by Elle James
“Yes. Can I help you?”
She pressed her lips together, as if debating her next move, then nodded. “I need to report a crime. A murder.”
The temperature in the room dropped several degrees, Michael was sure, and the group around the table leaned forward, all eyes—including the dog’s—focused on the petite woman in the doorway.
“Why don’t you come in and give us a few more details.” Graham motioned the woman forward.
As she moved past him, Michael caught the scents of wood smoke and sweat and something lighter and more feminine—a floral perfume or shampoo. An awareness stirred in his gut, a sense of familiarity, and the hair rose on the back of his neck. Where had he seen this woman before?
“I’m a biologist,” she said, speaking primarily to Graham, but casting nervous glances at the rest of them. “Or rather, I’m working on my master’s degree in biology. I’m studying several plant species found in the park for my thesis. I was out collecting specimens this morning when I heard people approaching. They were shouting in English and in Spanish, and they appeared to be searching for someone.”
“Did you get close to them?” Simon asked. “Did you talk to them?”
She shook her head. As she did so, her hair swung away from her face, revealing a jagged scar diagonally bisecting one cheek. The scar was bizarrely out of place on such a beautiful face, like a crack in an otherwise pristine china plate. Michael’s gut tightened, and he struggled to control his breathing. He was sure he knew her now, but maybe his mind was playing tricks on him. Post-traumatic stress throwing up some new, bizarre symptom.
“They were some distance away—maybe two hundred yards,” she continued. “I hid behind a large boulder and waited for them to leave.”
“Why did you do that?” Simon asked.
“Because she’s smart,” Carmen said. “A woman alone in the middle of nowhere sees a group of rowdy men? Of course she hides.”
Simon flushed, like a kid who’s been reprimanded. “She looks as though she can take care of herself.” He nodded to the weapon at her side. “You got a permit for that thing?”
“Yes.” She turned away from him. “I couldn’t see what they were doing—the terrain is rough out there. But I heard gunshots. Then they quieted down and left.”
“You’re sure they were gunshots?” Graham asked.
She nodded. “I was in the army, stationed in Kandahar. I know what gunfire sounds like. This was a semiautomatic. A rifle, not a handgun.”
Michael gripped the underside of the conference table until his fingers ached. This was no trick of a war-stressed mind. This was her—the woman who’d lingered in the back of his mind for the better part of five years. The one he could never forget.
“All right.” Graham leaned against the table, his pose deceptively casual. “What happened next?”
“I waited ten minutes to make sure they were gone, then I resumed collecting the specimens I’d come for. I headed back toward the road where I’d parked my car. I had walked less than half a mile when I stumbled over something.” Her face paled and she swallowed hard, her lips pressed tightly together, holding in emotion. “It was a body,” she said softly. Then, in a stronger voice, “A young man. Latino. He’d been shot in the chest.”
“He was dead?” Randall asked.
“Oh, yes. But not for long. The body was still warm.”
“So you think the men you heard shot him.” Simon couldn’t keep quiet long. Clearly, he liked playing the role of interrogator.
“It’s your job to decide that, not mine,” the woman said, a sharp edge to her voice. Good for her, Michael thought. Put Simon in his place.
“Can you show us where the body is?” Graham asked.
She nodded. “I think so. I was collecting specimens near there and I made note of the GPS coordinates. I should have noted the coordinates for the body, too, but seeing it out there was such a shock...” She looked down at the floor, hair falling forward to obscure her face once more. But Michael didn’t need the visual confirmation anymore. This was her. And to think he’d thought he’d never see her again.
What were the odds that he’d run into her now—in this place half a world away from where they’d last met? Then again, his mother always said everything happened for a reason. Michael told himself he didn’t believe in that kind of divine interference—in fate. But maybe some of his mother’s superstition had rubbed off on him.
“We’ll want a full statement from you later.” Graham pulled out a pen and turned to a fresh sheet on his clipboard. “Right now, if you’ll just give me your name and tell me where you’re camped.”
“Abigail Stewart.”
Only when the others turned toward him did Michael realize he’d spoken out loud. Abby stared at him, too, her mouth half-open, a red stain coloring her previously pale cheeks. “How did you know my name?” she demanded.
He stood, forcing himself to relax, or at least to look as if he didn’t have all these turbulent emotions fighting it out in his gut. “Hello, Abby,” he said softly. “I’m Michael Dance.”
“I don’t know a Michael Dance,” she said.
“No, you probably don’t remember me. It’s been a while. Five years.”
She searched his face, panic behind her eyes. He wanted to reach out, to reassure her. But he remained frozen, immobile.
“You knew me in Afghanistan?” she asked. “I don’t remember.”
“There’s no reason you should,” he said. “The last time I saw you, you were pretty out of it. Technically, you were dead—for a while, at least.”
He’d been the one to bring her back to life, massaging her heart and breathing in her ravaged mouth until her heart beat again and she’d sucked in oxygen on her own. He’d saved her life, and in that moment forged a connection he’d never been quite able to sever.
Chapter Three
Having a total stranger announce to a bunch of other strangers that you’d come back from the dead didn’t rank high on Abby’s list of experiences she wanted to repeat—or to ever have in the first place. From the moment she’d entered the trailer parked alongside the park ranger’s office, she’d felt the tall, dark-haired officer’s gaze fixed on her. She couldn’t decide if he was rude or just overly intense; she hadn’t spent a lot of time around law-enforcement types, so what did she know?
And what did she care? Except that the agent—Michael Dance—had made her care. He knew things about her she didn’t. He knew what had happened in the hours and days she’d lost to unconsciousness and trauma. That he’d seen her ripped open and clinging to life by a thread felt so personal and intimate. She both resented him and wanted to know more.
As for Michael Dance, he seemed content to keep staring at her, and when she’d agreed to take the officers to the body she’d found, he’d slipped up beside her and insisted she ride with him.
“You could ride with me and Graham if you’d rather,” Carmen, the only other woman in the room, offered, perhaps sensing Abby’s unease.
“No, that’s all right. I can ride with Lieutenant Dance.” Alone in a vehicle, maybe she could ask him some of the questions that troubled her.
But now, as they cruised along the paved South Rim Road through the park, she felt tongue-tied and awkward.
He took a roll of Life Savers from the pocket of his uniform shirt and held it out to her. “Want one?”
“Okay.” She took one of the butterscotch candies, then he did the same and returned the roll to his pocket.
“I’m addicted,” he said. “I quit smoking last year and took up the candy as a substitute.”
“Good for you for quitting,” she said. “I knew a lot of soldiers who smoked, but I never took it up.”
“Smart woman.” He settled back in the driver’s seat, gaze fixed on the curving
ribbon of blacktop that skirted the park’s main attraction—the deep, narrow Black Canyon.
Abby tried to relax, too, but curiosity needled her, overcoming her natural shyness. “How do you possibly remember me after all this time?” she blurted. “It’s been years, and you must have only seen me for a few hours, at most.” Had he been an orderly in the field hospital, a medic or a pilot, or simply a grunt tasked with transporting the wounded?
“I was a PJ. We saw hundreds of casualties during my tour—but you were the only woman. And you were my first save. It made an impression.”
PJs—pararescuers—were bona fide superheroes. Members of the US Air Force’s rescue squadron swooped into the thick of danger in Pave Hawk helicopters, often under heavy enemy fire, to snatch wounded soldiers from almost certain death. They performed critical lifesaving procedures in the air, long before their patients reached the doctors at field hospitals. Abby remembered none of this, but she’d seen a special on TV and watched with sick fascination, trying to imagine what it was like when she was the patient, being patched together by young men she’d likely never see again.
“I...I don’t know what to say.” She plucked at the seat belt harness, feeling trapped as much by her own emotions as by the confining cloth strap. “Thank you doesn’t seem like enough.”
“I was glad you made it. We lost too many soldiers over there, but losing a woman would have been worse. I know it shouldn’t be that way, but it was—I won’t lie.”
She nodded. Though women weren’t authorized for combat roles back then, the army needed female soldiers to interrogate native women and to fill a variety of noncombat roles, from resupply to repairing equipment that constantly broke down. Women soldiers stood guard and went on patrol, and sometimes got caught up in battles, in a war with no clearly defined front line, where every peasant could be friend or foe. But for all the roles they filled, women made up only about 10 percent of the ground forces in Afghanistan. As a female soldier, Abby hadn’t wanted to stand out from her fellow grunts, but she couldn’t help it.
“I still can’t believe you remembered my name,” she said.
He winced. “I made it a point to remember it. Later, I tried to look you up—just to see how you were doing. I’m not a stalker or anything. I just wanted to know.”
“But you didn’t find me?”
“I found out you’d gotten transferred stateside, but that was about it.” He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel of the FJ Cruiser he drove. A second Cruiser followed a few car lengths behind, with Graham and Carmen; for all Abby knew half a dozen other vehicles full of more law-enforcement agents came after that. “But now I know. You look good. I’m glad.”
She resisted the urge to touch the scar. “Thanks for not qualifying the compliment.”
He frowned. “I don’t get it.”
“Thanks for not saying, ‘You look good, considering what you’ve been through.’”
“People really tell you that?”
“Sometimes. I also get ‘That scar is hardly noticeable,’ which I know is a lie, since if it was so unnoticeable, why are they bothering to point it out?” Had she really just said that? To this guy she didn’t even know? She didn’t talk about this stuff with anybody. Not even the therapist the Army had sent her to. Waste of money, that.
“So you’re studying botany?” Maybe sensing her uneasiness, he smoothly changed the subject.
“Environmental science. And to answer your next question, which I know from experience is, ‘What do you do with a master’s degree in environmental science?’ I’ll probably end up teaching ungrateful undergrads somewhere. But all that is just to support the research I want to do into developing medicines from plants.”
“You mean, like herbal remedies and stuff?”
“I mean, like cancer drugs and medicine to cure Parkinson’s or diabetes. Plants are a tremendous resource we’ve scarcely begun to explore.”
“So there are plants in this park that can cure diseases?” He motioned to the scrubby landscape around them.
“This might look like desert to you, but there are hundreds of plants within the park and surrounding public lands. It’s the perfect place for my research.”
“A big change from the war,” he said.
“Everything is a big change from the war,” she said. “Didn’t you feel it, after you came home? That sense of not knowing what to do next? Of being a little out of place? Or was that just me?”
“It wasn’t just you,” he said. “Every day over there you had a mission—a purpose. Life over here isn’t like that.” He stared at the road ahead for a long moment, then added, “I thought about going back to school after I got out, but sitting in a classroom all day—that wasn’t for me.”
She shifted toward him, feeling more comfortable scrutinizing him for a change. He was good-looking—no doubt about that—with dark eyes and olive skin and a hawk nose and square chin. His broad shoulders filled out his short-sleeved tan shirt nicely, and slim-fit khakis showed off muscular thighs. “How did you end up working for border patrol?”
“They were at a job fair for veterans and it looked like interesting work. It was a lot of independent work, outdoors. I liked that.”
She nodded. She understood that desire to be outdoors and alone, away from other people. After the noise, chaos and crowds of the war, the wilderness felt healing.
“It’s great that you found work that’s important,” he said. “I mean, what you’re doing could make a big difference in peoples’ lives someday.”
“Someday, maybe. But yeah, I do feel as though it’s important work. Don’t you think what you’re doing is important?”
“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I’m not so sure.” He checked his mirrors and crunched down on the candy. “You said this guy you found is Mexican?” he asked.
Back to the reason she was here. Guess they couldn’t avoid that subject forever. “Well, Latino. He had dark hair and brown skin—like you.”
“My mom is from Mexico. My dad’s from Denver.”
“Do you speak Spanish?”
“I do. Comes in handy on the job sometimes.”
“Do you run into a lot of people from Mexico in the park?” she asked, thinking of Mariposa and Angelique.
“Some.” He slowed as they reached the end of the paved road and bumped onto a rougher gravel surface. “How much farther from here?” he asked.
She checked her GPS. “About nine miles.”
“You weren’t kidding—remote.”
“The best specimens are usually where they haven’t been disturbed by people or grazing animals.”
“Right. You haven’t seen anything else suspicious while you were out and about this week, have you?”
She stiffened, again thinking of the Mexican woman and child. “What do you mean, suspicious?”
“A bunch of marijuana plants, for instance? Or a portable meth lab?”
“No. Should I have seen those things?”
“Probably not, if you want to stay safe.”
“Is that why border patrol and the FBI and BLM and who knows who else are meeting in a trailer at park headquarters?” she asked. “To go after drugs in the park?”
The seat creaked as he shifted his weight. “We’re an interagency task force formed to address rising crime in the park and surrounding lands—much of it drug related.” He cut his eyes to her. “Just be careful out there. Good idea to carry that Sig.”
“When I applied for my backcountry permit at the ranger station, they told me to watch out for snakes. No one said anything about drug dealers or murderers.”
“Most tourists will never know they’re there. And how many people who visit the park ever step off the main road or popular trails?”
“Not many,” she said. “I almost never see anyone when I
’m out in the backcountry.” Which had made her encounter with Mariposa all the more remarkable. “If I do see anything suspicious, I’ll stay far away,” she said. “All I want to do is collect some plant specimens and get back to my research.”
They both fell silent as the Cruiser bumped over the rutted, sometimes muddy road. Though it was already early June, most of the usually dry arroyos trickled with snowmelt, and grass that would later turn a papery brown looked green and lush. Abby spotted several small herds of deer grazing in the distance, and a cluster of pronghorn antelope that exploded into life as the vehicles trundled past, bouncing away in stiff-legged leaps.
Finally her GPS indicated they were near the area where she’d found the body. “Pull over anywhere,” she said. “We’ll have to walk in from here.”
Michael stopped the Cruiser alongside the road and Graham slid his vehicle in behind them. The officers opened up the backs of the Cruisers and pulled out packs, canteens and, in Graham’s case, a semiautomatic rifle. They were going in loaded for bear, she supposed in case they ran into any of the bad guys.
Graham indicated she should lead the way. GPS in hand, she set out walking. The officers fell in behind in classic patrol formation. Abby’s heart raced. She slipped her hand into the front pocket of her jeans and wrapped it around the rabbit charm. Nothing to worry about, she reminded herself. You’re in Colorado. In a national park. No snipers here.
But of course, the dead man she’d found earlier reminded her that the serene landscape was not as safe as it seemed.
They walked for an hour before they came to the patch of desert parsley she’d harvested earlier. She noted the freshly turned earth where she’d dug up her specimen. “There’s the boulder I hid behind.” She pointed to the large rock, then walked over to it, trying to remember everything she’d done in those moments before she discovered the body. “I started walking this way.”
She led the way, the other three moving silently behind her. A few minutes later she spotted the pink bandanna she’d left tied to the branch of a piñon. “There.” She pointed. “The body is by that tree.”
