Jonah Greer had been a ghost for three years.
No driver’s license renewal. No steady address. No bank activity in his name after the month Lila died. He existed in old photographs, road department records, and one domestic disturbance call from a hunting cabin where neighbors heard him screaming that “the men with clean hands always win.”
Mara pulled everything.
Jonah had worked under Silas in county road maintenance. He knew service roads, culverts, storm gates, old access lanes, and which mile markers connected through the woods faster than the public road. He also knew how to use maintenance uniforms to make himself invisible. A man in a yellow raincoat near a broken car might look threatening under headlights, but to security cameras at a distance he could look like a highway worker.
That explained part of the impossible.
Not all.
Mile marker 214 to 219 still required speed. A truck had passed one man and seen another minutes later. The old service road helped, but not enough for an injured or heavily loaded man with a chainsaw.
Unless there were two men on the road.
Silas and Jonah were identical, but Silas had an alibi and limited mobility. Still, the theory remained: Jonah might have recruited someone to dress like him.
Or there were two yellow raincoats.
Two masks.
Two chainsaws.
Mara remembered Martin Hale’s words.
He was in front of me. Then behind me.
The killer was building fear with duplication.
At 8:30 p.m., investigators found Jonah’s first real trace: a cabin off Service Road 7, abandoned except for recent tire tracks. Inside were printed photos of men entering motels, copies of wedding announcements, scraps of counseling records, and pages torn from divorce files. On one wall, written in black marker, was a sentence repeated over and over:
The body remembers the vow.
Mara stared at it and felt cold move up her neck.
In a locked footlocker, they found a red coat, several wigs, and a cheap camera.
Vivian’s costume.
But not Vivian.
Someone else had been playing the red woman when needed.
The last item in the footlocker was a Polaroid of Ethan Cole standing beside his truck at a fuel station. On the back, someone had written:
He saw too early. Move him up.
Ethan was no longer number eight.
He was next.
Mara called the safe house where Ethan had been placed.
No answer.
She called again.
Still nothing.
At 8:47 p.m., Ethan’s wife Claire received a text from Ethan’s phone.
Tell her I’m sorry.
Then a second message arrived.
Exit 31. Alone. Or she sees everything.
Mara knew immediately that Ethan had left.
And this time, the road was waiting for him.