Edge

reached for his weapon and I went for mine. Though I recognized the tone; it wasn’t a break-in but the emergency door release. Somebody inside had hit it, to get out.
    Ahmad appeared immediately, holding a black M4 Bushmaster, the stock racked short, his finger outside the trigger guard. Tony Barr, pistol in hand, was behind him.
    I held up a hand.
    “Oh, no,” Joanne whispered, eyes wide. She was looking out the window to the side porch, where Maree stood, staring back through the glass. The younger sister had heard every hard word uttered about her. Her face, twisted in pain, continued to stare for a moment. Then she turned away andfled down the porch and over the lawn toward the woods.
    “No, please! Maree! No!” Joanne leapt up.
    “Stay here,” I said firmly. I told Ahmad and Barr to secure the principals and sprinted outside, tucking my gun away.

Chapter 42
    THE DEA AGENT I became friendly with in Texas told me that when sign cutting and tracking, it helps to know the goal of the person you’re pursuing.
    Some of the people you’re after have in mind nothing more than being anywhere that you’re not. They’ll escape wherever they can, however they can.
    Those are the hardest to track.
    The easiest to find are those who have a destination that you know or can deduce.
    I believed Maree had such a place in mind. I needed to find her path, though, because there were a number of specific places she might head for. I absolutely had to get there before she did. I paused at the edge of the forest and looked around me, at the puzzle of tree trunks and branches and foliage. Much of the greenery had been cut away to provide a clear view around the house, a perimeter for security purposes. But beyond that, a lot of the area was impenetrable.
    I spotted overturned branches, leaves disturbed, pebbles slightly out of place and then a few good prints from stylish shoes. I began to sprint.
    A hundred yards into the trees, I gave up on looking for sign. I no longer needed to, since Iheard Maree pushing relentlessly through the brush. That wasn’t all I heard. Growing in my ears was a roar—bearing out my deduction about where she was headed.
    A few moments later I broke from the woods into a clearing and saw the young woman ahead of me—knowing how to move quickly through the foliage, I’d closed the distance but she was still a hundred feet away.
    Looking back she saw me and stopped.
    As a shepherd I’ve pursued many people until they cease running. Usually it’s because they’ve run out of feasible routes or out of gasoline or physical stamina.
    On occasion they stopped simply because they’d reached their destination.
    Maree was on the edge of a rock cliff overlooking the source of the noise: the Potomac River. The woman who had twice tried to kill herself was looking down at the water cascading over the stones below. It was only thirty or forty feet to the surface but the river here was strewn with rocks and the current was swift and deep.
    This seemed the perfect setting for somebody who wished to take her life. I moved in closer, slowly. I didn’t want her to spook.
    She sat down, looked back at me with a hollow, red face. And slipped over the edge.
    I gasped and ran forward.
    But then her head emerged and I realized she’d slid down to a rocky outcropping below the side of the cliff. She was just sitting there, on a shelf jutting over the boulders and speedy water.
    I continued forward slowly, noticing some peopleon the distant shore of the river, tourists strolling along the path there, which bordered the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which travels all the way from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland.
    I got to the edge and looked down at the turbulent brown and gray water, the froth, the shiny rocks. To my right, Maree was huddled on the ledge, legs crossed like a yoga practitioner’s.
    “Maree,” I said.
    She was fiddling with her camera. I moved in closer and made sure she saw my slow, unthreatening transit toward her. I stopped when I was about twenty feet away, at the top of the cliff, and also sat—partly so that I wouldn’t be seen as a threat and partly because I myself am not a great fan of heights. She glanced toward me and turned her attention back to the Canon. She lifted it and took some panoramic pictures of the view, then aimed down at the rocks below her. Then, curiously, she turned the lens to her face, which was puffy and damp with tears. Hopeless.
    Even over the roar of the water