Bear Claw Conspiracy

She had a feeling she would be better to have him a little off balance around her, not vice versa.

When she was halfway down the incline, he called, “Hey. Gigi.”

He gave it the softer pronunciation, as though they were in Paris rather than the middle of nowhere.

She turned back and found him backlit by the afternoon sun, a solitary figure on the ridgeline. She had to clear her throat before she said, “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I was a jerk to you back in the city. You’re okay.”

“Be still my heart.” But she grinned when she said it. “And my name is Gigi,” she corrected, giving it the harder sound. “It’s short for Greta Grace, so you don’t need to get fancy with it. Or with me.”

He didn’t say anything, just gave her a slow nod, but she felt his eyes follow her the rest of the way down.

Then she tuned him out and got to work.

The next ninety minutes were a focused blur of photographs, sample bags and jars, and a whole lot of frustration at the lack of what she thought of as “big foam finger evidence”—the kind that pointed straight to an answer, or at least a new set of questions.

Granted, that was the exception rather than the norm, but still, she had been hoping for a quick break in the case.

By the time the sun dipped behind the mountains and the sky went pink around the edges, she was finishing up her preliminary round of collection. She locked her kit, and hauled its now considerable weight back up the ridgeline, where Blackthorn stood guard, silhouetted against the dusk.

He gave her a long, unreadable look. “All set?”

“With the first step, anyway. Now it’s time for me to put in some serious lab hours.”

He took the case from her without asking, his fingers brushing against hers. “But you’re not hopeful.”

“I’m always hopeful,” she corrected, telling herself it was impossible to get a whole-body tingle from that small contact. “But in this case, I’m not very optimistic. I didn’t see anything I could link straight to Tanya’s attackers. Between that and the beating her radio took, it was like she was dropped …” She trailed off, sudden excitement sparking. “Wait a second. Let me see your radio.”

He unclipped it from his belt and handed it over. “Bert can hook you up if you need a patch-through back to the lab or something.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

She took the sturdy unit, which, aside from being bright yellow rather than matte black, was very like the ones used by the HRTs back home, with long-range capabilities, GPS, a digital display … and a hinged faceplate that usually broke off within the first few weeks of use. It was the one design flaw in an otherwise solid piece of equipment.

Blackthorn’s still had its faceplate in place, though, and had a couple of upgrades she hadn’t seen before. “Is this new?” she asked.

“They arrived last week.”

Damn it, she had assumed Tanya’s faceplate was long gone—and because she had made an assumption, she almost missed the evidence … or lack thereof. “Do all of your rangers carry the same model?”

“Yeah, they’re interchangeable. We just grab one off the charger in my office. Why?”

She looked up at him, pulse kicking. “Did hers still have its faceplate when she left this morning?”

He thought for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure it did.” He looked back down to the scene, making the connection. “It could’ve bounced pretty far. Even given that some of her injuries came from an attack, she still hit hard when she fell.”

“Or we were meant to think she did.”

He went very still, eyes darkening as he slowly looked down, then back at her. “Damn. I saw it.”

“The faceplate?”

He shook his head. “No, that there was a problem with the way she and the radio had fallen.” His expression went distant as he replayed the scene in his head. “She was lying flat on her back, kind of sprawled, with the radio a few feet away. There weren’t any impact marks … but there was a smoothed-flat place.” He refocused, met her eyes. “Like someone had been there, swept his tracks, and then tossed the radio down after the fact.”

“All we’re going to have on that is your statement,” she cautioned, “and my not finding the faceplate doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there. I can’t use a negative to prove a positive.” But they were onto something. She was sure of it. “We’re going to need more.”

His expression firmed. “Then we’ll find it.” He paused. “You think this is a secondary scene. A dump site.”

She nodded. “That’s how it reads to me. And it’s consistent with her Jeep not being right in this area.” The vehicle’s GPS wasn’t registering and it hadn’t been sighted along what should have been Tanya’s morning route, either.

“So we have another crime scene to find.”

With another man she might’ve told him to stay out of the way and let the cops do their job. Given that he was the local expert, though, and the P.D. was spread very thin, she said, “The faceplate is going to be a needle in a really large haystack, and there’s no telling whether the Jeep is even still in the park. Take your pick.”

A muscle ticked at the corner of his jaw. “The Jeep would be an easier target, obviously, but an air search is going to be difficult to pull off, if not impossible. All the working birds are tied up fighting the wildfires, and a bunch are down for repairs. We’ve put out feelers to other parks, other options, but so far we haven’t come up with much.” His head came up and his shoulders squared. “So we go old school.”

“A foot search?” She looked around, unable to imagine any search being able to cover the vast, varied terrain that made up the state park.

“Yeah. I’ll line up off-duty rangers, any of the on-duty rangers who can be spared, maybe even some expert hikers.” He gestured down the ridge toward their vehicles. They went down together, side by side. “I’ll get the search organized for first light tomorrow. We’ll start with her sector and work out from there.” He shot her a look. “You want in?”

“Absolutely.” The invitation kicked a warm buzz through her, not just because he was admitting she could handle the backcountry, but because it felt good to be planning something rather than just gathering data. That was a big part of why she wanted to make the jump from lab rat to HRT—she wanted to do both.

Within minutes, Blackthorn was on the radio with three other station heads, getting their cooperation and coordinating the mobilization.

As they neared the parking area, she shot him a sidelong look, struck by the change in him. His face was animated, his green eyes fierce and intense. More, his voice now carried a heavy weight of command that had the heads of the other stations practically snapping to attention.

She remembered the scars on his shoulder and waist, belatedly recognizing them as bullet strikes. Ex-military, she thought, and pegged him as an officer. But if he had that kind of background, why had he buried himself out in the middle of nowhere?

New interest stirred, not just for the sexy package, but for the man inside it. He’s complicated, she reminded herself. But this time she found herself thinking that maybe she could handle some complications for the few more weeks she would be in Bear Claw.

Especially if those complications looked—and sounded—like Ranger Blackthorn in get-it-done mode.

“Thanks, Harvey. I’ll be in touch,” he said into the radio, then clicked it off and returned it to his belt. They had reached their vehicles, which were dark shapes in the gathering dusk. His shadow merged with that of his Jeep, and his voice seemed to come from the darkness when he said, “The cops collected the hikers’ clothes and stuff, said they would log it all into evidence for you. And Williams suggested you take a look around the station house, particularly Tanya’s room.”

“I’ve done some work in profiling and victimology, and have helped Jack out on a couple of cases. He’s hoping I’ll see something that could point toward a motive.”

“You don’t think this was random?” His voice carried a new edge. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Suddenly reminded that he wasn’t technically part of the investigation, she said, “There’s nothing to tell yet. We’re still exploring options.”

He moved in closer and dropped his voice an octave. “Hiding behind the official line, Gigi?”

Nerves stirred low in her belly, coiling her tight, but she met his eyes and said levelly, “I’m just trying to do my job, Blackthorn, so don’t crowd me. And don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re something you’re not.” He wasn’t a cop, couldn’t expect her to keep him fully in the loop unless he cleared it with the higher-ups.

He growled something under his breath, but eased back a step. He tried the door of her SUV, found it locked, and set her field kit on the ground. “You’ll want to follow me back to the station. Wouldn’t want you getting lost.”

He headed for his Jeep with long-legged strides, un-slinging his shotgun and knapsack as he went.

Gigi watched him go, trying not to be fascinated. He held himself apart but felt responsible, knew how to lead but had buried himself far from any troops, respected competence but wanted to be calling the shots … and was attracted and didn’t want to be.

No, she had definitely been right the first time around.

She didn’t have the mental energy to deal with him right now, not even for some short-term fun.

Too bad, she thought, remembering the gleam of bronze skin, the pucker of two bullet scars, one high, one low. Then she shook her head, climbed into her ride, and focused on the puzzle of two attackers, one missing faceplate … and a gut feeling that said there was far more to this case than anyone suspected.

Chapter Four

Matt kept it under warp speed as he led the way to the station house, but he was tempted to hit the gas and see if he could outrun his anger and frustration.

The case and the woman had him badly off-kilter, leaving him raw and reactive … and those were two things that didn’t belong anywhere near an investigation like this one. If he didn’t pull it together, he wasn’t going to be any use to his rangers, the cops, or Gigi. And the fact that his mind slotted her into a category of her own just proved that he was badly out of whack. He didn’t prioritize like that. Ever.

The radio crackled. “Hey, boss, you out there?”

“Yeah, Bert. What’s up?”

“We’re up to five stations sending rangers for the search, and three others are pending. We’re going to be ready to roll at first light.”

“Good.” He would run it past Tucker, but couldn’t imagine there would be a problem. The searchers all had training, and it wouldn’t cost the city a dime. “How’s Tanya?”

“No change.”

“Damn.” The station lights came into view, piercing the darkness up ahead. “We’re here.”

He parked the Jeep in its usual spot, while Gigi unknowingly took Tanya’s.

She locked her field kit in a strongbox in the back of her SUV, pocketed the key and turned for the station. She hesitated when she saw him standing there, watching her, then met his stare, unspeaking, as if to say, “Here I am. What are you going to do about it?”

That was the question, wasn’t it?

As before, heat laced the air between them. This time, though, there was a softer layer, one that came from the realization that she was smart and dedicated, and was busting her ass to help find Tanya’s attackers.

He wasn’t looking to get involved, hadn’t been for a long time, but there she was.

And he was in serious trouble.

“Bert!” he shouted, louder and sharper than he’d intended.

Boots thudded and the older ranger appeared in the screened doorway of the faux log cabin. “Boss?”

“I need you to show Ms. Lynd around the station for me.”

He needed some space, and he needed it now.

GIGI WATCHED HIM GO, trying to suppress a twinge of what should have been irritation but felt more like hurt. She had thought they had called a truce of sorts out at the scene. Apparently not.

“Please excuse Matt,” Bert said blandly. “He was raised by a grizzly.”

She glanced over at the older ranger, who had silver-shot hair and laugh lines at the corners of his weathered eyes. “Not wolves?”

He shook his head. “Nope, too social. We’re pretty sure it was a single bachelor grizzly of the pissed-off variety—the kind that snarls when cornered.” He toed open the screen door and held it for her. “Come on up. I’ll show you Tanya’s room and whatever else you want to see. Anything that’ll help.”

“Thanks.” Forcing her mind off Blackthorn’s Dr. Jekyll and Ranger Surly routine, she followed Bert into the station.

The building was T-shaped, with the main entrance—the public area—centered on the crossbars.

They entered a long, narrow room that was divided roughly in half by a waist-high counter, with bathrooms on either side: men on the left, women on the right. A door centered on the back wall led to the longer bunkhouse wing that finished the T-shape.

The walls of the front room were lined with maps, brochures and copies of the fliers the park service put out each year, complete with instructions on bear avoidance, trail safety and what to do in the event of an emergency. On the other side of the counter—the rangers’ side—the papers hung on the walls and office cubbies leaned more toward emergency numbers and scrawled notes.

Bert waved her through a flip-up pass in the counter, then gestured to a small desk. “That’s Tanya’s. So are the pictures.”

A row of sketches were tacked along the wall to the right of the desk. Tanya had captured dozens of moments: a stark, barren landscape of rocks and stunted trees; a doe and fawn silhouetted atop a sparsely forested ridgeline; ghostly wisps of mist rising off the surface of a pond as a coyote paused to drink; the curl of a fern, so mundane until seen through eyes that found something beautiful in it; a hawk’s flight, sketched so sparsely as to be mere suggestions of line and motion, except for the creature’s head and its bright, fierce eyes.

But Gigi’s attention was immediately drawn to a deft caricature off to one side. In it, a handsome young man—presumably Jim Feeney—and Bert were horsing around together there in the station. There was a hint of a Stetson-shadow just visible through a doorway, putting Blackthorn in the picture. Sort of.

“She’s talented,” Gigi commented past the sudden tightening of her throat.

Bert reached out to brush his thumb across the bold T at the bottom of the caricature. “She hasn’t woken up yet.”

There was guilt beneath the pain, just like with Matt. It made Gigi think that maybe rangers weren’t as different from cops as she had thought—both protected their people and their territories, and took it very seriously when one of their own went down in the line.

“Tell me about her,” she said.

“She’s a good kid, a good ranger, and practically has eyes in the back of her head. Whoever these guys are, they would’ve had to know the backcountry to get the drop on her.”

Which narrowed things down, but not by much. “Does she have any enemies you know about? Anyone who would want to hurt her?” Williams would have asked the standard questions, but it didn’t hurt to repeat them.

He shook his head. “No way. She wasn’t that kind of person.”

“How about a boyfriend?”

“She and Jim flirted, but I don’t think it was serious, at least not on her part. And before you ask, no, he wasn’t mad about it, and yes, he was here all morning. He’s at the hospital right now, driving himself nuts—just like we all are—wondering if there was something he could’ve done to prevent this and hoping to hell she wakes up soon.” His voice had sharpened, but before she could say something to bring things down a notch, his shoulders slumped. “Sorry. This really sucks.”

“Yeah. It does.” She touched his arm in sympathy. “I’m sorry to make you go through it again.”

“Don’t be. I’ll do whatever I can to help. It’s just …” He paused, then said slowly, “The rangers who work the outer stations tend to be out here for a reason. Some because they need space, others because they plain don’t like being around other people. Tanya is one of the first kind, or at least she was when she got here. Lately, though, she’s gone from this—” he tapped one of the lonely, barren landscapes “—to this—” his finger moved to the doe and her fawn “—to this.” He touched the caricature.

“She was healing from something?” Maybe something that had made enemies?

“That’d be my take. She didn’t talk about it, though, at least not with me. Just said she had made mistakes and wanted to move on. Recently, though, she seemed to be coming out of her shell.”

“Because of her relationship with Jim?” Or was there something else going on?

“Maybe. Or maybe it was just time. Who knows?” He straightened away from the pictures. “Come on. I’ll show you her room.”

Gigi followed him through to the bunkhouse wing, where a wide hallway was flanked on either side by rows of closed doors. The hall ended in a set of double doors leading out, their windows showing the pitch black of night beyond.

“That’s the boss’s office,” Bert said, jerking a thumb at the first on the left. “The rest are all dorm-type rooms from back when this was a research station. Matt’s house was the old observatory. He converted it when he came out here five, six years ago.”

“You don’t seem like the kind of guy who has trouble being around people.”

He shot her a look that said he knew exactly what she was asking. “My wife and I separated a couple of years ago, which made the ‘getting away’ part attractive. This is the perfect setup—close enough to the city that I can visit my one kid who stayed local for college and see the other two when they come back to town. Not to mention that room and board is included, which helps when you’re scraping to pay three tuitions.”

“And Jim?”

“Won’t last out here much longer. He came for the hiking and stayed because he was enjoying himself—and maybe a bit to see how things would go with Tanya—but I doubt he’ll be here come winter. He doesn’t need it the way the rest of us do.” A muted crackle of static had his head whipping around. “I need to get that.” He pointed to the end of the hall. “Her room is the last door on your right. It’s not locked.”

She watched him disappear through the door to the main room, wishing she had asked about Blackthorn just then. He had been there six years, and … what? Stalled? Healed? Found exactly what he was looking for?

As she headed for Tanya’s room, a faint shiver touched her nape. Under other circumstances, she would have thought it was her instincts telling her to watch her back, but she was safe in the station, and she knew darn well the threat wasn’t coming from outside.

She was on the borderline of a major crush.

And she needed to stop it.

“Okay. I’m stopping.” Blanking her mind of the lingering images of Blackthorn standing guard, silhouetted against the setting sun, she took a deep breath and pushed through into Tanya’s room.

Since it wasn’t a crime scene, she didn’t need to print the doorknob or wear protective gear. She just closed the door behind her, flipped the light switch, and stood there for a moment.

The room was maybe twice the width of the twin-size bed that sat along one wall beneath a colorful quilt. A desk and short chest of drawers took up the other wall, leaving only a narrow runway down the center of the space. The door was centered on one end, a window on the other.

The small space might have resembled a cell if it weren’t for the warm colors and bold textures decorating it, and the profusion of sketches tacked to the walls.

The pictures were similar to the ones out in the main station—mostly nature scenes, with a few caricatures of the other rangers, done on newer paper and layered atop the others. There was also a detailed sketch of blond, good-looking Jim, posed casually and looking at the artist with a seriously devilish glint that practically screamed “let’s get out of here and have some fun.”

Heart tugging for the victim, Gigi took another, longer look around the room, trying to get a sense of Tanya—or, more importantly, what she had been trying to escape.

Most everything in the room seemed to belong to her present incarnation: hiking and climbing equipment, sturdy clothes, trail maps, a few field guides on local plants and animals, a couple of paperbacks and a cache of chocolate bars. There was winter gear under the bed … and behind it, a set of high-end downhill skis, boots and other equipment, carefully wrapped in worn-looking plastic, as if they had been stored away for longer than just the summer. Gigi filed the observation and moved on.

There was a laptop on the small bureau, but it was wearing a layer of folded laundry, suggesting it wasn’t used all that often. Making a mental note to see if Jack wanted her to bring it down to the P.D. for the techies to look at, she took a quick rifle through Tanya’s bathroom stuff and then flipped through the books.

A folded piece of paper fluttered from one of the field guides, slipping from between a couple of pages at the back before she could catch it, or see what it had marked.

It proved to be another sketch: a quick pencil study of a dark-haired man in his mid-twenties, long-nosed and serious-eyed, sitting on an oblong boulder that jutted out across the impressive backdrop of a huge waterfall. The paper was soft with age and worn along the fold line, and the man looked oddly familiar, though she couldn’t immediately place him.

Did he look like someone a girl would disappear into the backcountry to forget?

Instincts humming, she secured the picture in one of the evidence bags she had brought with her, and tucked it into an inner pocket of her windbreaker. She thought about bagging the field guide, but decided to come back for it later if the picture turned out to be important. Tanya’s things weren’t going anywhere, and for all she knew, the guy was a family member, the waterfall far away.

That was the tricky part about victimology: it wasn’t always clear how the puzzle fit together until long after the fact, if at all.

And there weren’t any big-foam-finger clues here, at least not that she could tell at this point. Which meant it was time to head back down to the city and hit the lab.

Letting herself out of Tanya’s room, she stepped into the hallway. She heard radio traffic from the main room, and raised her voice to call, “Hey Bert, can you—”

Movement flashed in her peripheral vision and a heavy blow slammed into her from behind, driving her to her knees. Ambush!

Panic flared at the sight of a man dressed in dark clothes standing over her, his face obscured by shadows.

Part of her recorded details—six foot, shaved head, athletic—while another had her shouting, “Help! They’re in the station!”

Her body reacting more from training than thought, she tucked and rolled, then lashed out with a foot. She connected and her attacker fell back with a curse. But before she could follow up, the lights went out, plunging the hallway into pitch darkness.

“Come on!” a voice called from farther down the hall. “Forget about the stuff. The fire’ll take care of these two, along with everything else.”

Fire? Heart hammering with new terror, Gigi screamed, “Bert? Help!”

It was a mistake; her attacker oriented and slammed her aside. She swung another kick, but didn’t connect with anything, and moments later feet pounded away from her.

A door slammed, and then there were two dull thuds. Seconds later, she heard the crash of breaking glass on either side of her, behind several of the closed bunkroom doors, one of them Tanya’s.

Then there was an ominous whoomping sound that had her instincts sparking with terror as she identified the sounds: the man had thrown Molotov cocktails into the dorm rooms!