Page 59 of High Country Escape

“We’ll go now,” Gage said. “Debra, if you think of anything at all that might be helpful, give us a call.”

Debra said nothing, continuing to sob.

Gage and Ryker didn’t speak until they emerged from the hospital building. “Do you think she was telling the truth?” Ryker asked. “About not knowing Ledger?”

“She was pretty convincing. And we haven’t talked to her mother, but we dug pretty deep into her past and it checks out. There is a Debra Percy from San Antonio who had an older sister, Bettina, who disappeared when Debra was ten. If the person in that hospital bed assumed her identity, she covered her tracks really well.” He shook his head. “We’ve asked the state to do a search for Alice but they haven’t gotten back to us with anything yet.”

Ryker checked his watch. “It’s four o’clock.”

“You were supposed to be off shift an hour ago,” Gage said.

“We’re in the middle of an active search for a missing woman,” Ryker said. “Not to mention, Sarah Michaelson is still missing, and there’s a possible sexual predator on the loose. No one’s paying much attention to the schedule right now.”

“The sheriff is trying to get some help from the state on these searches,” Gage said. “Meanwhile, I need you to stay here with Debra. I’ll send someone out to relieve you as soon as I have a deputy available.”

“Do you think her attacker will try to finish her off?” Ryker asked.

“I don’t know. But I don’t want to take that chance.”

Carter had takenDalton straight to their parents’ house, where his mother had declared he would stay in his old bedroom for the time being. He spent a miserable night and woke the next morning to find that Carter was still there. “I’m temporarily moving back into my old room, too,” Carter said at breakfast. “Mom and Dad thought it would be a good idea.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” he protested.

He said it again when they were back in his room, after Carter suggested they distract themselves with gaming.

“You’d be a really ugly baby,” Carter said.

“Just leave me alone.” Dalton sank into the beanbag chair in the corner of the room. How many hours had he spent here as a teen, playing video games or hunched over a laptop, learning to code and create his own programs? “I promise I’m not going to flip out or anything.”

“Then what are you going to do?” Carter sat in the ladder-backed wooden chair that went with the student desk where both boys had done homework for years.

“I should be out there looking for her,” Dalton said.

“But you can’t be, so what are you going to do instead?”

Dalton wanted to shout at his brother to leave him alone. But being alone meant having no one to distract him from the worst-case scenarios that insisted on playing out in his head. Roxanne hurt. Roxanne tied up. Roxanne dead.

He leaned forward and picked up the laptop he had insisted on retrieving from his apartment before they came to his parents’ house. “I’m going to try again to find out something about Alice,” he said.

“You think Debra is Alice?” Carter asked. Dalton had briefly explained his theories on the drive home yesterday, though he hadn’t believed Carter was really listening.

“It makes sense. She came on the same tour as Roxanne and lured her away from the group, so that Ledger could attack her.”

“But she made that tour reservation weeks ago,” Carter said. “She had no idea Roxanne would be on the same tour.”

“Maybe she planned to persuade her to come on the trip, and I saved her the trouble by inviting Roxanne myself,” Dalton said. The knowledge that he was the one who was responsible for Roxanne being on the mountain that day ate at him.

“How are you going to find out the truth?” Carter asked.

Dalton opened the laptop. “I’ve been starting with Debra and going backwards—and getting nowhere. What if I start with Alice and try to trace her life and see where she ended up.”

“How are you going to do that if you don’t even know if Alice was her real name?” Carter asked. “And you don’t have a last name.”

“There are court documents somewhere that will have her real name,” Dalton said. “If I can find those, I’ll know her name and can start from there.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Carter asked.

“Leave me alone. Go home to Mira.”