When he stepped into the second bedroom he felt a crunch under his feet; he looked down and saw clumps of broken gypsum and shards of shattered glass covering the floor. He searched the walls and found the source—high up, near the ceiling. He ran back into the living room and looked at the wall on the opposite side; he found three jagged holes and three more that aligned with them on the exterior wall. They were bullet holes—someone had fired into the trailer three times.

Nick hurried outside and knelt down beside the lifeless dog. He combed his fingers through its thick black fur until he found a tangled wet clump on the animal’s thick breast. He felt the spot and found another bullet hole—the huge dog had apparently been felled by a single large-caliber bullet through the heart.

Nick could see the whole picture in his mind: Someone had used his car to approach the trailer without raising Alena’s suspicion. The three huge guard dogs would have detected the car in the woods and accompanied it into the clearing as always, but Alena had probably called them off—after all, it was only Nick. When the man finally had revealed himself, the dogs had attacked—and the man had fired point-blank.

He slowly rubbed the dog’s fur again. Acheron—the leader—the one that always guarded the driver’s-side door. Nick closed his eyes and shook his head. Did Alena have to witness this? Did she have to stand there and watch in horror as some stranger she thought was a friend destroyed one of her beloved dogs? It would have been like losing a child for her; it would have broken her heart.

But what happened next? And where was Alena now?

Nick got up from the ground and ran to the edge of the woods. “Alena!”

He listened, but there was no reply.

“Alena! It’s Nick! It’s all right, you can come out now!”

He waited but heard no sound from the woods. No one approached.

Where is Alena?

Nick knew that there were only two logical possibilities: Alena was alive or Alena was dead. Someone had wanted to find her badly—someone with a gun—and he was obviously willing to use it. He fired at least once into the dog and three more times into the trailer wall—he wasn’t fooling around. But the shots into the trailer were high, almost at ceiling level. He was either the world’s worst shot or they were only warning shots, meant to flush her out but not to kill.

Or meant to flush her out and then to kill. There were a thousand acres of forest up here; plenty of places to hide a woman’s body where it might never be found.

Where is she?