Indecision briefly flashed in his eyes.

He stepped over to a window and pushed the curtain to the side with one finger to see out. Gianna held her breath, trying to be as silent as possible as he listened. “We’ll be leaving a glowing trail of where we went. Anyone will be able to see our tracks.”

“They can already see our tracks. If they’re on foot, they can follow the path the three of us made yesterday. If they drive, the snowmobile tracks are pretty clear.”

“You said you didn’t see a vehicle, right? Did you see any other tracks in the road when you rode over with Frisco?”

She shook her head. “Some snowmobile tracks, but I assumed they were the ones Frisco made while coming here. No vehicles.”

“How bad were the roads?”

“Bad. If not for those extra-tall markers, I wouldn’t have known where the sides of the road were.” It was the last thing she wanted to tell him, but he needed the truth. Only he knew the area well enough to decide if leaving the cabin was worth the risk. She had only a hazy idea of where they were located. “How far to that big wreck?”

“Frisco said ten miles to the west. But first it’s a good eight miles out to the main highway, where he said the plows had done some clearing.”

What if we try to drive out and get stuck?

“That many miles isn’t horrible if we get stuck,” Gianna said slowly. “We walked a mile yesterday. We could manage if we had to come back to the cabin on foot.”

“I don’t want to get stuck and have the wrong type of help show up either. Or have a new storm suddenly dump another foot of snow. The forecast we heard is days old. It could have been updated and completely changed.”

Gianna’s head was about to explode. “What are we supposed to do?”

“I think we need to wait, Mom,” Violet said quietly. “I know you feel you need to take action—you’re always like that—but Chris is right. We need to sit tight. I know he can face anything that comes.”

A surprised and thankful expression lit Chris’s face as he looked at her daughter. Violet was right. Gianna was an action person. She always thought things through first, but she usually leaned in the direction of taking quick action. “Damn it.” She gave Chris a side-eye. “We’ll hole up for now.”

He nodded. “I think it’s the right thing to do. We can always leave later if we have to.”

If we’re able to.

“Do you think someone will come?” she asked softly, not clarifying that she meant someone who meant to do them harm.

He nodded again, his eyes stating he knew what she meant. “I do.”

Her stomach churned.

“But we’re ready. No one’s getting past me.”

“Do you think those shots we heard yesterday are related?”

“I have no idea. Could have been someone fooling around.”

“Oh!” Her hand slipped into the back pocket of her ski pants. “I grabbed Frisco’s camera. He took some shots of my Suburban and the cabin. Do you want to take a look?”

Chris took the camera and popped out the memory card. He moved to the rear of the cabin and grabbed a laptop off a small desk against the wall. He set it up on the island and placed the card into a port. They waited.

“You had the presence of mind to grab his camera and his gun?”

“Taking his gun was my first thought, since someone was firing at me. The camera was right next to him on the porch.”

The pictures opened and Chris rapidly scrolled through them. He sped past images of a fender bender, a dead buck, and a garbage-strewn campsite. Sunny weather was present in the first pictures on the card, and then clouds and rain took over. When snow started to show up, Chris scrolled more slowly. He stopped on a number of pictures of a birthday party. Frisco was front and center, a yellow-and-red party hat on his head and other rangers in uniform making goofy faces beside him. A photo of a cake with his name.

“Shit,” muttered Chris. He continued scrolling.

He paused at more snowy background pictures. Another dead deer, its red blood splattered on the snow. A shot of Gianna’s Suburban from the rear, her New York State license plate easy to read. Gianna leaned closer to the screen.

“He took that picture before he drove over here. Look . . . you can see the glass of the driver’s window. It’s solid.”

Chris nodded. The next image was the note he’d written with his name and address. Where did Frisco put the note? A chill shot through him; the note with his personal information was probably in Frisco’s pocket—available to anyone who examined the body. Fuck.

Then there were two images of the burned cabin and an image of the Suburban’s broken window. “Did he shoot those cabin pictures when you went back or did he take them before he came here?”

Gianna thought hard. “I can’t remember. I was focused on the broken window.”

More shots showed the broken trails and boot prints from the Suburban to the cabin. The pictures abruptly changed to the darker interior of the burned cabin.

“Violet, don’t look at these.” Gianna looked over her shoulder at her daughter’s wide eyes. “Just for a minute.”

Violet nodded and turned away, crouching down to pet the dog.

Frisco had taken three shots of the dead man. The last one was a clear shot of the holes in his skull. Chris pressed his lips together in a tight line but said nothing. Gianna studied the body with a professional eye.