“She’s going to hurt him!”
“Lizzy, you need to calm down. Rachel is predictable. Anything that happens that might jeopardize her goals, she mitigates. I don’t think Adele’s accidental death was the first time she found herself in such a situation. She didn’t panic, she came up with a plan almost immediately to protect herself but convinced Candace and the others that she did it to protect them. Smart...but predictable,” Regan muttered. “Narcissistic personality, at the very least needs to be liked, craves admiration. She was a cheerleader, check the popular box. She’s in the sciences, check the smart box. Rachel is exactly who and what she needs to be... She reads people well. Manipulates them in order to advance her goals. It’s all about her.”
“The podcast,” Lizzy said. “It uprooted her perfect life, didn’t it?”
“Yes, and that’s the sole reason she went after Lucas. He pushed and pushed until people started talking. Nia, the first caller, went to break the dam and was punished for it. But the dam still broke, and Nicole came forward. She has a lot more to say. Once that happened, Rachel knew she had to do something. She tried to kill Nicole, failed.”
“She’s going to kill him! Why are we standing here doing nothing?”
“Where do we look, Lizzy? She didn’t take Lucas because of what he knows that could hurt her, she took Lucas out of anger, as payback. But her ultimate goal is to avoid being arrested.”
Regan snapped her fingers. She pulled out her copy of Candace’s journal. “I know where she’s going—where she’s already been successful in getting rid of people.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Payson. From Payson she can go in four or five different directions, making it harder to track her. We need to study Candace’s maps. Lizzy, help me. When Lucas and I were looking at these yesterday, we really didn’t know what Candace was seeing. The maps aren’t traditional maps. Where is the mine? Where would Rachel take Lucas? Where did she take Adele’s body?”
Candace had highlighted two abandoned mines in Payson, then put a question mark on a third.
Lizzy looked, then she pulled out her phone and looked up Google Earth maps. “Okay, a mine, abandoned because no one found Adele’s body, remote, but accessible by car because you can’t really carry a body a great distance, right?”
Now she was thinking. “Exactly,” Regan said.
“Candace was off. This mark?” Lizzy pointed. “That’s an emergency exit to the mine.” She flipped through her phone and showed Regan an article about the history of mines in Payson. “I was reading this last night when I fell asleep. The entrance was barricaded after a kid got lost in the mine more than ten years ago. But I’ll bet that’s where she went. This one gets too much traffic. Not the mine itself, but there’s a road too close to it. And the one down here? That’s impossible to access except maybe on horses. The road that used to go down there got washed away in a storm more than six years ago.”
“If she dropped Candace in the mine, we’d never have figured this out,” Regan said.
“Or maybe someone would have come forward because they didn’t have the scapegoat in Joseph Abernathy.”
“Good point. Let’s go.”
“Go?”
“Yes. I’ll call the police on the way, but I don’t want to wait for them. Rachel certainly isn’t going to wait. As soon as she gets there, Lucas is going to die. I’m a great driver, I’ll gain on her. How long ago did she get him?”
Lizzy looked at her phone. “I called you, like, one minute after. That was at four fifty-six.”
It was five twenty-five now. Rachel had thirty minutes on them.
“It’s nearly a three-hour drive. We’re going to punch it. I hope you don’t get carsick.”
Forty-Seven
Regan called Detective Hernandez as she drove and laid everything out, including what she was doing. He would contact the Gila County Sheriff’s Department and the Payson Police Department. Regan told him which mine they were going to first but gave him all three locations. When he suggested she stand down and let the authorities handle it, she hung up.
She was not standing down. Lucas was in danger. If the police could set up a command center first and find him, great; if not, she wasn’t going to take the chance that he might die.
They drove in silence for a long time, which was fine by Regan. South Lake Mary Road wound through Coconino National Forest, but she knew it well. Eventually, it would hit Highway 87, which was just as winding but smoother.
There were better roads, but this was the fastest way. She assumed that Rachel had gone this way as well—less chance of being seen by law enforcement than on the interstate, and Rachel would assume that they’d be looking for her car. Rachel would also be following the speed limit to avoid being pulled over; Regan didn’t care. She’d gone through extensive road training at FLET-C and took every advanced driving class that she could because she enjoyed it. So while she was breaking a lot of traffic laws as she drove, she was gaining on Rachel.
She wasn’t going to lose Lucas. She should have insisted he stay at her dad’s.
She hadn’t seen who Rachel really was. She’d suspected that once Rachel knew that Nicole was going to make a full recovery, she’d bolt. That self-preservation was more important to her than revenge. Clearly, Rachel was far more devious and unbalanced than Regan had seen from her actions.
“Your driving is scaring the hell out of me,” Lizzy said.
That’s what her older brother used to say, and that was before she had offensive driver’s training.
“Are you going to puke?”
“No.”
“Just navigate for me once we hit Payson. We’re still an hour out. Hold on.”