MurderedIin Conard County (Conard County: The Next Generation Book 40)

by Rachel Lee

  At long last she turned to look at him, for the first time that day her blue eyes looking almost as brilliant as the sunny western sky. “That kid is going to have problems. He may not have seen the mess, he may not understand what happened, but he would remember that he left his dad behind in a tent on a mountainside. His mom will tell him about it later, but he’s going to remember leaving his dad.”

  Gus nodded. “Yeah, he will.” Of that he was certain. “The question will be whether he believes he abandoned his father.”

  She nodded and looked down at the mug she held. “More espresso?”

  “I’d like that.”

  Those blue eyes lifted again. “You sure you don’t have to get back?”

  “Not today. I have a good staff. But even so, I’m in no rush to face the inevitable questions about what happened over here.”

  “Me neither.” Her eyes shuttered briefly. “So my crew are out replacing fire rings?”

  He’d told her that but under the circumstances didn’t feel she’d slipped a memory cog. Overload. She must be experiencing it. “Yeah, it was the first thing they thought to do when I explained what had happened. Besides, I exceeded my authority.”

  Her head snapped around to look at him again. “Meaning?”

  “I suggested today would be a good day to stick together.”

  After a few beats, she nodded. “You’re right. I didn’t even think of that. The creep could still be out there.”

  “I don’t think there’s any question that he’s still out there. The only question is, did he leave the forest or is he hanging out somewhere?”

  Her charming, crooked smile peeked out. “Correcting my precision now?”

  He flashed a smile back at her. “You know why.”

  Of course she knew why. With a sigh, she rose. “Let’s go make some more coffee. If I tried to sleep I wouldn’t rest anyway, so I might as well be wired.”

  Inside the cabin was dim. Because of the harsh, cold winters, the builders hadn’t been generous with windows except at the very front where visitors would enter. Consequently, the rear room that housed the small kitchen and dining area was dim and needed the lights turned on. Blaire flipped the switch, then turned on the espresso maker.

  “How many shots?” she asked Gus.

  “It’s funny, but I’m not used to thinking of coffee in terms of shots.”

  That drew a faint laugh from her. She picked up and wagged a double shot glass at him. “How many of these?”

  He laughed outright. “Okay, two.”

  She nodded and turned back to the machine.

  “You gonna be okay?” he asked as the pump began pushing water through the coffee grounds. Noisy thing.

  “Sure,” she said, leaning against the counter and watching the espresso pour into the double shot glass. “I’m always okay. It’s not necessarily pleasant, but I’m okay.”

  Yeah, okay was a long way from being happy, content or otherwise good. He shook his head a little and pulled out one of the two chairs at the small table, sitting while he watched her. “This day is endless.”

  “What brought you this way this morning?”

  “I was restless and couldn’t sleep. Scrappy was agitating for a ride so I decided to saddle up. I think he was feeling my mood.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me. Animals are very sensitive to energy, at least in my experience.” She placed his mug in front of him again. “You know where the fixins are.”

  Making himself at home in her kitchen felt right. At least at the moment. He dressed up his espresso and waited for her to make her own. “Plans for today, since you can’t sleep?”

  “I’m probably going to run this morning like a broken record in my head.” She finished pouring milk into her mug, added a few ice cubes, then turned. “Outside, if you don’t mind. The walls are closing in.”

  He knew the feeling well. He held open the front door for her and resumed his perch on the step. She paced for a bit on the bare ground that probably served as a parking lot when people checked in and were directed to their campgrounds.

  “I keep thinking,” she said, “that the crime scene guys aren’t going to find much that’s useful. The ground was a mess, did you notice? People had obviously scuffed it up pretty good last night even if they didn’t this morning.”

  “I saw,” he said in agreement. “What are you thinking?”

  “That this guy knew what he was doing. That he didn’t just walk into a random campsite and shoot someone through an opening in their tent.”

  He sat up a little straighter. He must have been more tired than he realized not to have thought of this himself. “You’re saying stalking.”

  “I’m suggesting it, yes. No bumbling around in the dark as far as anyone knows. Certainly some of the people in the other tents must be light enough sleepers that they’d have heard activity.”

  “Maybe so.” He was chewing the idea in his head.

  “So, if he planned in advance he had to watch in advance. He’d have done that from a distance, right?”

  He nodded. He’d done enough recon to know the drill. “Say he did.”

  “Then the cops might not find anything useful at the scene.”

  He nodded, sucking some air between his front teeth as his mouth tightened. “What are your plans for tomorrow? Got any time for reconnaissance?”

  “I can make it.”

  “Can you ride?”

  “Sure.”

  “So shall I borrow an extra mount or do you want to walk a perimeter first?”

  She thought about it. “Walk,” she decided. “We don’t want to miss something.”

  “This assumes the cops don’t find something today.”

  “Of course.”

  Their eyes met and the agreement was sealed. They’d do a little searching of their own.

  That made him feel a bit better. He hoped it did for her, too.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, JEFF pulled his car into the lodge’s small parking area and went to face the music. He’d made a mistake and wished he could figure out a way of not telling Will and Karl. Desperately wished. Because things were going to get worse now.

  But Jeff was acutely aware that he was a lousy liar. He could see them when they arrived tomorrow and pretend that everything had gone off without a hitch, but it wouldn’t take them long to realize he was being untruthful.

  The bane of his existence.

  He let himself in and began to build a fire on the big stone hearth. That task was expected of the first to arrive, and given that the nights were chilly at this altitude, even in the summer when it had been known to snow occasionally, a small fire burning all the time was welcome.

  The heavy log construction of the lodge acted like an insulator, too. Once it had caught the chill, it hung on to it until it was driven out.

  The others weren’t expected until late tomorrow, though. Fine by him. There was plenty to eat and drink and maybe he could find a way to omit mentioning his oversight. His major oversight.

  Besides, it might amount to nothing. One shell casing? How much could that tell anyone? That he’d used a hollow-point bullet in a .45? Lots of folks bought hollow points and even more owned .45s. Hollow points were less likely to pass through the target and cause collateral damage, while still inflicting far more damage on the target than a full metal jacket.

  He couldn’t have been sure what he’d be facing when he opened that tent a few inches, but he knew he wanted to kill his target without killing anything else.

  They’d find the remains of the bullet at autopsy anyway. A popular brand that could be purchased in an awful lot of places. No, that wouldn’t lead to him.

  But the shell casing automatically ejected by his pistol? He should have scooped that up, but in his panic to get away, he’d clean forgotten it wa
s lying on the ground. What if it had retained his fingerprints?

  Not likely, he assured himself. The way he’d handled those bullets, any fingerprints should be just smears. The heat of the powder burning before it ejected the round from the shell should have wiped out any DNA evidence.

  So yeah, he’d made a mistake. It wasn’t a god-awful mistake, though. Hell, they couldn’t necessarily even link it to the shooting, regardless of bullet fragments they might find at autopsy. No, because anyone could have been shooting out there at any time. That brass casing might be months old.

  So no, it wasn’t a catastrophe.

  He spent a great deal of time that evening sipping beer and bucking himself up, dreading the moment tomorrow when his friends would come through the door.

  Friends? He wasn’t very sure of that any longer. Friends would have taken his word for it that he wouldn’t squeal on them. Friends should have trusted him rather than threatening him.

  Thinking about those threats put him in the blackest of moods. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t. He’d killed, though. In self-defense, he reminded himself. Because failing to take that guy out would have been signing his own death sentence. Yeah, self-defense, not murder.

  That proved to be a small sop to his conscience, but he needed one. While the cries of the child had begun to fade to the background, the memory of them still made him supremely uncomfortable.

  He’d caused that. Did self-defense justify that? He hoped the kid was too young to understand what had happened.

  Because he hated to think of the nightmares he’d caused if the kid wasn’t.

  Chapter Four

  The morning was still dewy when Blaire awoke from troubled, uneasy dreams. At least she’d finally been able to crash after a day that had seemed like a nightmare that would never end, a day during which she’d become so exhausted she had often felt as if she were only slightly attached to her own body.

  She’d had the feeling before, in combat and the aftermath, but not since then. Not until yesterday.

  It hadn’t just been lack of sleep that had gotten to her. Jimmy had gotten to her. He had caused her an emotional turmoil unlike any she had felt since one of her comrades had been hit in a firefight. Or blasted by a roadside bomb.

  All she could remember was how he’d been crying and clinging to his dead father. Yeah, he’d perked up well enough after she’d carried him away, singing to him, and he loved the silvery blanket, but how much trauma had he endured? How much had he understood and how much of that would stay with him forever?

  She had no idea how good a four-year-old’s long-term memory might be, but she suspected those memories were stronger if they carried a huge emotional impact. Heck, that was true for most people. Some events just got etched into your brain as if by acid.

  Her staff showed up, trickling in around 8:00 a.m. The first thing they wanted to know was news about the shooting. She had none. Then they asked if they could keep working on the fire rings as they had yesterday.

  Of course they could. It wasn’t like the job hadn’t been done, and from what she’d seen yesterday afternoon, she figured there was hardly a camper left in the park. When she climbed into her truck to check out all the sites, she found she was right: only one hardy camper remained, a guy who always spent nearly the entire summer here. He was friendly enough, but clearly didn’t want to strike up any lengthy conversations. Most days he sat beside a small fire drinking coffee. Beans seemed to be his preferred meal. Sometimes he went fishing in the tumbling stream a couple of hundred yards behind his campsite, and she’d occasionally seen a couple of freshly cleaned fish on a frying pan over his small fire.

  “Nothing better than fresh fish,” she inevitably said.

  “Nothing,” he always agreed before they went their separate ways.

  Finally, because she couldn’t ignore it any longer, she drove up to the site of yesterday’s horror. She left her truck in the small parking lot next to a sheriff’s vehicle but eschewed her ATV. She needed the walk back to the site, needed to stretch her legs and try to clear the air. When she got there, she felt a whole lot better.

  The deputies Gage had promised stood guard. Seeing them, she wished she’d thought to bring a thermos of soup or something with her. Their only seat was a fallen log outside the taped-off area, and neither of them looked as if they were having a good time.

  “Boring duty, huh?” she asked as she approached. Her uniform identified her as theirs identified them. She couldn’t remember having met either of them before. They looked almost brand spanking new. Together they formed a sea of khaki, hers interrupted with dark pants and a dark green quilted vest over her shirt. Both of the deputies looked as if they wished they’d brought a vest or jacket with them.

  “I suppose you can’t light a fire?” she said. “The firepit is outside the crime scene area and you guys look cold.”

  “We ran out of coffee,” one admitted frankly. His chest plate said his name was Carson. “We’ll be relieved soon, though, Ranger. Only four hours at a stretch. If they need us up here tomorrow, we’ll both be better prepared.”

  “You’re not from around here, huh?” That seemed apparent. Anyone who lived in these parts knew how chilly it could get up here even at the height of summer.

  “That’s obvious, I guess,” said the other guy. His last name was Bolling and his face was so fresh looking he could have passed for eighteen. Which she guessed was possible, however unlikely. “I’m from a small town in Nevada and I got sick of being hot.”

  Blaire had to laugh, and the two men joined her. She looked at Carson. “You, too?”

  “Different town, more Midwestern. I wanted mountains. Visions of hiking and skiing. That kind of thing.”

  “I’ll bet you never thought you’d be standing guard like this in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Not high on my list,” Bolling said. “So is the skiing good?”

  “We still don’t have a downhill slope right around here. Something goes wrong with every attempt. But if you want to off-trail cross-country, that’s great. So is snowshoeing. Just check in with me or with the national forest before you go. I need to know you’re out here and you need to know if we have avalanche conditions. Mind if I walk around a bit?”

  Carson chuckled. “I think you’re in charge of this place except for the roped-off area.”

  “Yeah, that’s yours.”

  She circled the campground, eyeing the signs of the hurried departures yesterday. And they had been hurried. Sure, it was unlikely the shooter was around or they’d have known it for certain, but she couldn’t blame them for wanting to get the hell away from here.

  Death had visited a few tents over. And it was not a natural death. Uneasiness would cause almost anyone to want to get as far away as possible.

  She knew she and Gus had planned to check out the area together, but he also had responsibilities at the national forest. Her load was a lot lighter, for the most part. She could afford to set her staff to replacing fire rings, especially now that they were empty of campers.

  She had no idea what she expected to find that the scene techs hadn’t. They’d probably applied their version of a fine-tooth comb to most of the area, even beyond the circle of yellow tape.

  But she kept walking slowly anyway. A campground was an unlikely place to pick up a trail, though. People were in constant motion at their sites and places in between. All of them had to traipse to one of the two outdoor chemical toilets, which meant they either walked around tents or passed between them. Kids, especially, scuffed the ground and kicked up needles and duff.

  She paused at one spot where she had to smile. It seemed some kids had been laying out roads, probably to use to play with miniature cars. There were even a couple of twigs broken off trees and firmly planted to make the road look tree-lined. Clever.

  How many kids had she seen last night? No
t many, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Their parents might have insisted they stay inside tents.

  Then she spied something red that was half-buried in earth and squatted. A small metal car, she realized as she brushed the debris away. She hoped it wasn’t someone’s favorite.

  Just in case she got a letter in a week or so from some youngster, she slipped it into her vest pocket. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d heard from a kid who’d left something behind and who couldn’t come back to retrieve it. Usually it was an inexpensive, small item that the parents didn’t consider worth the time and effort to return for. She could understand both sides of that issue, but she didn’t mind sending a toy back if it made a boy or girl happy. In fact, just doing it always made her smile.

  Since Afghanistan, her smiles had become rarer and far more precious to her when she could summon a genuine one. Gone were the days when laughter came easily. She hoped both would return eventually. She had to believe they would. A battlefield was a helluva place to lose all your illusions, and while humor had carried most of them through, it had become an increasingly dark humor. Something that no one on the outside would ever understand.

  Swallowing her memories yet again, she forced herself to move slowly and sweep the ground with her eyes. The guy had to have come from somewhere. He wasn’t a ghost.

  There was a basic rule to investigation: whoever took something from a scene also left something behind. She’d first learned that in Afghanistan when they’d been tracking the people who had attacked them or one of their other convoys. Nobody could move over even the rockiest ground without leaving traces, however minor.

  But this damn forest floor was a challenge unto itself. So much loose debris, easily scuffed and stirred. Even the wind could move it around. Moreover, under the trees it was soft, softer than a carpet, and footprints would disappear quickly unless boots scraped. Weight alone didn’t make a lasting impression, not unless it rained, and rain here at this time of year was rare enough. They certainly hadn’t had any in the several days leading up to the murder.