Dangerous Refuge

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Yeah, we’re heartless bastards until the forms are filled out.”

  “They were just doing their job.”

  “I know that, too. Doesn’t make it any easier on civilians.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  She leaned back against the seat and watched dark green trees whip by on either side of the windshield. The two-lane road twisted, rose, then dropped down until the solid wall of evergreen needles gave way to stands of aspen and tongues of grass and sagebrush among the pines. Granite boulders polished by long-ago glaciers gleamed in the sun.

  Tanner turned onto a dirt Forest Service road that led to an aging asphalt road. Within minutes the road crossed above Lorne’s ranch. A few hundred yards later they were bouncing along the ruts leading to the ranch house.

  “You’re going to scrape bottom,” she said. “We should have brought my Bronco. The gas gauge has a split personality, but I could have bought fuel in Tahoe.”

  “Long as it doesn’t rain, we’ll be fine. This is a former LAPD squad car. The suspension is a lot better than the car looks.”

  And I hope the engine is better than it sounds.

  “But if the weather goes sideways, there’s always the ranch truck,” he said.

  She murmured a word that could have been Lorne’s name.

  Tanner drove into the sunlight flooding around the ranch house. Shaye’s glance intently probed shadows and sunlight alike.

  “Looking for something in particular?” he asked.

  “I keep waiting for Dingo to come out and investigate.”

  “He’s still at the vet, and I’m wondering how he got into that poison.”

  That, plus the missing gold, is just too damned convenient for this homicide cop to swallow without choking.

  One or two—or even three—mismatched details he could accept. Life was that way. Messy. Death was the same.

  “So am I,” she said. “Dingo stayed away from roads and other people. He was as shy as a coyote.”

  “I called the vet before I picked you up. Dingo won’t be chasing rabbits for a while, but he’s getting better. We can see him later.”

  “I’d like to. He must hate being penned up.”

  Tanner parked on the shady side of the ranch house, several hundred feet away from the area where Lorne had died.

  Shaye unfastened the seat-belt harness, which had dialed itself up to choke. She had closed the car door behind herself when he reached her side of the sedan. He took her hand and gave it a squeeze that lasted just long enough to remind both of them how much they liked it.

  “Dessert with breakfast,” he said, smiling at her.

  “Never saw that on any menu.”

  “You’ve been going to the wrong restaurants.”

  He liked seeing the humor in her eyes and on her pink, naked lips so much that he wished he didn’t have to grill her like a murder suspect. But he knew he was going to just the same.

  Some questions just had to be answered.

  Nine

  Everything is going well.

  Lorne Davis’s death will be certified as natural.

  The nephew is an unexpected problem, but not insurmountable. Tanner Davis has no attachment to the ranch, so even if he ends up with it—unlikely—he’ll sell it to the highest bidder.

  If that doesn’t work out, or if the inconvenient cop gets in the way somehow, there will be a really convenient, and fatal, accident in his near future. Nobody will care, especially the brass in L.A.

  Nobody will miss Rua, either.

  Really, killing him will be a public service. The sooner the better.

  Ten

  Tanner led Shaye close to the flattened patch of grass and brittle weeds where his uncle had died.

  “Was Dingo a carrion hound?” he asked.

  She flinched and tried not to think of Lorne’s body and vultures sliding out of the air. “Not that I know of. He was more a hot-rabbit-and-fresh-kill kind of canine.”

  Tanner smiled faintly.

  She watched him study the area where Lorne had died. His eyes were intent, narrowed, looking for or seeing things that others wouldn’t see.

  “It’s different, now,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Full sunlight,” she said simply.

  He switched his attention to her. “Was Lorne wearing a jacket when you found him?”

  She remembered the scene all too clearly. “No. And the first deputy didn’t ask about that.”

  Tanner grunted. He wasn’t surprised. The deputy probably was doing back-to-back shifts just to cover his part of the county. There was never enough money to pay for full coverage, especially in rural areas. An old man dying alone on his ranch wasn’t going to raise enough interest to get much more than a body bag and an obituary in the local weekly.

  “The second deputy, Nate August, started to question me about Lorne’s clothes, but another call came in and he had to leave.”

  She stared at the beaten grass and reminded herself that Lorne had died quickly, no time to be alone in fear and pain.

  “Are you okay?” Tanner asked gently.

  “Yes. No. Not really.” She pulled off her ponytail holder and rubbed where some hair had been caught the wrong way. “I know his death was quick. That helps.”

  “I don’t want to make it harder on you, but . . .” He shrugged. “It sounds like nobody in the sheriff’s department is paying attention to this one.”

  “Everyone is spread thin in the county, and they concentrate on the towns.”

  “They’re working the odds. More people, more chances of needing a cop. What makes you say that Lorne died quickly?”

  “I’m a volunteer with the local search-and-rescue group,” she said. “They taught us to read and follow disturbances in the land—tracks, broken brush, or trampled grass, anything that was out of place.”

  “You could see the ground that well? I thought you found him before sunrise.”

  Her eyes narrowed, but she was looking at the past, not at him. He waited, letting her reexamine the picture in her mind of the moment she had first seen his uncle’s corpse. Something, or things, had led her to believe he died a quick, painless death. Tanner needed to know how she had arrived at her conclusions.

  “It was the gloaming time,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Those clean, beautiful moments before the sun clears the mountains across Carson Valley, when the stars are mostly gone and light seems to bloom from an invisible source. There aren’t many details, just darkness at your feet and the day coming up with the sun. You get the same feeling at twilight, after the sun has set and light drains away, leaving the stars behind.”

  He watched her, listening to her describe the beauty of the times when night and day passed each other. “Are you a dawn person?”

  “I won’t get up to see one, but if there’s another reason to be out, I like that hushed, waiting-for-something feeling.”

  “Lorne’s message must have really upset you,” Tanner said quietly, understanding what she hadn’t said—she really hadn’t slept well after hearing his uncle’s anger.

  She nodded and closed her eyes. It made no difference. She still saw Lorne’s body condensing from the shroud of night, the marks of scavengers getting clearer and clearer on his corpse with the rising sun.

  She opened her eyes. It was too easy to remember how he had looked lying slackly on his back, his ruined face lifted to the merciless sky and his thin silver hair lifting in the occasional wind.

  “What are you seeing?” Tanner asked in a low, undemanding voice.

  “Lorne. The marks of scavengers. Vultures sliding out of the brightening sky to get their share of the free protein.”

  He waited, hating that he had to put her through this. And knowing that the only other choice was to walk away and pretend that everything was as neat as the first deputy’s report, all gaps filled in, certainty crisp in every line, no dangling ends or unanswered questions.

  �
��This kind of ground doesn’t hold footprints well,” she said, “unless the person stays in place for a long time or paces back and forth or drags himself around. I didn’t see that kind of disturbance in the vegetation until they lifted Lorne’s body. Everything beneath him was crushed. His boot heels . . .” She waved her hand. “You can still see the marks. His arms were out from his sides.”

  “Sounds like he fell hard.”

  So hard his heels bounced.

  “Like a puppet without strings.” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, I—”

  “Don’t apologize. I asked for what you saw. You’re telling me.” He took her hand and rubbed his thumb across her fingertips.

  “Do you console every grieving civilian?” she asked softly.

  “No.”

  His thumb stroked her palm.

  She let out a breath. “He wasn’t wearing a hat. I guess it blew away in the wind.”

  Tanner waited, caressing her, saying nothing, silently encouraging her to remember each painful detail.

  “I’m not sure I ever saw him without his hat,” she said.

  “He only went bareheaded in bed or in the shower.”

  She almost smiled. “He wasn’t wearing one of his work shirts or his work pants. It was his go-to-town clothes. And . . .” She frowned, remembering. “The little pouch of chewing tobacco had spilled out over his shirt.”

  “The one he kept in his left shirt pocket?”

  She nodded. “I could tell he had died well before the scavengers came, because they didn’t draw blood. There were . . .” She drew a deep, careful breath. “Marks, gouges, but no bleeding. No rigor mortis. No bruises on his hands, no grass or dirt under his nails that I could see from ten feet away. Except for the scavengers, I didn’t see any sign of facial injury. Nothing to make me think he’d struggled or fought or anything like that.”

  “Like I said, you see better than an overworked deputy. Sheriff wrote it off as a heart attack before he ever looked at the body. If he looked at all.”

  Shaye watched Tanner with shadowed, beautiful eyes. “You don’t think that’s what happened?”

  “A heart attack is always possible, but in this case it leaves a lot of dangling ends.”

  “Such as?”

  Tanner started naming the facts that he was having trouble swallowing. “Lorne’s home, but he’s in his town clothes. Shortly before Lorne died, Dingo ate poison. Dingo’s a hunter, not a scavenger, and Lorne didn’t put out poison. Lorne’s dogs—the ones that lasted more than a year, anyway—hunted in the national forest in the daytime, not out of garbage cans at night. Lorne was trying to change his will. If he had lived, the Conservancy would have been cut out.”

  “We’ve had a lot of people refuse us,” Shaye said. “They’re all alive and a lot of them had more land than Lorne.”

  Tanner nodded. “That’s what I figured. Which leaves the missing gold. Did he say anything about being close to bankruptcy?”

  “No. He complained about the price of feed and taxes and what a lousy amount of money he got from the cattle when he shipped to the feedlots, but so does every other rancher I know. He was looking at new trucks, and had just bought a new dress hat and the boots I found him in, so he couldn’t have been that broke.”

  Then, as if it had just registered. “Gold? What gold? He had a silver belt buckle or two, but I never saw him wearing gold.”

  Tanner watched the sky with the measuring eyes of someone who had grown up where weather mattered. The morning was sunny with puffy clouds, but almost cool. Autumn was settling in, leaching the heat from the ground. Once the sun went behind the mountains in the late afternoon, the furnace went off and things got chilly real fast.

  Clouds slid over the sun like gray fingers, threatening rain. But the clouds were being pushed by a hard wind that chased and scattered them before they could get together and cry.

  Shaye waited, seeing cloud-shadow and sunlight change Tanner’s face. He looked like a man chewing on something he couldn’t swallow and wouldn’t spit out.

  “Sorry, that was my mistake bringing it up,” he said. “So you found him out here?” he asked quickly. “On his back, wearing his new town boots?”

  She wanted to pursue the question of the gold, but doubted that he would tell her much more than he had.

  All he has is questions to ask, not answers to give.

  It irritated the hell out of her. Then she took a better grip on her roller-coaster emotions and said, “Yes.”

  “Wonder why,” he said to himself. “He and my dad were raised alike. Dad didn’t change. I’m having a hard time believing Lorne did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “On the ranch you had your work boots, then you had the boots you wore into town, and for really special occasions you had a pair of fancy boots. Your work boots didn’t leave the ranch, and you weren’t on the ranch without being in them unless you were heading into town or coming back from town.”

  Shaye didn’t know what to say. Obviously the boot thing meant more to Tanner than it did to her.

  He sat on his heels and ran his fingers through the dirt, testing the dryness of the soil.

  “If you found Lorne here, he wasn’t coming back from his truck or heading toward it,” Tanner said, “yet he was wearing his town boots. With a town shirt. What about his pants?”

  She looked at the ground, seeing the past and not wanting to see it at all. “They weren’t work pants. Maybe he was just out admiring his land.”

  “He respected the land, but I never saw him stand around and admire it. Did you?”

  Wind gusted down the mountain, swirling her hair. Automatically she tucked it back behind her ears. “No. When he was outside, he was always doing something. Mending fences, cleaning the irrigation ditches, checking the cattle, cussing the deer and rabbits that kept raiding his garden, despite Dingo’s teeth. Even when we were talking, his hands were busy oiling a bridle or wielding a hoe or . . . something.”

  “Yes, that’s how I remember him.” Tanner stood and brushed his hands off. “No footprints around the body?”

  “I didn’t look for any.” Absently she pushed windblown hair back from her face again. “Even ten feet away, it was clear that Lorne was dead. If I can’t give aid, I’m supposed to leave everything untouched for the deputies. I called 911 and chased scavengers until a patrol car showed up.”

  And I cried, but I’m the only one who cares about that.

  “If it was important, wouldn’t the first deputy have seen it?” she added.

  “Not if he wasn’t looking for it,” Tanner said.

  She shook her head. “I should have looked. I’m sorry.”

  He heard the emotion in her voice and touched her chin. “Why would you? You’re not a cop. And maybe there was nothing to see.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  He changed the subject. “Lorne’s lawyer said that there had been offers on the ranch. Was that something he talked about with you?”

  “He laughed about it. Said the idiots thought they could eat the view.”

  “If you could, you’d be fat,” he said wryly, waving a hand at the surroundings.

  Behind the ranch house, the Sierra Nevada thrust granite spires up into the sky, creating a vast barrier to anything that didn’t have wings. In the winter, winds routinely reached more than one hundred miles an hour on the upper ridgelines, lifting snow like white fire from black rocks. The mountains were a wilderness of tall trees and rushing white streams, hidden valleys and stands of aspens that burned molten gold in the fall.

  Below the ranch to the east, Refuge spread out, far enough away to be interesting rather than intrusive. Around the town, sunlight glittered off the groundwater and irrigation channels that were wet even in the driest season. A hundred shades of green fields and marshes shimmered in the sun, surrounding farmhouses and town alike.

  Glory Springs and Lorne’s narrow ranch valley lay between the mountains and the main valley floor whe
re Refuge was, part of both but at the same time distinct, aloof. Like Lorne.

  “The ranch is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,” Shaye said quietly. “I wish . . .”

  Tanner waited, but she didn’t finish. “What do you wish?”

  “That Lorne was alive and the land was safe with the Conservancy.” She turned and faced him. “What are you going to do with the ranch?”

  Eleven

  At first Shaye thought that Tanner would ignore her question as he had the one about the gold. Then he shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said simply.

  “You weren’t in touch with Lorne, you haven’t been here since you were a kid, yet you dropped everything and drove here when he died. Because of the ranch?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  He shrugged. “I wondered myself. I think I was . . . looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “If I knew, I would have found it by now.” He hissed out a long breath and put his hands on his hips. His mouth settled into a flat line. “Whatever, I’m here now, and I keep tripping over questions. As for the ranch, when I’m sure I understand why you found Lorne lying on his back for a vulture buffet, then we can talk about the land and the Conservancy.”

  Because I’m sure I don’t want much to do with the land anymore. Right?

  He made an impatient sound. The ranch reminded him of too many things that never had had answers and never would—his father, his uncle, himself.

  If she picked up his uneasy thoughts, she hid it well. Or it didn’t bother her.

  And why should it? You’re nothing much to her, and while she’s a damned intriguing woman, she isn’t into casual sex—and that’s all I can offer her. She loves life in a place that drove me crazy.

  Or was it the teeth-grinding tension of growing up as a buffer between my uncle and my father that made me eager to get out?

  Tanner had never thought about that possibility and he didn’t have time or patience for it now. The past was over. The questions about Lorne’s death were here and now.