Destroying Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

place. Lives on raw venison until it gets too cold. By then the FBI figures he’s escaped somehow and relaxes its patrol. Winter and the cold spring keep the carcass frozen until a few weeks ago, when the flies find it.” He looked to Krantz. “You’re not going to touch this, right?”
    “Nope. Not so as anyone can tell.”
    “You think he’ll come back?” Eliza asked.
    “Maybe,” Krantz said. “It’s a great hiding place. You can’t see it from below, you can even climb the sandstone hump itself and not see it—not unless you come around that last piece of stone. Almost no way to find it unless you know where it is already.”
    “Except for the smell,” she said.
    “Except for that,” Krantz agreed. “But he probably couldn’t smell his own filth after a while, and it never occurred to him.” He looked thoughtful. “We need more cameras.”
    “There’s been nothing from the ones in town?” Jacob asked. “You’re studying them?”
    “Skimming them, at least. It’s a lot of footage. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a few more. Maybe we could pay some kids to look through the tapes for us. Set up a few in Witch’s Warts where we think the likely trails are.”
    “What about trip cameras?” Jacob asked.
    “We’d still get a lot of false positives from deer and coyotes,” Eliza said.
    “I can live with that,” Jacob said. “So long as you can send the data back to Blister Creek and we don’t have to trudge out here every time a curious skunk checks out one of your motion detectors.”
    “That can be done,” Krantz said. “Fayer was the computer expert, but maybe Miriam knows something. She used to ask the tech guys lots of questions.”
    “I’ll check,” Eliza said. “Maybe she can teach me.”
    They climbed down from the sandstone hump. Jacob had to look at the sun to figure out the direction to take to return to the temple where they’d left the car. He’d spent hours and hours the previous summer with the search groups, but the geography of Witch’s Warts was still a jumble in his mind.
    “I’m starting to see how Taylor Junior works,” Eliza said. “He likes holes. First the Anasazi cliff dwelling, now this. He even threw Brother Stanley into a sinkhole, remember? And the other Kimball brothers too. Caleb dug a pit at the dump. When Gideon murdered your grandpa, he dumped the body in a sinkhole.”
    “That’s where we’ll find him,” Krantz said. “Hiding underground or in some cave. He’s like the blasted Taliban.”
    It sounded right. It
felt
right. But Taylor Junior wasn’t alone. His entire cult had disappeared into Dark Canyon Wilderness—maybe thirty people. The manhunt hadn’t just scoured the Blister Creek Valley, it had fanned across eight thousand square miles of southern Utah. A big, wild country, but still…if the government could find al-Qaeda leaders in the mountains of Afghanistan, surely they could find a few dozen people hiding in the mountains of Utah.
    But they hadn’t.

    Jacob found himself thinking about Grandma Cowley’s diary the next day when he saw Daniel and Diego running their sleds over the slushy, muddy slope that led to the raised vegetable gardens. What had she said?
    But a few days later I saw the angel myself. Only it wasn’t a being of light. It was an evil spirit.
    After lunch, Jacob volunteered to help Miriam and his brother David frame their new house on the opposite side of the greenhouses. His son Daniel begged to come, so Jacob cinched up a tool belt on the boy and gave him a hammer to carry. Daniel hummed cheerfully as they entered the job site and beamed proudly when David looked down from the scaffolding and grinned.
    “Can always use more manpower,” David said. “You men want to tackle the half bath off the kitchen? The two-by-fours are already cut and marked.”
    Jacob hooked his nail gun into the compressor and then showed Daniel how to pick out the right boards. The boy chattered away as he held boards in place