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Calloway stepped back. She climbed in, uncertain what she was looking for but feeling the same urgency she’d felt when she and Ben had driven off the night before, as if she’d forgotten something. She unlocked their rugged carts. The shotguns and rifles remained racked, barrel up, like pool cues in a rack. Sarah’s pistols were stored in an interior drawer, the ammunition in the lock box. In a second drawer, where Sarah kept buttons and badges from other competitions, Tracy found the photograph of Wild Bill presenting her with the silver belt buckle: Sarah and the third place finisher stood on each side of her. She slid the photograph into her back pocket, lifted the duster, and checked the pockets.
    “It isn’t here,” she said climbing out.
    “What isn’t here?” Calloway asked.
    “The championship buckle,” Tracy said. “I gave it to Sarah last night before we left.”
    “I’m not following,” Calloway said.
    “Why would she take the buckle and not take her guns?” Ben asked.
    “I don’t know. It’s just . . .”
    “It’s just what?” Calloway asked.
    “I mean, she wouldn’t have had any reason to take the belt buckle unless she intended to give it back to me this morning, right?”
    “She walked away,” Calloway said. “Is that what you’re saying? She had time to decide what to take and started walking.”
    Tracy looked down the deserted road. The white center line snaked with the hillside’s contours, turning and disappearing around a bend. “So where is she?”

CHAPTER 9
    T he silver plating had lost its luster, but the cast image of a cowgirl firing two single-action revolvers and the lettering etched along the perimeter remained distinct: 1993 Washington State Champion .
    They’d found the belt buckle.
    They’d found Sarah.
    The emotion that welled inside Tracy surprised her. It wasn’t bitterness or guilt. It wasn’t even sorrow. It was anger, and it coursed through her like venom. She’d known. She’d always known Sarah’s disappearance wasn’t what everyone had wanted her to believe. She’d known there’d been more to it. And now she had a sense that she could finally prove it.
    “Finlay.” Calloway’s voice sounded as if it were coming from the far end of a long tunnel. “Take her out of here.”
    Someone touched her arm. Tracy pulled away. “No.”
    “You don’t need to be a part of this,” Calloway said.
    “I left her once,” she said. “I’m not leaving her again. I’m staying. To the end.”
    Calloway nodded to Armstrong, who stepped back to where Rosa had resumed digging. “I’ll need that back,” Calloway said. He held out his hand for the belt buckle but Tracy continued to trace the surface with her thumb, feeling the contour of each letter. “Tracy,” Calloway said.
    She held out the buckle, but when Calloway grasped it she did not release her grip, forcing him to look her in the eye. “I told you, Roy. We searched this area. We searched it twice.”

    She kept her distance the remainder of the afternoon, but she could see enough to know that Sarah had been buried in a fetal position, legs higher than her head. Whoever had used the hole created when the root ball was pulled free of the ground had misjudged the size of the hole, which was not uncommon. Spatial perception can become distorted when a person is under stress.
    Only after Kelly Rosa had zipped closed the black body bag and padlocked the zipper did Tracy hike out of the woods back to her car.
    She navigated the turns down the mountain without thought, her mind dulled. The sun had dipped below the tree line, causing shadows to creep across the road. She’d known, of course. It was why detectives were trained to work so hard to recover anyone abducted within the first forty-eight hours. After that, statistics showed that the odds of finding the person alive plummeted. After twenty years, the odds of finding Sarah alive had been infinitesimal. And yet there had remained that small