Snowbound Suspicion

by Cindi Myers

  “Then I hope they do come,” Bette said. She cleared her throat. “And thank you. You’re going to a lot of trouble to clear my name. Travis, too, I guess.”

  “We want to catch the right person,” he said. “The worst thing that can happen, as a law enforcement officer, is to find out you helped put an innocent person behind bars. It makes you doubt everything about yourself and the job.”

  “I guess I never thought about that,” she said. “I only saw things from the point of view of the innocent person—someone like Lacy.”

  “Sometimes cops are victims of their own zeal to close a case,” he said. “Or we get fooled by the evidence. It can happen easier than you think.”

  “Has it ever happened to you?”

  “No. And knowing it can happen makes me more careful.” His eyes met hers. “I don’t want you to be my first mistake.”

  She looked away, warmed by his words, but too unsure to speak. She wanted to believe Cody had her best interests at heart, but she had learned the hard way that her hormones could overrule good sense. She didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

  She cleared her throat and turned to him. “Why a cop?” she asked. “I mean, why would you want a job that puts you in contact with so many dangerous, unpleasant people?”

  “Why did you want to be a caterer?”

  “Because I like to cook, I like parties and it’s something I’m really good at.”

  “It’s sort of the same thing with me.” He pulled up his line and checked the hook, then lowered it into the water again. “I started out wanting to be a lawyer. I liked the idea of putting away criminals, and television shows and books make it seem really glamorous. By the time I graduated and started prepping to take the bar exam, I’d figured out it was a lot duller than most people know. Then I met a guy who worked for the US Marshals Service and he told me they were hiring, and that with my law degree, I’d have one up on a lot of candidates. I decided to apply, maybe do the job for a couple of years before I took the bar exam.” He shrugged. “I got hooked and never looked back.”

  “Do you ever think about doing anything else—maybe taking the bar?” she asked.

  He hesitated before answering. “I never used to,” he said. “Now...I don’t know. Maybe someday. I guess seeing somebody blow his brains out right in front of you gives you a different perspective on the job.”

  She put her hand on his arm and kept it there. “I guess law enforcement needs people like you,” she said. “But you’d probably make a good lawyer, too.”

  “The path we choose when we’re young doesn’t have to be the one we stay on our whole lives.” His eyes met hers, and she had the sense of seeing the real man, with no defensive screens. “People can change.”

  He was telling her he believed she had changed, and her heart felt too big for her chest as the idea sank in. This hard-nosed cop was telling her that—maybe—he was learning to see past the mistakes she had made.

  Maybe even into a future where a woman like her and a man like him might be together.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME the sun began sinking behind the trees, Cody and Bette had caught five good-sized fish. He cleaned them and packed them in snow in one of the buckets, then they gathered their gear and headed back toward the snowmobile.

  They were still a few dozen yards from the machine when Cody halted, frowning. Bette set down the tackle box and followed his gaze toward the snowmobile. “What is it?” she asked.

  He shook his head and started forward again. Twenty yards farther on, Cody stopped again and set down the auger and the bucket of fish. He motioned for Bette to stay back and he approached the snowmobile.

  The snow around the machine had been churned up. The snowmobile’s hood lay in the snow a few feet beyond them, and Bette could see wires sticking up out of the engine compartment. Cody carefully circled the machine, then scanned the area around them. “What’s wrong?” Bette called when she could bear the tension of his silence no more.

  “Someone’s wrecked it,” he said. “On purpose.” He gestured toward the dangling wires. “They’ve cut the wiring harness.”

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  He pulled out his phone and took photographs of the damage, and of the ground around the snowmobile. “No service,” he said, checking the screen. “We’ll have to walk back.”

  She looked past the snowmobile, at the faint track they had made getting to this place. “How far is it?” she asked.

  “About five miles.” He moved the bucket of fish and the auger closer to the snowmobile, and took the poles and tackle from her to add to the pile. “Come on,” he said. “We’d better get started if we want to make it back before dark.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The trek back to the ranch was brutal, post-holing through snow up past the knees. They hadn’t traveled half a mile before Cody was sweating inside the thick insulated coverall, and the rubber boots that were fine for snowmobiling and fishing felt as if they weighed ten pounds each. Bette was having a hard time, too, though she didn’t utter a word of complaint. He tried to break trail for her, but that didn’t make the going much easier.

  He had remembered to grab a water bottle from the snowmobile, and he stopped after what he judged to be the first mile and handed it to her. She drank deeply and returned it to him. “How do you know we’re headed in the right direction?” she asked.

  “I’m following our path here, and the blazes on the trees.” He indicated the orange plastic diamonds affixed to tree trunks at regular intervals.

  She nodded. “So, is this just another prank to annoy me—like the message on my door?”

  “The lake is on National Forest land,” Cody said. “It’s possible someone came along and decided to mess with the snowmobile—malicious mischief.”

  “Why didn’t we see them—or hear them?”

  “I think they parked in the woods and walked in,” Cody said. “We were out of sight over the hill, and the sound wouldn’t necessarily have carried that far. They wouldn’t have had to make a lot of noise.”

  “Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I think this was directed at me,” she said. “It kind of fits with a pattern of harassment.”

  “Would Carl do something like this?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe. I didn’t know the man. I didn’t want to know him.”

  “When Travis finds him, he can follow up on his alibi for this afternoon.”

  “If he finds him,” she said.

  He stashed the water bottle in one of the pockets of his coat. “Come on. Let’s keep walking.” But before he could take even another step forward, something whistled past his ear, followed by the distinctive popping sound of weapons fire.

  “Get down!” He shoved Bette into the snow and threw himself on top of her, as bullets continued to strike around them. “Into the trees,” he said and shoved her forward. Scrambling in the deep snow, they headed for a stand of fir, fifty yards to their left, away from the direction of the shots. They moved clumsily through the thick snow, clawing their way toward cover as bullets continued to rain down. Cody tried to keep himself between Bette and the shooter, staying low to present a smaller target and moving erratically when possible. They had almost reached cover when the impact of a bullet propelled him forward. Burning pain radiated from his shoulder as he fell, but he kept moving, crawling after Bette, into the trees. They lay at the base of one of the evergreens, gasping.

  Grimacing, Cody raised up enough to unzip his coverall and draw his Glock, though the movement cost him. His right shoulder felt as if someone had rammed a hot poker through it, and he could feel blood dripping down his back.

  “You’re hurt!” Bette stared at his shoulder, her face almost as white as the surrounding snow.

  He sat back against the tree, keeping his weight on his good side, and closed his eyes a m
oment, gearing up for what he knew he’d have to do next.

  Bette crawled up beside him. “Let me see,” she said.

  He angled his body so that she could look. “I think the bullet is still in there,” he said. “How much blood is there?”

  “Not as much as I would have thought,” she said. “It’s more seeping than gushing. That’s good, I think.”

  He nodded. It was good—as long as the bullet hadn’t nicked some internal artery. But he didn’t think so. “How are you at first aid?” he asked.

  “I can put a Band-Aid on a boo-boo,” she said. “I think this requires more than that.”

  “If I was the kind of man who carried a clean white handkerchief everywhere, we could use it as a bandage,” he said.

  She studied the wound again. “I guess what we’re looking for is something clean that can soak up the blood and protect the wound from dirt, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then I have something.” She turned her back to him and unzipped her coveralls. A few deft movements later, she pulled out her bra and dangled it in front of his face. “It’s padded and it’s mostly cotton. And it’s clean.”

  He choked back a laugh. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

  “I’m practical. It’s not the same thing. Now turn around.”

  He grit his teeth and cried out only once as she doused the wound with the rest of the water from their bottle, then twisted and wrapped the bra into an awkward bandage. “It looks ridiculous, but I think it will serve our purposes,” she said. “Now what?”

  “Now we try to find a way out of here,” he said. The gunfire had stopped, leaving the area silent—the unnatural silence after violence has intruded.

  Bette followed his gaze to the open area they had just crossed. “He was waiting for us,” she said in a ragged whisper. “Watching us. He let us get away from the snowmobile, out in the open, and when we stopped, he tried to kill us.”

  “It looks that way.” Cody checked his gun to make sure it was loaded—it was always loaded, but this gave him something to do with his hands, since whoever had put them in this situation wasn’t close enough to strangle.

  Bette closed her eyes, then opened them again. “This is crazy. I just need to find Carl and ask him what he wants. That’s what I should have done in the grocery store that day, instead of running away.”

  “Maybe this isn’t Carl,” Cody said.

  She stared at him. “You don’t think it’s Doug? Or Rainey?”

  “Maybe it’s the Ice Cold Killer.”

  “He’s a serial killer. He ambushes women and cuts their throats.”

  “He didn’t cut your throat,” Cody said. “You’re unfinished business.” The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to him. Yes, the attack on Bette hadn’t been the killer’s usual style, but that might be a sign that he was getting desperate. Coming unhinged. Considering that it took a kind of mental imbalance to become a serial killer in the first place, was it so far-fetched to think that could progress into an obsession with one particular woman? “Maybe he’s been waiting for another chance and thought this was it.”

  “So what do we do now?” she asked. “Lie here and wait for him to come after us?”

  “I think we wait and see what he does next.”

  “I am not going to lie here and let him pick us off like shooting fish in a barrel,” she said. She started to rise but wasn’t to her feet yet when a bullet hit the tree trunk above her head, sending bark flying.

  With a yelp, she flattened herself on the ground once more. “Okay, I guess that was stupid,” she muttered.

  Cody studied the landscape beyond this stand of trees. A small rise, slightly above and to the left, would provide good cover for the shooter. “I think he’s in the rocks up there,” he said, indicating the spot. “I don’t think he can see us here, but he probably knows he hit me. He’s waiting to see what we do next.”

  “Can you shoot him from here?” she asked.

  “No. He’s using a rifle. My handgun isn’t going to do us any good unless he gets closer.” He nudged her. “Let’s start moving back, deeper into the woods. He won’t be able to get a clear shot at us, and he may have to expose himself to come after us.”

  They crawled backward twenty, then thirty feet, to the banks of a frozen creek that wound through the trees. Cody moved awkwardly, trying and failing to protect his wounded shoulder, so that by the time they reached the creek, he was dizzy from pain. When he could speak, he said, “If we move along this creek, we’ll be headed toward the ranch, but we’ll still have cover.”

  “It’s going to take all night to get back to the ranch, crawling on our hands and knees,” she said. “And you need a doctor.”

  Cody didn’t tell her they probably didn’t have all night. A killer who had followed them to the lake, sabotaged their snowmobile, then waited patiently for them to provide clear targets wasn’t going to stop his pursuit now. All Cody could do was try to make the task more difficult for him. Keeping in the shelter of the trunk of a large fir, he rose to his knees, then stood. All remained silent. “Come on. It will be easier walking.”

  They moved alongside the creek, climbing over snowbanks and skirting deadfall. No one fired on them, but Cody had the sensation that they were still being watched. Was the shooter waiting for them to emerge into the open again?

  And then they were almost out of cover, the woods giving way to a broad meadow, snow like icing over a sheet cake. He stopped ten yards from the last tree. “We can’t cross that,” Bette whispered.

  Cody scanned the surroundings, looking for the shooter’s vantage point. He saw half a dozen possibilities. He needed to draw the man out, make him show his hand. He had no chance if he didn’t know where the shots would come from. But Bette was right—stepping into that open field would be suicide.

  “When we don’t come back for supper, someone from the ranch will come looking for us,” Bette said. “They knew we were coming here to fish.”

  It was anyone’s guess how long that would take. By himself, Cody might have hazarded more direct action, but he couldn’t risk Bette. “Then I guess we wait,” he said.

  He made himself as comfortable as possible—which wasn’t very comfortable, his back to a tree, the gun in his right hand, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his left shoulder and arm. Bette sat beside him, one hand on his thigh. She kept glancing at his injured shoulder. “What?” he asked, the tenth time she looked.

  “The blood is seeping through,” she said.

  “I hope it wasn’t your favorite bra,” he said.

  “If you’d ever had to wear one, you’d know there is no such thing,” she said.

  “I think I can speak for most men when I say you never have to wear one on our account.”

  A twig snapped, and they both sat up straighter. His hand tightened on the Glock.

  “Maybe it’s just a deer,” she whispered.

  A bullet thudded into a tree five feet in front of them. “Last time I checked, deer didn’t carry rifles,” Cody said, as he urged her to the ground. He peered around the trunk of the tree. Was that movement there, behind those rocks? He fired, and shards of rock flew from a boulder at the front of the grouping, followed by a volley of gunfire in their direction.

  He flattened himself on the ground over Bette. “You’re crushing me,” she said, her face in the dirt.

  “Better flattened than dead.”

  “And people say chivalry is dead.”

  “If I could get a little closer, I’d have a better chance of hitting him,” he said.

  She clutched his arm. “No. He’ll kill you.”

  “Not if I’m careful.”

  “No,” she said again. “Don’t leave me.”

  “I won’t.” He realized he couldn’t. If the gunman did kill him, she’d be left he
lpless. The shooter fired sporadically for the next ten minutes, with Cody returning fire. Then the hammer clicked onto an empty cylinder. He sagged to the ground behind the tree again and tried to move his left hand toward the spare ammo clip on his belt. It was impossible.

  “What are you doing?” Bette asked.

  “I need you to get the ammo clip off my belt,” he said.

  She fumbled a little, but managed to unfasten the clip. “Aren’t you Mr. Prepared?” she said.

  “Aren’t you glad I am?”

  “Oh, I am.” She levered herself up and kissed him, hard. “I’m very glad.”

  The roar of an engine—more than one engine, Cody decided—broke the stillness that had followed the last volley of gunfire. Headlights swept the edge of the forest. Breaking twigs and muffled steps announced the shooter’s retreat. Cody waited, heart pounding painfully. Beside him, Bette breathed raggedly.

  “Cody! It’s Travis! Are you okay?”

  “In here!” Bette stood and waved, then moved toward their voices. Cody closed his eyes and sagged against the tree. They were safe. For now, anyway.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Travis, I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life.” Bette grabbed the sheriff by the arm and dragged him toward the tree where she and Cody had been sheltering. “Cody’s hurt. He needs a doctor right away.”

  “What happened?” Mr. Walker strode up behind his son.

  “Someone sabotaged our snowmobile, so we had to walk out,” Bette said. “Then they started shooting at us. They hit Cody.” They had reached the tree.

  Travis knelt beside Cody. “Hey.”

  Cody scowled at him. “Hey yourself. About time you got here.”

  “Bette said somebody shot you.”

  “Rifle shot. It didn’t bleed too much.”

  “Let me take a look.” He helped Cody sit forward, and he shined the light on the bloodstained bandage. He frowned. “What is that you’ve got on there?” he asked.