“My God.” Kent’s eyes were wide with horror. “I never thought of that.” He rubbed his eyes briefly as if to erase an ugly image that had formed there, then turned back to Perez. “Anyway, sorry. I had to finish a theft report, and then I had to give some illegal campers the boot.”
Sam frowned. “Not the mother and the two little girls? Down in that flat spot by the river?”
Kent nodded. “Yeah. Mexican migrants, I think. Barely understood English.”
She sighed. “They probably don’t have money for the campground fee.”
“I sent her to the national forest. At least I hope she understood; I showed it to her on the map.” He glanced at Perez. “We have a real problem with the homeless.”
The FBI agent made an impatient gesture. “They’re everywhere.”
“Got that right. We see too many illegal Mexicans here.” Apparently Kent had a sudden thought about Agent Perez’s probable ancestry, because he hastily added, “And other homeless, too. Sometimes we chase them around for weeks, even months. About three years ago—I was a summer hire then—we had this one guy, about my age, and his teenage girlfriend. They kept popping up all over the park. The girl had the most beautiful eyes, big and brown, like a whitetail deer. She was only about Sam’s size but a lot younger.”
Sam suddenly felt like an elderly dwarf. She corrected the slouch of her back and tried to relax the frown line etched into her forehead.
Kent continued. “Sixteen, maybe seventeen years old. And she was out to here, at least eight months pregnant.” He held his hand out in front of his abdomen, measuring an imaginary belly.
The gesture looked strange on a man. Evidently Perez thought so, too: his gaze remained fixed on the outstretched hand until Kent dropped it back to his side.
Perez abruptly changed the topic. “So, you two know each other?”
“Oh yeah,” Kent said. “I’ve known Sam for years.”
Perez turned to her. “I thought your name was Summer.”
“Sam’s my nickname,” she said. “Better than Sum, don’t you think?” Then, hearing the double-entendre, she added, “S-U-M, I mean, not S-O-M-E.”
“Got it the first time.” Perez’s gaze shifted to Kent. “What’s the connection between you two?”
Kent explained her seasonal employment in the park a year ago, that they were fellow wildlife biologists, Sam’s follow-up article about the cougars. Perez took in the information without a change in expression. He looked back to Sam. “You’re a biologist, a writer, and a photographer?”
“She’s Wonder Woman,” Kent said. “Odiferous Wonder Woman.”
Sam jabbed him with an elbow.
Perez touched the tip of the pen to the notepad again. “So you’re a journalist.” His tone made the word sound like an epithet.
“I’m not the press,” she told the agent. Although it felt slightly disloyal to Adam to say it, the last thing she wanted was to be lumped in with the media team she’d just seen in action. “I’m a freelance writer and photographer. And I only do wildlife and outdoor stories.” She mentioned the Save the Wilderness Fund. Perez wrote it down.
“And now she’s doing online stuff, you know, on the Internet?” Kent contributed.
The FBI agent scribbled some more. “So you’re a blogger.” The way he said it made her think that he didn’t have a lot of respect for the medium.
Oh, jeez. Just what she needed: to be categorized with all those unpaid bloggers out there sharing recipes or dog training tips. “I am paid to write online articles,” she stressed.
“I see.” Perez lifted his gaze toward her. “What do you know about Zachary?”
“Blond, two and a half years old. Disappeared last night from this campsite. Cute little guy, with scratches on his face.”
The FBI agent was attentive now. “Where did you get this description?”
“I saw him. Around five forty, five forty-five yesterday evening.” She described the encounter.
“And you didn’t take him back to his parents?”
She winced. “He took off on his own, down the path that led back to the campground. His father waved at me.”
“So you know Mr. Fischer?”
The agent’s direct gaze made her squirm. “No. I mean, I didn’t then. I met him this morning.”
“You’re certain that Mr. Fischer was the man who waved at you?”
In her mind’s eye, she saw again the man’s silhouette. The sharp profile, the bulge at the back of the neck. Fred Fischer? “It was very dark,” she finally murmured.
Perez stepped closer. “Are you certain that Zack reached this man?”
She relived the brambles snagging her, the flash of Zack’s sweatshirt as he disappeared into the shadows on the path near the river. How could she have let a two-year-old run off like that?
“Did you see Zachary with the man?” Perez pressed.
“No!” The word came out too loud. She swallowed, lowered her voice. “The last I saw of Zack, he was running away from me, down the path, toward the man who waved.” The fingers of her left hand clenched into a fist as she remembered the boy’s tiny fingers slipping from her grasp. I am guilty of letting him go.
“Where are you staying?” Perez asked, his pen poised over his notepad. “I may want to talk to you again.”
“Tonight, the Wagon Wheel Motel in Las Rojas. Tomorrow, I’m not sure. If I can help in the search for Zack, I will. Although he may not be in the park.”
The FBI agent studied her for a moment. How did he part his hair with such knife-edge precision? “What makes you say that?”
She ticked off the reasons on her fingers. “A, we haven’t found any sign of him; B, a two-year-old can’t walk far; C, the man at the end of the path.”
A helicopter thundered overhead, flying slowly and low to the ground. Sam held her hands over her ears.
When it had passed, Kent said, “Civil Air Patrol.” Search volunteers.
Perez nodded, turned, and strolled through the campsite, hands clasped behind his back, slowly scrutinizing the scenery. Kent trailed the FBI agent to the rock ledge.
“This was where his mother last saw him.” Kent pointed.
Perez nodded, paced around the smooth rock outcropping, studying it from all angles. Then he stopped and squatted next to a thicket of twigs, staring at something on the ground. He raised his head. “Could it have been a cougar?”
Sam approached, peered over his shoulder at a large four-toed print. “That’s a dog print. See the toenails? Cougars retract their claws.”
“Canine,” Kent concurred.
Exasperation was written on Perez’s features. “I know that’s a dog print. A big shepherd, maybe a Lab. But this one?” His index finger indicated an equally large, but rounder impression to the side of the dog print.
“Too smudged to tell,” Kent said.
Perez straightened, jotted down a note. “So it could have been a cougar.”
“No.” Sam’s voice was firm.
Using his pen, Perez pointed to the sign on the signboard that bordered the campsite. WHAT TO DO IF YOU SEE A COUGAR. Addressing Kent, he asked, “Why do you have those posted?”
Kent hooked his thumbs in his belt. “The park service requires them in every park with a cougar population.”
Sam explained further. “The cougars in this park stay mostly in the high country, away from people.”
The agent’s eyebrows lifted. “Mostly?”
Kent swallowed before responding. “They sometimes follow the deer down or come down for water in dry season. But there’s never been a cougar attack in this park. And only one in this state, as far as I know, and that was way back in 1997.”
Perez’s expression was skeptical. “Less than a year ago, a woman was killed by a mountain lion in a California park.”
Sam scoffed. “Well, of course in California! People there go jogging through wild areas like they’re running down Hollywood Boulevard.”
When the FBI agent r
egarded her curiously, she realized her words had been too vehement. Even Kent was frowning. But then, they didn’t live next to L.A. transplants who had just chain-sawed three acres of mature forest to plant a lawn.
Perez wasn’t ready to give up. “There have been a number of cougar attacks in the West. They’re on the increase.”
Sam waited a second for Kent to respond. When he didn’t, she jumped in. “They only happen in areas where the people are destroying the lions’ habitat. How would you react if your home was wilderness one year and subdivisions the next?”
Perez’s steady gaze told her he was not impressed. “Several people have been attacked across the western U.S. and British Columbia. Some were killed.”
Sam grimaced. Each incident was a blow for wildlife recovery organizations. Many reports were unconfirmed, but she could see it would do no good to argue that with Mr. FBI.
Kent finally spoke up. “Those incidents are unusual. Cougars don’t normally behave like that.”
Perez shrugged. “You’re the wildlife expert in the park?”
Kent nodded. “The cougars here have plenty of open territory, and plenty of prey—mule deer and jackrabbits and bighorn sheep. They have no reason to seek out humans.”
Someone had to say the unthinkable, just as Kent had this morning. “Look,” Sam told Perez, “if a cougar had killed Zack, we’d have found his body by now. Or at least . . . parts of it.” Even saying the words made her feel a little queasy.
“Unless the cat dragged him off. I understand they can carry prey a long distance.” Perez tugged at the knot of his tie. “Do you know where their lair is?” he asked Kent.
Sam snorted. “Cougars don’t have lairs. Mother cats might use the same cave or thicket for a few weeks while their cubs are too small to travel, but aside from that they roam around throughout their territory.”
The FBI agent’s face took on a deeper hue. Sam continued, enjoying the man’s embarrassment. “Adult cats have a range of forty to sixty square miles. But they’re rarely seen. They’re elusive creatures.”
Perez turned to Kent. “I may need to check it out for myself. If so, I’ll want you to take me to them.”
Right, she thought. Just knock on the door of a cougar lair: “Cougars, meet the FBI—he’s got a few questions for you.” Addressing Perez, she said, “It would make it easy for you, wouldn’t it, to blame a cougar?”
He raised an ebony eyebrow.
“Then it wouldn’t be an FBI problem, would it?” she pressed.
“Our judicial system does make it difficult to arrest wildlife, no matter how strong the evidence.” His expression remained solemn, but there was a sparkle in his dark eyes.
Was he making fun of her? She retorted, “Then you could go back to your coffee and doughnuts.”
“Cappuccino and biscotti,” he corrected.
Sam was grateful when his jacket chirped, covering for her lack of a snappy comeback. He plucked a cell phone from an inner pocket and flipped it open. “Perez.”
With a glance over his shoulder, the FBI agent moved away from them into the woods until his voice was too low to be heard.
“Could you stand about a half mile away from me from now on?” Kent said to her. “Maybe he’ll forget we know each other.”
She felt a twinge of regret. “Sorry. It’s just getting to me, all this emphasis on the cougars. If everyone assumes that a cougar ate Zack, they’re going to stop looking for him. He’s out there, somewhere, waiting for help. And they’re going to go after the cougars. With guns.”
“Sam, believe me, I know what’s at stake here. But we have to find a way to get everyone to help, not just alienate them right off the bat.” He fanned the air in her direction again. “Don’t you need to be somewhere? Somewhere downwind?”
She gave him a half smile. Kent couldn’t stay mad at her for long. “I do need to get going, but first I want to give you something.”
She returned to her Civic, pulled out her search notes and the baseball cap, then trotted back to Kent. Perez joined them just as she was ripping out the page onto which she’d copied Wilson’s license number and noted the toys and cookies.
“I told Ranger Gaines—”
“We don’t have a Gaines,” Kent said.
“Female, Southern accent?”
“Gates,” Kent corrected. “Archaeologist. She’s new. Georgia Gates.”
“Gates, then. I told her all this on the phone, but be sure it gets checked out.” She held the scrap of paper out toward Kent.
“May I see that?” Perez pulled the page from her hand and studied the text. She told him her impressions of Wilson. The FBI agent listened impassively.
“He’s weird,” she concluded. “And there was mud on his clothes, like he’d been down by the river. If the man I saw wasn’t Fischer, it could have been Wilson.”
“No law against being weird,” Perez responded. “And anyone could have gone to the river. But we’ll check him out.”
“Here,” she said, holding out the cap. “I think this is Zack’s cap. Wilson had it in his camper. He said he found it down by the river this morning.”
“Which makes sense, since that was close to the last place you saw Zack last night.”
“The last place I saw him was halfway down the path between the road and the Goodman Trailhead parking lot. There’s a lot of riverbank between there and the RV area. If I were you, I’d get Wilson to show you exactly where he found the cap.”
Perez locked eyes with her for a long moment. His clear brown gaze didn’t tell her whether she’d just scored a point with him or lost ten. She’d always pictured a typical FBI agent as an overweight older fellow with a crew cut, not as a tall, handsome bronze specimen who looked several years younger and in better shape than she was.
He held out his hand for the cap. When she placed it on his palm, he gave her a curious look.
“Wilson washed it.”
Frowning, Perez folded her page of notes into a neat square and pushed it into the breast pocket of his jacket, then extracted another plastic bag from his pocket and slid the cap into that.
Turning his back to her, he said to Kent, “Something’s come up. We’ve got to get back to park headquarters.”
Sam checked her watch as she walked with them to the parking area.
“Where are you going?” Perez asked.
She yawned and stretched her arms over her head. “I’ve got a couple of hours before I need to do this chat thing for Save the Wilderness Fund. I thought I’d see if the search party needs more help.”
Kent grabbed her sleeve. “Sam, you’re dead on your feet. And take my word for it, you need soap like a fish needs water.”
“But you were up all night, and you’re—”
“This is my job. You go do yours.”
He was right. She was on day two of her assignment for SWF, and what had she done for them? “I’ll be back at park headquarters tomorrow at first light.”
“I hope this will all be wrapped up by tomorrow.” He looked at Perez, who had preceded him to the truck and now stood impatiently beside the passenger’s door. Kent turned his back on the agent and rolled his eyes. “They always travel in pairs, you know,” he whispered. “If you think this one knows nothing about the great outdoors, you should see the other one. She’s wearing high heels.” He raised his voice. “Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Sam climbed into her car and headed for the tiny town of Las Rojas.
6
SAM took a long, hot luxurious shower before she walked to the adjoining Appletree Café and ordered takeout: the cook’s specialty, chicken and dumplings. She added apple pie for good measure. The dining room was filled. The scene felt familiar, reminiscent of the small town she’d grown up in. Cowboy boots and jeans marked the locals, most of whom were drifting out now. Rural folks ate early. The second wave, the tourists, were just now starting to filter in.
While she waited for her order, Buck Ferguson emerged fr
om the men’s room. Sam pulled herself up on a counter stool and tried to blend into the wallpaper as she watched him work the room. Several of the townspeople hailed Ferguson as he passed. He clasped hands like a politician running for office, switching the toothpick in his mouth from side to side as he exchanged greetings. Then he saw her. Even as he moved toward the exit, his eyes remained fixed on her as if daring her to look away first.
The bell on the door clanged. Sam looked toward the sound, breaking away from the glaring contest. Fred Fischer entered. His clothes were different and his freshly washed hair was gathered into a bushy ponytail, but the shadows under his eyes were, if anything, deeper than they had been this morning. His mouth had a grim set to it.
It made sense, she guessed, that the Fischers would be here. The Wagon Wheel was the closest motel to the park. Fischer turned toward the counter, his hazel eyes glittering with anxiety or sorrow or anger or maybe all three. His lips were pressed into a thin line but still quivered a bit at the corners.
Buck Ferguson smacked Fischer lightly on the arm with a fist. “Stay strong,” he told the younger man before he strode out through the door.
It seemed an odd thing to say to a stranger, but then it was Buck Ferguson saying it. Fred Fischer turned toward the counter, his face inscrutable. Again, she pictured the silhouetted form slowly turning from the light, compared the memory with the man before her. The dark baggy clothes, the bulge at the back of the neck. Yes. Fred Fischer could definitely have been the man she’d seen. But so could Wilson. Probably any number of men.
Fischer’s eyes narrowed, and Sam had no difficulty reading the expression in them now. It was anger. His hands balled into fists. He covered the distance between them with three steps. Leaning close to her ear, he growled, “Leave me alone.”
A chill prickled down her back. “I’m sorry if I was staring,” she said, “It’s just that—”
A waitress appeared at his elbow with a tray. “On the house,” she murmured in a hushed tone.
Fred Fischer took the tray and backed through the door, his shoulders hunched over the covered dishes. Sam wondered if Jenny was sobbing in their room.
Why had Fischer gone after her like that? What reason did he have to be hostile? Unless, of course, he blamed her for losing Zack. No. Leave me alone meant he thought she was attacking him in some way. Because she’d accused him of being the man on the path? Or because he had been there but didn’t want anyone to know?
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