“Staff like Kreuger?” Cooper prompted.
“That creepy landscaping guy?”
“Why creepy?” Park asked.
“Llcaj hated him. He said Kreuger was always spying on him. Creeping around.”
Spying on Llcaj while he spied on the retreat. “Is that why he attacked Kreuger?” Cooper guessed.
Monty locked the papers she’d rescued from the safe into the briefcase with a loud snap. “I don’t know anything about that.” It was obvious she was lying. “But around then is when it got worse. Some of my guys swore they’d hear a wolf prowling around their houses all the way down in town. They started quitting. When Llcaj disappeared last week, that was the last straw. But now they’ll see. Now we’re going to get some answers.”
An enormous boom of thunder sounded, the sort that you felt against your eardrums, and all three of them jumped. “If we don’t go now, we’re not going to make it out.”
She grabbed the case and slammed the office lights off. Beside Cooper, Park quickly looked down, rubbing a hand over his eyes until Monty passed. “Hurry up!” she called.
Outside the sky had taken on an eerie green cast and the rain felt like hail, it was being whipped so hard against their faces by the wind. Monty’s sturdy-looking SUV took a couple false starts, and Cooper had a brief nightmare of waiting out the storm inside the warehouse, trying to prevent Monty from noticing Park’s reflective eyes, but eventually the engine turned over and they pulled jerkily onto the road.
Even at their highest setting, the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain and Monty had to drive slowly down the curving mountain road. Twigs and small branches littered the way.
“Goddamnit,” Monty cursed as she pulled around a particularly large one. Rather than keep two hands on the wheel, though, she returned to gripping the briefcase, securely in her lap, obviously unwilling to let it out of her sight or even touch. Cooper eyed it. How desperate was she to make sure this deal didn’t fall through. How sure a thing really was it?
“How did Nielsen come to be co-owner of the retreat?” he asked.
“What?” Monty said distractedly. “Oh, they inherited it together after their old man passed.”
Cooper’s eyebrows shot up and he resisted twisting in his seat to look at Park. “Jack Nielsen and Vanessa Claymont are siblings?”
Monty frowned, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. “Yes, yes. Why is that so surprising? She’s a bit older than him, so they didn’t grow up together, really. I think Vanessa ran off when she was a teenager.”
“And Nielsen?” Cooper asked.
“He never left,” she said. “I think that’s why he wants to get his share of the money and get out now. Poor guy’s been stuck on this mountain taking care of their father his whole life.”
Cooper could believe her show of empathy a bit more if she wasn’t white-knuckling the papers that promised her a share of the land she thought Nielsen so deserved to be free of. “What do you mean take care of?”
Monty looked at Cooper again, this time suspiciously. “You seem mighty curious.”
“Of course I am,” Cooper said. “Wouldn’t you be if you were supposed to be on vacation and the next thing you know it’s Friday the 13th?”
Monty acknowledged that with a nod and her shoulders eased just slightly, but she still didn’t answer his earlier question.
Park spoke up from the back seat, surprising Cooper. “We’ve been noticing some weird things there, too, you know. Even before the ranger showed up.”
Monty’s hand on the wheel jerked at that, and she cursed as the car slipped on the road a bit. “Like what? What have you seen?” she demanded. There was something strange in her voice. Almost a nervousness.
“You first,” Park said bluntly. “Why was Nielsen taking care of his father? Was he sick?”
Monty pursed her lips looking into the rearview mirror, angrily. But she seemed unable to resist Park’s ploy. “Guy was basically a hermit. People in town said he never came off the mountain. Just stayed up here working on his research. Nielsen had to do everything for him. Vanessa only came back after he was dead and she could collect on the inheritance. At first she was just as happy as he was to break up the land to sell. I don’t mind telling you, I got the place for a steal. And then suddenly, this. Refusing to sell anymore. Building the retreat. It all came out of nowhere. I don’t know what changed her mind,” Monty murmured. “We used to be friendly once. Back then she couldn’t wait to leave. Hated being back here. She called it the one last punishment her father was forcing on her.”
“You said his research. What did he do?” Park asked.
“Some kind of doctor, I think?” Monty said. “We found some old scientific journals squirreled away in the floorboards before we tore the old place down.”
“What’d you do with them?”
“After a couple of them went missing, I told Beck. He asked for the rest, the ones I’d brought home with me. I gave them to him yesterday. Oh shi—” Monty tapped rapidly on the brakes to slow down without sliding as a shape appeared up ahead. It was a car pulled to the side of the road.
“Someone’s broke down,” Park said.
As Monty carefully pulled up beside it and stopped, Cooper realized it was the ranger’s vehicle. The driver’s side door was wide-open, shaking in the wind, the seat soaked. No one was in the car.
“He must have walked for help,” Monty said even as another boom of thunder knocked the air.
“In this?” Cooper asked.
“We’re not far from the retreat now. Makes more sense than waiting it out on the road.”
Cooper started to respond when the back seat door opened and Park hopped out into the storm. “O—Andrew!” Cooper called.
“Give me a minute!” Park called back, and slammed the door. He disappeared around the other side of the ranger’s car.
“What’s he doing?” Monty hissed, spinning in her seat. “I don’t have time for this.” Cooper unbuckled his seat belt. “Are you crazy?”
“I’ll get him. Just give us two minutes.”
Monty shook her head slowly but said, “Fine. But if you’re not back by then, I’m leaving.”
Cooper pulled up his jacket hood and hopped out of the car, landing in a muddy puddle. He found Park on the other side of the ranger’s car, peering over the edge of the roadside—a sharp incline toward thick woods made sharper where the ground had turned to slick mud and was rapidly eroding.
“What’s going on?” Cooper yelled over the rain.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Park yelled back. “Why would he just walk away and leave everything open like this? The keys are still in the ignition and I can’t find that evidence bag with Llcaj’s shirt anywhere.”
Cooper shook his head and there was another crack of thunder, this one sharper. It sounded so close that for the first time he began to really worry. “Maybe he took it with him?”
“Look. There,” Park said suddenly, pointing a short distance away. Part of the drop-off was more crumbled, and when he crouched down to examine it, he held up a loose weed that looked like it had been torn up by its roots. “You think he decided to take a shortcut in the wrong direction?” he yelled. He tossed the plant at Cooper’s feet and scrambled rather gracefully down the hill.
“Fuck’s sake,” Cooper muttered, watching him. “Wait for me!”
He crouched, too, trying to keep his center of gravity as low as possible and all four limbs in touch with the ground. Two inching steps downward, his foot gave way to crumbling mud and Cooper landed on his ass hard, slipping and tumbling down the short hillside.
“You’re going to have to carry me back up that, you know!” Cooper yelled at Park, who was about fifteen feet deeper into the woods heading toward a creek whose banks had flooded, making the nearby plants look funny, growing in the mi
ddle of a now bustling stream.
He followed after Park, squinting. It was pretty dark down here—a combination of being in the woods and the heavy storm. It might even be approaching evening by now. Cooper touched his phone in his pocket and was just considering whether he should risk taking it out in the rain to check the time when he saw it.
A man lying facedown, half in and half out of the creek.
Cooper began to run, but Park got there first, splashing into the flooded banks, rolling the man over and pulling him out of the water. As soon as he saw the open, staring eyes, Cooper knew it was too late. Beck was dead.
Cooper watched Park check for a pulse or breathing, just in case, but he shook his head no. For a long moment they were both just silent as the rain and wind continued to rage and whip the trees above them.
“I guess we know why he never showed up to the mill,” Cooper said.
“Or he did show up and we’re not the first people to be escorted out by Monty today.” Park’s hands moved efficiently over the rest of the body. Cooper winced but didn’t look away. The job meant he’d been around death plenty, but it was still disturbing on a deep primal level to see a person moved around and repositioned without resistance.
“I can’t find any physical trauma,” Park was saying.
“You can’t think this was natural,” Cooper said skeptically. “He just happens to keel over on his way from threatening one business to checking the story of another? With, oh yeah, literal bloody evidence in the car? Bloody evidence that’s now officially missing?”
“That would be quite a coincidence,” Park said. He hesitated mid-pat down, then pulled a plastic tube with an orange cap and yellow label from the ranger’s pocket.
“What is that?”
“An autoinjector,” Park mused, examining it. “A knockoff EpiPen, I think. It’s been used. Beck could have started having an allergic reaction, pulled over, used his pen. Didn’t work. Confused, he stumbled over the edge and down the hill.”
Cooper hummed. That was certainly a possibility. More likely than not...
...if they weren’t in the middle of a potentially deadly missing persons’ case and Cooper hadn’t just seen a possible bill for medical equipment that very morning. “How much do these go for about?” he asked.
Park shrugged. “Don’t know. Not branded is cheaper, I think. But it’s hardly a dependable murder weapon.”
“That’s assuming it was full of epinephrine,” Cooper said. “Nielsen knows poisons. Nielsen knows poisons that affect wolves, apparently because he grew up in a wolf family with a scientist father.”
“But why would—” Park broke off and spun quickly to look behind them. Cooper turned, too, stumbling over the flooded forest floor. On top of the hill, on the side of the road stood a figure, blurred by shadows and rain.
“Hello? Monty?” Cooper called out, tensing. Beside him he saw Park slip the autoinjector into his own pocket.
Pause. “No, it’s me, Paul.” Pause. “Who’s down there?”
Cooper glanced at Park. “Kyle and Andrew. There’s been a—an accident.”
The figure that was Paul hesitated, and something in his stillness made the hairs on the back of Cooper’s neck stiffen. He became abruptly conscious of how much more vulnerable they were down here. Suddenly, Paul seemed to come to a decision and started down the hillside as elegantly as Park. He was wearing a navy rain jacket and baseball cap that the rain streamed off of oddly.
As he approached, Cooper briefly wondered if he should give a heads-up, but it was too late for that. Paul’s nose wrinkled with disgust and his eyes immediately found the ranger’s body.
“Oh my god,” Paul gasped, and stumbled backward. “He’s—” He looked at Park, eyes wide. “You—Why did you—”
“Don’t be absurd,” Park snapped with more impatience than Cooper had heard in a while. “I didn’t kill him. We just found him now.”
“Here?” Paul asked, looking around. “What are you doing out here?”
“Monty was giving us a ride back in the storm and we saw the ranger’s car,” Cooper said. “Didn’t she tell you?”
Paul frowned. He didn’t seem to know where to look. Eyes darting between the two of them and then, like a magnet, back to the body. “Monty? I didn’t see her. There’s no one up there.”
Huh, Cooper thought. If she had just left them with a potentially broken-down car in the middle of a monsoon, that was...pretty cold. Even if she had warned them, he hadn’t actually believed she would really abandon them so quickly. More the fool, him.
“Maybe she went for help,” Park suggested magnanimously.
“Then she’s not going to get far,” Paul said. “There’s a tree down and the roads are flooding. No one’s getting out tonight. And no help is getting in,” he added, looking again at the ranger and then flinching away.
“We can’t leave him here in this,” Cooper said to Park. Preserving a possible crime scene was one thing, but at this rate all the evidence and perhaps the body itself was going to wash away.
“Is there somewhere out of the way we can put him?” Park asked Paul. “Somewhere with a lock and as...cool as possible.”
Paul’s face was horrified. “You want to take him back to the retreat? No. I can’t.”
“What about that barn? By the staff quarters,” Cooper suggested. “That locks, right?”
“Yes,” Paul said, even as he was shaking his head no. “But you’re not seriously suggesting—”
Park cut him off. “The barn, then. Did you drive here?” Paul nodded. “Good. I think we should lock up the ranger’s car and leave it here for now.”
“Why were you out on the road?” Cooper asked.
Paul’s face twisted and he seemed even more nervous than before. “Looking for you,” he said hesitantly. “We were worried something had happened. Some of the guests noticed your cabin door was open. I’m afraid—” He looked at Park and had to clear his throat as his voice cracked. “I’m afraid someone might have broken in.”
Chapter Ten
Whoever was behind this certainly wasn’t getting the rest and relaxation bit of the retreat. Someone had clearly been through their bags and Cooper’s weapon was missing. Fortunately, it was in a securely locked case, but that still left them less defended than before.
Paul had been ashen-faced when he’d finally dropped them back at their cabin, lucky number seven, which was feeling decidedly less lucky with rainwater blown in all over the floor and their clothes scattered around. Though his pale and queasy expression could have just as much to do with transporting poor Beck into the barn and wrapping him carefully with a tarp than it did with upsetting the Shepherd.
Cooper and Park had searched Beck’s car more thoroughly before leaving it on the road. A box in the back had revealed all sorts of notes on the comings and goings of people at the retreat, photographs and files. The number of employees who would come for five, six months at a time and then disappear. Beck’s notes implied they all seemed to be working under fake names, Reggie included.
Drugs? Human Trafficking? Illegal exports? were all possible explanations he’d scribbled across his notes. The ranger had obviously been investigating for longer and more seriously than he’d implied. The fact that a good deal of his findings were stored in the trunk of his car implied that his investigation was not exactly sanctioned.
What they hadn’t found was Llcaj’s shirt or the scientific journals Monty had said she’d given him. Of course, those might be safely at the station somewhere.
But there was no way for them to check that. In addition to the roads being blocked, the phone lines were down and Wi-Fi was out. They were essentially stranded with a dead body in the barn and at least one very nosy thief who may or may not have killed three people.
A good amount of wind and rain had blown through the open cabin door
, leaving a layer of damp on the floor and removing any possible scent of the intruder. Paul had offered to move them into the staff lodging or move another couple into number seven so that Cooper and Park could take over a dry cabin, but they’d refused, not wanting to inconvenience anyone or, worse, put them in harm’s way.
“I’m sure no one would have done this if they’d known who you are,” Paul had fretted, seeming almost more upset by the break-in than the possible homicide.
“And I’d like it to stay that way,” Park had said. “I really don’t want to draw any unnecessary attention.”
Cooper wasn’t sure if that was possible anymore. Clearly at least one person had taken enough of an interest to break in, and depending on how quickly Paul spread the news of Beck’s death, it was sure to get out that they were involved in the discovery. They were running out of time.
As they’d completely missed dinner, Paul had come by again himself with a cooler of food while Cooper was showering and scrubbing off all the death, mud, rainwater and plant material that had attached itself and had him looking like the previously unknown missing link between fish and fungus.
Now it was Park’s turn to get clean and Cooper flopped onto the bed with a sigh to eat. While working through his second sandwich of thick sourdough, spicy horseradish, tomatoes and cheese, he pulled out a pen and one of the exercise sheets Dr. Joyce had given him. Flipping the sheet over to the blank side, he started to map out the information he knew so far. Listing everyone who might want to sabotage the retreat, break into the mill, retrieve the evidence the ranger had collected, or want Llcaj and/or Kreuger dead. The problem was that hardly ruled out anybody. Not even Kreuger himself. And on top of it all, he didn’t see what the map in the desk or that medical supplies bill had to do with a single thing.
The bathroom door opened and Park emerged with a soft cloud of steam, naked and toweling his hair dry. “That might have been the best shower of my life,” he said.
“Rude, considering how much shower sex we’ve had,” Cooper said. “But same.” He rolled over on the bed, making room for Park to ease himself down with a groan. “Sandwich?” Cooper offered him his remaining half.
Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (Big Bad Wolf) Page 21
