Then the girl had disappeared from her home while gathering some wood from the shed. He remembered the desperate voice of the mother on the phone: We usually fill the wood box together. I never let her go out alone, especially on a cold day like that.

Joe Thibideau had a daughter of his own. If Melissa had fallen victim to the same brutal bastard who killed Eddie, he only hoped he’d have the chance to nail the son of a bitch. Never in all his forty-seven years had he wanted anything so badly.

Of course, the girl could be a simple runaway, or she might have gotten lost. And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were linked together by a single savage thread.

He moved through a thick patch of alders, and paused with his back against the rough bark of a tree. He had lost the others about twenty minutes ago. He should keep close by, he knew, but they had been searching in the cold for nearly two days. It was time to take a chance. He had a hunch. Just another hour or two couldn’t hurt, right?

And maybe, just maybe, if the girl was still alive, he could do something to keep her that way.

A branch snapped and sent its burden of heavy snow thudding to the ground. He jumped, almost dropping his flashlight and hitting his head against the tree trunk, which only caused a fresh shower of snow to fall on top of him. Shaking snow from his collar, he pulled a compass and then the map from the left pocket of his parka and smoothed it out over his knees, holding the flashlight in his mouth. The areas already searched were circled in bright fluorescent green on the map. They had been over about four square miles directly behind the house. She could have been picked up by a car, could be fifty miles away from here by now. So far they had been betting against that, since the house was a good half mile off any provincially plowed road, and the driveway hadn’t shown any fresh tracks. But they couldn’t rule it out.

The map didn’t have it, but the hydroelectric plant was less than a mile farther south. It was supposed to make use of the old mine shafts in the area to produce enough power to light up most of Quebec City and parts of Northern Maine into the twenty-first century and beyond. Construction on the new plant had been halted a couple of months back, but he was sure the old Jackson mine building was still there, and it might be just the place for a lost little girl to seek shelter. Or for a killer to hide a body.