Matilda ("Tilly" to her friends) Whitewing would later attribute her escape from her would-be captor to two things: her track coach and Sam Poteet, who had by sheer luck been driving down the road where she was struggling with her captor.

Tillly was a sturdy girl, and the hours she spent at practice and in the gym had made her strong. When the white pickup stopped the driver offered her a ride and she was ready to get into the car when she noticed there was neither a door nor window handle on the passenger side.

"Forget it," she told him and was about to slam the door shut when he grabbed her arm and tried to jerk her into his truck.

Tilly knew she was in a fight for her life. There was no way she was going to let him take her if she could help it. She was going to fight him with everything that she had and she knew that was quite a lot. Bracing one foot on the bottom of the open door for support, she fought back as he sought to pull her into the car.

"No!" she cried out and twisted her arm out of his grasp and began to run in the direction of the way she had come. Soon she heard footsteps behind her and she quickened her pace, running faster than she had in any race.

But she was tired from practice and fast as she was he caught up to her, grabbing hold of her hair and trying to jerk her back to him. She stomped on his foot as hard as she could and heard him howl in pain.

It was at this moment that Sam Poteet was driving down the road in the direction of the rez. He saw the girl struggling and jumped out of his truck. He put one arm around the girl, pulling her away, and with his free hand formed a fist and hit him in his nose.

The would-be kidnapper was smaller than Sam and took the opportunity to run into the bushes, holding onto his bleeding nose. Hell with him, thought Sam, I'll leave him for the cops to find.

He went immediately to the girl and took her in his arms. "Shh, shh," he told her as she began to cry, "I won't hurt you, you're safe now." He held the trembling girl in his arms and pondering what his next action should be. When she calmed enough he put her in his truck then went and pulled the keys from the ignition of the little white truck. That asshole might use it to get away, he thought, but he would have to hotwire it to be of any use.

Fortunately there was cellphone service and he called the tribal police to tell them what had happened. It would take a while for them to get there, so he pulled a coke out of the cooler in his truck bed and offered it to the girl. She took it numbly, nodding her head in thanks. She had not yet spoken.

He was one of the many who wondered why this bad man had not been caught. He had been found in the hospital room of Mathias' Arab girlfriend and managed to get away. If he had any wilderness skills, and had been taught how to live in the woods he could probably hide there for a while. The girl needed to get to the station now and make a statement while the memory was fresh in her mind. He wondered who she was and what she had been doing alone on the road.

Mathias pulled up in his Yukon, a cruiser following behind him. "What do we have here, Sam?" he asked.

"I found her struggling to get away from someone," he answered, "I don't know for sure who it was, could it be the same man who was in your girlfriend's hospital room?"

"Too soon to know that, do you know who she is?" Mathias did not like the reference to the incident at the hospital. There might be secrets on the reservation, but sometimes it seemed like everyone in the tribe knew everybody's business."

"Nope, she hasn't said a word. I pulled the keys to his pickup truck," he handed them to Mathias, "I saw him run into the woods but I didn't try to go after him."

"And he could be anywhere by now. Sam, I'd appreciate if you'd go down to the station and make a statement, I've got to talk to the girl."

"Sure," Sam walked away on his long legs. There was an arrogance to Sam Poteet that Mathias didn't like. Though he respected the traditionals and was something of one himself, he didn't like people who made a show of it. Sam was one of those.

He went over to Sam's pickup and said in a gentle voice, "Hi, I'm Chief Mathias. I'm know you're probably really scared, but you're safe, he can't get you now. I need to take you to the station where we can talk about what happened and see if we can find your mom or someone to take you home afterwards."

"My mom gets off at five, she works at the Fed Ex office." Tilly spoke for the first time.

"Can I get your name, sweetheart?" Mathias had a way of putting people, especially young girls, at ease.

"Tilly, I mean Matilda, Whitewing."

"Oh," he smiled at her, "You're the track star at the high school, aren't you? I've been to some of your meets. I hear you're on your way to a track scholarship.

The girl said nothing, but gave him a shy smile. He escorted him to his Yukon, noting that she didn't seem to have suffered any physical hurts from her ordeal. He turned his radio off, surmising that she wouldn't appreciate the country station he had it turned to and they made the trip to the station if a silence that was more comfortable than it might have been.

He heard the girl give a soft sigh of relief when they reached the station. He helped her out of his truck and led her through the glass doors of the tribal police station. "Give Betty your mom's number," he told her, "and she'll try to reach your mom at work. If she can't, is there a neighbor or someone she can call?" Tilly nodded and wrote down two numbers and handed the piece of paper to the girl at the front desk.

"I'm going to put you in a room where we can talk without being disturbed. I want you to tell me everything that happened. I have a book of photos," he refrained from calling them mug shots, "you can look at and tell me if he resembles anyone you see."

So she told the story from beginning to end, how she had missed the after school bus and her mom couldn't leave work to pick her up. No one, it seemed, was available to give her a ride home, so she decided to walk instead. The problem was that after a while she found that she was more tired than she thought she was and decided to see if she could hitch a ride, even though the road wasn't necessarily a well-traveled one.

"And that was when the man in the white Toyota pickup tried to pick you up?"

"Yes," she answered, "Only when I opened the door I noticed that the door and window handles were missing. That's when I remembered about the girls, but I thought he only picked prostitutes and now I was afraid he was going to kidnap me. I told him I wasn't interested and started to close the door and he tried to grab me and pull me in the truck. We struggled and I wasn't going to let him get me. He'd grabbed my arm, but I freed myself and began running and he started to run after me. He caught up to me only because I was tired and we started struggling. That's when Sam Poteet pulled up and stopped him. Then he ran away."

"Hmm," Mathias realized he had maybe been given a clue as to how this stranger had been grabbing the women, "I want you to promise me that from now on you won't hitchhike or get into any stranger's car—deal?" The girl nodded. "All right, I'm going to have you look at some photos and tell me if any resemble this guy."

He got up and brought a book to her and she began leafing through it. There didn't seem to be any flash of recognition on her face until she found the drawing Mathias had put in the back of the book.

"That's him," she said, "or it looks a lot like him even if it is just a drawing."

He took the sheet of paper from her but he did not really need to look at it. It was the sketch Alia had had made of the intruder in her hospital room."

He handed the sketch back to her. "Had you ever seen him before he tried to kidnap you?"

"Well," she said slowly, "Maybe, but I'm not sure. A lot of people come to the track meets since we've gotten so good—maybe I've seen him there but I'm not sure. I mean, maybe he was a face in the crowd, but there are a lot of people who come to the meets. Maybe I've never seen him before or maybe I've seen him around in town. I'm sorry, I can't be more definite than that. I wish I could be more helpful."

"You have been helpful," he told her, "Now, I want you to do something for me. I want you to tell your friends what happened and I want you to tell them what I told you about hitchhiking. We don't want to help him find more victims. If you think you see him, if only for a moment, I want you to call us and tell us when and where." She nodded, feeling clearly relieved, and Mathias escorted her to the front desk where her mother was waiting for her.

"You have a brave daughter, Mrs. Whitewing, but she's got to learn not to hitchhike." Mrs. Whitewing nodded and left with her daughter, clearly giving her a lecture that would probably last for most of the way home.

Mathias put the finishing touches on Tilly's report, then as an afterthought, he attached a copy of the sketch of the man from the hospital. That's two he's missed, he thought, Alia because she was in an exposed place—if killing her was on his mind, then Matilda Whitening who got away from because she was strong and determined.

Where are you coming from, where have you been hiding? You've got to come from somewhere, you just didn't spring up out of the earth. Are you Cheyenne? You look like you could be, but you could be Crow, too, or any of the tribes around here. How long have you been killing? Are there really bodies hidden in the mountains or are those just old bones? Who was your first victim? Was it Rachel Rainwater?

How do you pick your victims? You've already shown a predilection for prostitutes, but they haven't made up all of your victims, have they?

Have you killed any white girls in Durant that Sheriff Longmire doesn't know about? It can be easy to hide a body if you really want. Have been teasing us with the bodies we found? Why did you leave the girl under the tree so near to my house? And why did you hang her pink boot in that tree?

Mathias sighed. He wished that this case would just go away. He wanted to move back into the cabin that he and Alia shared. He wanted to enjoy his baby son and watch him grow to manhood. He wanted him to study hard in school and go to college, be the first in his family to graduate.

He was tired of this job, some days he felt just worn out. He'd like to go back to school and study law enforcement, or maybe criminology, and teach. It would be a lot less stressful to lecture about crime in class then to actually deal with it on a day to day basis.

Alia would tell him to do it, if that was what he really wanted, but he knew that he couldn't leave. He couldn't solve all the problems on the rez, but he felt like he owed his people. This serial killer, now, he couldn't walk away from him and when Alia had recovered from her pregnancy she'd be there to help.

He was going to get this bastard, somehow. A man who killed women was a coward. Bundy had been a coward, Ridgway was a coward. He owed it to the dead girls to try to solve this, even if it meant calling in the Feds. This guy was pissing him off.