Hightower tried to control his emotions, to come up with some kind of a plan.
He didn’t have much, but after a few seconds, he did havesomething.
He did not know where they’d take Andie, but at least he knew where they grabbed her from. He put Eldora Mountain into his navigation system and saw he was forty minutes out if he drove the speed limit.
He’d make it in a half hour despite the snow, he told himself, and he called Hanley back.
Forty-Three
Among Scott Kincaid’s many peccadilloes, lying was hardly one of the most severe, but he had just told Zack Hightower an outright lie.
At this moment he didnothave Andie Delaney. He had his eyes on her, but they were through binoculars, and she was several hundred yards away, high above him on the ledge of a snowy mountain.
No, he didn’t have her, but she’d be down here soon enough, one way or another, and he was determined to get her when she came to him.
His men—Bennett, Maybus, and Winter—had followed her from the bakery at ten thirty, when her mother picked her up, all the way to Eldora Mountain, twenty minutes west. Here her mom had left her with her snowboard and her gear, she’d met up with some other kids, and they immediately headed for the Corona chairlift.
Andie wore a distinctive yellow coat with a red helmet and black pants with white kneepads, making her easy to spot from a distance. Winter and Maybus stayed down at the base while Bennett followed her up, watched her separate from her friends and then go solo to the far-right side of West Ridge, a double-black-diamond slope that ran along and then through a thick wood of pine trees.
Winter had a set of binoculars in the Bronco, and he watched her descend. She wiped out a couple of times; he saw her spend a couple ofminutes halfway down recovering from a particularly bad spill, but she seemed determined, and eventually she got back on her board and continued on.
Scott Kincaid had called with the news about the Voorhies brothers, and then he arrived alone in the Wagoneer a few minutes later. He kept Bennett at the top of the hill but sent Winter and Maybus up the mountainside through a foot trail in the trees, told them to snatch the girl when she was alone on the slopes, put a gun in her ribs, and tell her they’d shoot her if they all didn’t walk down through the thick woods together.
Scott Kincaid remained in the Jeep Wagoneer. Just as he doubted his men would get Hightower in the MRI center, he also doubted his men trudging up the mountain would capture the girl. It was possible, of course, but if she came back down with a story of dangerous men in camouflage on the hill, he’d be here to throw her in the SUV at gunpoint before she alerted the authorities.
—
Andie Delaney took a deep breath, looked through the heavy snowfall, down the double-black-diamond course in front of her, and prepared herself for another run.
There was almost no one on the right side of West Ridge right now; even her friends had left her for some easier slopes. The freezing rain hardening under the fresh snow here had made this run almost impossible, but Andie loved a good challenge.
Her backside and right arm still ached from her last run, but she was indomitable, and she was determined to give it another go.
She’d started well on the first run of the day but acknowledged now that she had grown a little overconfident in the top half, and when she hit the full shade between two banks of trees, she’d shifted her weight wrong on her board, lost her balance, and tumbled off, slammed chest first into hard-packed snow.
Another wipeout just forty yards down the slope, still in the trees, just pissed her off; she’d sat there on her butt, her board still on her feet out in front of her, for nearly a minute, slapping the hard-packed snow in frustration with a gloved hand.
She told herself to shake it off, just like her dad always told her to do, and finally she did, recovered from a brief bout of doubt and self-pity, then got back up and finished the run beautifully.
Now her goal was to do the whole thing without landing on her chest or on her ass. She took a couple more slow breaths, closed her eyes to mentally visualize the toughest part of the entire course, and then dropped her snowboard over the ledge and took off.
Just like the first run, the top half felt great. Even more snow had fallen in the thirty minutes since her last try; she had the friction she needed on the turns, even when she felt rock and ice below the packed precipitation.
She made it down to the chutes between the trees; the gray day and heavy snow building on her goggles made the visibility poor, but she knew the line, and she stuck to it.
Her speed was good, her knees and low back working as shock absorbers, her mind still visualizing what was just ahead.
The pines around her were heavy with fresh snow; this track of the slope felt narrower than it had when she shot by a half hour earlier, but she concentrated on the icy patch just ahead, the area that had been her undoing on her first run.
Squinting through her goggles, she was surprised to see a pair of men in camouflage, directly ahead, standing between trees. It was weird to be dressed for hunting here on Eldora; she’d been coming here since she was four and couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone halfway up the slope who wasn’t a skier, a snowboarder, or a member of the ski patrol, and the ski patrol always wore easily identifiable jackets.
These men in front of her were right at the icy patch; they held their hands out like they wanted her to stop, and she thought they must have been with Eldora Mountain Resort, trying to stop her for her own safety.
This was dumb of them, she was fine, but she slowed up anyway.
She came to a stop just ten feet away from the men, immediately knelt and flipped the levers on the bindings holding her boots onto the board. She kicked out, hefted the big board, and leaned against it.
“Hi,” she said.
