The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 4

by Nora Roberts

  “There weren’t any tracks, Reece, in any direction, but for Rick’s going in and out. Look.” He crouched. “See here? I’m no Natty Bumppo, but I can handle the basics. My tracks from this morning, and Rick’s. Ground’s pretty soft.”

  “Well, they didn’t fly in on the wings of a damn dove.”

  “No. But if he knew anything about tracking, about hiking, he could’ve covered his tracks.”

  “Why? Who’d look here for a dead woman no one saw him kill?”

  “You saw him. And maybe he saw you right back.”

  “He never looked around, never looked across.”

  “Not while you were looking across. You ran, didn’t you? And left your stuff sitting on the rock. Maybe he caught a glimpse of you taking off, or just saw your pack on the rock. Two and two make four pretty quick. He covered up. It took us two hours to get back to my cabin. Another thirty minutes easy before Rick would’ve gotten out here. More like another hour because he talked to you first. Three hours? Hell, you could cover up an elephant march through here if you knew your ass from your elbow.”

  “He saw me.” And her throat slapped shut on the idea of it.

  “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Either way, he was careful. Smart and careful enough to take his time, cover up any sign he’d been here, or she had.”

  “He saw me. Why didn’t I think of that before?” She passed a hand over her face. “He’d already dragged or carried her away, or weighed her down and tossed her in the water, by the time I got to you.”

  “I’d go for the first option. Takes time to weigh down a body.”

  “So he carried her away.”

  Reece stopped, because there was the river rushing by ahead of the line of trees, the tumble of rocks. The blade of it cut through the canyon so the walls seemed to fly straight up. As if we were in a box, she thought, with the lid off to the spread of sky.

  “From here,” she murmured. “It’s all so…alone here. The river, the presence of it, cuts you off from everything. And it’s all so beautiful, why would you care?”

  “A good place to die.”

  “No place is. Once you’ve been close enough, you know no place is a good place to die. But this is so stunning—the trees, the rocks, the walls, the water. It would’ve been the last thing she saw, and she didn’t see it at all. She was so angry. I think she didn’t see anything but him and her own rage. Then there would’ve been the fear, and the pain.”

  “Can you see where you were from here?”

  She walked out, closer to the river. Cooler today, she thought, and not as bright. The sun wasn’t as strong and the clouds were thicker—streams and rolls of white over the blue.

  “There.” She pointed up, over. “I stopped there, sat there and ate a sandwich, drank some water. The sun felt good, and I liked hearing the water. I saw the hawk. Then I saw them, standing here.”

  She turned to Brody. “Like we are. She was facing him, like this, and he had his back to the water. I said before I didn’t think she saw anything but him. I guess he was only seeing her, too. I watched her more, because she was more animated. A lot of movement.”

  Reece threw her arms out, demonstrating. “Drama. You could feel the heat of her across the river. She was steaming. But he seemed very controlled. Or his body language was. Am I making this up?” She pressed her fingers over her eyes. “Am I remembering what happened, or projecting?”

  “You know what you saw.”

  The absolute calm in his tone had her dropping her hands, and quieted the flutters in her belly. “Yes. Yes, I do. She was winging her arms around, jabbing her finger at him.I’m warning you. It seemed like that. And she shoved him.”

  Reece planted her hands on Brody’s chest, pushed. “I think he fell back a step,” she said drily. “If you wouldn’t mind getting into character.”

  “Okay.” He obliged.

  “He went like this.” Reece crossed her hands, flung them out. “I thought, Safe! Like the umpire’s signal.”

  “Baseball?” He felt a trickle of amusement. “You thought baseball?”

  “For a second. But it wasThat’s it. I’ve had enough. Then she slapped him.”

  When Reece swung her hand, Brody caught her wrist. “I get the picture.”

  “I wasn’t going to hit you. He took it, the first time, then she hauled off and hit him again. That’s when he pushed her down. Go ahead.”

  “Sure.” Brody gave her a shove, and though it pushed her back a little, it didn’t take her down.

  “It must’ve been a lot harder than that. No.” She lifted her hands when he smiled and feinted another shove. “I’ll just go with it.” She glanced back to gauge the distance to the rocks. Reenacting the crime didn’t mean she had to knock herself silly. “Wait. She didn’t have a pack on.” Reece shrugged hers off, tossed it aside, then dropped to the ground.

  “She must’ve fallen harder, and I think she hit her head—bumped it, anyway—on the ground, or maybe on the rocks here. She stayed down a minute. Her hat fell off. I forgot that. Her hat fell off, and when she shook her head—like she was a little dazed—there was a glint. Earrings. She must have been wearing earrings. I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

  “I’d say you’re wrong about that. What did he do? Move toward her?”

  “No. No. She got up, fast, lunged at him. She wasn’t afraid, she was pissed. Seriously pissed. She was screaming at him—I couldn’t hear, but I could see. He tossed her down. Not a shove this time. And when she fell, he straddled her.”

  Reece got down, looked up at Brody. “Would you mind?”

  “Sure. No problem.” He planted a foot on either side of Reece.

  “He held out a hand, I think, but she wouldn’t let up. She propped up on her elbows and kept at him. Her mouth was moving, and I—in my head—heard her screaming and bitching. Then he got down.

  “He more than sat on her, put his weight down to hold her,” she said when Brody crouched. “Oh.” She wheezed out a breath when Brody followed directions. “Yeah, like that. Nothing playful, nothing sexual—at least from my view. She was slapping out at him, and he held her arms down. No, don’t!” Panic spurted into her when Brody clamped his hands over her wrists. “I can’t. Don’t.”

  “Take it easy.” He kept his eyes on hers as he loosened his grip, shifted his weight. “I’m not going to hurt you. Tell me what happened next.”

  “She was struggling, twisting under him. But he was stronger. He yanked her head up by the hair, rapped it down hard. Then he…then he put his hands around her throat. She bucked, tried to throw him off, she grabbed his wrists, but I don’t think she had much left in her. Wait…he pinned her arms down with his knees, to stop her from hitting out. I forgot that, too, damn it.”

  “You remembered it now.”

  “She kicked out, trying to get some leverage, I guess. Her feet hammered against the ground, and her fingers dug into the ground. Then they stopped. Everything stopped, but he kept his hands around her throat. He kept them there, and I ran. Get up, okay? Get up.”

  He merely shifted so he sat on the ground beside her. “Any chance she was still alive?”

  “He kept his hands around her throat.” Reece sat up, brought up her knees and pressed her face to them.

  He said nothing for a few minutes, just let the river run beside them while clouds shifted shadows over rock and water. “I figure you’re the glass-half-empty type.”

  “What?”

  “Glass is probably more than half empty because it’s cracked and what’s in it’s leaking out. So you see this happen and you think, Oh God, guilt, guilt, despair. I saw a woman murdered and couldn’t do anything to stop it. Poor her, poor me,” he continued. “Instead of thinking, I saw a woman murdered, and if I hadn’t been where I was when I was, no one would have known what happened to her.”

  She’d propped her chin on her knees to study him while he spoke, and now cocked her head. “You’re right. I know you’re right, and I’m trying
to look at it that way. Still, you don’t strike me as the glass-is-half-full type.”

  “Half full, half empty, what the hell difference does it make? If there’s something in the damn glass, drink it.”

  She laughed. Sitting where a woman had died only the day before, Reece felt the laugh rise in her chest and break free. “Good policy. Right now, I wish to God it held a nice chilly Pinot Grigio.”

  After pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes, she pushed to her feet. “Reenacting it left signs. Footprints,” she said as he rose. “Dents in the ground from the heels of my boots, flattened dirt, handprints. You don’t have to be Natty Bumppo to see a couple of people were here, fought here.”

  Brody walked off a few feet to break off a fanning branch of willow and began sweeping it over the disturbed ground. “He’s smart,” he said as he cleared off the tracks. “He drags or carries her off, out of sight of the river, the canyon, then he gets a branch like this from another area, comes back, makes sure neither of them dropped anything. Have to keep your cool.”

  He straightened, studied the ground. “Pretty clean. Natty might be able to see something, but I’m an amateur. Could be, maybe, you bring in a team of crime-scene experts, they’d find a stray hair, but what’s that going to prove?”

  He tossed the branch aside. “Nothing. All he has to do is cover the tracks leading out. Plenty of places to bury a body around here. Or, if it were me and I had a car, I’d toss it in the trunk and drive somewhere else. Somewhere I could take my time digging a hole deep enough the animals wouldn’t uncover her.”

  “That’s not cool. It’s cold.”

  “Killing somebody takes ice or heat, depending. Getting away with it? Yeah, that takes cold blood. Seen enough?”

  She nodded. “More than.”

  9

  AS THEY WALKED BACK, Reece uncapped her water bottle and drank. When Brody held out a hand, she passed it to him.

  “They always say there’s no such thing as a perfect murder.”

  He drank deep, handed her the bottle. “They say a lot of things, and they’re wrong a good part of the time.”

  “They really are. But still, whoever she was, she belonged somewhere. She came from somewhere. Odds are she had a job, a home. She might have had a family.”

  “Might have, could have.”

  Annoyed, Reece jammed her hands in her pockets. “Well, she was connected to at least one person. And he killed her. They had something between them.”

  “Back to might have, could have. They could have met the day they ended up here, or been together for a decade. They could have come from anywhere. Traveling in from California, up from Texas, out from back East. Hell, they could’ve been French.”

  “French?”

  “People kill in every language. The point is, the odds of them passing through are just as good as they are for them being from the area. Probably better. Fewer people live in Wyoming than live in Alaska.”

  “Is that why you moved here?”

  “Part of it. Probably. You work for a newspaper, a big-city paper, you’re in people up to your eyeballs. The point is, the odds are better that whoever these people were, they came from somewhere else.”

  “And they got into a fight to the death because they got lost and he wouldn’t stop to ask for directions? It’s a male plague worthy of some serious ass-kicking, I grant you. But I don’t think so. They met there or went there because they had something to talk about. Or argue about.”

  He liked the way she talked, Brody decided. Rarely in a straight line. Like when she cooked, juggling any number of dishes at the same time. “Supposition, not fact.”

  “Fine, I’m supposing. And I’m supposing they weren’t French.”

  “Possibly Italian. Lithuanian isn’t out of the question.”

  “Fine, a Lithuanian couple gets lost because, like men across the globe, he values his penis—among other things—as a compass. So he’s incapable of asking for directions and thereby disparaging the power of his penis.”

  He frowned at her. “This is a closely guarded male secret. How did you crack the code?”

  “More of us know of this than you could possibly guess. In any case, they get out of their car, tromp through the trees toward the river, because sure, that’s the way to figure out where they are. They argue, fight, he kills her. Then, being a Lithuanian mountain man, he expertly covers all tracks and takes the body back to their rented Taurus so he can bury her in their homeland.”

  “You ought to write that down.”

  “If that’s the sort of ridiculous nonsenseyou write, I’m amazed you’ve been published.”

  “I might’ve stuck with the French, just for that international scope. But it goes back, Slim, to they could have been anyone from anywhere.”

  It helped to think of it as a puzzle. It gave it more distance somehow. “If he covered his trail the way he did, he knows something about hiking and tracking.”

  “A lot of people do. On the ‘could be’ side, they may have been here before.”

  Brody glanced around. He knew this type of terrain because he’d hiked in areas like it, and used areas like it in his work. There’d be columbine and money flowers spurting up before much longer. Honeysuckle blooming as it twined wherever it could reach. Shady spots, pretty spots.

  It would show off better toward June.

  “A little early in the season for tourists,” he calculated, “but people come this time of year because they want to avoid the summer and winter crowds. Or they’re heading somewhere else and stop for a short hike. Or the ones you saw live in the Fist and sampled your cooking.”

  “That’s a really happy thought. Thanks.”

  “You saw what he was wearing. Would you recognize it again?”

  “Orange hunter’s cap, black all-weather jacket. Coat. No, jacket, I guess. I see that kind of thing every day. I just didn’t get a good enough look at him. I could hand-feed him the soup du jour and not know the difference. I don’t see how I’ll ever…Oh my God.”

  He saw it, too. In fact, he saw the bear a good ten seconds before she noticed it lumbering along. “He’s not interested in you.”

  “And you know that because you’re a bear psychic?” It seemed so unreal she wasn’t really scared. At least not actively. “God, he’s really big.”

  “I’ve seen bigger.”

  “Good for you. Um, we’re not supposed to run.”

  “No. That would just entertain him until he caught up. Just keep talking, keep moving, just a little detour. Okay, he sees us.”

  All right, she thought, starting to get really scared. Hello, bear. “And that’s good?”

  She remembered the illustration in her guidebook of the suggested position for playing dead during a bear charge. It looked something like the child’s pose in yoga.

  She could do that, no problem. She could easily fall right down on the ground, because if it charged, her legs were going to buckle anyway.

  Before she could test the guidebook’s veracity, the bear gave them a long look, turned its tail and walked away.

  “Mostly they’re shy,” Brody commented.

  “Mostly. Excellent. I think I need to sit down.”

  “Just keep moving. Your first bear sighting?”

  “That close up and personal, yeah. I forgot to think about them.” She rubbed a hand between her breasts to make certain her abruptly drumming heart stayed where it belonged. “To be bear-aware, like it says in my guide. Kind a breathless,” she said and tapped her fingers to her chest again. “I guess he was beautiful, in a terrifying sort of way.”

  “One thing. If there was a dead body nearby that he could scent, he’d have been more aggressive. So that means it’s either not around here, or buried deep enough.”

  Now she had to swallow, hard and deep. “More pleasant images for me. I’m definitely having that wine. A really big glass of wine.”

  SHE FELT SAFER when she was back in the car. Safer, and ridiculously tired.
She wanted a nap as much as she wanted the wine. A dim, quiet room, a soft blanket, locked doors. And oblivion.

  When he started the car she closed her gritty eyes for just a moment. And slid off the edge of fatigue into sleep.

  SHE SLEPT QUIETLY, Brody thought, not a sound, not a movement. Her head rested in that nook between the seat and the window, and her hands lay limp in her lap.

  What the hell was he supposed to do with her now?

  Since he wasn’t entirely sure, he drove idly, taking impulsive detours to extend the trip back to town.

  She handled herself better than she gave herself credit for. At least that was his opinion. A lot of people wouldn’t have gone back through what she had. He figured most would consider their duty done and over by reporting the crime.

  She didn’t.

  Maybe because of what she’d lived through before. Or maybe it was just the way she was built.

  Checked herself into a psych hospital, he mused. And from the tone of her voice, he understood she thought of that as a kind of surrender.

  He saw it as courage.

  He also figured she considered her travels since Boston a kind of flight. He thought of it more as a voyage. Just as he considered his time since leaving Chicago. A flight was just fear and escape. A voyage? It was a passage, wasn’t it? He’d needed that passage to dig in and do what he wanted, to live by his own terms, his own clock and calendar.

  From his point of view, Reece Gilmore was doing pretty much the same thing. She just carried a lot more baggage with her on the trip.

  He’d never been in fear for his life, but he could imagine it. Imagining was what he did. Just as he could imagine the panic of lying in pain and confusion in a hospital bed. The despair of doubting your own sanity. Add it all up, it was a lot for one person to handle.

  And she’d roped him in, which wasn’t easy to do. He wasn’t the type to try to mend the broken wing of a baby bird. Nature took its course, and the less people interfered with it, the better.

  But he was sucked in now, and not just because he was a degree of separation away from witnessing a murder. Though that would have been enough.