Jude pressed two fingers on his right hand to his temple, like a medium communing with the spirits. A look of intense concentration settled over his face.

“Now would be a good time for you to say something,” he told me in a stage whisper. “Propose a theory, and I will do my Sherlockian duty and tell you why you’re wrong.”

A theory? I was about as much use at putting together theories as Saskia was at putting people at ease.

“I believe in you,” Jude told me. “I really do.”

“And I believe you’re keeping something from us,” Free added. “I really do.”

One for all, and all for trouble.

“I don’t think Gabriel believes his brother just walked away from their family.” I should have told them more than that. I should have told them exactly what I’d seen at Gabriel’s place—and exactly what the sheriff had told me. But Gabriel had helped me find Saskia the day before.

Gabriel and I were both the kind of people who slept on the floor.

“Do you think good old Gabe believes that his brother’s case might be connected to Bella’s?” Jude asked.

Yes. The force of my instinctual response was savage in my mind, but I was saved from responding by the sound of the world’s most mournful baying. NATO had found us, Duchess on his heels. As Free tore a stick off the tree and tossed it for Her Ladyship, NATO hunkered down between Jude and me and continued the hound dog version of a tragic ballad.

Jude tousled his K9’s head back and forth, scratching at just the right spot behind his ears. “The world isn’t as bad as all that, old man.”

I felt, rather than saw, Saskia edging toward us. She’d spent the past twenty-four hours giving everyone—myself included—a wide berth. Meeting her liquid gaze, I had the oddest sense that she was on the verge of adding her howls to NATO’s.

I didn’t know the reason for their canine melancholy, but I had my suspicions. “We train them to find what they’re looking for.” I turned from Saskia to study NATO’s deep brown eyes. “And in training, that’s something they can do.”

But out in the real world, that wasn’t how search and rescue worked.

“First the river,” I said, reaching up to stroke a hand along NATO’s velvety-soft ears. “Then the mountain…”

In both cases, the hounds had caught Bella’s trail. And both times, that trail had gone cold. Whoever had taken Bella knew how to cover their own tracks—and hers. A local. Someone who knows that mountain.