Page 54 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

54.

The center of his universe was alive.

John Millwood’s heart was thudding—and not from the effort of trooping through the woods like an Eagle Scout in pursuit of a merit badge.

Fiona was alive.

He was about two miles south of Hinowah, and a half mile west of where he’d parked on Route 13 a half hour earlier, when he began pushing through viny and dense woods. He paused and gazed about him in a slow circle.

Green and brown, green and brown…

Then he kept trooping along, secure in the knowledge that she was safe.

He would soon find her!

In fact, he didn’t mind a brief delay.

It would give him time to refine her punishment. Something appropriate, to assure that she would never, ever pull a stunt like this again.

Millwood had taken the advice of that man Shaw for as long as he could: shower, warm up in the motel room. He’d sat at the cheap desk, reading emails and making some work-related calls. He’d gotten some sleep, but then wakened, agitated. And finally the impatience and antsiness got to be too much.

He had to get out of the room and hunt for her himself. And so he had driven back toward Hinowah to the spot where he and Shaw had found her car. Below the highway, down the steep hillside, he could see flashing lights. The workers were probably trying to get the car out of the water.

Damn her. Responsible for losing a fifty-thousand-dollar car? True, Fiona had bought it and she had made the payments, but every penny in a family belonged to the man—the head of the household. That was just the natural order of things.

And so it was in effect his car that she’d destroyed.

He was going to ask the emergency workers if they’d seen her but he first ran into a man in a battered pickup, parked on the shoulder of Route 13, two hundred yards from the dissolving levee. Wearing coveralls and a safety vest, he was, it turned out, part of a sandbag-filling group of volunteers that had been told to stand down and keep way back from the levee for some safety reason.

Had he, by any chance, seen a young blond woman in the woods?

The man had turned down the volume of a country-western station and said, “Well, yesterday, yessir. There was a woman. She was wearing a stocking cap, so I don’t know what color hair, but yessir.”

He’d pointed to a ridge of rocks to the south of that miniature mountain Millwood had learned was named Copper Peak. Where he’d gone for his goddamn swim. (Her frigging fault too, of course!)

And then the bombshell: She had been carrying a couple of heavy gym bags, the worker had told him.

Millwood felt the emotion unleashed within him.

First, elation that she was alive.

Second, undiluted rage. The sneaky little whore had some plan. She’d taken her luggage from the car before it went into the water. And that meant she’d planned it all out. She’d driven the car into the river on purpose.

The video was to trick him.

God, the sense of betrayal had been almost overwhelming.

Now, he pushed along the overgrown mining trail, looking for any sign that she’d passed this way.

He paused and took a hit of whisky from his leather and silver flask. Bushmills. His favorite. Fiona hadn’t liked Irish whisky at first but then he kept pushing her. (One time she’d said, “Don’t be a nag,” and he’d given her his “hurt” look—he really perfected it—and she could see he felt bad about it. She’d taken one sip, shivered, then another, as he kept insisting. Finally, she said yes, he was right. She did like it.)

If only she’d listen to him the way she should!

More slogging through the leaves and the mud. His poor Ferragamos would never be the same.

Thank you so very much, Fiona. You’ll clean them. You’ll make them shine like new.

Looking at the ground, doing his own tracking, like Shaw. No prints yet. But he’d find them.

As he trudged, he considered various scenarios about what might have happened.

Most likely this was a trick so she could run off with someone, get to a motel and…

He shivered in rage at how that sentence would end.

It occurred to him that Shaw found the car pretty fast. Maybe he was a good tracker but then again maybe the two of them engineered the whole thing.

That’s why he’d sent Millwood to a motel—to get him out of the way so the two of them could shack up in a room of their own.

He was a good-looking guy, and younger than Millwood.

A thought that made him want to scream.

Then, though, the holes in that conspiracy began to emerge. For one thing, Shaw had seemed genuinely concerned about her.

And how could they have met previously?

It would have to be somebody else.

But who?

Months ago he’d gone to the dark web and found a hacker, whom he gave five hundred dollars by way of a gift card number for instructions on constructing a keylogger—malware to record her passcodes.

The instructions were:

Use visual basic or borland delphi to write a cyclical information request, OR a system hook, you gotta use C Language, I like filter drivers inside the keyboard stack…U want other boxes which is always good go with DLL…

At which point, Millwood had thought: Screw this. And simply hid a tiny spy camera in the vent over her desk, videoing her typing in her passwords.

A lot easier.

Last night, at the motel, the emails he read were not about his work; they were hers. And there was nothing suspicious about them—though they could have contained a code. The word recipe might mean “motel room.” The word groceries might mean “condoms.”

But even if not, she still had to be punished for putting him through all this.

And he suddenly had a thought.

What if the punishment had a second purpose? Something that brought them closer, tied them together forever?

Ah, yes…He liked that.

It centered, of course, on dependency.

The end result of the punishment was that she would have to depend on him completely.

Say, she lost her hearing.

Or went blind.

He liked the last one best. If she was deaf, she couldn’t hear his orders or his corrections.

How could one become blinded?

Acid in her eyes? No that pain was too much. But more important, he couldn’t disfigure her. It was her angelic appearance that made him obsessed.

Maybe there were blinding poisons. Or, wait…There’d been something on the news about a man who went blind because a baseball had hit him in the back of the head. The occipital portion of the brain. He would do some research into it. Yes, he liked that idea.

He could control a blind woman completely.

Then John Millwood froze.

There, in a patch of muddy earth were her prints. They were her shoe size—6⒈／⒉, which he knew because he’d bought her a dozen pairs of sexy high heels (which she rarely wore, bitch).

He followed them for a short distance but then they disappeared. As if she’d tried to obscure them.

Or someone had.

A lover…

Fury surged through him, then it dissipated.

He needed to focus.

And studying the ground carefully, he started forward once more after the love of his life.