Mountain Investigation

by Jessica Andersen

  But when tears threatened to blur her vision, she dashed them away, irritated with herself. “They’re just things. Get over it.”

  Except Lee hadn’t taken only her things. He’d also taken a big chunk of her self-respect and her ability to trust, and he’d driven a deeper wedge between her and her parents. They hadn’t left because they’d needed to get away from Bear Claw. They’d left because they’d wanted to get away from her and the intrusive media presence she’d brought into their lives. She’d tried not to blame them, but just as they’d stayed on the road when she’d wanted to settle down, and settled down just as she was ready to leave the nest, her parents had done what they needed for each other, not what she’d needed from them.

  That wasn’t news, or even much of a surprise, but it had stung nonetheless. Was it so much to ask that someone care for her for her own sake?

  “And aren’t we feeling self-pitying this morning?” she said aloud. “Get over it. You’re alive and in protective custody, and sooner or later this thing is going to break.” God willing. And when it did, when Lee and al-Jihad and the rest of them were all off the street, then she’d be free to start over. Again.

  Needing to keep busy while her brain churned, she pulled together a basic breakfast from the supplies at hand, and refilled the coffeemaker after she’d downed her second cup. By the time Gray returned, she had prepared scrambled eggs and toasted bagels, and found paper plates and plastic utensils among the bagged supplies. She was trying not to think about what Lee had probably done to her dishes. They had been inexpensive warehouse-store purchases, but she’d liked the repeating motifs of birds and pinecones.

  Gesturing with the package of plates, she said, “Can I impose on you to take these outside, or can the agents take turns coming in or something?

  Gray scowled, temper lighting his eyes. “I told you we’d fend for ourselves.”

  She would’ve snapped in response, except that she thought she caught a thread of something else beneath the anger, a hint that looked almost like desperation, and told her this wasn’t about eggs, or even the case. Setting down the plates, she crossed to the coffeepot, very deliberately poured a second mug and carried it over to him. She held it out, partly a peace offering, partly a dare. “No,” she said, keeping her tone reasonable, “you said I should suit myself, which I did, by making breakfast for everyone.”

  He stared down at her for a long moment. Then he muttered something under his breath, and took the coffee. “Seriously, it’s not your responsibility to feed us.”

  “I need to do something, or I’ll go insane,” she said reasonably. At least she thought it was reasonable.

  He dipped his head in a half nod. “That much I get. Okay. Thanks. I’ll let them know they can come in on a rotation.” But he didn’t leave, didn’t turn away, just stood there holding the mug of coffee, staring down at her.

  Mariah held her ground, refusing the sudden urge to fuss with her hair or check if she had a smattering of bagel crumbs on her cheek. The damn electricity that had gotten them in trouble before sparked in the air between them now, as his expression went from fierce and annoyed to something softer. The sight of it brought a warm twist low in her belly, and her voice threatened to shake when she said, “If you’re trying to come up with an apology for being an ass, don’t worry about it. This isn’t exactly a normal situation.”

  “Not an apology,” he said, “an explanation for why I’m not comfortable with the whole breakfast thing.”

  “You’ve got a lifelong bacheloresque fear of having a woman cook you breakfast?” she asked, and for the first time she realized that while he knew some of the most intimate details of her life, she knew almost nothing about his.

  “I was married,” he said, surprising her because she’d pegged him as the “never been married, never wanted to be married” type. He continued, “More than that, I liked being married. I liked coming down and smelling coffee and toast, or getting up first and putting something together for the two of us. That’s something I miss.” He paused. “The last time anyone made me breakfast was the morning of the bombings.”

  Mariah sucked in a breath as the world closed in around her. “Your wife was in one of the malls?”

  He shook his head, but his expression didn’t clear. “No, Stacy’s alive and well, remarried and living in L.A. We’d just gotten separated—it was her idea, though I think we both knew it wasn’t working. I went to stay with friends out here in Colorado—my college roommate, Ken, his wife, Trish, and their six-month-old baby, Catherine. My goddaughter.” He paused. Mariah would’ve said something, but all of the air seemed to have been sucked from her lungs, rendering her silent as he continued, “They wanted to cheer me up, so Trish made a big breakfast late that morning, we went and picked out a Christmas tree and then we headed over to the local mall so they could take Catherine’s picture with Santa.” He broke off then and took a long swallow of the scalding-hot coffee, but didn’t seem to notice the heat.

  “Gray,” Mariah began.

  “I was standing in line with them,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “and God help me, I was frustrated as hell, and getting mean. I was jealous of Ken—the guy who’d been my wingman in college, my good friend in the years since. He was so damn happy, he and Trish were so good together, and baby Catherine was so perfect…I couldn’t take it anymore. I said something to them—I don’t even remember what—and I took off. I just needed a minute alone, needed to find a way to stop hating my buddy for having everything that I wanted.” He spread his hands away from his body and looked at her, hollow-eyed. “I was sitting on a bench near this fountain, maybe a few hundred yards away, when the bomb went off.”

  Mariah would’ve touched him, would’ve soothed him if she could’ve figured out how. But he looked so closed off, standing there with pain in his eyes and his body language telling her to keep away, that he didn’t want sympathy or understanding, didn’t want anything but to punish himself.

  “Gray,” she said again.

  This time he heard her. He looked at her, seeming to see her now, and his voice went harsh when he said, “So yeah, that’s an apology for my being less than gracious over your offer of breakfast. And it’s an explanation for a whole bunch of other things, isn’t it?”

  “You’re not going to move on until you’re sure your friends have gotten justice,” she said, making it a statement rather than a question. Her chest ached for a family she hadn’t known, and Gray who’d suffered one blow on top of another, for no other reason than he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  In that, she thought, they finally had something in common. Neither of them had done the wrong thing to begin with, but the domino effect of decisions they’d made had led to terrible consequences nonetheless.

  “The baby was partly shielded by her parents’ bodies,” he said, his voice raw. “I got her out and pulled rank to get her on the first ambulance out of there, triage be damned. They tried…I know they tried. I was sitting outside the PICU when she passed twenty-two hours later. I’ve been trying to wipe al-Jihad and his network off the face of the planet ever since, and I don’t intend to stop until I do it, or die trying.”

  He said the latter so matter-of-factly that she believed, with absolute certainty, that he would willingly lose his own life if he could be sure of taking the terrorists with him.

  What would it be like, she wondered, to be the focus of an emotion that intense, coming from a man capable of such feeling?

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “that was probably way more than you wanted or needed to know.” He turned away, heading for the door. “I’ll tell the others to come in and get food. Stay put for an hour and don’t give them any grief, okay? I need to walk.”

  She told herself to let him go, that it would be better for both of them if she did. Instead, she said, “Wait.”

  He paused, glancing back. “Yeah?”

  “I’m coming with you. You don’t know these woods they w
ay I do.”

  His eyes went unreadable. “Thanks for the concern, but I found my way up here just fine the other day. Trust me, I won’t get lost.”

  “No, but you won’t find what you’re looking for, either.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Peace,” she said simply. “A place where you can sit and think, or clear your mind and just let yourself forget for a little while.” She almost held out a hand to him, but thought better of it and walked past him to grab a jacket and shove her feet into a pair of hiking boots.

  “You’re not leaving the cabin,” he said, but it was a weak protest.

  “Bring the others if you want, or bring some of them and leave the rest here to guard our backs,” she said, suddenly realizing that she needed to make the visit for her own purposes as well. “I really think we should go. I think…I’m sure that if I can just clear my head, I’ll be able to remember what Lee said. I can’t do that here after all. Maybe I’ll be able to do it where we’re going.”

  “Where is that?” he asked, and she knew she had him.

  Now she did hold out a hand to him. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Chapter Eight

  Protocol said they should stay in the cabin, but as far as Gray was concerned, protocol—or rather Johnson’s stubborn adherence to protocol regardless of the situation—had hampered the investigation too much for too long.

  Besides, Johnson was off chasing other leads. The SAC hadn’t said as much, but Gray knew his boss held little hope of Mariah being able to help at this point. That was why Johnson had agreed so readily to the op up at the ridgeline cabin, and why he’d assigned a handful of relatively junior agents to the protective detail. Which was just fine as far as Gray was concerned, because it gave him greater leeway than he would’ve had otherwise—including the leverage to fall in with Mariah’s plan of hiking out into the woods to meditate. If they were lucky, it’d smooth out the edges they were both feeling, allowing her to relax and access her memories of being incarcerated.

  He was rationalizing—he knew it. Logic dictated that they should stay put in the cabin, that Mariah should try working with the self-hypnosis protocols the profiler, Thorne, had given her. Instead, they were going for a damn walk, not just because Mariah thought it would help her remember, but because he’d dumped his story on her, and in the aftermath she’d recognized that if he didn’t get out of the cabin, didn’t burn off some of the restless, edgy energy that always gathered when he thought about the day of the bombing, the consequences could be dire.

  He’d thought he had the memories and the rage under control. Apparently, he’d been dead wrong.

  Mariah led the way along the narrow, wooded trail, which was on a slight upgrade that headed up the mountain. Gray hiked immediately behind and off to the right of her, keeping a sharp eye on the scene ahead of them, ready to shield her if necessary. Behind him ranged three of the junior agents, one of whom had clearly let his gym time lag. Gray could hear the guy puffing with the effort of the climb, and felt zero sympathy.

  They were all on high alert, though there had been no sign of anyone else in the woods. They’d barely seen any wildlife, either, just trees and more trees, with glimpses of the leaden gray sky becoming more frequent as they climbed higher and the forest thinned slightly.

  Gray’s blood hummed with tension and exertion, clearing his mind and sharpening his senses.

  The dull snap of the damp leaves and twigs beneath their boots was a rhythmic counterpoint to the rasp of their breaths, occasionally highlighted by the cry of a gliding hawk or eagle. The air moved through the treetops in a steady flow, forming a whisper of background noise that took the edges off the churned-up feelings inside him. The air smelled of pine and rain, with an overtone of rot from the fallen trees that littered the forest floor, slowly returning to the soil they’d sprung from. And though Gray knew it was his imagination, or wishful thinking that everything could’ve been different between them, as he walked, he swore he could taste Mariah on his lips. They’d only kissed once, but her feel and flavor were locked into his sensory memory.

  Ahead of him, she walked with loose, swinging strides. She didn’t look around, keeping her attention fixed on the root-strewn trail, but somehow he knew she was completely aware of her surroundings, fully tuned in to the forest.

  After a half hour or so, she turned off the path and picked her way up a steep incline, using gnarled pine roots as footholds. When Gray followed, he saw that the roots she’d used were worn smooth. And when she paused on a narrow ledge and waited for him to catch up, he found that she’d led him to a small cave that had been invisible from below, shielded by overgrown scrub and a trick of light and angles.

  “The others should wait here,” she said. “It’s tight quarters in the cave. It’ll be too crowded and distracting with five of us in there.”

  Gray couldn’t argue, especially after the three junior agents had reached the ledge, forcing him to crowd her practically into the cave mouth. But he frowned. “There’s no way your ex could know about this place?”

  She shook her head. “I moved here after he was locked up, and this cave isn’t on any of the maps that I’m aware of. It’s not part of any of the old mine systems, and we’re way off the beaten tourist path.”

  “You found it,” he pointed out.

  She glanced at him and hesitated a moment, as if weighing her answer. Then she said, “I told you how my parents were always moving around? Well, my grandfather didn’t—he lived in Montana, in a set of woods not unlike these. I spent as much time there as my folks would let me, and whenever I visited, Grandpa took me out hiking. In part, I think he was trying to wear me out so I’d stop talking—I loved to talk to him, because it felt like he really listened.” She paused and flicked a glance beyond Gray to the other agents. Lifting a shoulder in a self-conscious half shrug, she finished, “Anyway, he was a woodsman from way back, sometimes hunting wildlife, though mostly shooting with his camera by the time I came along. He taught me how to read the woods, and how to find my way home.”

  Gray wanted to tell her to clue him in on that last part, because it had been a long time since he’d been someplace that felt like home. That had been a large part of his snappishness that morning—the realization that coming into her cabin and finding her in the kitchen, surrounded by the smells of morning and warmth, had felt far too natural, bringing a wistful ache.

  They were different in more ways than he could count. So why did it sometimes seem as if they clicked on levels he hadn’t even known would get to him?

  “It’s not safe,” one of the junior agents said from behind him. It took Gray a moment to figure out that the other man was talking about the cave.

  “We’ll be fine,” Gray said, before he realized that he’d made the decision. He glanced back at the others. “Stay here and keep watch. I doubt the radios will work in the cave, so if we get in trouble, we’ll fire a couple of warning shots. If we’re not back in three hours, come in after us.” He fixed the third, lagging agent with a look. “And while you’re waiting, maybe you can talk to these guys about joining a damn gym.” When he turned back to Mariah, he caught the hint of a grin. “What?”

  “For a second there, you sounded like your boss.”

  Gray shuddered. “Please.” Gesturing to the cave, he said, “Lead on.”

  She pulled a midsized flashlight out of her back pocket. Snapping it on, she directed the yellow cone of light into the cave. “Follow me.”

  With a final warning look at the junior agents, whom he suspected had also been tasked with keeping tabs on him for Johnson’s benefit, Gray ducked through the scrub guarding the cave mouth and moved inside.

  The temperature immediately dropped a good ten degrees and the air dampened, sending a shiver down the back of his neck. The cave walls were raw and uneven, arching up and over him by a foot or so. The floor was a craggy mix of stone and dirt, the latter of which had been flattened in places by a woman’s footprin
ts, suggesting that Mariah came here often.

  In a dozen long strides, he caught up with her as she forged ahead down the narrow arcade formed by the cave. “No offense, but this isn’t exactly my idea of a meditation spot.” He pitched his voice low, but the sound bounced off the rock walls, making it seem as though he’d shouted.

  “Patience, Grasshopper. And silence is a virtue.”

  It surprised him to realize that he, a man who most often kept his own counsel, wanted to talk, the words coming from the fine hum of energy that ran through him. He didn’t think it was nerves, exactly, but he didn’t know what else to call it. Awareness, maybe, or the gut-deep sense that something important was about to happen.

  He’d felt the same way once or twice on assignment, when his instincts had warned him that things were going south. He hadn’t had any premonition the day of the bombing, though, or the day he’d ignored another agent’s message and had nearly gotten a stadium full of innocents killed. Was it any wonder he didn’t trust his own instincts? They sure as hell hadn’t proven themselves when it counted.

  “Through here,” Mariah said, poking her head into what looked like a crack in the wall of the main cave. “Watch your head.”

  A hint of claustrophobia kicked in. “I don’t know—”

  “It opens up a short way in,” she called back, her voice echoing strangely from within the small niche.

  “I don’t like feeling trapped.”

  “Who does? It’s worth it, I promise. Trust me.”

  He wondered if she understood how rarely he trusted anything but rock-solid evidence. He didn’t even trust himself half the time. Yet still, he ducked and followed, crab-walking toward the faint yellow glow of her flashlight, hoping to hell she’d considered the fact that he was considerably larger than she was.

  The tight fit brought a second, stronger surge of claustrophobia, but he kept going, ignoring the way the rock touched him on all sides and snagged at his clothing. Moments later, he realized that he wasn’t following the flashlight at all. He was headed toward daylight. Beyond, he could hear the sound of running water and the trill of a songbird.