The stranger didn’t speak.
Jay changed approaches then and went from offers to pleas. To outright begging. He said that his wife was the only thing that mattered to him in the world, talked about the kind of woman she was, strong and smart and, above all, forgiving. If she had any weakness, it was an excess of empathy, a desire to believe the best of everyone at all times, a tendency to forgive what should have been unforgivable. If she was released, she would forgive this man for these sins. So would Jay.
The stranger never answered.
They were thirty miles out of Red Lodge, the last traces of the mountain snow falling behind them, when Jay finally asked a question that broke the silence.
“What is your name?”
“Eli Pate.” This came conversationally enough, said with the same cordial manner he’d demonstrated in the house. Jay thought that it was a pointless question, because of course the man would lie. Still, he wanted something to call him.
“Eli…whatever you want from me, it’s-”
“Stay eastbound. Continue the conversation if you wish, but I have nothing to say. When I have something to say, you’ll hear it.”
For the remainder of the drive, there were no words exchanged beyond Eli’s curt instructions. They crossed the plains and cut through the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. It was wide-open country, the famous Montana sky hanging above them unbroken and endless. In a one-stoplight town called Lame Deer, Eli ordered Jay to turn north. They passed the reservation school, an institution named Chief Dull Knife College, and drove alongside a creek. From the time they’d set out, Jay had hoped he was being taken to the same place as his wife. The farther they’d gotten from his home and the deeper into the desolate land, the more he’d believed this would be the case. While he still didn’t understand the purpose behind it all, he took some solace in the idea that they would be reunited, no matter how awful the circumstances.
It wasn’t until he saw the plumes of bone-white smoke that he began to fear he was wrong about the reunion and to suspect for the first time why he’d been selected for the day’s horrors. As they pulled into the small town of Chill River, Jay was praying that Eli would send him farther north, toward someplace unknown. The unknown suddenly sounded better than turning east.
“Right on Willow Avenue and head east,” Eli Pate commanded him.
Jay understood now.
They followed Willow Avenue outside of town and soon the source of the smoke appeared on their right-four mammoth stacks protruding into the sky like spires, clouds foaming out of them. A sign in front cheerfully welcomed them to Chill River. TOMORROW’S TOWN…TODAY!
“Pull over for a moment.”
Jay put the truck on the shoulder of the road.
“You have an idea what you’re looking at, I assume?” Eli Pate said.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“You already know.”
Eli Pate shifted in the seat and used his right hand to produce his cell phone. He kept the gun to Jay’s head with the left, then extended the phone so that they both could see the display. No video feed this time, just a still image. Sabrina, bleary-eyed and confused, looking at the shackle on her wrist as if she couldn’t make sense of it. Jay had to remind himself how to breathe.
“Tell me,” Eli Pate said again. His voice was very low.
“A generating station.” The words croaked from Jay’s constricted throat. He couldn’t look away from the image of Sabrina. When Eli Pate pocketed the phone, Jay was torn between relief and sorrow. He didn’t want to see his wife like that, but he also couldn’t bear not to see her at all.
“What generating station?” Eli Pate said. “Give me some detail. I’m nothing but a rube, Jay. You’re an expert.”
Jay stared at the place where the smoke met the sky.
“The Chill River generation station,” he said. “We’re looking at a coal-fired power plant.”
“Sounds impressive. Do you happen to know how much power it generates?”
“Peak output is more than two thousand megawatts.”
“Is that a lot?”
“Second-largest coal-fired station west of the Mississippi.” The gun was still against Jay’s skull, but he’d stopped noticing the sensation. All of his physical attention was now on those stacks and the snaking high-voltage lines that led away from the power plant. All of his mental attention was on the way his wife looked in that picture.
“Quantify that for me, Jay. How many people are fed by this operation?”
“Nearly a million.”
“That seems hard to believe, considering how far out in the sticks we are.”
“The power goes two hundred and fifty miles west of here. There it’s distributed into different grids, different transmission systems. All the way to the West Coast.” His words came in a monotone, his mind on Sabrina. Where did this man have her? The frame of the camera was too tight to indicate anything about her location. Only her condition.
“Fascinating stuff,” Eli Pate said. “One more question: How does it move to those different grids?”
“Through the five-hundred-kV transmission lines.”
“And how many of those lines are required to move all that electricity from here?”
Jay didn’t want to tell the truth, but the man already knew it, so there was no point in lying. “Two,” he said.
Eli Pate whistled between his teeth. “Goodness. How oddly vulnerable, don’t you think? Imagine if the public knew! Why, the fear it would conjure…that would be something to behold. I’ve been told something about you, and please correct me if I’m wrong-did you once work on those lines? Before the move to Red Lodge?”
“Yes.”
“Dangerous work. There’s a technique, I understand, called barehanding. It requires very brave men, very specialized training, very sophisticated equipment. Helicopters, even, and sometimes high rope work. That’s you, correct?”
Jay didn’t speak. Eli tapped the gun lightly on his skull. “Do you know why you’re here now, my friend?”
“No.”
“Sure you do. But I’ll humor you, because you’ve humored me. You’re here, Jay, to shut this show down. You’re here to turn off the lights.”
7
In the last minutes of her life, Lauren had driven out of Cassadaga on Kicklighter Road, headed away from the interstate. That intrigued and confused the homicide detectives. No one was aware of any destination she might have had other than Siesta Key, where Mark waited for her with steaks on the grill as the sun settled behind the Gulf of Mexico. That route called for her to take I-4 West, crossing central Florida the same way she’d come, and I-4 was north of Cassadaga. She’d headed south instead, but she hadn’t made it far before she pulled off the road. The investigators theorized that she’d stopped to get her bearings, realizing she’d made a mistake and not wanting to continue in the wrong direction down the wrong road.
The investigators didn’t know Lauren, though. This was a woman who, when Mark had asked her if she knew what state was west of Montana, had looked at him suspiciously, as if it were a trick question, and said, “Well, am I standing up in it or lying down?” He had great fun with that one, but it was a bizarre illustration of the way she considered maps: one-dimensionally; the only directions that mattered to her were right, left, and straight. Tell her to drive northwest and you’d get a blank stare in response. She’d graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida and aced the bar exam, but she had no interest in compasses.
All of this was part of the explanation for how she’d ended up driving southbound out of Cassadaga, according to the police. But again, you had to know her. One of the reasons Lauren was so bad with directions was that she’d always relied on technology as a crutch. Her Infiniti was equipped with a navigation system that she used constantly. If she was walking, she used the GPS on her phone. She’d do this even in St. Pete, let alone in a rural location she’d never been to before. A review of the GPS proved that she’d entered the address of the Cassadaga Hotel. When she’d headed south on Kicklighter, driving away from an unfamiliar town on an unfamiliar road, she’d had no guidance from the GPS, no programmed destination.