Paul watched as three distinct piles took shape.James went through them twice more, rearranging a few entries, then pulled the smallest pile toward him.
"These are the real ones.The dates aren't chronological—they jump around.But if you take every third entry..."He grabbed a notepad and started writing."The dates form a sequence."
Paul felt his pulse quicken as James worked, extracting every third entry and arranging them in order.Slowly, a pattern emerged—dates that corresponded to specific land sales, names that weren't people but places, numbers that might be coordinates.
"She coded it," James breathed."She made it look like paranoid rambling, but she embedded the real information in a way that only someone who knew how she thought would find it."
"Someone like her ex-husband."
James's hands moved faster now, the exhaustion and frustration from earlier having completely vanished.He pulled out more pages, started cross-referencing, building a picture from fragments that had seemed meaningless an hour ago.
"God, Anna," he murmured."You brilliant, careful woman."
As they worked, it occurred to Paul that they may very well have just discovered the truth Anna had died protecting.
Now they just had to survive long enough to make sure her death hadn't been in vain.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Kari stood at the edge of the wash, watching the first light of dawn paint the canyon walls in shades of rose and gold, and tried not to think about how beautiful it was.Beautiful places could be deadly.The Sonoran Desert had taught her that lesson a hundred times over.
The search teams had found Silas Hartman twenty minutes ago, just as the sun cleared the eastern ridgeline.A hiker training for his own ultramarathon had spotted the body from a high vantage point and called it in.Now Kari stood with Maria Santos and a cluster of search and rescue personnel, waiting for the medical examiner to finish his preliminary assessment before they could properly process the scene.
From this distance, Hartman looked peaceful.That's what struck her most forcefully—the same careful positioning she'd seen with Jessica Ramirez, with the photos from Jennifer Hayes and Jordan Rodriguez.Lying on his side as if he'd simply chosen to rest, one arm tucked beneath his head like a pillow.
If you didn't know better, you might think he was sleeping.
But Kari did know better.She could see the way his lips had cracked and bled from dehydration.The gray pallor of his skin.The unnatural stillness that separated sleep from death.
"How long has he been here?"Maria asked the ME, a brisk woman in her fifties who'd behaved as if she'd seen more death in her lifetime than anyone should have to.
"Hard to say precisely in this heat.But based on lividity and rigor, I'd estimate he died sometime yesterday afternoon.Maybe between two and four PM."The ME stood, stripping off her gloves."Preliminary cause appears consistent with your other victims.Severe dehydration, heat exhaustion, probable cardiac arrest.I'll know more after the autopsy."
Yesterday afternoon.While Kari and Maria had been searching the canyons, calling his name, Hartman had already been dead.The thought sat heavy in Kari's chest, though she knew better than to indulge in guilt over things beyond her control.
They'd done everything possible.Sometimes everything possible wasn't enough.
"His GPS watch?"she asked.
Maria held up an evidence bag containing the device."Still on his wrist, like we figured.I'll get the data downloaded as soon as we're back at the station, but you can see some of it on the display."
She angled the watch so Kari could see the screen."Same pattern as the others.Zigzagging all over hell and back, heading steadily away from established trails into rough country."
Kari studied the small screen, watching the digital trail of Hartman's final hours.The pattern was even more extreme than Jessica Ramirez's had been—wild swings northeast then south then west, covering miles of brutal terrain in what must have been a desperate attempt to escape his pursuer.The elevation data showed he'd climbed and descended steep slopes multiple times, burning through energy at an unsustainable rate while the afternoon heat drained every drop of moisture from his body.
"He ran for his life," she said quietly."For hours.Until he couldn't run anymore."
"And then the killer positioned him like this."Maria gestured at Hartman's carefully arranged body."Why?What's the point of the staging?"
Kari had been asking herself the same question since finding Jessica.The positioning was too deliberate to be random, too consistent across victims to be coincidence.It meant something to the killer—but what?Some kind of ritual?A message?
Or just a twisted sense of mercy, making the dead look peaceful when their final hours had been anything but?
She crouched near Hartman's body, careful not to disturb anything the ME and forensics team might need to document.From this angle, she could see the torn fabric of his running shirt, the abrasions on his arms and legs from falls or scrapes against rocks and brush.His feet were bare—his shoes had been removed and placed neatly beside him.
"The shoes," she said, pointing."They're positioned just like Jessica's were.And Jennifer Hayes's, according to the Phoenix PD report."
Maria photographed them."Killer must remove them post-mortem."
