The ledge was a sheer drop of several hundred feet, a shocker to come upon without warning from the forest.

"Dead end, girl."

Lola yipped back. Panting, assuming her posture that said, This is it, Todd. I've found it. Then she sneezed. Taylor surveyed the rocky stretch of ledge, beautiful against the brilliant, rising sun.

"But there's nothing here."

Lola barked, giving an indication it was somewhere along the rugged cliff top.

"Hey, careful!"

The entire ledge was fissured with crevasses, some no wider than six inches, some a foot or two. But they were deep, plunging treacherously into darkness. Lola was panting, tail wagging at one. At the surface, it ran about twenty feet from the edge into the forest, a gash in the rock maybe twenty inches wide that descended into a dark eternity.

Lola stood steadfast at one point along the crevasse and yelped as Taylor realized its mouth was big enough to swallow a child. He dropped to his knees next to his dog.

"Hello!" Taylor called into the crevasse.

Silence.

For the next three minutes, he called, lying flat on the rock, listening for the faintest sound of life. Nothing. Suddenly, Taylor's blood turned cold. Nearly touching his nose were a few threads of fabric, like something torn from a shirt. Next to it, quivering in the wind, a few strands of hair. Some blood droplets. Taylor reached for his radio.

The FBI evidence team had trouble finding a safe place to put down their helicopter. The winds at the altitude of Sector 23 were rocking the aircraft. Eventually, they found a spot some two hundred yards from Taylor's detect point and humped it in.

"Something's down there," Taylor said. "Lola's going nuts up here."

"You hear anything?" an agent asked Taylor.

"Nothing."

Powerful flashlights were aimed down the hole; long aluminum poles were extended, prodding the depths for any indication of life. Nothing.

More experts arrived within minutes.

SAR people worked one side of the opening with the aim of rescuing a victim, while FBI technicians meticulously studied the evidence at the surface. Using tweezers and a powerful magnifying glass, a technician was confident the strands of hair were similar to Paige Baker's. They began tapping at the rock to remove blood droplets. Preliminary on-scene testing indicated the trace was human. The fabric was cotton. White. Material and color were consistent with the socks Paige was wearing when she vanished. Everything was photographed and recorded. The area was regarded as a restricted federal crime scene.

Agent Frank Zander arrived. "What have we got here?"

Agent William Horn, one of the FBI's senior evidence people, explained the blood, hair and fabric at the mouth of the crevasse.

"It doesn't look good, Frank."

"She down there?"

"At this point, odds are she is."

"How soon before you can confirm?"

"Don't know. The opening is too narrow and tight for us to drop a rescuer or tech down there. We're flying in some small fiber-optics cameras, listening devices. Looks like this thing stretches to the bottom, four hundred feet, maybe more. We need an exceptional length of fiber for the camera, we're waking up a high-tech firm in California. We'll need some time, Frank."

Zander nodded.

"This is your scene, Bill, and my investigation. Nobody who is here now is permitted to leave. All radio contact goes through you to me. It's all need-to-know. Nobody talks to anybody until it is determined exactly what we have here. It is critical now that nothing leaks from here. Critical."

Horn nodded.

Before Zander returned to the command center, he looked at the FBI evidence technicians in their hooded jumpsuits with gloves. They glowed in the dawn against the backdrop of the sky and mountains as they worked silently on what Zander believed was the grave of Paige Baker.

FORTY-ONE.

A nation away from the FBI's secret investigation at the crevasse of Sector 23 in Montana, a constable with the Ontario Provincial Police was ending her night shift east of Toronto, patrolling RV campsites near the Sandbanks Provincial Park.

The waters of Lake Ontario lapped against the vast sand beaches as she cross-checked license plates with the tourist alert sheet on her clipboard. She locked on to a California tag for Meyers, knocked on the door of their thirty-foot motor home, informing Willa Meyers to call the San Francisco Police Department right away. "A family emergency."

An SFPD dispatcher took her call at approximately 4:00 A.M. Pacific Time. She paged Inspector Linda Turgeon, who was sleeping but had the call patched to her home. Turgeon told Willa Meyers what had happened in Montana.

"My dear Lord, no!" Willa was horrified, explaining that she and Huck had no idea their niece was lost in the Rocky Mountains.

"We purposely avoided the news because of Isaiah Hood's impending execution," Willa said; then she told Turgeon about Lee's secret family history. "We wanted them to join us in Canada. It was a delicate family matter. Lee was receiving counseling. Doug didn't even know everything. We wanted to get Lee as far away from the hood case as possible at the time of the execution. We didn't know they had returned there."

Willa told Turgeon that when a San Francisco reporter recently reached them asking questions about Emily's past, she figured it was somehow related to Hood's execution, not to Paige.

Turgeon consoled Willa, then called Sydowski, catching him on his way out of his room in the Sky Forest Vista Inn near Kalispell. He took extensive notes as Turgeon enlightened him.

Now, Sydowski was finishing his third coffee watching the sun climb as Zander's chopper returned from Sector 23 to the helipad near the command center. The two men talked near a stand of spruce behind a fire crew dorm.

"I think we found her, Walter."

"Alive?"

"No. Blood, hair and clothing fragments at the mouth of a narrow and deep rock fissure, just under two miles from the campsite."

"You confirm her body is there?"

"No. It's going to take a few hours to get some equipment up there. No one, absolutely no one, knows what we've got there."

"I've got an update on Emily Baker," Sydowski said. "SFPD contacted Emily's aunt. Emily is the sister of Rachel Ross, the child murdered in Glacier twenty-two years again by Isaiah Hood, the guy who is going to be executed."

Zander was dumbfounded.

"Why didn't we know this from the outset?" He shook his head. "That happened in the same region. The Bureau, or Montana, should have known."

"Turns out Emily was Natalie Ross at the time. Natalie's mother changed her name shortly after the tragedy. As you know, Natalie Ross was the witness, the only witness, who saw Hood kill her sister. Her testimony helped seal his death warrant." He filled Zander in on the rest of the story. "Emily would never speak of her past. Began undergoing counseling for it as Hood's execution date loomed."

Zander stared into the sunlight piercing the spruce.

"Damn, Walt. What do you make of it?"

"In my time, I've seen them all. The devil told me to do it, the voices told me, my dog told me. I've had the most upstanding people, finest-looking people, look me straight in the eye and say they had to kill their infant child because God told them it was the Antichrist. But--"

Zander looked at Sydowski. "But what?"

"To me, the pieces here just don't quite fit."

"I think they do. It's just a matter of which category. Just a matter of time, Walt. Look at everything we've got so far. The ax, the T-shirt, his hand, her past, his temper, the girl's corpse. I think we've got them beyond a reasonable doubt."

"I don't. Not yet. It is still largely circumstantial."

"What about the mother's background, her history?"

"I see it as a reason for their strange behavior."

"I see it as damning."

"Frank, you have no linchpin to bring it all together. Nothing physical, irrefutable."

"She's in the crevasse."

"What if she fell?"

Zander's eyes narrowed.

"I'm going to find out, Walt. Give me time. I am going to get them on the box as soon as possible."

"It's your case. How you handle it is up to you."

Within twenty minutes, everything was conveyed to Lloyd Turner, FBI Special Agent In Charge, and Nora Lam of Justice, who immediately shook her head.

"What's you're hurry? Why not see what your investigation at the crevasse yields? It might give you your trump card."

"We're holding a pretty winnable hand now, Nora." Zander said.

"I agree with Frank. A polygraph might help at this stage," Turner said.

"You know he has to agree, cooperate and be Mirandized?" Lam said. "You must advise him of his right to a lawyer."

Doug was escorted once again to the task force room and seated before the investigators. He listened as Zander explained the situation.

"Doug, we've got a problem and we need your help."

He emphasized how the search was expanding, "more people, more resources," but the job of ruling out all other possibilities in Paige's disappearance required a lot of work. "We're going through permits trying to locate and talk to every other party in the area at the time."

"How can I help?"

"Well, Doug," Zander said. "An investigation is largely a process of elimination. We want to eliminate all potential options quickly so we can concentrate on valid ones."

"I see."

"The most disturbing one we have to deal with is that something has happened to Paige--an animal, or a stranger in the park. Do you follow me?"

Doug looked at his hands. That other family made him uneasy.

"I--I. Yes."

"We have to look at everyone. It is critical."

"Yes."

"We want to eliminate you."

Doug said nothing. He had known for a long while that was coming.

"Doug, your wound, the ax, her T-shirt..."

Doug sniffed; tears welled...he knew.

"Can you appreciate where I am going here?"

His pulse galloped. "Yes," he said, his heart breaking "Would you agree to take a polygraph?"

Doug swallowed.

"It's just a tool, but it might help us, help everyone."

Before Doug realized his head was nodding, Zander asked him to voice his answer.

"Yes, I will take a polygraph."

"Then I have to tell you certain things first because the law requires it."

"What things?"

"You have the right to remain silent..."

Jesus, Doug could not believe...

"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

How does a life come to this...?

"You have the right to consult with an attorney and have them present with you while you are being questioned."