Undercover Hunter

by Rachel Lee

  “Does it make any difference?” she asked.

  “Only when it starts to melt over large areas. Ten inches would only cause light flooding. Even two feet over a large enough area could swamp some places if it melts fast enough. But for now the problems are the same, ten inches or ten feet, we’re snowed in.”

  “I’m honestly surprised we didn’t lose power.”

  “Me, too. We lost just about everything else, though.”

  Including email. She was impatient to see what Lew had sent them, but there was no way to get to it. She wanted to talk to Gage, and to Craig Stone, but she couldn’t imagine that either of them had a magic carpet to bring them here. They were definitely on hold.

  She wondered if she should go through the files again, then decided against it. Cade’s nearness at once aroused and troubled her. She felt relief when he left her side to return to the couch, a relief that was tinged with disappointment. Caution lights flared in her brain, but the rest of her didn’t seem to want to listen.

  Maybe she was having some kind of reaction to all the years she’d refused to dip her toes into a possible relationship. She’d buried a part of herself because it just wouldn’t fit safely in her career. Oh, some managed it, but she hadn’t even been willing to try. Nothing more miserable than having to see a guy every single day when you’d just broken up. It could create other kinds of problems, too.

  She had dated, well outside her unit, but had always broken it off because she was wary and uneasy. She couldn’t say exactly why, unless maybe it was that rape so long ago, but she found it hard to trust that any relationship would endure. Especially when life had sent her all over the world.

  Now she’d gone and done the very worst thing: she’d had sex with her partner. Great sex. The kind she would call lovemaking. But where did that leave them now? Confined to a house together, with a difficult, haunting case to work on, and trying to ignore the fact that they’d crossed the lines?

  Cade seemed to be fairly comfortable but how would she know? Neither of them mentioned last night. It might as well have been erased.

  Except that she couldn’t erase the memory, or her tingling awareness of him. Couldn’t wipe away a hunger to tumble back into bed with him. The only way to live with that was to pretend it didn’t exist even as the memories dogged her. Maybe that’s what he was doing. Or maybe it had been utterly meaningless to him.

  She half hoped it had been, because it would be easier to pretend she felt nothing if he was unaffected. All they had done, really, was scratch an itch. Now they could move on.

  She wished like hell she believed that.

  All of a sudden, movement caught her eye. Leaning forward, she saw a man coming down the street, skimming along the top of the snow on cross-country skis. He was covered from head to toe in winter gear and seemed to be wearing a backpack.

  “Well, will you look at that,” she said.

  Cade rose and joined her. She felt his laugh before it reached his lips. “Doggone, talk about prepared.”

  “It never would have occurred to me!”

  “If I’d been home, it would have crossed my mind, but they didn’t issue us skis for this job.”

  DeeJay started to smile as she watched the man glide down the street. He was using the traditional Nordic style, long strides that were much like walking except for the glide that carried him forward even farther.

  “I prefer that stride,” Cade remarked. “The stuff athletes do these days that looks more like speed skating? Not a fun way to ski cross-country.”

  “This looks like something you could do almost all day long.”

  “Exactly.”

  Much to her surprise, the skier paused before their house, then began to glide toward their porch. “What the...?”

  When he reached the porch, he bent to release his bindings and leaned his poles against the rail. Clearly, he had meant to come here.

  “I’ll get it,” Cade said. “If you don’t mind.”

  She didn’t mind, but she followed him anyway, curious.

  Cade opened the door to the icy day, and DeeJay peered around to see a tall man with gray eyes smiling at them. “Craig Stone,” he said. “Special delivery.”

  * * *

  They gathered at the kitchen table after Craig dumped most of his outerwear. He brought the backpack with him and answered DeeJay’s question.

  “Well, two things brought me this way. I got back into town late yesterday afternoon and I got a curious call from Gage Dalton. It left me feeling like I needed to get these maps to you as soon as possible. Then my wife, Sky, got to craving some chocolate. She’s pregnant and from what I can tell these cravings are pretty strong. I found out the convenience store over this way is sort of open, but of course she didn’t want me to come out just to get her chocolate. So when I told her Gage wanted me to see you two as soon as possible...” His eyes danced. “Two birds with one stone. Me.”

  DeeJay and Cade both laughed. Charming man, DeeJay thought. She brought him coffee, which he accepted gratefully, and asked if he was hungry. She was sure she could find something easy enough for him to cover her lack of skill.

  “Not at all hungry,” he answered. “I’ll probably pig out on chocolate along with Sky when I get home, though. So you wanted to see trail maps and contour maps.” He leaned over and pulled a stack of folded printed maps from his backpack and laid them on the table. “Anything special?” His gaze was curious. “I’m thinking you’re not just looking for touristy reasons, not if Gage thought it was important.”

  Cade and DeeJay shared a look and reached agreement silently. Both stuck their hands into their hip pockets and pulled out their badge cases. They opened them on the table in front of Craig.

  “This is about the boys, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Cade answered. “Gage said you’re law enforcement.”

  “In the forest, anyway. Also a biologist. I can tell you which hat I prefer.” He leaned back, lifted his coffee, sipped and then sighed. “All right then. How can I help?”

  DeeJay leaned forward. “We need to know how the perp got to the site where he hung the bodies last time. It’s not in the reports, and you know the country.”

  “About as well as anyone,” he agreed. “Nobody asked me that before. Curious. Or maybe not. They found the scene so long after it all happened.” He straightened, put down his cup and began to sort through maps. “We’ve been looking for the boys, you know. None of us can get what happened last time out of our heads, so we’re looking to see if he’s stashing bodies in the forest again. Nothing so far.”

  He pulled out one map, moved the stack to the side and unfolded the one he’d chosen.

  “Did you get all your hikers safely out yesterday?” DeeJay asked.

  He looked up from the map and smiled faintly. “We did. Those that wanted to ride it out are hunkered down in cabins we have here and there. Weren’t that many. Great skiing now, though, not to mention avalanche risk. I guess we just have to hope they aren’t too foolhardy.”

  He pulled a mechanical pencil out of his breast pocket and pointed to a spot on the map. “This is where the guy hung the kids last time. Pretty dense forest, lots of rocks, lots of undergrowth. Not the kind of place some hiker might come on casually.” He looked up, meeting their gazes. “Not an easy place to get to with a body.”

  “ATV?” Cade asked.

  “Possible, but it wouldn’t be a straight line. What are you hoping for?”

  “A direction he might have come from.”

  Craig nodded and looked down at the map. “Considering we allow ATVs only on designated trails, he’d have been running a real risk coming that way.”

  “He’s a risk taker,” DeeJay said. “He wouldn’t be operating here again otherwise.”

  “I figured that. Well,
I’ll be honest. There’s no real trail in that area, not close by anyway. And these maps don’t say much about what’s growing there, where the boulders are and so on. You’re going to be relying a lot on my memory here, unless you want me to go out there and ride over it. And if he came up over the property that the resort just brought...well, that’s private and never been my headache. After all they’ve done out there to put in the slopes and build roads, it would be pretty much impossible to tell anything now.”

  Cade leaned closer. “So he could have come across the private property, then into the forest land?”

  Craig nodded. “It would be my guess he did exactly that. Less chance of running into me or one of the other rangers, who’d have given him hell for driving off a designated trail. Nobody would think twice about him doing that on basically abandoned private property.”

  DeeJay looked at the map. She was reasonably good at reading them—it had been part of her early training—but as a military cop she hadn’t often needed to rely on terrain maps. “There was a way to get up there on the private property?”

  “Most likely.” He drew a finger down the map south of the forest boundary. “Lots of people have bought that land and sold it over the years, all of them with ideas for some kind of resort. None of them ever came to fruition until this last group. Luke Masters could probably tell you better than anyone what kind of access there was before the build started. I’m sure there was some. Maybe enough to get a pickup truck at least part of the way. Then an ATV? I don’t know. It’s pretty rugged out that way, but you’d either have to hoof it or use an ATV to get up that far. I’d bet on it.”

  He pulled out a different map. As he spread it, DeeJay could clearly see it was a road map. “Here’s another part of your problem. At the bottom of the resort property, you have a couple of county roads spreading out, as well as the one that goes directly to town. I don’t think you’re going to get much help from direction, not unless there’s some evidence somewhere that he came from a different direction and came through the forest. I sure haven’t heard it.”

  “Neither have we,” said Cade. “For whatever reason, the age of the site, or just not thinking about it, nobody seemed to show any official interest in how he might have gotten there.”

  “Probably the age of the site,” DeeJay said, looking at Cade.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Three years after the last boy disappeared means a lot of rain, a lot of winter, a lot of new growth and probably a million ways his tracks wouldn’t be clear.”

  * * *

  Craig left them with some maps, promising to keep thinking about access to the scene. DeeJay watched him ski off down the street. She thought she might have heard the rumble of a heavy engine, but if so it was faraway. A plow probably wouldn’t reach them soon. She figured this storm had taxed the county hard.

  “Dead end,” she heard Cade say.

  She turned to him. “So it seems.”

  He arched his brow. “You don’t agree?”

  “I’m not sure.” She returned her gaze to the snow-buried world outside. It seemed safer than looking at Cade right now. Crossing the line last night had been bad enough, but now every time she looked at him she felt a jolt of sexual awareness that bordered on serious arousal. One night wasn’t going to be enough. She wished she knew if he felt the same. If she had any wiles, she’d long since forgotten them, so she had no idea how to find out.

  “Oh, well,” she said, forcing herself to turn from the window and face all the messes from the killer to blurred professional lines. “We knew when we went out there that we were looking at a Herculean task to get those bodies up there. Nothing’s really changed. I hate to think Craig came out in this just to tell us that we’re not going to find a Day-Glo arrow to the killer’s point of origin.”

  “We have to try everything. You know that. Anyway, he was clearly looking for a good excuse to get his wife chocolate.”

  She had to laugh. “That was cute.”

  “And probably true.” He paused, then said, “If I don’t get some exercise, I’m apt to start climbing walls. Care to join me in some shoveling?”

  She hesitated. “What about the phone? And do we have a shovel?”

  “I’ll call Gage and tell him we’ll be outside. He won’t get here soon anyway. There’s a storage shed just back of the house. Maybe there are some shovels in there.”

  “I’ll shovel with my hands if I need to. Better than chewing nails.”

  * * *

  Apparently a lot of other people had the same idea. An hour later the neighborhood had become a kind of beehive of shared work. Those with snowblowers were cheerfully clearing all the sidewalks. Other residents helped each other with porches and buried cars. DeeJay and Cade met a lot of people in a short time, and everyone wanted to know their impressions of the locality.

  It was kind of like meeting a friendly PR committee. When they took breaks, it was an excuse to cluster and chat, and coffee and tea were coming out of all the houses in a stream. Share and share alike. DeeJay approved of this neighborhood.

  At some point everyone seemed to decide that DeeJay and Cade weren’t there to do a hatchet job on the town, and conversation turned to the missing boys.

  “It was bad enough that we went through this once and never caught the creep,” said a woman about DeeJay’s age. She held a cup of tea beneath her face, and every time she spoke a cloud of steam emerged. Small, she seemed almost pixielike. “I’ve got a boy myself and I won’t let him out alone anymore. I’ve had to become a guard dog, and that’s not good for either of us. Lots of parents are feeling the same way. And the families whose boys have disappeared...” She looked away and just shook her head. “I’d go out of my mind.”

  DeeJay nodded her agreement, staring down the street, which looked a bit odd at the moment with so much of the sidewalks, driveway, porches and cars cleared while the street between remained buried in snow.

  She’d been resolved from the outset, but her resolve was hardening. If she could turn herself into bait, she would. The only problem was figuring out how, and she needed to see photos of the female victims to know if she resembled them at all. If she did...

  Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it?

  The distant rumbling she’d been hearing for a while suddenly became loud. Heads swung around to see a big yellow plow turn onto the street.

  “About time,” someone said. The party mood had vanished the instant the subject of the missing boys had come up. Apparently, fear and horror didn’t leave these people alone for long.

  “Might as well get inside and warm up,” a man said. “We’re going to have a lot more shoveling to do when he gets done.”

  Nods and goodbyes were passed around, then DeeJay and Cade joined the exodus, heading back into their house.

  The phone rang just as they were shedding their outerwear. DeeJay answered to hear Gage.

  “Had to move heaven and earth, but your street should be clear soon.”

  “It’s getting done right now.”

  “Give me about twenty, then. I’ll come over.”

  * * *

  He had fixated on the woman. Calvin knew it and quit making excuses. He ran the plow attached to the front of his pickup up and down his drive, even though the county plows probably wouldn’t reach his road until tomorrow. He’d grown up here and didn’t expect the impossible to happen.

  But clearing his long drive gave him an excuse to clear a route to the barn, if anyone happened to notice, not that anyone was out and about. An excess of caution. Besides, from time to time he heard the helicopter for the emergency rescue team fly by. Not exactly overhead, but he didn’t want to stand out in anyone’s mind.

  The woman. DeeJay, someone at the diner had said when he’d asked who she was. Odd name for a woman. It sounded more like a man.

 
But he wasn’t really thinking about her name. He was thinking about her, about the way she seemed to glow in his mind’s eye. He recognized that aura and knew what it meant. He’d settled on her. He had to take her.

  Back inside for a break, drinking hot cocoa made with the instant mix—his mother would not have approved, but the small act of defiance pleased him in some way—he looked at his mother’s photo. It sat in a small frame along with other family photos, on a piece of furniture his mother had called a lowboy. To him it was just a table with drawers.

  He picked up the photo, staring at it, wondering if her eyes had really been as dark as they appeared in the photo. He couldn’t recall them now, except flashes from the moments when she had been cleansing him, and then they had indeed appeared black as night.

  A thin woman, with a severe face and a will of iron. Sometimes when he thought about her, he could understand why his dad had killed himself. Other times, he thought his dad was a rat for abandoning his wife and child.

  But the woman, DeeJay, had those dark eyes. Short hair, like his mother, who had called hair a vanity and often took her shears to both of them. Kate Sweet had been tall, too, like DeeJay, as if life had stretched her out in some way, making her all lean angles. She had towered over him for most of his life. He hadn’t equaled her in height until he was almost eighteen.

  Taking a woman would change his pattern, cover himself, but it didn’t quite answer the questions that loomed in his mind each time this happened. Maybe it was like the time he had finally turned on his mother and whipped her with his belt until she left him alone. Maybe he hadn’t felt his mother was pure enough to be cleansing him. It was possible. Certainly the two other women he’d fixated on hadn’t been pure, had probably been past purification.

  He set down the photo and told himself to stop wondering. He was the person she had made him to be, a man with a mission. Whatever went on inside him that he occasionally needed to take a woman like her—well, she had made him. Maybe this was part of what she wanted, too.