At the top, she allowed herself one more backward glance.
The figure had reached the wash.Was crossing it with that same inexorable pace, neither hurrying nor slowing.Patient.So terrifyingly patient.Like someone who knew exactly how this was going to end and saw no need to rush the inevitable.
Jennifer ran.
Or tried to run.Her legs were refusing to cooperate now, the signals from her brain arriving delayed and distorted.She was staggering more than running, a drunk's lurching progress.The terrain blurred beneath her feet—rock and scrub and the bleached bones of some long-dead animal that made her think, irrationally, of her own skeleton baking in this merciless sun.
She thought about her daughter.Melissa was twenty-three now, living her own life in Seattle with a boyfriend Jennifer had only met twice and a career that involved working with some kind of software that Jennifer didn't fully understand.Jennifer and her daughter talked every Sunday, an hour of connection that had become the anchor point of Jennifer's week.This Sunday, Jennifer had planned to tell her about the Sonoran 100, about the months of preparation finally paying off.
I love you,she thought, pushing the words out into the universe with whatever energy she had left.I love you, and I'm sorry I didn't tell you more often.
Her right leg buckled.
She caught herself, somehow, and kept moving.But she could feel the end approaching now.Her body was shutting down, system by system, conserving whatever resources remained for the vital organs.Soon her legs would stop working entirely.Soon she would fall and not get back up.
The ground ahead rose slightly—just a gentle incline, barely noticeable under normal circumstances.It might as well have been Everest.Jennifer's pace slowed to a walk, then to a stumble, then to something that was barely forward motion at all.Each step was a negotiation, a desperate bargain with a body that had nothing left to give.
She made it another fifty yards.Maybe less.
Then her legs gave out entirely, and she fell.
The impact with the hard-packed earth drove the air from her lungs.For a long moment she just lay there, her cheek pressed against the ground, watching a beetle navigate the obstacle of a small stone with single-minded determination.
Lucky beetle,she thought distantly.Lucky, stupid beetle with its simple beetle problems.
She tried to push herself up.Her arms trembled, buckled, dropped her back to the dirt.
Footsteps behind her.Unhurried.The crunch of gravel under feet that had covered this same brutal distance without apparent effort.
Jennifer rolled onto her back, wanting to see.Wanting to understand.The sun was directly behind the figure now, transforming them into a silhouette, a shadow given human form.She couldn't make out features, couldn't see the face of the person who had run her to ground like an animal.
Just the shape.The outline.The idea of a person.
She opened her mouth to speak—to beg, to curse, to ask why—but no words came.Her throat was too dry, her body too depleted.All she could do was lie there in the dirt, watching the shadow grow larger as it approached.
The figure stopped, looking down at her.
Jennifer closed her eyes.
She thought about the thousands of miles she'd covered in her life, the hundreds of sunrises she'd witnessed, the moments of pure transcendence when her body and mind had merged into something greater than either.The finish line she might never cross, and the daughter she might never see again, and the life she'd been building, step by step, mile by mile, from the wreckage of everything that had come before.
All that work hadn't saved her.
But it had made her into someone worth saving.
The shadow fell over her, and Jennifer Hayes stopped running.
CHAPTER ONE
Kari Blackhorse had spent three days staring at a fence, waiting for news that didn't come.
The chain-link barrier stretched across the desert landscape like a scar, eight feet high and topped with barbed wire, marking the boundary of land that Devco Holdings had purchased fifteen years ago for four times its market value.Behind it, the Sonoran Desert continued uninterrupted—the same saguaros and palo verde trees, the same rocky washes and distant mesas—but that land belonged to someone else now.Someone with enough money to buy sixty acres of wilderness and enough power to keep everyone out.
Someone who might have taken Ben.
She paced along the perimeter road, her boots kicking up small clouds of dust in the scorching late afternoon heat.Three days.Seventy-two hours since Ben Tsosie had cut through this fence to investigate what lay beyond, following a trail that Kari's mother had blazed years before her death.Seventy-two hours since he'd stopped answering his phone, stopped responding to messages, stopped being the steady presence she'd come to rely on in the eighteen months since she'd returned to the Navajo Nation.
Kari stopped pacing and stared at the fence.Somewhere beyond it, FBI Agent Paul Daniels was searching with a team of federal officers, executing a warrant that had taken three agonizing days to obtain.Three days of phone calls and paperwork and jurisdictional wrangling while Ben was out there—alive or dead, free or captive, she didn't know.Three days that would have been plenty of time to dispose of a body, to scrub evidence, to make another inconvenient truth disappear.
