’s father. “Charles is the owner of the hotel Grace works at.”

Colton nodded, his face growing paler by the second. “I don’t like this, Chandler. First, people go missing. Then, my daughter is nowhere to be found and her boss winds up dead.”

A woman toppled out of a cop car behind us and made her way to the tow truck. Halfway there, she screamed and fell to the ground. It took me a second to realize the woman wearing a light blue robe was Charles’ wife. Jared and a woman I’d never seen before tried to console her. Colton jerked around and hung his head with a sigh.

He pointed to the grieving trio. “You already know Jared, and Charles’ wife. The young woman is Charles’ daughter, Lauren. She was on her way home when she saw the fire in the ravine. She’s the one who called it in, not realizing it was her father in the car.”

I couldn’t imagine seeing something like that, only to find out later it was a loved one. “What do you think made Beckett run off the road?” I wondered out loud.

Colton shrugged. “Not sure, but I’m sure we’ll find out. Right now, my focus is on Grace. I can’t worry about this other shit right now.”

I placed a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t blame you, but please . . . I have a question.”

His brows furrowed. “What?”

“Did you know this same thing happened forty years ago? Twelve people went missing, here, in this very place.”

His eyes widened in shock. “What are you talking about? How did you hear about this?”

Reed held up a hand. “I found it in our FBI database. However, back then, three bodies were found by Larry Bradfield and his team. Larry was the chief of police at that time.”

Colton nodded and glanced back and forth at us. “I know who he is. He’s long since dead. But it’s funny. When I moved here and saw him around, he never said a word about it.”

“That’s why we’re going to do our own searching,” I claimed.

He shook my hand and I could feel it trembling. “Thanks, Chandler. I appreciate you doing this for me. I know you probably need to be handling other things.”

“I’m happy to help,” I replied.

Taking a deep breath, he looked over at the carnage. “I’ll continue looking for the black truck. It’s been almost two days. The chances of finding her grow slimmer every day.”

I squeezed his shoulder. “We’ll find her. She’s a fighter.”

A sad smile spread across his face. “Yes, she is. I made sure of that.”

We made it to the Hidden Falls bridge in record time. I’d been right when I guessed there was five feet of snow still on the ground. At the end of the bridge, there was a wall of snow. Everything on that side of the bridge and beyond was buried under it all.

I climbed onto the bridge’s wooden rails and up onto the snow. There were holes in various parts of the snow where you could see the tops of the fence beneath. One wrong step and you could easily get trapped below. That was one of the reasons tourists were told not to hike when the snow was that deep. However, there were still footprints from where people had attempted to continue on.

Reed stopped and opened his map. There were three red dots where the bodies were found. He pointed north, past the falls. “One was found half a mile that way, and the others are a little further.”

There wasn’t a trail leading to those spots, so we trekked carefully across the forest floor. I didn’t want to damage the natural beauty of the park. It pissed me off when people stepped off the paths at Yellowstone just to get a closer look.

Once we got to the coordinates of the first victim, nothing odd stuck out. And then again with the other two sites. How the hell did they get there in the first place? Brows furrowed, Reed focused on the map.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked him.

He looked up at me. “Probably. Just wondering how the victims got here. Makes no sense.”

“Can I see the map?” He handed it to me and I studied it. The Grand Teton National Forest covered 310,000 acres of land, being forty-five miles from north to south, and twenty-six miles in width. If only we knew which way the victims came from. There were a lot of different scenarios.

The sun grew fainter by the minute. “We need to head back,” Reed suggested. “Unless you want to be stuck out here all night.”

I gave him the map back and we headed toward the main trail. “We live on the eastern side of the park. The victims could’ve easily ventured inside from the south or the west.”

I glanced back at Reed and he shrugged. “It’s possible. They would’ve had to travel about ten to twelve miles of forest to get where they were. Not everyone could do that.”

“Obviously, considering only three were found. Maybe they were the most fit out of the other victims.”

“They were also the first three to go missing,” Reed added.

Stopping mid-step, I turned around to face him. It was as if the clues clicked into place. “Sounds like they were true hikers that got lost, or maybe the killer was sloppy in the beginning.”

Reed nodded. “True. Most serial killers evolve.”

“And that might be why none of the others were found.”

“It’s a good theory,” he said with a sigh. “Too bad it doesn’t get us anywhere.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t.

“Where are you going?” I asked Reed. We’d been home for a less than an hour.

He opened the refrigerator and brought out a bottle of water. “I’m going to work. Someone has to pick up your slack.” Turning around, he reached for an apple out of the fruit basket on the counter and took a bite. “There’s a man in Pocatello who needs to be dealt with. It’s only two and a half hours away. I figured, why not.”

It was hard to face the fact that he was like me now, regardless of the fact he was only five years younger. Bryce and I had been the ones who watched after him when our mother and father moved to Charlotte; we’d trained him to be a killer. You’d think killing people would be the hardest thing to do, but it came naturally to us. Over time, you grew immune to the shock of it. I slept soundly each night, knowing the fuckers on our list wouldn’t be able to hurt any more innocents.

Reed finished his apple and started for the door.

“Be careful,” I called out.

He chuckled. “Yes, Dad.”

Once he was gone, I fixed a sandwich and sat on the couch. Flipping through the TV channels, everyone was talking about Grace and the other missing people. It’d been two days since she went missing. Over the years, I’d seen what happened to women in kidnapping situations. To think of anything even close to that happening to Grace made me goddamn livid, and restless.

Shutting off the TV, I grabbed my keys off the counter and hurried outside to my truck. The man who took her was out there. I couldn’t just sit around and wait for something to happen. If I had to search every night for that fucker, I’d do it. I opened my truck door and was about to get in when a thump came from the back porch. Every year, we’d have a bear or two that’d venture into the yard, but I didn’t like them feeling like this was their territory.

Slowly, I walked around the side of the house, peeking past the corner. What I saw definitely wasn’t a bear. Stumbling toward the back door was a woman, her clothes covered in mud and her chocolate-colored hair matted with blood. I knew who it was without even seeing her face. Heart racing, I ran over.

“Grace!”

Eyes wide, she turned around, only to fall over. I was there to catch her before she hit the ground. Her body shook, but the second she saw my face, she breathed a sigh of relief. “Ian?”

I lifted her in my arms. “Yes, it’s me. You’re safe now. We need to get you to the hospital.”

She grabbed my shirt, her eyes wild and tired. Judging by the way they kept trying to roll into the back of her head, I was about to lose her. “I’ll be fine,” she rasped, swallowing hard. “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

I carried her inside and laid her on the couch. “Why?”

A tear fell down her cheek and her eyes closed. “They’re hunting me.”