"Back of her head was split. Much of the damage was internal." The sheriff's deputies and some local men were behind the church, passing a small bottle, and talking.

Rachel's face is clear. Her eyes closed. Lee reaches in and takes her hand. It is cold. So cold. My Sun Ray.

"I don't feel scared anymore."

Rachel's death had fractured Emily's family. Her father never smiled. Every ounce of happiness had left him. Her mother would sit alone for hours in Rachel's room, not allowing anything to be touched. In their grief, her parents were melting away from her when Emily needed them.

The words were never spoken, but in their anguish they held her responsible for her sister's death. They branded her with blame, searing it into her soul.

It was her fault.

She was there.

It is the annual summer camping trip with the Buckhorn Creek Girls Club. Four days and nights in the backcountry of Glacier National Park. Mothers and fathers are dropping girls off at the Town Hall. Lee and Rachel's folks giving them hugs and kisses.

"Remember to watch over your little sister."

"I will."

Hauling their sleeping bags and packs from the car, waving good-byes from the bus. Her parents waving, smiling for the last time.

The group hikes deep into the park. The mountains, the fragrant trees and clear water streams sparkling in the sun. This must be the way to heaven, Lee thinks. Everything about the trip is perfect. Rachel loves it. They pick flowers, make crafts, sing songs by the campfire, toast marshmallows, tell ghost stories, count stars. It is perfect.

The third afternoon the group has a scavenger hunt. When her turn comes, Rachel reaches into a leader's hat and pulls out a folded slip of paper with instructions to catch two butterflies and place them in the empty glass jelly jar.

"Will you help me, Lee?"

Rachel holds the jar while her big sister takes her hand and they go the meadow nearby.

"Not too far girls," one of the leaders called after them.

The meadow is abundant with flowers, glacier lilies. Butterflies flit about them, white, pink and yellow. Emily is taking pictures of Rachel, laughing in the sun, chasing butterflies.

"Look, a blue one."

Rachel trots up the meadow hill to a forest edge.

"Rachel, wait!"

Rachel vanishes into a stand of spruce.

She follows, catching up to her as they come to the cliff, gasping as they halt in their tracks.

He is standing there. Smiling.

The monster.

Emily fought with every fiber of her being to tell Agent Tracy Bowman the things she could never tell anyone, not even Doug.

Paige had disappeared into the same abyss as Rachel. How could this be happening? Emily could not bear it. Could not. Please. She wept.

Arms wrapped around her, holding her together. Someone was saying her name. "Emily, it's OK to cry."

Doug? It was not Doug. He was off talking to searchers.

"Emily, it's OK." Bowman comforted her. "Tell me what is tormenting you."

Emily could not stop sobbing. Doug. Could not get the words out.

How do you begin to say my daughter is lost where my sister died, and I am the one responsible? How do you say that and keep yourself alive?

She should tell Doug.

But before she realized it, Emily could no longer contain her pain.

"It's happening again," she cried.

"What is happening again, Emily?"

"I was there when she died."

"When who died?"

"My sister. Now it is happening again."

THIRTY-TWO.

Stay focused,Dolores. Focused. Fidelity Bravery Integrity. I cannot let the team down. Got to find the lost little girl. But right now, FBI Special Agent Dolores Harding had to sit down to catch her breath.

She and Orin Mills had been scouring their assigned patch of Grizzly Tooth ever since daybreak. Coming up on fourteen hours.

"Over here, Mills!"

Twenty yards off, he raised his walking stick, signaling he would join her on the rock ledge in the shade of a stand of pine.

The sun was high. Harding's calves and thighs ached as she reached for her water bottle, scanning the mountains' majesty from behind her sunglasses. She was a marathoner, a twenty-nine-year-old hard-driving agent assigned to the OCPD at the Salt Lake City Division. It seemed only yesterday she was surveilling two case targets who were to arrive at Salt Lake City International Airport from Mexico City via LAX. They were no-shows. Could have been bad information. Or they were tipped.

It was two days ago, wasn't it? She was exhausted out here. For after that job, Harding suddenly found herself partnered in Glacier National Park with Special Agent Orin Mills with White Collar at the Division. Cerebral guys. Harding and Mills were part of the horde of agents dispatched from Utah. Even for some case-hardened agents, it was a gut-wrenching assignment. Harding saw how some of the agents who were fathers were quite pensive about this one, while the young jerks were quietly tabulating availability pay.

Mills was a big, friendly, soft-spoken, fifty-two-year-old Mormon with three grandchildren. Took this emergency assignment personally. Harding, a blue-collar girl who left Pennsylvania's Rust Belt to study criminology at John Jay in New York, and Mills, a church-goer who was raised in Provo, had scoured Sector 21 three times. Heartache written in Orin's face as he joined her on the ledge, inhaling the air as it cooled in the sunset.

"Not much time left for looking today, Dolores. Can you imagine the horror this child is enduring?"

Harding regarded the mountains, the glacier valleys, and felt bad for quietly complaining about her body aches and discomfort. She was an adult FBI agent in jeans and a T-shirt, equipped with heavy socks, boots, water, food, a semi-automatic .40-caliber Glock, bear repellant, bug spray, first-aid kit, radio, training, physical conditioning. If a few hours searching a mountain slope had exacted this much on her, what would it do to lost, frightened child from the city? Harding became angry at the mountains, as if they were an informant refusing to disclose life-and-death information. Come on, give her up. You do not need her. Give her up. This has gone on long enough.

Harding reached for her well-thumbed sector map. Precision-folded and marked.

"We've got some time, Orin. Any areas you want to re-visit--darn!"

Harding dropped her water bottle; it tumbled and swished for a few yards. She climbed from the ledge carefully to retrieve it. It had rolled into a small surface fissure. As she reached for it, a metallic glint seized her attention. Harding shone her penlight into the crack, which was about two feet. She removed her sunglasses, eyes adjusting to the light on a small ax.

"Mills! We got something here!" Concentrating, Harding was certain she saw a lace pattern of browned blood on the head reaching to the handle. Gooseflesh rose on her arms. "Mills! It's not good! Stay where you are and get ERT on the radio. We need them here now!"

The FBI's Evidence Response Team descended upon the scene. Yellow crime scene tape sealed the area. Radios crackled; helicopters landed nearby by or hovered; photographs were taken. Harding was instructed to remain at the scene, to maintain the evidence chain.

Suddenly, she found Frank Zander next to her.

"You're Harding? You made the find?"

Even dreamier up close.

"Yes, I found it. Just dumb-ass luck."

"Good work."

It was a camping ax. A one-and-a-half pound Titan Striker with a drop-forged steel head and a sixteen-inch curved handle with a rubberized cushion grip. It was placed in a plastic evidence bag and flown from the area on Harding's lap under the last vestiges of daylight.

It fit the description of Doug Baker's ax given earlier by the New York detective, thought Zander. They could check the serial number for distribution points, run credit cards. He was standing off by himself at the scene, staring at the Rockies. A blood-stained T-shirt, a bloodied hatchet, a public argument, a domestic dispute at home, a mother undergoing counseling. The pieces were falling into place. A noose was being fashioned. Zander's jaw clenched.

It was time to talk to Doug Baker again.

Time to learn the truth.

THIRTY-THREE.

Concern flowed through the phone line from John Jackson, the chief lawyer for Montana's attorney general in Helena.

"David, are you all right?"

Since David Cohen had taken on Isaiah Hood's case three years ago, the two lawyers had developed a strong professional kinship.

"John, there's been a development."

"A development? What sort of development?"

Standing alone in his disheveled motel room in Deer Lodge, Cohen sniffed and ran a shaking hand through his hair.

"A grave, urgent development."

"David the Governor will not intervene. The sentence will be--"

"John, I believe he is innocent."

Jackson knew losing a death sentence appeal was a punishing blow for death penalty lawyers to absorb. Jackson had lawyer friends in Florida and Texas. Few people know of the horror they often endure. One committed suicide. Jackson gave the eulogy.

"I absolutely believe that the state will be executing an innocent man."

Cohen's eyes burned into the TV news.

"David, the Supreme Court has rejected you. There is no basis of law--"

"To hell with the law."

"David, have you been drinking?"

"No. John. Just hold off on your press release and give me some time--"

"I can't I--"

"John, I swear, if you go ahead with this, Montana will never recover. You will have your place in history for having sealed its fate as the judicial pariah of the nation. I swear--"

"David, I know this is a difficult time--"

Cohen sniffed and checked his watch.

"Listen. Hear me out. All I am asking, John, is for two hours to talk to my client. Then let me talk to the governor. I guarantee he will want to hear this before you kill Hood."

"I don't know...."

"Just hold off on anything for that long. Christ, John we're still two days away. Please just hold off. No press releases yet. Not a word."

Jackson sighed. Cohen heard his chair squeak.

"John, please. You have man's life in your hands."

Jackson's concern was for Cohen, not for Hood, the child killer. No one in the entire state was concerned for him, except the candle-holding protesters, but they were not abundant in Montana. Still, Jackson could not see what harm two hours would do. The state had all the power. He could stall the release for that long without much difficulty. Most people were distracted by the search for the little girl in Glacier. Seemed to have eclipsed Hood's case.

"I will see what I can do. You've got two hours."

Now with the sun setting, everything became clearer to Cohen as he sped his Neon along Lake Conley Road to the prison, going through the security ritual, the razor wire, the clanging doors, icy stares from the guards, to see Hood on death row.