“Anna, thank God. Where are you?” Hunter’s voice was frantic.
“Trunk… car… driving,” Anna said. Her words were slurred and annoyingly took their time to come out of her mouth.
“Anna,” Hunter said, his voice gruff, commanding, as if he was going to tell her to get her act together.
“I’m… here.” She tried to sound as forceful as Hunter, more… in charge of her situation, but her voice was whispery soft without any real body or bite.
“Drugged?” Hunter asked.
“Chlor—form.”
“Okay, listen up. The whole pack is searching for every vehicle that the Everton family and their workers drive.”
“Everton,” she breathed out, trying to reveal his name so they wouldn’t be looking for the wrong man.
“Yeah, Roger Everton. Actually, Everton is just the name of the business. He changed his name to that when his father didn’t leave him anything in his will.”
“Great.” So Everton probably thought she and Bjornolf were DEA and trying to get his adopted daughter away from him by inviting her over to dinner that night. Then they’d interrogate Jessica for all she knew about her dad’s involvement in the murders.
“Bjornolf and Nathan are going to the tree farm. They suspect he might be headed there,” Hunter said.
She didn’t say anything as she wondered how the other men had been killed. She was almost certain Everton had buried them somewhere on the five hundred acres of the tree farm. He probably intended to bury her somewhere nearby, if not in the same spot.
“Anna?” Hunter said.
When she didn’t say anything, Hunter ordered, “Don’t go to sleep! And don’t hang up on me! Keep talking.”
“Tri… angu… lating?” she asked, attempting to shake free of the grogginess, but the harder she tried, the more she felt like she was going to pass out again. Then she realized her mistake. She had a phone with GPS. “Ping… ing?” she got out before Hunter responded.
“You bet. Finn’s on it.”
“Tell… him…to…” A rough bump in the road shook her, and she nearly lost the phone.
“Tell him what, Anna?”
“Put… a… rush…”
“A rush on it. You got that, Finn?”
She could almost see the two men smiling at each other as if they didn’t know that she was in kind of a hurry here. She smiled, too. Then they’d be serious again and so was she.
After that last thought, she blacked out until she felt her body draped over a hard shoulder that dug into her ribs. She heard the impatient footsteps of her kidnapper as he headed somewhere, his boots crunching on the crusted-over snow. She realized then that the army blanket didn’t smell just musty and like wool and the great outdoors, but like the two DEA agents who had died.
That meant her senses were returning little by little. The fog still cloaked her brain in a numbing sort of way, but she was coming to the conclusion that she might have a little fight left in her—if she could remain awake long enough.
Then he tossed her and she felt for a moment like she was sailing through the air. She landed hard on something metal. Despite the blanket padding her head, it banged against the heavy steel, and at impact, a sharp pain shot through her skull. Not enough to knock her out. Instead, it shook her from her drugged stupor a little.
Her heart began skipping beats when she thought she was in a coffin. An engine roared to life, and whatever she was in vibrated. She guessed the vehicle was some kind of earth-moving machine. She wondered if he intended to bury her alive.
Her blood turned to ice. She fumbled under her jacket for her holster. Why hadn’t she thought of the gun before now? Her fingers touched the metal, and she let out a tentative sigh of relief. He hadn’t checked her for weapons.
Thank God the vehicle he was driving was slow moving. She hoped he was going to go a long way before he dumped her body. Maybe she could wake up enough to aim the gun accurately before he attempted to kill her.
She tried to reach her phone to tell Hunter where she was and realized it had been in her hand when she passed out the last time.
Now… it wasn’t.
Chapter 18
They were nearly at the tree farm when Bjornolf got a call from Hunter.
“She’s alive, Bjornolf,” Hunter assured him. “She’s groggy from the effects of chloroform, but she was speaking on her phone with us only moments earlier.”
Guardedly relieved, Bjornolf couldn’t say anything for a minute as he wheeled into the farm’s snow-covered gravel parking lot. His emotions were so raw that he couldn’t believe he—who was always in control of them on any mission, no matter the circumstances—could be so full of anger and, at the same time, so terrified he might lose Anna.
“According to Everton’s daughter, Jessica, he just drove up in a car and parked it outside his home,” Bjornolf said, trying to keep his breathing steady when he felt sick to his stomach. “He’s taken Anna in a backhoe somewhere on the farm. The girl has shifted and hidden in the woods, proving she’s one of us.”
Hunter let out his breath. “Finn has just confirmed that Anna is at the farm. Her digital cell phone was pinged, and he’s determined its latitude and longitude via GPS, so we’ve got our police officers headed in that direction. They should be there in a couple of minutes.”
Bjornolf screeched the Land Rover to a halt. “We just arrived,” he told Hunter.
He opened his door but before he could bolt in the direction that he heard the backhoe moving, Nathan, in wolf form, squeezed between the steering wheel and Bjornolf’s chest and leaped out.
Bjornolf with gun in hand—and Nathan with canines readied—raced after the backhoe.
Somewhere in the distance in the woods, the backhoe stopped.
So did Bjornolf’s heart. He wasn’t close enough yet. If Everton dumped her in an open hole, he could have her buried before Bjornolf reached her.
Gunshots rang out. He prayed the man was a lousy shot.
Vehicles started to pull into the gravel parking lot behind him. The army had arrived. Were they already too late?
No more shots rang out. The vehicle wasn’t moving, though. The engine was running, but the backhoe was standing still.
Bjornolf raced through the trees and didn’t think he’d ever make it in time. The stillness was what killed him the most. No sounds of a woman crying out in pain. No more gunshots exploding. Just the sound of birds twittering in the trees and the backhoe engine rumbling.
He bolted out of a stand of blue spruce and saw a new section where seedlings were being planted. The backhoe rested at the edge of a huge pit. Nathan was bounding around the backhoe, smelling the scents on the vehicle and tracing them to the pit.
There was no sign of Everton. Or Anna. Hell. Had Everton heard Bjornolf coming and run?
Where was Anna? Everton couldn’t have run off with her, not in the drugged state she was in. What about the shots? She had to be wounded, if not dead.
Bjornolf bolted for the backhoe, believing then he might see Anna rolled up in the blanket in the digger. Shot.
She wasn’t there. Dirt and chipped yellow paint. The digger was empty. He stared at it as if thinking that if he looked long enough, she’d materialize.
A groan from the pit had him pivoting and shifting his attention down into the hole. Nathan barked and dug at the edge of the pit.
“Anna!” She was standing in the mud in the middle of the eight-foot-deep hole, which was covered by an undisturbed light layer of snow in patches. She held a gun in her hand, pointed at a body nearby, a blanket on the muddy earth beside her feet.
Everton was lying on his back, clutching his bloodied chest. Blood was also leaking down his crooked, swollen, and discolored nose. His eyes closed as he groaned again.