Forest of Scars: A Dark Crime Thriller

“Forest of Scars,” the next dark thriller in the Logan and Scarlett serial killer series, releases on Amazon August 22.

Today, you can read chapter one for FREE!

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Tourists called autumn in the Adirondacks leaf-peeping season. But the locals had another name for it during certain years when children went missing.

They called it the harvesting.

Jamie Collins had heard his father use the word earlier that day while they set up camp. Not about the leaves, but in a hushed conversation with the man at the camp store who had looked at their site number and frowned.

“Kinda remote up there,” the man had said, leaning over the counter. “Not the best time to be so far out.”

“We’ll be fine,” Jamie’s father said. Dad’s voice dropped as he glanced at Jamie, who was examining a display of pocketknives. “Susan wanted somewhere quiet. After everything this year.”

“Just keep the boy close. It’s that season. Harvesting season.”

Jamie’s father laughed. “Little late for crops, isn’t it?”

The man didn’t smile back.

Now, as the amber afternoon light filtered through the forest canopy, Jamie remembered the exchange with a vague discomfort he couldn’t name. At ten years old, he possessed that peculiar sensitivity of children, a barometer for adult tensions not stated but transmitted through the air like radio waves.

He sat on a fallen log twenty yards from their campsite, where his mother was organizing their cooler contents. His father had gone to gather more firewood, telling Jamie to stay within sight of the camp. But Jamie had found something.

The deer print was perfect, pressed into a patch of mud still damp from yesterday’s rain. Beside it lay a single maple leaf. Its color was an impossible crimson, so vivid it seemed unnatural, as if someone had painted it. Jamie had never seen a leaf so red. He pocketed it and studied the deer print. Fresh. The edges were still sharp, the water only just seeping back into the deepest part of the impression.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

Jamie’s head snapped up at the sound. A child’s voice, higher even than his own, coming from deep in the woods. He stood, peering between the trees.

“Hello?” the voice called again, wavering with uncertainty.

“Mom?” Jamie called back toward camp. The cooler lid slammed in response, but his mother didn’t appear. “Mom, I think there’s someone lost in the woods.”

Jamie didn’t understand the medications Susan Collins took, only that they delayed her responses. The doctors had explained it to Jamie in terms of clocks running at different speeds. His mother’s clock was running slower for a while, they said, until she felt better.

When no answer came, Jamie took three steps toward the voice, then stopped. His father’s instructions pulsed in his mind. Stay within sight of camp.

“Where are you?” Jamie asked.

“I can’t find my way back,” the voice answered, tearful now. “Can you help me?”

Over his shoulder, Jamie spotted the blue corner of their tent and his mother’s red jacket as she moved between the cooler and the picnic table. They weren’t supposed to lose sight of the camp, but he wasn’t exactly doing that. He could still see his mother.

“I’m coming,” he said, decision made. “Keep talking so I can find you.”

“Thank you,” the voice said. “I was looking for my dog. He ran away.”

Jamie followed the voice, careful to keep track of his path. The afternoon light took a peculiar quality unique to autumn forests. Slanted golden beams transformed the woods into cathedrals of yellow and crimson. Beauty that distracted him from how quickly the light was fading.

“What’s your dog’s name?” Jamie asked, picking his way over a fallen trunk covered in emerald moss.

“Chester. He’s small. Brown.”

“I’m Jamie.” The boy hiked deeper into the woods. He could still see the blue corner of their tent if he turned around. Just barely. “What’s your name?”

A pause.

“Emily.”

Something in the quality of the sound made Jamie stop. He had a cousin named Emily. But this voice didn’t sound right.

“How old are you, Emily?”

“Same as you. I think I see Chester over here. Come look.”

Jamie took another step, then froze. The voice had come from behind a massive oak tree thirty feet ahead, its trunk wider than his father’s car. The light caught dust motes in the air, swirling them like miniature galaxies. Beautiful, but wrong somehow. Too perfect. Like the leaf in his pocket.

“I don’t think I should,” Jamie said, taking a step backward. “I have to ask my mom.”

“Please? He’s right here. I can almost reach him.”

The hairs on his arms rising, Jamie took another step back. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees.

“I have to go. My mom is waiting at our campsite.”

He turned and found he could no longer see the tent. The forest looked different. Had he come this way? Which direction was the camp?

“Jamie.” The voice had changed. Deeper now. Not a child at all. “Don’t you want to see the colors?”

Fear shot through him like an electric current. Jamie spun in place, heart slamming against his ribs.

“Dad!” he shouted. “Mom!”

“They can’t hear you. No one can hear you this far in.”

Jamie ran. Not knowing which direction led back to camp, he sprinted away from the voice.

The forest floor blurred beneath his sneakers. Roots reached up to trip him, branches clawing at his face and arms.

Behind him came the sound of footsteps. Not running. Walking. Unhurried. Confident.

“The maples are at their peak today,” the voice called. “Tomorrow the oaks will turn. I’ve been waiting for you, Jamie. For this perfect moment.”

Jamie’s lungs burned. He dodged between trees, changed direction, desperate to shake his pursuer. The rational part of his mind screamed he was getting lost, but the instinct to survive took over.

He burst into a clearing and skidded to a stop. Standing in the center was a man with his back turned to Jamie. Safety. This person could keep him safe.

“Help me,” Jamie gasped. “Someone’s chasing me.”

The man turned. He was tall, with the lean build of someone who hiked mountain trails daily. His features were neither handsome nor ugly. But his eyes were remarkable—the precise copper-gold of fall leaves.

He smiled, and Jamie knew with terrible certainty that this was the owner of the voice.

“There you are,” the man said. “Right on time.”

Jamie turned, but his foot caught on a root and he sprawled onto the forest floor. The maple leaf fell from his pocket, landing face up on the dark earth. Jamie lunged for it, some desperate part of him believing it was important to hold on to this protective piece of beauty.

The man’s boot came down on his outstretched hand, applying just enough pressure to immobilize it without breaking bones.

“Careful,” the man said, voice gentle as he lifted something from his belt. “We wouldn’t want to damage something so perfect.”

The last rays of sunlight caught the edge of the blade in the attacker’s hand, transforming ordinary steel into something molten and hideous.

“Do you see how the light hits the edge?” the man asked, crouching beside Jamie. “Like the forest is blessing my work.”

In the distance, so faint it might have been imagination, his father’s voice called. The man heard it too. His eyes flicked toward the sound, then back to Jamie.

“We have to go now,” he said, all pretense gone. “It’s almost time for you to see the colors. The real colors.”

He pressed a sweet-smelling cloth over Jamie’s face. As consciousness slipped away, Jamie saw the man retrieve the maple leaf, examining it with the appreciation of a curator handling a priceless artifact.

“Perfect,” the man said.

Jamie fell asleep.

***

At the Collins’ campsite, Richard Collins burst from the tree line, arms full of firewood, expression frantic.

“Susan, where’s Jamie?”

Susan looked up from the cooler. Slowed by medication, she took precious seconds to process the question and pointed vaguely toward the log where Jamie had been sitting.

“He was right there,” she said, the words coming out thick and distant. “Just a minute ago.”

Richard dropped the firewood. He ran to the log and searched the ground. There, he saw his son’s footprints in the earth, leading away from camp. Following them with his eyes, he found something that made his blood freeze—a second set of prints, larger, coming from a different direction, intersecting with Jamie’s. Both sets continued into the forest.

“How could you let him wander off?” Richard asked.

Susan appeared confused before she shook off the cobwebs. Then the panic in his eyes leaped to Susan’s, and he felt guilty for laying the blame at her feet. It was the medication. The damn pills.

“Jamie!” he yelled.

Only silence answered. The quiet reminded Richard of the forest after a predator frightened the prey. The sun slipped below the horizon, and the forest faded into shadow. He would never find Jamie in the dark, and Susan was in no condition to help.

Richard Collins grabbed his phone and prayed he would get a signal.

***

On the other side of the ridge, in a ranger’s patrol vehicle at the edge of the park, the phone rang.

“This is Richard Collins at the Maple Ridge campsite,” the father said. “My son is missing. Ten years old. Been gone almost fifteen minutes.”

The ranger peered through the windshield. He remembered Richard and Susan Collins. They had checked in at the park station this afternoon before departing with their boy, Jamie. Though the father seemed competent enough to survive in the wilderness, the mother was a fragile thing that shouldn’t have been in the woods. Something was wrong with the way she moved, as though she were sludging ankle-deep through mud.

In thirty minutes, an indigo sky would cover the woods. At night, a search was next to impossible.

“I’m not far from your site, Mr. Collins,” Ranger Thorne said. “I’ll coordinate a search. Can you describe what your son was wearing?”

Across the forest, night deepened. A bird called as the father rattled off everything he could remember about his son’s attire.

Thorne shifted his jaw and stared into the gathering shadows. This was no ordinary disappearance. The incidents returned every seven years, like some vile migration.

The harvesting had begun again.

Richard Collins’ voice went hoarse from shouting his son’s name. Each cry came back empty, swallowed by the vast wilderness of the Adirondacks of Upstate New York. He stood at the edge of their campsite, flashlight beam cutting through the first hundred feet of trees before dissolving.

“Jamie!” His voice cracked on the second syllable. Behind him, he heard his wife.

Susan Collins parted the brush bordering their camp with her eyes locked on the tree line. She might have appeared unnaturally calm for a mother whose child was missing. Richard knew better; behind her placid expression raged a storm she couldn’t express.

Nine months ago, Susan Collins had been a partner at an Albany architecture firm, known for her fast thinking and quicker tongue. Then came the morning she couldn’t get out of bed. Her limbs had turned to lead, her thoughts to molasses. The diagnosis had arrived two weeks later: a rare neurochemical imbalance, triggered by a viral infection. The doctors called it Petrovic-Winterhalter Syndrome. Only twenty-three documented cases worldwide.

“I’ll find him, Susan,” Richard said, though he couldn’t be sure she was processing his words. The medication, a complex cocktail of synapse modulators and dopamine enhancers, kept the worst symptoms at bay, but transformed his vibrant wife into something like a wax figure animated by clockwork. The doctors promised improvement over time. Richard had stopped asking how much time months ago.

He’d been such a fool to bring Susan here. Yet the doctors had sworn this would be good for her. Nature might hasten her recovery.

Susan blinked slowly. “The leaves,” she said, each word emerging like a stone pushed uphill. “He wanted to collect…leaves.”

Richard tensed. It was the most she’d spoken at once in days.

“When did Jamie say this? After I went for firewood?”

She nodded, the motion delayed as though she was moving through invisible water.

The walkie-talkie on the picnic table buzzed. “Collins, this is Ranger Thorne. Over.”

Lunging for it, Richard pressed the transmit button so hard his finger turned white. “This is Collins. Any sign of Jamie? Over.”

“Nothing yet. I’m five minutes from your location. In the meantime, I’ve radioed for additional personnel. Stay at your campsite. Over.”

“Five minutes is too long,” Richard said, releasing the button before remembering to add, “Over.”

He turned back to the forest edge, raising the flashlight. The beam caught nothing but trees and shadows.

Richard knew he should be out there, searching for Jamie. How far could his son have gone? But he couldn’t leave Susan alone, and he didn’t know these woods.

Still, he saw no choice. “I going to look again,” he said, not waiting for a response that might take minutes to form. “Just along the edge. I’ll stay in sight.”

Thirty yards into the forest, the grief hit him like a physical blow, doubling him over. He had spent his adult life in control: a senior systems analyst at Global Insurance; everything in its place, every scenario accounted for. But he hadn’t accounted for Jamie wandering away. Hadn’t accounted for an illness that made Susan lose the quick reflexes needed for parenting.

The shadows seemed to move between the trees, beyond the reach of his flashlight.

“Jamie!”

As his voice echoed back to him, headlights swept through the trees, illuminating the camp. The crunch of tires on gravel. A vehicle door opening and closing. Richard ran toward the lights.

The Forest Service SUV parked beside their Honda. Its light bar threw red and blue reflections across the ground like fractured gems. In its glow stood a tall figure, surveying the scene with the calm assessment of a surgeon before an operation.

Senior Forest Ranger Marcus Thorne cut an impressive silhouette against the emergency lights. His uniform was pressed despite the late hour, his posture military-straight. As Richard approached, Thorne turned, revealing a face weathered by decades in the wilderness—all angles and planes, like something carved from the mountains themselves.

“Mr. Collins,” Thorne said. He extended a hand that engulfed Richard’s. “We’re going to find your son.”

The hand wasn’t offered as comfort but as fact. Richard felt the first flutter of hope since Jamie’s disappearance.

“He was sitting right there,” Richard pointed to the log. “My wife says he wanted to collect leaves. I was gathering firewood. I wasn’t gone more than fifteen minutes.”

Thorne nodded and produced a notebook. He wrote as Richard spoke.

“Tell me again what he was wearing,?” Thorne said, already walking toward the log.

“Red jacket. Blue jeans. Black and white sneakers,” Richard said, following. “He’s short for his age. Blond hair. Blue eyes.”

Thorne crouched by the log, shining his own flashlight across the ground. He touched nothing, but his eyes scanned the scene carefully.

“Did you follow these tracks?” he asked, pointing to the footprints leading away from the scene.

“Yes, as far as I could. They crossed with larger prints about fifty yards in, then both continued into the forest before disappearing,” Richard said, the words tangling as he rushed to get them out. “Someone took him. Someone took my son.”

Thorne straightened, his face impassive, but something flickered in his eyes. The ranger knew something. What wasn’t he telling them?

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Thorne said. “Children wander. They follow animals, interesting plants. Most lost children are found within a mile of where they disappeared.”

The ranger returned to his vehicle and gestured for Richard to follow. From inside the SUV, he produced a topographical map and spread it over the hood, weighing the corners with his fingers.

“We are here,” Thorne indicated. “The terrain slopes eastward toward a stream, then rises again to a ridge. If Jamie followed an animal, he would likely have gone east, following the path of least resistance.”

Richard studied the map, trying to make sense of the contour lines that meant nothing to him. Thorne’s certainty was contagious, though. The ranger’s presence brought order to the chaos. Susan peered over their shoulders without speaking.

She understands, but the words won’t form.

“There’s a service road three miles to the east,” Thorne continued. “I have units setting up at access points. The temperature tonight will drop to around forty-five degrees. With his jacket, Jamie will feel cold, but he’s not in danger of hypothermia.” He spoke the boy’s name with a casual familiarity.

“What about the other footprints?” Richard asked. “The larger ones?”

“We have other hikers in the area. Hunters, though they shouldn’t be this far in. Could be another ranger on patrol.” He held Richard’s gaze. “We’ll investigate every possibility, Mr. Collins. I promise you that.”

The radio on Thorne’s belt crackled as he folded the map.

“Thorne, this is Dispatch. Units 3 and 4 are in position on the east service road. Unit 7 reports from the north ridge trail. No visual contact. Over.”

Thorne unclipped the radio. “Copy that. I’m at the Collins campsite now. Tell the units to hold position and monitor. We’ll begin a coordinated grid search. I’ll remain on the scene. Over.”

He turned to Richard, slipping the radio back on his belt with the same economy that characterized all his movements.

“Mr. Collins, I need to check something in my vehicle, then we’ll establish a search perimeter around your campsite.”

Before Richard could argue that Thorne was wasting too much time, the ranger opened the passenger door and leaned inside. From where Richard stood, it appeared the ranger was checking equipment in the footwell. After adjusting his hat, Thorne rummaged inside the glove compartment.

The ranger straightened and closed the door, his face revealing nothing but professional concern as he returned to Richard.

“I’ve got additional emergency supplies,” Thorne explained. “Thermal blankets, water, and portable lighting. We’ll need to set up a command post. I’d like to use your picnic table.”

Richard nodded numbly, watching as Thorne unloaded equipment from the back of his vehicle. The ranger produced lights, radios, maps, and a first aid kit. Within minutes, he transformed the campsite into an operational center.

More Forest Service vehicles began arriving. There were enough boots on the ground to cover the forest. At least, that’s what Richard told himself. After conferring with Thorne, the rangers formed a circle.

Susan slumped on the picnic bench at the edge of the activity, her dulled eyes following Thorne. When the ranger passed by, she spoke, her words slow but clear.

“You’ll find him?”

Thorne paused, looking down at her with an expression of such sincere compassion that Richard felt a surge of gratitude.

“Yes, Mrs. Collins,” the ranger said. “I will find your son. You have my word.”

Behind them, the SUV sat dark and silent, its windows reflecting the emergency lights. Thorne turned back to the search map he’d laid out. In the unforgiving glare, his expression revealed nothing but the calm, determined focus of a man doing exactly what he was born to do.

“We’ll start here,” he said to the assembled rangers, “and work our way east. The boy can’t have gone far.”

Thorne gestured to a ranger with graying temples, a veteran of these woods.

“Hayes, you’re in charge of the command post,” Thorne said, his tone leaving no room for question. “Maintain radio contact with all the search teams. Log every report. Nothing gets missed.”

“Yes, sir,” Hayes said.

Checking his watch, Thorne looked toward the eastern tree line. “I’m going to circle the perimeter and begin my search near the stream. That’s where the boy most likely headed.”

“I’m coming with you,” Richard said.

Thorne spun. “Not with me.”

“Jamie is my son. I have to find him.”

“What about your wife?”

“She’s fine if she remains with Mr. Hayes.”

The senior ranger considered Richard. “Okay, but only if you stay with one of my experienced rangers, Mr. Collins. We can’t afford to lose a second person in these woods.” He signaled to a younger ranger. “Martinez will accompany you. Stay within ten feet of him at all times. Understand?”

Richard agreed, grateful for the concession.

“Good,” Thorne said, adjusting his utility belt. “Stay in touch. If your son is out there, Mr. Collins, we will find him.”

Thorne climbed into his SUV and drove away, circling the forest so he could reach the streambed. Something the man in the camp store had said about harvesting season made Richard uneasy.

A secret existed in these woods, and the rangers knew what it was.