by Elle James
She was about to ask Mariposa if she knew these newcomers when the young woman took off running. Her sudden departure startled Abby so much she didn’t immediately react. She stared after the young woman, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
Mariposa ran with her skirt held up, legs lifted high, in the opposite direction of the approaching strangers, stumbling over the uneven terrain as if her life depended on it. Abby debated running after her, but what would that do but frighten the woman more? She watched the fleeing figure until she’d disappeared over a slight rise, then glanced back toward the voices. They were getting louder, moving closer at a rapid pace.
Abby slipped on the pack and unholstered the weapon once more, then settled into the shade of a boulder to wait.
The group moved steadily toward her. All men, from the sound of them. The uneven terrain and stubby trees blocked them from view, but their voices carried easily in the stillness. They weren’t attempting stealth; instead, they shouted and crashed through the underbrush with a great crackling of breaking twigs and branches. As they neared she thought she heard both English and Spanish. They seemed to be searching for someone, shouting, “Come out!” and, “Where is he?”
Or were they saying, “Where is she?” Were they looking for Mariposa? Why?
The first gunshots sent a jolt of adrenaline to her heart. She gripped the pistol more tightly and hunkered down closer to the boulder. For a moment she was back in Afghanistan, pinned down by enemy fire, unable to fight back. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, fighting for calm. She wasn’t over there anymore. She was in the United States. No one was shooting at her. She was safe.
A second rapid burst of gunfire shattered the air, and Abby bit down on her lip so hard she tasted blood. Then everything went still. The echo of the concussion reverberated in the air, ringing in her ears. She couldn’t hear the men anymore, though whether because they were silent or because she was momentarily deaf, she didn’t know. She opened her eyes and reached into the pocket of her jeans to grip the small ceramic figure of a rabbit she kept there. She’d awoken in the field hospital with it clutched in her hand; she had no idea who had put the rabbit there, but ever since, she’d kept it as a kind of good-luck charm. The familiar feel of its smooth sides and little pointed ears calmed her. She was safe. She was all right.
The voices drifted to her once more, less agitated now, and receding. They gradually faded altogether, until everything around her was silent once more.
She waited a full ten minutes behind the boulder, clutching the pistol in both hands, every muscle tensed and poised to defend herself. After the clock on her phone told her the time she’d allotted had passed, she stood and scanned the wilderness around her. Nothing. No men, no Mariposa, no dust clouds marking the trail of a vehicle. The landscape was as still as a painting, not even a breeze stirring the leaves of the stunted trees.
Still shaky from the adrenaline rush, she holstered the pistol and settled the backpack more firmly on her shoulder. She could return to her car, but would that increase her chances of running into the men? Maybe it would be better to remain here for a while longer. She’d go about her business and give the men time to move farther away.
She returned to the parsley plants. Digging up the specimen calmed her further. She cradled the uprooted plant in her fingers and slid it into the plastic collection bag, then labeled the bag with the date, time and GPS coordinates where she’d found it, and stowed it in her pack. Then she stood and stretched. Her muscles ached from tension. Time to head back to camp. She’d clean up, then stop by the ranger station and report the men and the shooting—but not Mariposa. She had no desire to betray the woman’s secrets, whatever they were.
She checked her GPS to orient herself, then turned southwest, in the direction of her car and the road. She had no trail to follow, only paths made by animals and the red line on the GPS unit that marked her route into this area. On patrol in Kandahar she’d used similar GPS units, but just as often she’d relied on the memory of landmarks or even the positioning of stars. Nothing over there had ever felt familiar to her, but she’d learned to accept the unfamiliarity, until the day that roadside bomb had almost taken everything away.
She picked her way carefully through the rough landscape, around clumps of prickly pear cactus and desert willows, past sagebrush and Mormon tea and dozens of other plants she identified out of long habit. She kept her eyes focused down, hoping to spot one of the other coveted species on her list. All the plants were considered rare in the area, and all held promise of medical uses. The research she was doing now might one day lead to cultivation of these species to treat cancer or Parkinson’s or some other crippling disease.
So focused was she on cataloging the plants around her that she didn’t see the fallen branch until she’d stumbled over it. Cursing her own clumsiness, she straightened and looked back at the offending obstacle. It stuck out from beneath a clump of rabbitbrush, dark brown and as big around as a man’s arm. What kind of a tree would that be, the bark such a dark color—and out here in an area where large trees were rare?
She bent to look closer and cold horror swept over her. She hadn’t fallen over a branch at all. The thing that had tripped her was a man. He lay sprawled on the ground, arms outstretched, lifeless eyes staring up at her, long past seeing anything.
Chapter Two
Lieutenant Michael Dance had a low tolerance for meetings. As much as they were necessary to do his job, he endured them. But he’d wasted too many hours sitting in conference rooms, listening to other people drone on about things he didn’t consider important. He preferred to be out in the field, doing real work that counted.
The person who’d called this meeting, however, was his boss, Captain Graham Ellison, aka “G-Man.” Though Graham was with the FBI and Dance worked for Customs and Border Protection, Graham headed up the interagency task force charged with maintaining law and order on this vast swath of public land in southwest Colorado. And in their short acquaintance, Graham struck Michael as being someone worth listening to.
“National park rangers found an abandoned vehicle at the Dragon Point overlook yesterday,” Graham said. A burly guy with the thick neck and wide shoulders of a linebacker and the short-cropped hair and erect stance of ex-military, Graham spoke softly, like many big men. His very presence commanded attention, so he didn’t need to raise his voice. “The Montrose County sheriff’s office has identified it as belonging to a Lauren Starling of Denver. Ms. Starling failed to show for work this morning, so they’ve asked us to keep an eye out. Here’s a picture.”
He passed around a glossy eight-by-ten photograph. Michael studied the studio head shot of a thirtysomething blonde with shoulder-length curls, violet-blue eyes and a dazzling white smile. She looked directly at the camera, beautiful and confident. “Do they think she was out here alone?” he asked, as he passed the photo on to the man next to him, Randall Knightbridge, with the Bureau of Land Management.
“They don’t know,” Graham said. “Right now they’re just asking us to keep an eye out for her.”
“Hey, I know this chick,” Randall said.
Everyone turned to stare. The BLM ranger was the youngest member of the task force, in his late twenties and an acknowledged geek. He could rattle off the plots of half a dozen paranormal series on television, played lacrosse in his spare time and wore long-sleeved uniform shirts year-round to hide the colorful tattoos that decorated both arms. He didn’t have a rep as a ladies’ man, so what was he doing knowing a glamour girl like the one in the picture?
“I mean, I don’t know her personally,” he corrected, as if reading Michael’s thoughts. “But I’ve seen her on TV. She does the news on channel nine in Denver.”
“You’re right.” Simon Woolridge, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, grabbed the picture and gave it a second look. “I knew she looked
familiar.”
“Like one of your ex-wives,” quipped Lance Carpenter, a Montrose County sheriff’s deputy.
“Lauren Starling is the evening news anchor for channel nine,” Graham confirmed. “Her high profile is one reason this case is getting special attention from everyone involved.”
“When did she go missing?” Marco Cruz, an agent with the DEA, asked.
“The Denver police aren’t treating it as a missing person case yet,” Graham said. “The car was simply parked at the overlook. There were no signs of a struggle. She took a week’s vacation and didn’t tell anyone where she was going. Nothing significant is missing from her apartment. That’s all the information I have at the moment.”
“Are they thinking suicide?” asked Carmen Redhorse, the only female member of the task force. Petite and dark haired, Carmen worked with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
No one looked surprised at her suggestion of suicide. Unfortunately, the deep canyon and steep drop-offs of Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park were popular places for the despondent to end it all. Four or five people committed suicide in the park each year.
“There’s no note,” Graham said. “The Denver police are on the case right now. They’ve simply asked us to keep an eye on things. If you see anything suspicious, we’ll pass it on to the local authorities.” He consulted the clipboard in his hand. “On to more pressing matters. State police impounded a truck carrying a hundred pounds of fresh marijuana bud at a truck stop in Gunnison last night. The pot was concealed inside a load of coffee, but the drug dogs picked up the scent, no problem.”
“When will these rubes learn they can’t fool a dog’s nose?” Randall leaned down to pet his Belgian Malinois, Lotte, who’d stretched out beneath his chair. She thumped the floor twice with her plume of a tail, but didn’t raise her head.
“The logbook indicates the truck passed through this area,” Graham continued. “That’s the second shipment that’s been waylaid in as many months, and another indication that there’s an active growing operation in the area. We know from experience that public lands are prime targets for illegal growers.”
“Free land, away from people, limited law enforcement presence.” Carmen ticked off the reasons wilderness areas presented such a temptation to drug runners. “I read the first national parks had problems with bootleggers. Now it’s pot and meth.”
Graham turned to the large map of the area that covered most of one wall of the trailer that served as task force headquarters. “We’re going to be flying more surveillance this week, trying to locate the growing fields. We’ll be concentrating on the Gunnison Gorge just west of the park boundaries. The counters we laid last week show increased vehicle traffic on the roads in that area.”
In addition to the more than thirty thousand acres within the national park, the task force was charged with controlling crime within the almost sixty-three thousand acres of the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area and the forty-three thousand acres of the Curecanti National Recreation Area. It was a ridiculous amount of land for a few people to patrol, much of it almost inaccessible, roadless wilderness. In recent years, drug cartels had taken advantage of short-staffed park service to cultivate thousands of acres of public land. They dug irrigation canals, built fences and destroyed priceless artifacts with impunity. This task force was an attempt to stop them.
A pretty feeble attempt, Michael thought. He thumbed a butterscotch Life Saver from the roll he kept in his pocket and popped it into his mouth. They were wasting time sitting around talking about the problem, instead of being out there doing something about it.
“If we want to find the crops, look for the people who take care of the crops,” Simon said.
“You mean the people who plant the weed?” Randall asked.
“The people who plant it and water it and weed it and guard it from predators—both animal and human,” Simon said. “Illegals, most likely, shipped in for that purpose. We find them and put pressure on them, we can find the person behind this. The money man.”
Here was something Michael knew about. “Human trafficking in Colorado is up twenty percent this year,” he said. “Some sources suggest a lot of victims who end up in Denver come from this area. We could be looking at a pipeline for more than drugs.”
“So the guys in charge of drugs offer a free pass into the country to people who will work for them?” Lance asked.
“More likely they work with coyotes who charge people to bring them into the country, but instead of going to their cousin in Fort Collins or their aunt in Laramie, they end up prisoners of this drug cartel,” Michael said. “And once they’ve worked the fields for a while or learned to cook up meth or whatever the drug lords need them to do, they take the women and the younger men to Denver and turn them out as prostitutes. It’s slavery on a scale people have no idea even exists anymore.”
“So in addition to drugs, we may be dealing with human trafficking,” Carmen said.
“We don’t know that.” Simon’s voice was dismissive. “It’s only speculation. We do know that if these people have workers, they’re probably illegals. Deport the workforce and you can cripple an operation. At least temporarily.”
“Only until they bring in the next load of workers.” Michael glared at the man across the conference table. “Rounding up people and deporting them solves nothing. And you miss the chance to break up the trafficking pipeline.”
“End the drug operation and you remove the reason they have to bring in people,” Simon countered.
“Right. And now they take them straight to Denver, where no one even notices what’s going on.”
“Back to the discussion at hand.” Graham cut them off. He gave each of them a stern look. “As a task force, our job is to address all serious crime in this region, whether it’s human trafficking or drugs or money laundering or murder. But I don’t have to tell you that in this time of budget cuts, we have to be able to show the politicians are getting their money’s worth. A high-profile case could do a lot to assure we all get to keep working.”
And drugs were worth more to federal coffers than people, Michael thought grimly. The law allowed the Feds to seize any and all property involved in drug crimes, from cash and cars to mansions.
“Tomorrow we’ll begin five days of aerial patrols, focused on these sectors.” Graham indicated half a dozen spots on the map. “These are fairly level spots with access to water, remote, but possible to reach in four-wheel-drive vehicles.”
“What about the private property in the area?” Michael asked. Several white spots on the map, some completely surrounded by federal land, indicated acreage owned by private individuals.
“Private property could provide an access point for the drug runners, so we’ll be looking at that. Most of the private land is unoccupied,” Graham said.
“Except for Prentice’s fortress,” Simon said.
Michael didn’t ask the obvious question. If he waited, someone would explain this mystery to the new guy; if not, he’d find out what he needed to know on his own.
“Richard Prentice owns the land here.” Graham pointed to a white square closest to the park—almost on the canyon rim. “He’s built a compound there with several houses, stables, a gated entrance, et cetera.”
“But before that, he tried to blackmail the government into buying the place at an exorbitant price,” Carmen said. “He threatened to build this giant triple-X theater with huge neon signs practically at the park entrance.” Her lip curled in disgust.
“He’s had success with those kinds of tactics before,” Graham said. “He threatened to blow up a historic building over near Ouray until a conservation group raised the money to buy the place from him.”
“At an inflated price,” Carmen said. “That’s how he operates. If he can figure out a way to exploit a situation for money,
he will.”
“But the government didn’t bite this time?” Michael asked.
“No,” Lance said. “And the county fought back by passing an ordinance prohibiting sexually oriented businesses. He built a mansion instead, and spends his time filing harassment complaints every time we drive by or fly over.”
“So do we think he has anything to do with the crime wave around here?” Michael asked. Greed and a lust for power were motivation enough for all manner of misdeeds.
Graham shook his head. “Prentice likes to thumb his nose at the government, but we have no reason to suspect he’s guilty of any felonies.”
“Which doesn’t mean he isn’t guilty,” Carmen said. “Just that we can’t prove it—yet.”
Michael studied the map again. First chance he got, he’d check out this Prentice guy.
“Next on the list.” Graham scanned the clipboard again, but before he could continue, a knock sounded on the door.
“Come in,” Graham called.
The door opened and a woman stood on the threshold, eyes wide with surprise. A fall of long honey-blond hair obscured most of her face, but she appeared young, and pretty, with dark eyes and a well-shaped nose and chin. She wore canvas cargo pants, hiking boots and a long-sleeved canvas shirt, open at the throat to reveal a black tank top trimmed in lace, and a hint of tanned cleavage. Michael’s gaze locked on the holstered weapon at her side—a .40-caliber Sig Sauer. He had one like it at his hip. So was she some kind of law enforcement? A new member of the team no one had mentioned?
“I, uh, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said. “I was looking for the park rangers. Their office was closed, and I saw the cars over here...”
“The park rangers go home at four,” Graham said. “They’ll be in at nine in the morning if you need help with camping permits or something.”
Her eyes narrowed, focused on the tan uniforms, then on the name badge pinned to Graham’s shirt pocket. “Captain Ellison. Are you a law enforcement officer?”
