atching the first flight out meant getting up at three A.M. so she would have time to drive to the airport in Kentucky, turn in her rental car, and still have plenty of time to get through security. She bought some snacks out of vending machines in the Louisville airport, because it was a safe bet the airline wasn’t going to serve anything and she was already hungry. From Louisville she flew to Chicago, then from Chicago to Salt Lake City, where she changed airlines and flew to Boise.

Diaz was waiting for her, and her heart gave a huge thump at the sight of him. He was dressed much as usual, in jeans and those rubber-soled boots, though in deference to the changing season he wore a long-sleeved denim shirt over his dark T-shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over his forearms. He stood apart from the small crowd, his expression as remote as ever. Several people darted vaguely uneasy glances at him, though he wasn’t doing anything other than just standing there.

“What did you find out?” she asked anxiously as she reached him. She’d been fretting during the entire trip, wondering who they were going to see and what he or she knew about the kidnapping.

“I’ll tell you on the way. I have two rooms booked for us at a hotel,” he said. “We’ll drop off your luggage and you can change clothes before we leave.”

“Why do I need to change clothes?” She looked down at herself. She was dressed for comfort, in slacks and a blouse, with a lightweight sweater thrown over her shoulders to keep off the chill. For someone used to El Paso’s climate, both airplanes and Idaho were too cold for her.

“You need something sturdier, like jeans and boots, since we don’t know what we’ll find. I’ve done some advance scouting and the terrain looks rough.” They collected her luggage; he took her heaviest bag and shifted it to his left hand, then used his right to guide her in the direction of the parking lot.

“How long have you been here?”

“I got here last night.”

She hadn’t seen him for three weeks, and until this moment she hadn’t realized how starved she felt. Just his physical presence sent a wave of longing through her. He was like the pain of childbirth: away from him, she remembered that almost electric aura of danger, but she didn’t feel it. Being near him made her heartbeat rev up, all her senses heighten; it was almost as if the fight-or-flight response kicked in—or maybe that was exactly what happened.

She recognized the giddy sense of euphoria, the butterflies in her stomach; she hadn’t felt this way since David. She’d loved David and she most assuredly did not love Diaz, but she had also wanted David sexually. No other man she’d met since then had gotten that reaction from her, no matter how much she might like the man himself, until Diaz. She wanted him. She needed her head examined, but she wanted him.

She was expecting a rental car, or maybe an SUV, but the vehicle he led her to was an enormous, black four-wheel-drive pickup, with the frame sitting so high she wondered how she could climb into the cab, even though she was wearing slacks.

Diaz put her bags in the bed of the truck, then unlocked the doors. “Where on earth did you get this thing?” she asked, looking up at the lights mounted on top of the cab. “I know you didn’t rent it.”

He put his hands on her waist and lifted her onto the seat. “It belongs to an acquaintance.”

When he got behind the wheel, she said, “An ‘acquaintance,’ huh? Not a friend?”

“I don’t have friends.”

The blunt statement rattled her, hit her in the chest, and made her ache inside. How could he bear to live such a solitary life? “You have me,” she said before she thought.

He froze in the act of putting the key in the ignition, and slowly turned his head to look at her. She couldn’t read the expression in his dark eyes; she knew only that they burned. “Do I?” he asked softly.

For a moment she felt off balance, as if he’d asked one thing but meant another. Was he asking if she was his on an entirely different level, or was he expressing doubt? She had no idea; he was so unreadable she was left floundering, so she instinctively went to shallow water. “If you want a friend, you do. How can you live without friendship?”

He shrugged and turned the key, firing up the big motor. “Easy.”

Yes, that was what he’d meant, that he doubted he had any real friends. She was both disappointed and relieved. However much she might want him, she wasn’t certain she’d ever have the nerve to do anything about it. That would be like stepping into a cage with a tiger, no matter how tame the handler said it was. The doubt and fear would always remain.

She sought refuge in the original subject. “This ‘acquaintance’ knows and trusts you well enough to put this monster at your disposal?”

“He trusts me.”

She noticed that he didn’t say the man knew him. This was a dead-end subject, though, and she was anxious to find out what Diaz knew and why they were in Idaho.

“Okay, we’re on the way. What did you find out?”

“Nothing, yet,” he said, and she almost wilted in disappointment.

“But I thought—”

“After we talk to this guy, we might know something more. What I heard was that his brother was the pilot of the plane that crashed.”

“You got the pilot’s name?”

“Maybe.” At her frustrated look, he said, “It’s like a string. We’ll pull on it and see if it goes anywhere. Most of the time it doesn’t, but negative knowledge is almost as good as positive knowledge.”

“Meaning then you know where not to look.”

“It also tells you something about the person who put the string in your hand, too.”

“But maybe you have the pilot’s name?”

“I heard that a guy named Gilliland would fly any cargo out of Mexico, but that he crashed and was killed seven or eight years ago. The only thing anyone knew about him was that he had a brother named Norman Gilliland who lived in the Sawtooth Wilderness close to Lowman.”

She stared at him, suddenly uneasy; after a moment, she realized why. “So no one knew anything about the pilot, but all of a sudden someone remembers his brother’s first name and exactly where he lived? That’s very specific knowledge for someone who didn’t know anything else about the pilot.”

He gave her an approving glance. “You might make a pretty good tracker yourself. You have good instincts.”

She knotted her fists. “This is another wild-goose chase, isn’t it? Why are we even bothering?”

He paused. “ ‘Another’?”

“That’s what I’ve been doing for ten years, running in circles and getting nowhere.” She stared out the window, her jaw set.

“Like someone’s been feeding you false information?”

Slowly she turned her head to look at him. “You think that’s it? I’ve been deliberately led away from the right track?”

“You’re too smart and too good at what you do for it to be otherwise. When it’s someone else’s kid, you have damn good luck finding them, don’t you?”

Mutely she nodded. She had an almost eerie knack for success, as if she could put herself in the mind of a lost child or runaway and figure out where they’d gone. That had made it doubly frustrating for her, that she could find other children but not her own child.

“That’s another string I can follow,” he said. “Maybe I’ve been asking the wrong questions. Maybe I should ask who’s been telling people to give you the wrong answers.”

She really had been chasing in circles all these years, and someone had made certain she stayed in the same rut by dangling a carrot in front of her nose. The only real lead she’d ever had was the one that had taken her to Guadalupe that night when Diaz was there, and she had no idea who her informant had been. Nor had Diaz ever found out, or he would have told her. On second thought—“Did you ever find out who tipped me that you’d be in Guadalupe?”

“No.”

Another mystery, but evidently this one was in their favor. She was having a hard time dealing with this new slant on all the frustrations and dead ends, the constant rise of hope only to have it dashed on the rocks. She could understand if no one had told her anything, just stonewalled her, but to deliberately have her chasing wild story after wild story smacked of a deep malevolence.

She was so mired in thought she didn’t realize they’d stopped in front of a small hotel until he opened the door and vaulted out. By the time she got her purse hooked on her shoulder and her own door open, he was there, reaching up to grasp her waist and lift her out of the seat. He set her on the ground in front of him, hemmed in by the truck, the open door, and his body. There were a good six inches between them, but abruptly she felt blasted by his body heat, carrying with it the warm, clean smell of his skin. He hadn’t shaved; at least two or three days’ growth of beard stubbled his jaw. She wanted to reach up and stroke his face, feel the bristles against her palm.

“Don’t let it get you down,” he said. She struggled to pull her mind back to reality. “Misdirection takes money and influence. Knowing that gives me another string. Hell, I’ve almost got a whole ball of yarn now.”

She managed a smile, and he turned to lift her bag out of the truck bed. He led the way inside, past a small reception area, where the man on duty gave them a cursory glance, then went back to what he was doing. Everything was clean and well maintained, including the smallish elevator, which arrived with a smooth whooshing sound.

Diaz pushed the button for the third floor, and after the doors closed and the elevator began gliding upward, he said, “Your room number is 323; I’m in 325.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out an electronic door card, which he handed to her. “Here’s your card. Take a left out of the elevator.”

He took both her Pullman case and carry-on bag, while she walked ahead of him and unlocked the door to room 323. The heavy curtains over the windows were closed so the room was dark, and she flipped the light switch. It was a standard hotel room, clean and unimaginative, with a king-sized bed, a twenty-five-inch television in an armoire, an easy chair with an ottoman, and another chair at a desk. The connecting door to the next room stood open, revealing a mirror image of her room.

Maybe he walked in his sleep.

“Where do you want this?” he asked, indicating her heavy suitcase.

“On the bed. I’ll dig out my clothes and be with you in a minute.”

“I’ll wait outside.” He left by her door, and Milla hurried to unzip her suitcase and search through it for her jeans, socks, and sneakers. Three minutes later she grabbed her purse, put her room card in it, and was out the door.

They retraced their steps to the parking lot. He boosted her into the truck, and as she buckled herself in, she said, with a touch of irritation, “Why did you get a truck so high I need a stepladder to get into it?”

“Where we’re going, we’ll need the extra clearance.”

She gaped at him. “What are we doing, stump-jumping?”

“Part of the way.”

The ride was going to be a rough one, then. Before they left Boise he said, “Hungry?” Thinking she needed to fortify herself, she nodded, and he pulled into a fast-food place. Less than five minutes later they were back on the highway, hamburgers in hand.

“We’ll drive as far as we can, but we’ll have to walk the last leg,” he said. “This guy is a survivalist, and he made damn sure he isn’t easy to get to.”

“Will he shoot at us?” she asked, a little alarmed.

“He might, but from what I’ve been able to find out he isn’t generally violent, just a little crazy.”

Which was better than being a lot crazy, but anyone with a survivalist mind-set might get a little anxious at being approached by two strangers, especially if he’d gone to a lot of trouble to make sure people couldn’t easily get to his house.

Three hours later, she realized “house” had been a generous term. After leaving the real road, Diaz had driven the truck over terrain so rough and mountainous Milla had simply closed her eyes and held on to the strap, certain they were going to overturn at any minute. When the trail finally ended—and “trail” was another generous term—at a mountain that seemed to go straight up, Diaz turned off the engine and said, “Here’s where we start walking.”

Milla stuffed her purse under the seat, then jumped out of the truck without waiting for his aid, and turned in a slow circle, staring up at the mountains surrounding her. From what she’d seen so far, Idaho was one of the most beautiful places in the world. The sky was the deep vivid blue of autumn, the trees were a glorious mix of evergreens and color, and the air was crisp and clean.

He took a backpack out from behind the seat and slipped his arms through the loops. “This way,” he said, stepping into the silent forest.

“How do you know the exact way?”

“I told you, I scouted around some yesterday.”

“But if you came this far, you could have already talked to him.”

“It was night. I didn’t want to spook him.”

He’d come up here last night? The wilderness was so rugged and... absolute that she couldn’t imagine how he’d found the track, much less managed to stay on it. She knew he was totally at home in the southwestern desert regions, but had vaguely expected him to be more of a fish out of water up here in the mountains. Not so; he seemed to unerringly know the direction he wanted, and he moved through the massive trees like a silent ghost.

“Have you done mountain hiking before?” she asked, glad she’d made a point of keeping in shape. This wasn’t terrain for a couch potato.

“The Sierra Madre. I’ve been in the Rockies before, too.”

“What’s in the backpack?”

“Water. Food. Ground sheet. The basics.”

“Are we spending the night out here?” she asked in astonishment.

“No, we should be back to the truck before dark. I just don’t take chances in terrain like this.”

Following behind him as she was, she noticed the bulge under his loose shirt. Being armed was natural for him, but she hadn’t seen him get the weapon out of the glove box, nor had he gone into his own room at the hotel. Surely he hadn’t—“Did you have that pistol with you in the airport?”

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “I didn’t have to go through a metal detector.”

“My God, isn’t that a federal offense, though?”

He shrugged. “They might get upset if they caught me.”

“How did you get it up here?”

“I didn’t. I got it here.”

“I guess I shouldn’t ask if it’s registered.”

“It’s registered. Just not to me.”

“It’s stolen?”

He sighed. “No, it isn’t stolen. It belongs to the man who owns the truck. And even if I did get caught at the airport with it, I wouldn’t be arrested. They’d want to arrest me, but it wouldn’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“I know some people with Homeland Security. I’ve—uh—done some work for them. Freelance.”

She was amazed that he was answering her questions, because he was usually so reticent. She hurried a bit until she was more or less abreast with him. “You find terrorists?” she asked in amazement, her voice rising on the last word.

“Sometimes,” he said, with that vague tone in his voice that said he wasn’t going into any detail on that particular subject.

“You’re a Fed?”

He stopped in his tracks and looked at her, his head cocked in mild exasperation. “No, I just said I’ve done some freelance stuff. That’s all. I’ve done jobs for individuals, corporations, governments. I guess I’m kind of a bounty hunter, though I don’t go after bail jumpers. Usually. Now, are we done with the questions?”

She made a derisive noise in her throat. “In your dreams.”

His slow smile began transforming his face. “Then can they wait until we’re heading back? I want to listen to what’s around us.”

“Okay, but only because you have a good reason.” She fell back behind him and they continued the hike in silence, with only their muffled footsteps breaking the peace of the mountains. It was just as well; within minutes the trail went sharply upward, and she needed her breath for the climb.

After half an hour they heard the sound of rushing water. The almost invisible trail led them straight to the river. The water had cut a small gorge through the mountain; at this point, the sheer rock walls were about eight feet high and the river was narrow, no more than twenty feet wide, which forced the water along at a faster pace. The rapid current frothed and boiled over underwater rocks, whitecapping the surface and occasionally sending up a spray of diamond drops.

Diaz led them along the bank, with the sound of the rushing water growing louder and louder as the stream gradually narrowed until the width was about twelve feet. He stopped, raised his voice, and said, “Here we are.”

Only then did she see the tiny shack on the other side of the river. “Shack” was a complimentary description. It appeared to be made out of rough plywood, with black tar paper nailed over it. The forest was making an effort to reclaim its territory, because moss was growing up the sides of the shack, and vines were growing down from the roof. The tar paper and vegetation did a good job of camouflage; the one tiny window and rough rock chimney were almost the only details that gave away the shack’s location.

“Hello!” Diaz yelled.

After a minute the rough door opened and a grizzled head stuck out. The man regarded them with suspicion for a moment; then he stared hard at Milla. Her presence seemed to reassure him, because he eased out of the door with a shotgun cradled in his arms. He looked bearlike, standing about six-foot-six and weighing close to three hundred pounds. His long gray hair was in a ponytail that hung halfway down his back, but his beard was only a few inches long, proving that he did some personal upkeep. The beard was the only evidence of that, though. He wore camouflage pants in a forest pattern, and a green flannel shirt.

“Yeah? Who are you?”

“My name is Diaz. Are you Norman Gilliland?”

“That’s right. What about it?”

“If you don’t mind, we have some questions about your brother that we’d like to ask.”

“Which brother?”

Diaz paused, because they had no first name. “The pilot.”

Norman shifted a wad of chewing tobacco to his other jaw and pondered the matter. “That would be Virgil, I guess. He’s dead.”

“Yes, we know. Did you know anything about his—”

“Smuggling? Some.” Norman heaved a sigh. “Guess you might as well come over. You carrying?”

“Pistol,” Diaz replied.

“Just keep it holstered, son, and we’ll do all right.”

Norman carefully propped the shotgun against the shack, then lifted a long, rough plank that looked to be hand-hewn, about fifteen feet long, three or four inches thick, and a foot wide. It had to be heavy, but Norman handled it as if it were a two-by-four wall stud. He positioned one end of the plank into a notch that had been carved into the riverbank, then got down on his knees and let the other end tilt down until it fit into a corresponding notch on their side of the river. “There you are,” he said. “Come on over.”

Milla looked at the plank, at the rushing water foaming beneath it, and drew a deep breath. “Ready if you are,” she said to Diaz.

He caught her hand and carried it to his belt. “Hold on to me for balance.”

She pulled her hand back. “No way. If I fall, I don’t want to take you with me.”

“As if I wouldn’t go in after you anyway.” He took her hand once more and put it on his belt. “Hang on.”

“Are you coming or not?” Norman called irritably.

“Yes.” Diaz stepped calmly onto the plank, and Milla followed. Twelve inches was really pretty wide; as a kid she’d balanced on much narrower edges. But now that she was an adult, she knew how reckless kids were, and she’d never walked across a roaring river even as a child. She did remember that you had to just do it, that a sure step was much better than a hesitant one. She didn’t crowd Diaz, just maintained a grip on his belt, and it did help with balance. In no time they were across the plank and stepping onto solid ground.

Neither Diaz nor Norman offered to shake hands, so Milla steeled herself and held out her hand. “I’m Milla Edge. Thank you for talking to us.”

Norman eyed her hand as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do, then gingerly folded his big paw around her fingers and gave it a barely noticeable shake. “Glad to meet you. I don’t get many visitors.”

No joke. He’d made damn sure of that by living where he did.

He didn’t invite them inside, and she was just as glad he hadn’t. Not only was the shack tiny, but she’d bet Norman hadn’t won any housekeeping awards lately. There were a couple of nice-sized rocks nearby, though, and he indicated they should sit there. Norman himself took a seat on a stump. “Now, what can I do for you folks?”

“You said you knew about your brother’s smuggling,” Diaz said.

“Course I did. Marijuana. He made a bunch of money, but Virgil never did have any sense about money and I guess he blew it all. God knows, when he died there wasn’t anything left.”

“He died in a plane crash?”

“Virgil? Naw. He died of liver cancer, in November of ninety.”

Before Justin was kidnapped. Milla sighed in sharp disappointment, even though after their conversation in the truck, she hadn’t really been expecting any useful information.

“Did he ever smuggle anything except weed?”

“That was pretty much it, I reckon, though there could have been some cocaine runs.”

“How about people? Babies?”

“Not that I ever heard.”

“Did he work for just one man?”

“He never was that steady. He moved around a lot, until he got sick. The cancer took him fast. By the time he knew he had it, he only had a couple of months left.”

“Where was he when he died?”

“Why, right here. I got him buried back in the woods. Nobody wanted to foot the bill for his funeral, so I took care of it myself.”

There wasn’t anything else to be said. They thanked Norman, Diaz slickly passed him some folded green for his time, and they went back to the plank bridge.

Milla felt confident enough not to hold on to Diaz’s belt on the return crossing, though he insisted. As long as she didn’t look down at the water, which gave her a mild sense of vertigo as it rushed past, she was fine.

They were almost halfway across when Diaz made a sharp sound of warning. The board tilted wildly beneath their feet; Milla released Diaz, both arms waving as she scrambled for balance. It happened so fast she didn’t even scream as they both plunged down into the swift, icy river.