Bear Claw Conspiracy

by Jessica Andersen

  “I… Darn it, you were listening in on the phone the whole time.”

  “I caught the end of it, anyway. Sue me.” Her eyes gleamed. “What happened with you two last night?”

  “Aren’t we supposed to be processing a scene?” Gigi took a pointed look around, though admittedly there didn’t seem to be much of a scene to process. The apartment had been stripped back to bare walls and plain furniture, with nothing personal that she could see.

  “Yep. And it’ll go much faster if you confess, so we can get started.” Alyssa paused. “Or you can tell me to mind my own business.”

  Gigi winced. “Ouch. Low blow.”

  “I’ll start. You slept together. That’s obvious, given the way he was looking at you just now.”

  “I…” To Gigi’s horror, her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, crap.” She spun away, mortified, feeling her control start to slip. Aware that Alyssa was coming over, knowing that a kind word might break her, she held up a hand. “Don’t. Please.”

  “Sorry. I’m pregnant, which means I can do pretty much what I want and I’ll be forgiven.” The blonde wrapped her arms around Gigi, sandwiching Baby McDermott between them, and said, “You don’t have to be a hero with me. Not ever.”

  A big sob welled up, jamming Gigi’s throat. She held on for another few seconds, then let go, sagging against Alyssa and giving herself permission to lose it and give in to the shakes that had eluded her the night before.

  Her friend hung on. “It’s okay, kiddo. Whatever’s going on, it’s going to be okay.”

  She sucked in a shuddering breath as tears scalded her eyes, but to her surprise, that was all that happened. After a moment, she lost the overwhelming urge to wail, and the tightness in her throat eased. A minute after that, she could breathe again.

  Letting out a shaky laugh, she straightened away from Alyssa. “Well. That was anticlimactic. I guess…I think… Wow. It’s been a pretty intense few days.”

  Alyssa pressed her hands into her lower back and leaned against a corner of a ratty couch that looked like a few more fibers wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other. “Would that be the part where you dove back into a burning building, made it through a car chase or spent the night with Matt in the ‘safe’ house?” The finger quotes said she knew exactly what kind of a house it was.

  “All of it.” Gigi’s cheeks heated. “And you could’ve warned me about the cabin.”

  “Would it have changed anything?”

  “Maybe.” But honesty compelled her to admit, “Probably not.” She and Matt had been on a collision course. It would’ve happened with or without the ambience.

  “So. You going to give a pregnant lady some details?”

  “Only if said pregnant lady is working while we talk.” Given that MacDonald had taken the time to strip the place bare, logic said that it probably wouldn’t yield anything useful. But instinct itched along her spine, telling her that there was something…

  Or maybe not. Maybe her emotions had screwed with her instincts. Wasn’t that what Matt had been implying when he mentioned the two guys on his team who’d had things on their mind the day of the bank robbery?

  It didn’t escape her that his point jibed with the Lynd protocol: one thing at a time. Work, then family. Mixing the two was risky, especially if you wanted to be the best at both.

  Alyssa nodded. “How about you get started and I’ll catch up. Better yet, I’ll observe your highly trained technique.”

  “Wow. You’re really working it, aren’t you?” Gigi sent her a look. “Or are you feeling crappy again?”

  “Little bit of both.” She nudged her field kit with a toe. “I’m waiting.”

  Gigi put on her protective gear and got to work, first taking a tour of the apartment, looking for obvious stuff and snapping some overview photos, and then coming back to the main room.

  Alyssa sent her a look, then pointedly drummed her fingers atop Baby McDermott. “Still waiting.”

  Starting with a banged up wooden desk that had a layer of dust on it with a laptop-shaped void off to one side, Gigi took more pictures with a ruler for scale, and then used a shoeprint-size piece of transfer paper to take a print of the laptop. She wasn’t hopeful that it would lead to anything, though. Thanks to the TV shows, the bad guys had gotten way better at cleaning up after themselves. Hello, CSI effect.

  Finally, she said, “I called my mom last night to tell her what was going on.”

  Alyssa raised an eyebrow. “And?”

  “I couldn’t tell her about it. Any of it.” Gigi went through the drawers, which held nothing but lint and crumbs. “She just finally started getting behind the idea of me trying to get into the accelerated training program. Mostly because it’s a tangible goal that involves testing and competition, which she gets, even if she doesn’t understand why this is what I want to do.”

  “Dangerous professions can be harder on the family than the individual. The individual chooses the job, chooses the risk. The family members don’t always get a vote.”

  Hearing a tone, Gigi glanced over. “You and Tucker make it work, and so do Cassie and Seth.”

  “Three of the four of us are analysts. And while we see more action than the norm, being in Bear Claw—or in Seth’s case, a field office—the action is still the exception. As for Fax and Chelsea…well, they’re different. He sponsored her into the agency, made her his partner. But…” She shook her head. “He worked under a female superior for a long time, which I think makes him more ready to accept Chelsea being in the field with him.”

  Gigi let out a soft sigh. “Whereas Matt has spent most of his life trying to protect the world from itself.”

  “He could change.”

  Now it was Gigi’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “Okay, maybe not.” Alyssa paused. “Where did you guys leave things?”

  With a kiss that had shot right to the top of her top ten, one that had made her feel strong yet feminine, like she was the supercop’s girl, the center of his world. “With a ‘maybe’ on going out to dinner after this case is wrapped up and things go back to normal.”

  Alyssa made a face. “Which one of you was doing the most backpedaling?”

  “I’d say we were about even.” Gigi abandoned the desk and moved to the couch, which was the only other large piece of furniture in the cramped sitting area.

  Alyssa shifted over to lean on the desk, moving slowly, while Gigi gave the carpet a quick scan—wincing at the profusion of fibers, most if not all of which would be totally useless.

  Part of an analyst’s job was making judgment calls about what to collect and what to leave behind. Each piece of evidence she selected represented dollars, man hours, storage space and analytics.

  One of the things that made her very good at what she did was her instincts. Normally, she could look at a scene and know, at a gut-check level, what to take. Now, though, her instincts were humming, but they weren’t telling her anything. It wasn’t just Alyssa being there, either. Her head wasn’t in the game.

  She used a small flashlight to look under the couch, trying to make out anything useful amid the dust rats. “When I woke up this morning, I thought to myself that if he asked me to turn down the academy and stay here with him, I would seriously consider it.” She was ashamed even saying it aloud. “I’ve known the guy—really known him, I mean, not just to the point of avoiding each other in the hallway—for what, seventy-two hours? And we’ve been in each other’s faces—and not in the good way—for more than half that time. So it’s ridiculous for me to even think…” She shook her head. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe, but there’s such a thing as love at first sight.”

  Gigi snorted. “Lust at first sight, maybe, but not love. We’re not… It’s not like that.” But she glanced over. “Was it that way for you and Tucker?”

  “No way. We met. We danced. We hooked up. We realized, belatedly, that we were going to be working together. And big, bad Tucker McDermo
tt, the original ‘I’m a rolling stone, just passing through’ didn’t want anything to do with a girl who wanted to put down roots, so we spent the next few months snarling at each other.” She shook her head. “No, I’m thinking of Fax and Chelsea, actually. When she met him, he was posing as a convict and had just helped al-Jihad himself break out of the ARX prison. He was on the job, deep undercover…and they got one good look at each other, and fell hard.”

  “Oh.” Gigi had to swallow past the wistful lump in her throat. “Well. We already know Fax is a special case. And I’m the ‘doesn’t want to put down roots’ factor in this equation. I still have things I want to do before I settle down.”

  “Why does it have to be settling? Why can’t it be making a choice of one thing you want over something else you want? Or, better yet, finding a way to have them both.”

  Pulling the cushions off the sofa with more force than was probably necessary, Gigi probed the cracks and found the usual gnarly assortment of crumbs, old food, wrappers, coins and other garbage. “That’s not the way it works in my family.”

  “So be the black sheep and do your own thing.”

  “Been there, done that.” Gigi flicked at her earrings and hair.

  “Those are little things.”

  “The job isn’t.”

  “Maybe, but you’re still doing the ‘got to be the best’ thing they’re so into.” Alyssa shifted, wincing.

  Gigi’s instincts flared. “You’re not in labor, are you?”

  “God, no. I’d be screaming my head off. And don’t change the subject.”

  “Do you swear you’re not in labor?”

  “I swear. Seriously. Now let’s move on.”

  Gigi felt her way along the back of the sofa, where things sometimes got wedged and forgotten. “Look, I know my family is whacked-out, okay? In a good way, maybe, but whacked-out nonetheless. I know there’s no law that says I have to be in the top whatever percentile of the universe…but what if I want to be? My parents gave me all these great opportunities, so why not use them to shoot for the moon? I want to be on a hazardous response team. I want the adrenaline rush. I want to save lives and be an über-cop, not just date one.” Love one. Marry one and spend the rest of her life waking up as she had that morning, wrapped up in him and pleasantly satiated from their lovemaking. Maybe even riding herd on a couple of green-eyed—

  Whoa, back up. Getting in way too deep there. She could feel the urgency building, the need to see him again, even though he and Tucker were just outside.

  “An über-cop?” Alyssa’s voice was amused.

  “Oh, shut up. You know what I mean. I’ve got goals that are mine, not my family’s, and I don’t want to give them up.”

  “Has he asked you to?”

  “Not yet.” But he would. If things went any further between them, she would eventually have to decide between him and the job. She knew that deep down in her soul. “Right now, I’m more the problem than he is. I’ve got this thing going on inside me that I don’t like. At all. When I’m not with him, I’m thinking about him, obsessing over him, both the good stuff and the bad.” Even saying it aloud made her feel shaky and weak. “Then when I am with him, I go back and forth between wanting to tear his clothes off with my teeth, and wanting to slap at him because I hate feeling this way and it’s his fault. Only it isn’t. It’s mine.”

  “Oh, Gigi. Honey.”

  She wound down, breathing hard, and realized she was crouched over the sofa, glaring into its sprung interior like a madwoman. Looking up, she found Alyssa watching her, wide-eyed. “See? He’s making me crazy. Strike that. I’m making myself crazy over him.” She pushed to her feet, wanting to pace, but not letting herself because she had a job to do, damn it.

  “Gigi—”

  “I hate this. I must look completely—” Insane, she started to say, but then broke off as she flashed on the prior morning, when Matt had yelled at Ian over the mayor’s shenanigans…and looked completely insane doing it. “Oh, for crap’s sake.” She started laughing helplessly, almost hysterically as she realized she was doing the same damn thing—yelling at a friend because she couldn’t deal with the amount of emotion he could pull from her. “You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re like fertilizer and fuel, functional on our own, but put us together and pow, stuff gets blown up.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I know. It’s okay, really. I’m not losing it.” She took a deep breath. “I’m just figuring a few things out.” She put the sofa cushions back, then stood in the center of the room and did a careful three-sixty turn, looking for anything else that pinged on her radar screen, even if this particular scene might just be about going through the motions.

  “A few things,” Alyssa repeated. “Like the fact that you two are good for each other.”

  “Ha-ha. Try that one again. More like we set each other off, and… Well, what have we got here?” Her instincts suddenly kicked hard and she went on point. “Does that look like blood to you over there on the doorframe? Looks like blood to me.”

  The rusty smear hadn’t been immediately obvious because the rest of the place was pretty filthy, but when she looked at it from exactly the right angle, there was a handprint pattern to the grime on the doorframe leading to the bathroom.

  Senses humming, she approached the spot, ignoring the funky smell coming from the room beyond.

  Alyssa came up behind her. “Looks pretty new.”

  The blood was dry and rusty, but the imprint was crisp, unsmudged by later traffic.

  “Could’ve been from yesterday,” Gigi agreed. “Maybe from the guy Matt shot, or someone who tried to stop the bleeding.” Which not only suggested the men had been in the apartment very recently, it made the bathroom the next obvious place to search.

  She took pictures of the handprint and then lifted it and took a couple of DNA swabs. She handed off the evidence for Alyssa to bag and tag while she kept going, her pulse drumming a little with the high that came from being on the verge of finding a piece to add to the puzzle.

  The bathroom itself was small and scuzzy, an abstract study in cracked porcelain and rodent droppings. It, too, had been stripped of its personal items, but the trash basket held a few scraps of wax-coated paper at the bottom. “Looks like someone did some first aid in here.”

  “More blood?”

  “Pieces of bandage wrappers. There’s no obvious blood—given how good they were about picking up after themselves elsewhere, they probably bleached it to nuke the DNA.” But that was okay, she had the handprint. She should be able to lift enough DNA from it to give Cassie something to work with.

  After taking more photos, she picked up the trash basket and shook it to move the bandage wrappers around and see if there was anything more interesting beneath.

  A piece of paper unstuck itself from the bottom of the can and fluttered to the floor.

  “Hello.” There went her instincts again.

  Alyssa poked her head in. “Got something?”

  “Maybe.” Gigi took some photos and made a couple of notes, tightening up her chain of evidence in case the scrap of paper turned out to be something useful. Then she reached down and picked it up, handling it as carefully as she could.

  For a second, disappointment threatened when she saw that it was just another bandage wrapper, this one mostly intact. But then she saw the bloody thumbprint on one edge and writing on the other side, and adrenaline sizzled through her. “It’s a note. Numbers. Letters. And a date and time.” She looked up, blood draining from her face. “Whatever it is, it’s happening in less than two hours.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Matt took one look at the note Gigi had spread out on a rickety desk and said, “The middle numbers are GPS coordinates.” At Gigi’s frown, he added, “It’s a military notation scheme, not civilian.”

  “Alex MacDonald was in the National Guard,” Alyssa put in.

  He caught Gigi’s quick glance, but got busy pul
ling out his phone and keying the sequence into the GPS feature. “Who do you have that’s good at codes?” The number-letter sequences almost made sense, but not really.

  She photographed the scrap of paper. “I’ll send it to a friend, see if she has any suggestions.”

  “If you’re cool with it, you could hit up Ian, too. He’s good at puzzles.” At her nod, he rattled off the number. His GPS was taking forever. “Come on, you bugger. Load already.”

  “Yeah,” Tucker put in drily, “Talking to it always helps.” He stood a few paces away with Alyssa, who was propped up against the sofa and looked more than a little pasty. Tucker, too, was pretty drawn all of a sudden.

  “Everything okay?”

  “I’d be lots better if people stopped asking me if I’m okay,” Alyssa snapped, then closed her eyes and shook her head. “Sorry. Crabby.”

  “You’ve earned it, I’d say.” But he caught Gigi’s worried look, and his gut churned slowly at the realization that as a team, they were batting a thousand on the distraction factors. “Look, if you two want to head out—” His phone rang, interrupting. He glared at the stalled GPS transfer and stabbed the button to answer. “Blackthorn here.”

  “We got MacDonald,” Jack said, satisfaction plain in his voice. “Idiot ran his truck off the road heading up into the backcountry.”

  “Hang on,” Matt said. “I’m putting you on speaker. Go ahead.”

  “One of the search parties found him and sat on him until I got here. He’s light-headed from blood loss and a fever, and he’s singing like a freaking canary. That’s the good news. The bad news is what he’s telling us: apparently he and a half dozen other local thugs, along with some out-of-town muscle, have been keeping those fires down at Sectors Five and Six going in order to tie up air support and keep the rangers focused downhill. The break-ins were theirs, too—partly for entertainment and profit, partly to mix things up and, again, to keep attention off other parts of the park.”

  Matt’s blood iced with fury at MacDonald and the others—and whoever was controlling them. They’d destroyed thousands of acres and caused numerous casualties for nothing more than distraction.