Murdered In Conard County

Scrappy needed no further urging.

* * *

“WE THINK SOMEONE’S been shot.”

The words that had come across the telephone seemed to shriek in Blaire’s ears as she hurried to grab a light jacket and her pistol belt as well as a shotgun out of the locked cabinet. On the way out the door she grabbed the first-aid kit. The sheriff would be sending a car or two, but she had the edge in time and distance. She would definitely arrive first.

The call had come from the most remote campground, and she’d be able to get only partway there in the truck. The last mile or so would have to be covered on the all-terrain side-by-side lashed to the bed of the truck.

If someone was injured, why had it had to happen at the most out-of-the-way campground? A campground limited to people who seriously wanted to rough it, who didn’t mind carrying in supplies and tents. After the road ended up there, at the place she’d leave her truck, no vehicles of any kind were allowed. She was the only one permitted to head in there on any motorized vehicle. She had one equipped for emergency transport.

She was just loading the last items into her vehicle when Gus appeared, astride Scrappy, a welcome sight.

“I heard the shot. What happened?”

“Up at the Twin Rocks Campground. I just got a call. They think someone’s been shot.”

“Think?”

“That’s the word. You want to follow me on horseback, or ride with me?” It never once entered her head that he wouldn’t want to come along to help.

* * *

IT NEVER ENTERED his head, either. “I’m not armed,” he warned her as he slipped off the saddle.

“We can share.”

He loosely draped Scrappy’s reins around the porch railing in front of the cabin, knowing they wouldn’t hold him. He didn’t want them to. It was a signal to Scrappy to hang around, not remain frozen in place. A few seconds later, he climbed into the pickup with Blaire and they started up the less-than-ideal road. He was glad his teeth weren’t loose because Blaire wasted no time avoiding the ruts.

He spoke, raising his voice a bit to be heard over the roaring engine. “Have you thought yet about what you’re doing for Christmas and Thanksgiving?”

She didn’t answer for a moment as she shifted into a lower gear for the steepening road. “It’s July. What brought that on?”

“Danged if I know,” he admitted. “I was riding Scrappy in your direction because I’m restless tonight and it all started with a line from ‘Over the River’ popping into my head. Then as I was coming down the path I remembered how in the Middle Ages people put candles on tree branches on long winter nights so the pathways would be lit for travelers. Which led to...”

“Christmas,” she said. “Got it. Still weird.”

He laughed. “That’s what I thought, too. My head apparently plays by its own rules.”

It was her turn to laugh, a short mirthless sound. “No kidding. I don’t have to tell you about mine.”

No, she didn’t, and he was damned sorry that she carried those burdens, too. “So, holidays,” he repeated. No point in thinking about what lay ahead of them. If someone had been shot, they both knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. And both of them had seen it before.

“I’ll probably stay right here,” she answered. “I love it when the forest is buried in snow, and someone has to be around if the snowshoe hikers and the cross-country skiers get into trouble.”

“Always,” he agreed. “And doesn’t someone always get into trouble?”

“From what I understand, it hasn’t failed yet.”

He drummed his fingers on his thigh, then asked, “You called the sheriff?”

“Yeah, but discharge of a weapon is in my bailiwick. They have a couple of cars heading this way. If I find out someone has been shot, I’ll warn them. Otherwise I’ll tell them to stand down.”

Made sense. This wasn’t a war zone after all. Most likely someone had brought a gun along for protection and had fired it into the night for no good reason. Scared? A big shadow hovering in the trees?

And in the dead of night, wakened from a sound sleep by a gunshot, a camper could be forgiven for calling to say that someone had been shot even without seeing it. The more isolated a person felt, the more he or she was apt to expect the worst. Those guys up there at Twin Rocks were about as isolated as anyone could get without hiking off alone.

He hoped that was all it was. An accident that had been misinterpreted. His stomach, though, gave one huge twist, preparing him for the worst.

“You hanging around for the holidays?” she asked. Her voice bobbled as the road became rougher.

“Last year my assistant did,” he reminded her. “This year it’s me. What did you do last year?”

“Went to visit my mother in the nursing home. I told you she has Alzheimer’s.”

“Yeah. That’s sad.”

“Pointless to visit. She doesn’t even recognize my voice on the phone anymore. Regardless, I don’t think she feels lonely.”

“Why’s that?”

“She spends a lot of time talking to friends and relatives who died back when. Her own little party.”

“I hope it comforts her.”

“Me, too.” Swinging a hard left, she turned onto a narrower leg of road that led directly to a dirt and gravel parking lot of sorts. It was where the campers left their vehicles before hiking in.

“You ever been to this campground?” she asked as she set the brake and switched off the ignition.

“Not on purpose,” he admitted. “I may have. Scrappy and I sometimes wander a bit when we’re out for a day-off ride.”

“Everything has to be lugged in,” she replied, as if that would explain all he needed to know.

It actually did. Rustic was the popular word for it. “They have a phone, though?”

“Yeah, a direct line to me. The state splurged. I would guess lawyers had something to do with that.”

He gave a short laugh. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Even though Blaire was clearly experienced at getting the side-by-side off the back of her truck, he helped. It was heavy, it needed to roll down a ramp, and it might decide to just keep going.

Once it was safely parked, he helped reload the ramp and close the tailgate. Then there was loading the first-aid supplies and guns. She knew where everything went, so he took directions.

With a pause as he saw the roll of crime scene tape and box of latex gloves. And shoe covers. God. A couple of flashlights that would turn night into day. He hoped they didn’t need any of it. Not any of it.

At least the state hadn’t stinted on the side-by-side. It had a roof for rainy weather, and a roll bar he could easily grab for stability. There were four-point harnesses as well, no guarantee against every danger but far better than being flung from the vehicle.

These side-by-side UTVs weren’t as stable as three-wheelers, either. It might be necessary for her job, but if he were out for joyriding, he’d vastly prefer a standard ATV.

She drove but tempered urgency with decent caution. The headlights were good enough, but this classified more as a migratory path than a road. Even knowing a ranger might have to get out here in an emergency, no one had wanted to make this campground easily accessible by vehicle. There were lots of places like that in his part of the forest. Places where he needed to drag teams on foot when someone got injured.

Soon, however, he saw the occasional glint of light through the trees. A lot of very-awake campers, he imagined. Frightened by the gunshot. He hoped they weren’t frightened by more.

The forest thinned out almost abruptly as they reached the campground. He could make out scattered tents, well separated in the trees. Impossible in the dark to tell how many there might be.

But a group of people, all of whom looked as if they’d dragged on jeans, shirts and boots in a hurry, huddled together, a couple of the women hugging themselves.

Blaire brought the ATV to a halt, parked it and jumped off. He followed more slowly, not wanting to reduce her authority in any way. She was the boss here. He was just a visitor. And he wasn’t so stupid that he hadn’t noticed how people tended to turn to the man who was present first.

He waited by the vehicle as Blaire covered the twenty or so feet to the huddle. Soon excited voices reached him, all of them talking at the same time about the single gunshot that had torn the silence of the night. From the gestures, he guessed they were pointing to where they thought the shot came from, and, of course, there were at least as many directions as people.

They’d been in tents, though, and that would muffle the sound. Plus there were enough rocks around her to cause confusing echoes.

But then one man silenced them all.

“Mark Jasper didn’t come out of his tent. His kid was crying just a few minutes ago, but then he quieted.”

He saw Blaire grow absolutely still. “His kid?”

“He brought his four-year-old with him. I guess the shot may have scared him. But... Why didn’t Mark come out?”

Good question, thought Gus. Excellent question.

“Maybe he didn’t want to take a chance and expose his boy. They might have gone back to sleep,” said one of the women. Her voice trembled. She didn’t believe that, Gus realized.

Blaire turned slowly toward the tent that the man had pointed out. She didn’t want to look. He didn’t, either. But as she took her first step toward the shelter, he stepped over and joined her. To hell with jurisdiction. His gorge was rising. A kid had been in that tent? No dad joining the others? By now this Jasper guy could have heard enough of the voices to know it was safe.

He glanced at Blaire and saw that her face had set into lines of stone. She knew, too. When they reached the door of the tent, she stopped and pointed. Leaning over, he saw it, too. The tent was unzipped by about six or seven inches.

“Gloves,” he said immediately.

“Yes.”

Protect the evidence. The opening might have been left by this Jasper guy, or it might have been created by someone else. Either way...

He brought her a pair of latex gloves, then snapped his own set on. Their eyes met, and hers reflected the trepidation he was feeling.

Then he heard a sound from behind him and swung around. The guy who had announced that Jasper hadn’t come out had followed them. “Back up, sir.” His tone was one of command, honed by years of military practice.

“Now,” Blaire added, the same steely note in her voice. “You might be trampling evidence.”

The guy’s eyes widened and he started to back up.

Now Blaire turned her head. “Carefully,” she said sharply. “Don’t scuff. You might bury something.”

The view of the guy raising his legs carefully with each step might have been amusing under other circumstances. There was no amusement now.

“Ready?” Blaire asked.

“Yup.”

She leaned toward the tent and called, “Mr. Jasper? I’m the ranger. We’re coming in. We need to check on you.” No sound answered her.

“Like anyone can be ready for this,” she muttered under her breath as she reached up for the zipper tab. The metal teeth seemed loud as the world held its breath.

When she had the zipper halfway down, she parted the canvas and shone her flashlight inside.

“Oh, my God,” she breathed.

Chapter Two

Blaire had seen a lot of truly horrible things during her time in Afghanistan. There had even been times when she’d been nearly frozen by a desire not to do what she needed to do. She’d survived, she’d acted and on a couple of occasions, she’d even saved lives.

This was different. In the glare of the flashlight she saw a man in a sleeping bag, his head near the front opening. Or rather what was left of his head. Worse, she saw a small child clinging desperately to the man’s waist, eyes wide with shock and terror. That kid couldn’t possibly understand this horror but had still entered the icy pit of not being able to move, of hanging on to his daddy for comfort and finding no response.

She squeezed her eyes shut for just a moment, then said quietly to Gus, “The father’s been shot in the head. Dead. The kid is clinging to him and terrified out of his mind. I need the boy’s name.”

Gus slipped away, and soon she heard him murmuring to the gathered campers.

Not knowing if she would ever get the boy’s name, she said quietly, “Wanna come outside? I’m sort of like police, you know. You probably saw me working when you were on your way up here.”

No response.

Then Gus’s voice in her ear. “Jimmy. He’s Jimmy.”

“Okay.” She lowered the zipper more. When Gus squatted, she let him continue pulling it down so she didn’t have to take eyes off the frightened and confused little boy. “Jimmy? Would you like to go home to Mommy? We can get Mommy to come for you.”

His eyes flickered a bit. He’d heard her.

“My friend Gus here has a horse, too. You want to ride a horse? His name is Scrappy and he’s neat. All different colors.”

She had his attention now and stepped carefully through the flap, totally avoiding the father. She wondered how much evidence she was destroying but didn’t much care. The priority was getting that child out of there.

The floor of the tent was small and not easy to cross. A small sleeping bag lay bunched up, a trap for the unwary foot. Toys were scattered about, too, plastic horses, some metal and plastic cars and a huge metal tractor. She bet Jimmy had had fun making roads in the pine needles and duff outside.

As soon as she got near, she squatted. His gaze was focusing on her more and more, coming out of the shock and into the moment. “I think we need to go find your mommy, don’t you?”

“Daddy?”

“We’ll take care of Daddy for you, okay? Mommy is going to need you, Jimmy. She probably misses you so bad right now. Let’s go and I’ll put you on my ATV. You like ATVs?”

“Zoom.” The smallest of smiles cracked his frozen face.

“Well, this is a big one, and it definitely zooms. It’s also a little like riding a roller coaster. Come on, let’s go check it out.”

At last Jimmy uncoiled and stood. But there was no way Blaire was going to let him see any more of his father. She scooped him up in her arms and turned so that he’d have to look through her.

“Gus?”

“Yo.”

“Could you hold the flap open, please?”

Who knew a skinny four-year-old could feel at once so heavy and light? The flashlight she carried wasn’t helping, either. She wished she had a third arm.

“Are you cold, Jimmy?” she asked as she moved toward the opening and bent a little to ease them through.

“A little bit,” he admitted.

“Well, I’ve got a nice warm blanket on my ATV. You can curl up with it while I call your mommy, okay?” Lying. How was she going to call this kid’s mother? Not immediately, for sure. She couldn’t touch the corpse or look for ID until after the crime techs were done.

“Gus? The sheriff?”

“I radioed. There’s a lot more than two cars on the way. Crime scene people, too.”

“We’ve got to get this cordoned off.”

“I’ll ask Mr. Curious to help me. He’ll love it. The kid?”

“Jimmy is going to get my favorite blanket and a place to curl up in the back of the ATV, right, Jimmy?”

Jimmy gave a small nod. His fingers dug into her, crumpling cloth and maybe even bruising a bit. She didn’t care.

Walking carefully and slowly with the boy, almost unconsciously she began to hum a tune from her early childhood, “All Through the Night.”

To her surprise, Jimmy knew the words and began to sing them with her. His voice was thin, frail from the shock, but he was clinging desperately to something familiar. After a moment, she began to sing softly with him. Before she reached the ATV, Jimmy’s head was resting against her shoulder.

When the song ended, he said, “Mommy sings that.” Then he started to sing it again.

And Blaire blinked hard, fighting back the first tears she’d felt in years.

* * *

GUS WATCHED BLAIRE carry the small child to the ATV. He’d already recovered the crime scene tape and there were plenty of trees to wind it around, but he hesitated for a moment, watching woman and child. He could imagine how hard this was for her, dealing with a freshly fatherless child. War did that too often. Now here, in a peaceful forest. Or one that should have been peaceful.

His radio crackled, and he answered it. “Maddox.”

“We’re about a mile out from the parking area,” came the familiar voice of the sheriff, Gage Dalton. “Anything else we need to know?”

“I’m about to rope the scene right now. The vic has a small child. We’re going to need some help with that and with finding a way to get in touch with family as soon as possible.”

“We’ll do what we can as fast as we can. The witnesses?”

“Some are trying to pack up. I’m going to stop that.”

He was as good as his word, too. When he clicked off the radio, he turned toward the people who had dispersed from the remaining knot and started to fold up tents.

“You all can stop right there. The sheriff will be here soon and you might be material witnesses. None of you can leave the scene until he tells you.”

Some grumbles answered him, but poles and other items clattered to the ground. One woman, with her arms wrapped around herself, said, “I feel like a sitting duck.”

“If you were,” Gus said, “you’d already know it.” That at least took some of the tension out of the small crowd. Then he signaled to the guy who’d tried to follow them to the tent and said, “You get to help me rope off the area.”

The guy nodded. “I can do that. Sorry I got too close. Instinct.”

“Instinct?”

“Yeah. Iraq. Know all the parameters of the situation.”

Gus was familiar with that. He decided the guy wasn’t a ghoul after all. He also proved to be very useful. In less than ten minutes, they had a large area around the victim’s tent cordoned off. Part of him was disturbed that a gunshot had been heard but no one had approached the tent of the one person who hadn’t joined them, not even the veteran. The tent in which a child had apparently been crying.

But it was the middle of the night, people had probably been wakened from a sound sleep and were experiencing some difficulty in putting the pieces together in any useful way. Camping was supposed to be a peaceful experience unless you ran into a bear. And, of course, the sound of the child crying might have persuaded them everything was okay in that tent. After all, it looked untouched from the outside.

Scared as some of these people were that there might be additional gunfire, they all might reasonably have assumed that Jasper and his son were staying cautiously out of sight.

Once he and Wes, the veteran, had roped off the area, there wasn’t another thing they could do before the cops arrived. Preserve the scene, then stand back. And keep witnesses from leaving before they were dismissed by proper authority. He could understand, though, why some of them just wanted to get the hell out of here.

The fact remained, any one of that group of twelve to fourteen people could be the shooter. He wondered if any one of them had even considered that possibility.

Blaire settled Jimmy in the back of the ATV after moving a few items to the side. She had a thick wool blanket she carried in case she got stranded outside overnight without warning, and she did her best to turn it into a nest.

Then she pulled out a shiny survival blanket and Jimmy’s world seemed to settle once again. “Space blanket!” The excitement was clear in his voice.

“You bet,” she said, summoning a smile. “Now just stay here while we try to get your mommy. If you do that for me, you can keep the space blanket.”

That seemed to make him utterly happy. He snuggled into the gray wool blanket and hugged the silvery Mylar to his chin. “I’ll sleep,” he announced.

“Great idea,” she said. She couldn’t resist brushing his hair gently back from his forehead. “Pleasant dreams, Jimmy.”

He was already falling asleep, though. Exhausted from his fear and his crying, the tyke was nodding off. “Mommy says that, too,” he murmured. And then his thumb found its way into his mouth and his eyes stayed closed.

Blaire waited for a minute, hoping the child could sleep for a while but imagining the sheriff’s arrival with all the people and the work they needed to do would probably wake him. She could hope not.

* * *

HE HADN’T KNOWN the kid was there. God in heaven, he hadn’t known. Jeff scrambled as quietly as he could over rough ground, putting as much distance between him and the vic as he could.

He’d been shocked by the sight of the kid. He almost couldn’t bring himself to do it. If he hadn’t, though, he’d be the next one The Hunt Club would take out. They’d warned him.

His damn fault for getting too curious. Now he was on the hook with them for a murder he didn’t want to commit, and he was never going to forget that little boy. Those eyes, those cries, would haunt him forever.

Cussing viciously under his breath, he grabbed rocks and slipped on scree. He couldn’t even turn on his flashlight yet, he was still too close. But the moon had nose-dived behind the mountain and he didn’t even have its thin, watery light to help him in his escape.

His heart was hammering and not just because of his efforts at climbing. He’d just killed a man and probably traumatized a kid for life. That kid wasn’t supposed to be there. He’d been watching the guy for the last two weeks and he’d been camping solo. What had he done? Brought his son up for the weekend? Must have.

Giving Jeff the shock of his life. He should have backed off, should have told the others he couldn’t do it because the target wasn’t alone. Off-season. No tag. Whatever. Surely he could have come up with an excuse so they’d have given him another chance.

Maybe. Now that he knew what the others had been up to, he couldn’t even rely on their friendship anymore. Look what they’d put him up to, even when he’d sworn he’d never rat them out.

And he wouldn’t have. Man alive, he was in it up to his neck even if he hadn’t known they were acting out some of the plans they’d made. An accomplice. He’d aided them. The noose would have tightened around his throat, too.

God, why hadn’t he been able to make them see that? He wasn’t an innocent who could just walk into a police station and say, “You know what my friends have been doing the last few years?”

Yeah. Right.

He swore again as a sharp rock bit right through his jeans and made him want to cry out from the unexpected pain. He shouldn’t be struggling up the side of a mountain in the dark. He shouldn’t be doing this at all.

He had believed it was all a game. A fun thing to talk about when they gathered at the lodge in the fall for their usual hunting trip. Planning early summer get-togethers to eyeball various campgrounds, looking for the places a shooter could escape without being seen.

The victim didn’t much matter. Whoever was convenient and easy. The important thing was not to leave anything behind. To know the habits of the prey the same way they would know the habits of a deer.

Did the vic go hiking? If so, along what trails and how often and for how long? Was he or she alone very often or at all? Then Will had gotten the idea that they should get them in their tents. When there were other people in the campground, making it so much more challenging. Yeah.

He had believed it was just talk. He’d accompanied the others on the scouting expeditions, enjoying being in the woods while there were still patches of snow under the trees. He liked scoping out the campgrounds as the first hardy outdoorsy types began to arrive. And that, he had believed, was where it ended.

Planning. Scouting. A game.

But he’d been so wrong he could hardly believe his own delusion. He’d known these guys all his life. How was it possible he’d never noticed the psychopathy in either of them? Because that’s what he now believed it was. They didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything except their own pleasure.