He winced as phantom pain sliced through his lower left abdomen, where a gnarled scar and low-grade ulcer formed a pointed reminder that it wasn’t his job to be asking those questions. Hadn’t been for a long time.
As the rotor noise dimmed, he pulled Bert aside, out of the Cochrans’ earshot. “Take those two back to the station and keep them there.”
The other man darted a look at the hikers. “You think they hurt Tanya?”
“No. But they may have seen something and not even realized it.”
Bert craned around, eyes widening as he followed Matt’s thought process. “You think the guys who got Tanya are still around?”
Probably, said Matt’s instincts. “Just get back to the station and put them in separate rooms so they can’t compare stories any more than they already have. Then you can relieve Jim on the radio so he can go to the hospital. If he balks, make it an order.”
He didn’t think the younger man would give even a token protest. Jim and Tanya had been circling around each other for the past six months, ever since she transferred up from Station Seven, and the fear and emotion in the younger man’s face had been real. While that kind of romantic connection didn’t work for Matt, he wasn’t about to make the choice for someone else. He had sworn off trying to run other people’s lives.
“Aren’t you coming back with us?” Bert asked, still looking around, searching for monsters in the shadows. But that was the thing about monsters. Most of the time, you couldn’t see them until the damage was already done.
“I’m going to stay and look around, scare off any scavengers who might be interested in the scene.” Human or otherwise. Matt tapped the butt of the shotgun riding over his shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”
Bert looked unconvinced, but there was enough of an enlisted man still left in him that he followed orders without further argument, collecting the Cochrans and getting them moving back toward the Jeeps.
When they were gone, Matt was left alone beneath a brilliantly blue sky, warmed by the summer sun. But the beauty and isolation didn’t settle him like they normally did. Instead, there was a heavy weight on his chest as he lifted his radio. “Jim, you reading me?”
“Here, boss. She get away okay?”
“Yeah. They’re en route. You can go down to the city as soon as Bert gets there. Right now, though, I need you to patch me through to Tucker McDermott.” This wasn’t a case for Homicide, really, but Tucker was a friend. One of his very few.
There was a beat of silence. “I thought she fell.”
“It looks like it wasn’t an accident.”
“What?”
“Just put me through to Tucker, okay? Bert will fill you in when he gets there.”
The patch-through from radio to telephone took a minute, but was necessary. There was no cell coverage in the back of beyond, and even satellite phones were hit-or-miss. So the rangers often relied on radios, especially for the more out-of-the-way sectors: Seven and Eight on the eastern side, Thirteen and Fourteen on the western side, and good old Sector Nine, which formed the bridge between the two lobes of the huge park…where the crime usually ran to vandalism and careless fires, not attempted murder.
Matt took a long look at the scuffed-up sidewall of the gulley and the three ropes that snaked from a big boulder and disappeared over the edge. He didn’t need to glance down there to know that the bottom of the wash was churned up and littered with scraps from the med techs’ sterile packaging. The scene was seriously contaminated, and it was going to take a hell of an analyst to make anything out of it. Fortunately, the Bear Claw P.D.’s crime lab was staffed by a group of talented analysts who were the ultimate professionals…with one glaring, purple-booted, on-loan-from-Denver exception.
Matt grimaced at the intrusive image of sparkling gray eyes in a sharp face framed by sleek dark hair. Gigi Lynd. Even her name sounded expensive and citified, not like anything that belonged out in the backcountry.
He would tell Tucker to send anyone but her. Hell, Station Two’s nature trail would be a stretch for someone like her…and the last thing he needed to be doing right now was babysitting some city-slicker analyst who dressed like she was looking for trouble.
Chapter Two
Gigi nailed three bad-guy targets, skipped the little old lady cutout, tagged the last two baddies and slapped her Beretta on the counter with a flourish that might not have been strictly necessary, but damn, she was on a roll.
Granted, the firing range’s offerings were pretty basic, but still.
She slipped off her headphones and turned, just catching the tail end of her friend Alyssa’s impressed whistle. The heavily pregnant blonde’s eyes glittered with appreciation behind her tinted safety glasses, but she faked a pained look. “Please tell me you didn’t just pick that up for the test, like you did the computer stuff you showed me.”
Gigi grinned and slicked her dark, asymmetrically bobbed hair behind her ears before pulling her clip, clearing the chamber, and giving the weapon a quick, practiced wipe down. “I shot my first rifle when I was nine, started with handguns when I was thirteen.”
“Thank God. I was starting to get seriously depressed, thinking that you’d only been shooting for the past six months or so.”
“Nope. More like the past two decades. And you don’t look the slightest bit depressed.” In fact, the head of the Bear Claw P.D.’s Forensics Division looked amazing—rosy cheeked and curvy, with the mysterious “I know something you don’t” look that Gigi associated with her sisters’ first pregnancies. “I take it you’re feeling better?”
“Incredible.” Alyssa smoothed her palm across the top of her protruding belly. “After the past three weeks of abject almost-time-to-pop yuckiness, I woke up this morning feeling amazing.” A smile touched her lips with an entirely different sort of knowing look. “Tucker did, too, much to his surprise and delight.”
“Ouch.” Gigi exaggerated the wince. “Taunting the celibate again, are we?”
Alyssa twinkled at her. “A girl who looks like you and shoots like that doesn’t need to be celibate.”
“Right. Because guys perform best at gunpoint.” When Alyssa gave her a “yeah, right” look, Gigi lifted a shoulder. “I guess I’m not a casual sex kind of girl.”
Her friend’s blue eyes narrowed. “I never thought you were.”
Maybe not, but plenty of guys looked at the outside packaging and thought they knew what was going on inside it. If she mentioned that, though, Alyssa would bring up the m word again—makeover—and that wasn’t happening. What might look a little too glittery in Bear Claw played just fine in Denver, and Gigi liked her personal style. There was nothing wrong with being different.
So as they crossed the parking lot toward her borrowed SUV, she went with a second, equally honest answer. “I’m not going to be here for much longer, which would make any sort of hookup, for entertaining sex or otherwise, casual by definition. No offense, but when the call comes, I’m out of here.”
The Denver P.D. was piloting an accelerated SWAT/critical response training program that would leapfrog a few select forensic analysts straight into existing hazardous response teams—HRTs—where they would act as both technical support and boots on the ground. Although the TV shows made it seem like every CSI was a badge-wearing, gun-carrying cop, that was far from the case in most jurisdictions, where the cops were cops and the lab rats were…well, lab rats.
Going from the lab straight to hazardous response was a heck of a leap, but the members of Gigi’s family were anything but conventional when it came to their ambitions. Whatever the Lynds did, they did it full throttle.
Alyssa glanced away. “I know you’ve only been here a few months, and we’re just really getting to know each other. And it’s not like I don’t have other friends. Good friends. But…I like how you bring a new perspective to things around here. I wish—selfishly, I admit—that I had the budget to hire you away from Denver and keep you here in the lab. Thanks to Mayor Tightwad, I
don’t, so I have to think outside the box. If that means hunting down a few eligible bachelors…”
“Aw.” Throat tightening, Gigi nudged the other woman gently with an elbow. “Thanks. But let’s be realistic—I’m focusing on my career, which means you can’t tempt me with a guy.” The members of her family paired off in their mid-thirties, once they had a degree or two and a tenure track. She might not have inherited the Lynds’ love of academia, but she had gotten their ambition in spades. “Besides it’s not like I’m going to Mars or Timbuktu or something. I’ll visit.”
Alyssa shot her an “it won’t be the same” look. “Are you sure—” Her phone rang with the plain digital ringtone that said it was official business. Immediately straightening away from Gigi’s SUV, Alyssa pulled the phone and answered with a clipped, professional “McDermott, Forensics.” But then her face softened. “Hello, McDermott, Homicide. What’s up?”
Gigi started to wander off and give Alyssa privacy to talk to her husband. Baby McDermott’s arrival was so imminent that most of the couple’s business conversations inevitably turned personal, which made Gigi… Well, better to give them privacy.
“Station Fourteen?” Alyssa said, voice going worried. “Matt’s station?”
The name stopped Gigi in her tracks.
Matt. As in Matt Blackthorn, head ranger of the state park’s most remote outpost. The one guy she had noticed in Bear Claw, and not necessarily in a good way.
Her first impression had been positive—how could it not be? Blackthorn looked like one of the guys on the glossy brochures put out by the tourism bureau—edgy and gorgeous, with subtle bronzing and hard, commanding features that fit with his rumored Cherokee heritage. But unlike the professional models in the brochures, Blackthorn carried a rugged, purposeful energy and seemed to bring the mountain air down to the city with him—not the tame air of the ski slopes, but that of the wilderness, uncivilized and predatory.
The first moment she’d laid eyes on the big ranger, she had actually caught her breath.
They’d both been in the hallway outside of Tucker’s office, her coming in, Blackthorn going out. And for a moment, something had sparked between them. At first, she had thought it was mutual attraction—the heated flash in the depths of his dark green eyes had resonated with the “hell, yeah” her hormones had been chorusing.
Then his gaze had shifted as he took in the rest of her, and his expression had tightened, killing the light of interest. Zap. Gone.
She didn’t know what he had or hadn’t seen in her, or what it had meant to him. She only knew that he’d touched the brim of the black felt hat he wore over his dark hair, and kept going. And the next time they’d crossed paths, when she’d done a briefing on a rash of parking-lot break-ins at several trailheads leading to the backcountry, Blackthorn had cut the conversation short enough to earn them a couple of raised eyebrows from the other cops and rangers involved in the meeting.
After that, she had avoided him. Not because he made her uncomfortable—she didn’t give anyone that power—but because it didn’t matter whether or not the head ranger of Station Fourteen liked her. She was there to work evidence for the Bear Claw City P.D. and prove to her bosses back home that she could fit herself seamlessly into an existing team like the BCCPD’s crime lab. Blackthorn wasn’t part of that world.
Unless there was a crime scene up at Station Fourteen. Then he was very much a part of her world—at least for the duration of the case.
Alyssa frowned. “Cassie’s going to be tied up for the next few hours and there’s no way I’m driving up to the middle of nowhere, never mind hiking to the site. Gigi can—” She broke off and glanced in Gigi’s direction. “Okay. I can switch some stuff around and send Cassie, I guess. Tell him she’ll be coming in behind the officers, and will need really good directions or a lead-in. We’re shorthanded as it is. It won’t do us any good to lose an analyst to the Forgotten.”
Gigi barely heard the last part. She was too busy seething at the realization that Blackthorn had told Tucker—a former member of the Denver P.D. who had a direct pipeline to her bosses—that he didn’t want her on the case.
“That backstabbing—” She bit off the snarl as Alyssa clicked her phone shut and regarded her curiously.
“What on earth is the problem between you and Matt?”
Taking a deep breath, Gigi slapped a layer of professionalism over her other emotions. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s no problem. We met a couple of times, I was pleasant, he wasn’t. End of story.” At least it had been. Now she wanted a piece of him for trying to torpedo her. What had she ever done to him?
Nothing, that was what. Judgmental idiot.
“There’s got to be more to it than that,” Alyssa said. “It’s not like him to be a jerk to anyone, especially a woman, never mind leaning on Tucker for something like this.”
Gigi said through her teeth, “I’ve barely spoken to the man. If he took one look at me and decided he didn’t like what he saw, that’s his problem.”
Alyssa’s look went speculative, but she said only, “He told Tucker he didn’t think you could handle the backcountry, that he’d rather wait for someone he didn’t have to babysit.”
“He…” Gigi counted to ten and reminded herself that it didn’t matter what Blackthorn thought of her. Tucker was a fair guy and a top-notch cop, which meant he cared about results. “Fine, let’s give Ranger Surly what he wants. I’ll take over for Cassie and she can deal with his parking lot smash-and-grab.”
But Alyssa shook her head, expression clouding. “It’s way more than that. A few hours ago, two men attacked and injured one of his rangers—a woman named Tanya Dawes. They just airlifted her out.”
“Oh.” Oh, damn. Gigi exhaled in a rush, knowing full well that aggravated assault trumped any personal issues that might or might not exist between her and Blackthorn. “Is she going to be okay?”
“It looks like she took a serious blow to the head and may have some internal injuries. I guess she came around just long enough to tell Matt that two men had ambushed her.”
“Sexual assault?”
“No sign of it, which is good. But the head injury…that’s not good.”
“Did she give Blackthorn any sort of description?”
“Nothing.”
“Damn.” Which meant that the crime scene analysis could be critical. “How do you want to handle it?”
Alyssa thought for a few seconds, then said, “I want you to head out to Station Fourteen. According to Matt, the scene took a beating when they airlifted her out, which makes you the better choice. Cassie is hell on wheels with the tech stuff, but you’ve got more experience with contaminated scenes. And if the problem between you and Matt is strictly an oil-and-water sort of thing, you’ll deal with it. Right?”
Gigi nodded, already mentally reviewing the field kit she had with her, looking for gaps. “Of course. I’ve taken static on crime scenes before. I can handle myself.”
More importantly, this wasn’t about her and it sure wasn’t about Blackthorn. She was there to do a job and she didn’t intend to let anyone get in her way…especially not a park ranger with a great body and a nasty judgmental streak.
WHEN THE FIRST BCCPD vehicle churned into view in a cloud of dust, Matt was surprised to see Jack Williams at the wheel.
Williams, who topped six feet and had early salt in his chestnut hair though he was just on the downside of thirty, was one of the top detectives in Homicide. Born and raised in Bear Claw, Jack was the latest in a long line of Williamses to serve the BCCPD, and Matt’s gut had long ago put the guy in the “solid cop” category.
As Williams climbed from the SUV, Matt headed over, hands in his pockets, still wearing his shotgun and knapsack over his shoulder. “I’ll have to thank Tucker,” he said to Williams. “This isn’t exactly a case for Homicide, but I’m damn glad to see you.”
The detective gave him a nod. “We take care of our own.”
Matt didn
’t think he was talking about the close connection that had evolved between the P.D. and park service in Bear Claw, but didn’t want to go down that road, so he said simply, “Thanks.” He glanced over as a second cop got out of the SUV—a younger uniformed officer with a startling shock of white-blond hair and pale eyes that together made him look washed out beneath the late-summer sun. “New partner?”
“Billy Doran,” Williams said by way of introduction. “Thanks to Mayor Cheapskate’s latest round of cuts, we’re down to under a dozen detectives trying to cover the whole damn city. Rather than partnering detectives, Tucker’s got some of us teaming up with uniforms.”
Despite his one-time interest in politics, Matt had stayed well clear of Bear Claw’s issues, just as he largely avoided the city itself. He hadn’t moved to Station Fourteen to get involved in city stuff, after all. Even so, he knew that Mayor Percy Proudfoot had been taking some serious hacks at the budget in an effort to turn around a huge budget deficit. The P.D. in particular was having to get creative.
He sent the kid a nod. “Doran.” Turning back to Williams, he said, “I’ll lead you guys in, then come back down for Cassie when she gets here.” He hesitated. “There’s something I didn’t get a chance to tell Tucker.” He told them about the feather, patted his buttoned pocket. “You guys want it?”
“Keep it until Cass gets here,” Williams said. “It’s probably better not to move it around more than necessary. But don’t be surprised if she wants your shirt, too, in case there’s transfer.” He grinned. “Just watch what you say if she does. Last guy who made a sexist joke about the crime scene girls got the rough side of Alyssa’s tongue, and then spent some quality time directing traffic for a sewer repair crew, courtesy of Chief Mendoza.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Actually, it didn’t matter to him whether the Bear Claw analysts were women or Martians, as long as they got the job done.
Bear Claw Conspiracy Page 2
