by Rachel Grant
The man of her fantasies is finally hers. Sort of…
* * *
Two things haunt forensic anthropologist Hazel MacLeod: the bones of victims of genocide she examines for her work, and former SEAL Sean Logan’s rejection. But within days of moving to her cousin’s estate to take a much needed break, she finds herself faced with both.
* * *
First, she’s called in to examine a mass grave in Virginia, then, her politician cousin receives a threatening letter and insists Hazel needs around the clock protection—from none other than Sean Logan. To make matters worse, because the threat to her is classified, Hazel and Sean must pretend to be lovers to hide that he’s her bodyguard.
* * *
Sean has spent years trying to avoid his boss’s sexy cousin, but now he’s guarding her twenty-four/seven and even bringing her as his date to a romantic destination wedding. As the heat between them intensifies, Sean can’t lose sight of the danger that brought them together. But when bullets start flying, new questions arise. Are the senator’s political rivals really behind the threat, or is someone trying to silence Hazel from speaking for the dead?
Contents
Books By Rachel Grant
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Tinderbox Excerpt
Rachel Grant’s Flashpoint Series
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books By Rachel Grant
Flashpoint Series
Tinderbox (#1)
Catalyst (#2)
Firestorm (#3)
* * *
Evidence Series
Concrete Evidence (#1)
Body of Evidence (#2)
Withholding Evidence (#3)
Incriminating Evidence (#4)
Covert Evidence (#5)
Cold Evidence (#6)
Poison Evidence (#7)
Silent Evidence (#8)
* * *
Evidence Series Box Set Volume 1: Books 1-3
Evidence Series Box Set Volume 2: Books 4-6
* * *
Romantic Mystery
Grave Danger
* * *
Paranormal Romance
Midnight Sun
This one is for Toni Anderson.
* * *
Fabulous author and dear friend. I thank the universe every day for the gift of your friendship. Thank you for being the kind of person who makes the world a better place. Even my books will take a bullet for you.
1
Virginia
October
* * *
The lake, surrounded by the bright, vibrant colors of fall, would be beautiful if it were still a lake and not a boggy nightmare, a forest of long-dead tree stumps erupting from acres of mud. But Anderson Lake wasn’t a real lake, and thanks to a twelve-foot drawdown, it was now not even a fake one. Once upon a time, this had been a river valley, then the hydroelectric fairy came along and transformed it into a reservoir. Now a crack in the dam required the deep drawdown for repairs.
The four-foot-tall tree stumps made it possible for Hazel MacLeod to envision the extent of the woods along the river thirty years ago, before the dam was built. A glimpse back in time to the valley this had been.
Hazel had visited this reservoir several times in the five years her cousin’s company had owned property that abutted the water, but seeing it during drawdown was vastly different from the serene lake when the reservoir was full. She turned her gaze to the north end of the muddy lake bed with its tree-ghost forest and tried to guess where Raptor land started and stopped. She’d never been on this eastern edge of the reservoir; it wouldn’t look familiar to her even if the lake were at normal capacity.
She knew she was in the right spot because she’d spotted Isabel’s blue Prius and the sheriff’s SUV in the line of cars, and she’d had no trouble finding the path through the woods Isabel had indicated. She’d been told it was important she enter from the utility company’s access point because the adjacent property owner would not allow egress across their land. The landowner feared Isabel would find and record an archaeological site that could put restrictions on land use.
The objections had been so vehement, the owner had delayed the survey for days as lawyers sorted out what the property line and easement was between utility reservoir and landowner.
Now Isabel was up against the wall to get the survey done before the lake was refilled, and she’d called Hazel in a state of panic, needing her particular expertise at the lake immediately. Hazel had done the only thing she could and grabbed her backpack with field equipment and borrowed the Range Rover from Alec’s fleet of vehicles to drive an hour from Gaithersburg to northwestern Virginia and the muddy shores of Anderson Lake.
According to Isabel, she needed to follow the lakeside path south for a half mile, where she would spot Isabel and her crew documenting the find that had her so alarmed. The path, being well above the usual level of the lake, was hard, dry, red Virginia clay and easy to follow as it cut through trees or skirted the high water shoreline. At last, Hazel rounded a bend and spotted her cousin’s wife, Isabel Dawson, along with the county sheriff, a deputy, and five other men and women. Three were Isabel’s field crew, while the remaining two wore coveralls that labeled them as utility workers.
Isabel shoved her phone in her pocket and smiled broadly when she spotted Hazel. She waved her over, yelling, “Thank you for getting here so quickly! You’re a godsend.” She turned to the others when Hazel reached the group. “This is Dr. Hazel MacLeod, forensic anthropologist.”
Hazel passed her credentials to the sheriff to verify her expertise.
“You work for Talon & Drake, the engineering firm that was contracted to fix the dam, Miss MacLeod?” he asked.
“Dr. MacLeod,” she corrected to establish that if he didn’t like her initial assessment of the bones, his opinion didn’t matter. She was the expert here. “I’m a consultant. I’ve worked with Talon & Drake in the past when human remains were found during construction and they needed an estimate of the age of the skeletons to determine if they were archaeological, historic, or recent.”
“And that’s what you’re supposed to do here?” the sheriff asked, his tone skeptical.
“It’s why Dr. Dawson called me, yes,” she said, using Isabel’s degree as well for the same reason. Isabel had warned Hazel when she called that the sheriff was eager to write off this find as a prehistoric burial ground and move on. He’d been irritated at Isabel’s insistence on calling Hazel in to examine the bones.
Which was a pretty major red flag in her line of work.
Usually, sheriffs were more worried on the other side of the equation, fearing bones of crime victims might be released to tribes under the Native American Graves Protection and Re
patriation Act, preventing further investigation into a homicide. In her experience, it was a rare law enforcement officer who was quick to write off a find that included human remains. Especially when there were no artifacts present, as Isabel had indicated on the phone. But then, there was a strong likelihood—given the number of skeletons involved—this could be a slave burial ground, which brought different issues all around, but that wouldn’t be the sheriff’s problem either.
Hazel had scheduled her second appointment with her psychotherapist for this afternoon, but the urgency in Isabel’s tone as she expressed her concerns about the sheriff had convinced her to reschedule. She turned to Isabel. “Shall we get started?”
Isabel looked at her feet. “Do you have rubber boots?”
She shook her head. She hadn’t purchased a new pair since returning from a five-month assignment in Croatia a week ago. She hadn’t expected to go into the field so soon. She had enough money saved to take time off from work—a mental break she needed after spending months identifying victims of genocide in the Balkans—and had been lucky to find her old field kit stocked and ready to go after Isabel’s frantic call. “I’ll sacrifice these shoes to the cause,” she said, referring to the worn running shoes that were about to get filled with red clay mud.
She followed Isabel into the muck and mud that defined the high water level of the reservoir. Isabel’s employer, Talon & Drake, was the contractor hired to repair the dam. Knowing archaeological sites would be exposed when the artificial lake was lowered, Isabel, the Bethesda office’s lead archaeologist, had been tasked with documenting changes to the old village sites that would be exposed. It was a pretty standard project. The bones had been an unexpected discovery.
Isabel and her crew had been in the field since last Wednesday—working through the weekend because the repairs were nearly complete and refilling the lake would begin on Friday. Their job was to photograph and measure prehistoric features and survey the stump forest to record new sites exposed after thirty years of inundation. During today’s survey, the team came across a pile of bones in the water, just beyond the drawdown zone. Following the management plan agreed to by the utility company, Talon & Drake, and the State Historic Preservation Office, Isabel had notified all parties to the agreement along with the local sheriff’s office, as these remains had never been documented as being part of a previously recorded archaeological site.
If the bones were prehistoric, they would be left in situ, remaining where they’d rested for hundreds or thousands of years without disturbance, as intended at the time of their burial. But if Isabel’s crew had found an historic slave burial ground, it could be argued that they should be examined. Documented. Reburied in a place where their descendants could visit and honor them. They could be counted and acknowledged in death in a way they hadn’t been in life.
The bones could give voice to a past that many tried to erase.
Hazel wasn’t a fan of unnecessarily disturbing the remains of the deceased, but sometimes, as with her work for the International Commission on Missing Persons in the Balkans, disturbing remains was the only way to acknowledge victims of genocide. To be counted.
There was no way she’d give these bones the cursory once-over the sheriff wanted.
Her feet sank into the thick, saturated silt. The clay grabbed her submerged shoe and held on. Her foot popped free, leaving the sneaker behind. She grimaced and grabbed the shoe, tossing it along with her sock to the shore before removing her other shoe and sock, tossing them as well.
“Sorry,” Isabel said. “You gonna be okay barefoot?”
She shrugged. “I’ll have to be.” She could do a preliminary examination today, then decide if she needed to come back tomorrow with better footwear. The water was cool, but not achingly so on the early October afternoon. She followed Isabel, stepping carefully to avoid cutting her feet on buried rocks or tree roots as they wound through the eerie dead forest in which all the stumps were chest-high.
The sheriff, deputy, and utility workers remained on shore. Isabel’s field-workers, one young woman and two young men, accompanied them, the woman pointing to the pin flags protruding from the water, marking the first bones they’d spotted, several meters from the bulk of the remains.
At last they reached the bones that were the reason Hazel had dropped everything and made a mad dash to the reservoir. A fine layer of orange silt covered the bones, obscuring them at first, disguising them as sticks, branches of the stump forest. But Hazel knew those curves and lines. They weren’t the irregular shape of tree limbs. They were human limbs. Condyles, sockets, curved ribs. The shapes were so familiar. And among them, she spotted a bony brow ridge, empty eye sockets, and a wide nasal aperture.
Like spotting fish underwater, once she spotted one cranium, her vision adjusted to take in the whole school. She scanned the water for meters in every direction. Skulls and long bones. Ribs and scapulae. Pelvic bones and vertebrae. Thousands of bones. Two dozen or more individuals, from the looks of it.
Just like Bosnia. Just like Croatia. Just like Rwanda and Darfur. A mass grave.
Sean Logan spotted Isabel’s Prius in the line of cars that included a sheriff’s SUV. He pulled out his cell phone and called his boss. Well, sort of his boss. Alec Ravissant owned Raptor, but since he’d been elected to the US Senate, he’d handed over management of the company to Keith Hatcher, Sean’s official boss.
But today, Rav had called the office and asked Sean to drive out to Isabel’s project area, which was near Raptor’s auxiliary wilderness training area, to pick up his wife and bring her home. An odd request considering he’d also asked Sean to bring Chase Johnston to the reservoir so he could drive Isabel’s perfectly fine car back to Gaithersburg.
Even stranger, Rav had told Sean to look out for anything suspicious at the reservoir and be on guard, but not to share that detail with anyone, not even Chase or Isabel.
He’d offered no explanation as to why he was sending Sean on this errand, nor had he said anything about a sheriff being at Isabel’s job site…which could qualify as suspicious. “Rav,” Sean said into the phone. “We’re here. Does Isabel know to expect us?”
“No,” his boss said. “She said there was some sort of issue at the site and she’d call me back. She was in a hurry to get me off the phone, so I’ve been not very patiently waiting for her to call as promised.”
“Issue?” Sean asked, looking at the bar of lights on the sheriff’s SUV. “Did you know the county sheriff is here?”
“What?” Rav cursed. But it wasn’t an angry sort of sound. Sean recognized the ring of fear. He climbed out of his Raptor-issued SUV, one of the many perks of his job. “I’ll find Isabel and call you back,” Sean said.
“Tell Isabel to call me. Now.”
“Sure thing.” He hung up and tucked the phone away. To Chase, he said, “Let’s go.”
“Rav’s worried?” the kid asked. Chase wasn’t really a kid…but he looked like he was about fifteen. Combine that with the eager, gung-ho enthusiasm of a boy who’d never served in the military, never seen combat, and Sean couldn’t help but think of him as a kid, even though he knew the young man had been more than tested a few years ago.
“Yeah. Isabel said something about an issue at the site without explaining. The sheriff’s vehicle is worrisome.”
The kid frowned. “Should we draw our weapons?”
Sean shook his head. Chase, with his pale white skin, lived a life with fewer concerns than Sean ever could.
“As a Black man, it’s unwise for me to approach a police officer with gun drawn, even if they know to expect me. This guy has no idea we’re here.”
Chase flushed bright red. “Right. Sorry.”
Sean patted him on the back as they started down the path. “Just a fact of life. Frankly, it’s not good for you to approach weapon drawn either, but you stand a better chance of surviving the encounter than I do.”
They hurried down the path, not bothering to be silent. Sea
n had no wish to startle anyone at the other end. Relief settled in when he rounded a bend and the reservoir came into view. But there was no sign of Isabel or her crew. He glanced to the north and south, taking in the exposed lake bed with stunted trees seeing sunlight for the first time in at least thirty years. He’d run scuba trainings in this lake, he’d seen the stumps underwater, but still, this was nothing like the Anderson Lake he was used to.
He spotted the path to the south that cut through the living forest. Fresh footprints told him that was the route to Isabel. After a quick half-mile walk between forest and lake, he caught sight of Isabel with her bright orange curls, wading in the water amidst the stump forest with four other people.
The sheriff and a deputy stood on dry land with two men who appeared to be from the utility company. Whatever the emergency was, no one appeared to be agitated. He wanted to call Rav to give him the heads-up, but the boss was more interested in speaking to his wife, so he sent a quick text: Eyes on Isabel. She’s fine. Will have her call you after we speak. SL5X
