Bear Bait (9781101611548) (10 page)

Frustrated, Sam hung up, then paced impatiently next to Lisa’s bed. Chase! She’d call Chase. Kidnapping a federal employee was certainly FBI business. She reached for the phone, but stopped before her fingers picked up the receiver.
Get a grip.
As the doctor had said, Lisa might have spoken from delirium or confusion. Brain-damaged victims mixed up their words, blurted out one thing when they meant another.

She stared at the sleeping form on the bed. She had a million questions for Lisa. Whatever the criminals had been up to at Marmot Lake, so far they’d gotten away with it. And they were still out there. The only movement was the girl’s chest rising and falling under the white sheets.

Please wake up
. Sam took hold of a foot that formed a small tent near the end of Lisa’s bed. She tweaked a toe. Lisa groaned. Guilt instantly washed over Sam.
Now you’re torturing a severely injured girl, Westin?
She fled as soon as Mack appeared to take her place.

BY
Sunday evening, Ernest Craig was frantic. Nobody in town had seen Allie. He’d searched her room at their trailer, but he couldn’t find any trace of a work number. He called Jack Winner again, and her friend Susan Plinsky. Neither of them knew the name of the company she worked for in Seattle.

He sat at the chipped table in the kitchen, cradling his aching head in his hands. She’d been so proud to finally land that job, after almost a year of looking for
anything
better than Best Burgers in Forks. She was so smart, but a
high school diploma didn’t get anyone far these days. The best she could do was a job at a landscaping company. Or was it a nursery?

Why didn’t he keep track of these things? Shit, how could he call to see if she was all right if he didn’t even know the name of the company? He couldn’t even file a missing person on Allie; he could imagine the smart-ass county sheriff laughing at the holes in his story. Leaning forward, Ernest let his forehead drop to the tabletop, let it thump against the cool Formica. He deserved the pain. His ex-wife was right; he spent his life with his head up his ass.

The paper reported that a young woman, a park service employee, had been severely injured in the park in a forest fire. They had girls fighting forest fires now. Girl soldiers, girl firefighters. Well, Allie was strong, especially now that she was doing landscaping. He guessed she could be a firefighter if she had to. But he hoped it would never come to that. He remembered the way the guys in his unit had talked about the nurses in ’Nam. He didn’t like to think about his girl out in the woods with a bunch of rough men.

He raised his head and checked the paper again. Lisa Glass, that was her name, the park service employee. From Philadelphia. Crap, she was only nineteen years old, two years younger than Allie. And in serious condition. He felt sorry for her parents. He knew what it was like to worry about a daughter. If he had any money, he’d send some flowers to that poor family.

It was a dangerous world out there for girls, especially blond lookers like Allie. And the damn cops were as useless as the feds. They wouldn’t do anything to protect her. He had visions of her old Nova breaking down, of her hitchhiking and being picked up by a group of perverts, of them beating her and raping her and leaving her for dead in some clear-cut or drainage ditch along the highway.

She could be lying there right now.

THE
forest was already in evening shadow by the time Sam drove into the parking lot at Marmot Lake. When she saw the gate standing wide open, her pulse quickened. But only another NPS truck faced the lake. As Sam pulled hers into place beside it, Ranger Paul Schuler emerged from the trail, shovel in hand, stomping and brushing ash off his clothes. She climbed down to greet him.

He held up a hand in greeting. “All clear,” he told her. “No flare-ups.”

“Anything else of significance?”

“Such as?” His steel-rimmed glasses were so smudged she wondered how he could stand to look through them.

“Blood. Bear skin. Weapons. Tools.”

He gave her a surprised look, so she told him about the illegal hunter she’d encountered a couple of days ago, and then about the old mine shaft.

Paul’s eyebrows rose. “The plot thickens. Maybe we’d better start running patrols through here once in a while to remind the public that this is NPS property now.”

“I just came from the hospital,” she told him. “Lisa Glass woke up for a few minutes.”

“That’s good news.”

“She said she was kidnapped.”

“Hmmm. Not such good news.” He turned away and leaned on his shovel, considering, and they both stared at the lake for a moment. The evening light reflected lavender
in the water’s quiet surface. Finally, he murmured, “The best laid plans of mice and men are often gone awry.”

She stared at him. Did he always talk in code? “You lost me there. Care to explain?”

“I meant that anything could have happened. Stay out here long enough, and you’ll run into everyone from Bigfoot trackers to meth cooks.”

She didn’t want to hear that. She had enough to think about with arsonists and potential poachers and miners. “And where do you think Lisa Glass fits in?”

“Lisa works on the trail crew,” Schuler said. “And the trail crew is not the most trustworthy bunch.”

“I hear they’re mostly JDs,” Sam commented.

“Yep. Trail work counts as community service with juvenile court judges, so we have a bunch of delinquents slinging pickaxes every summer.”

“But Lisa wasn’t a delinquent.” She’d found out that much from Joe.

“True.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “At least not a convicted one. But she’s got to be a tough cookie. Trail crew pays twelve dollars an hour, but hardly anybody signs up after they find out they’ve got to break rocks and get up at the crack of dawn and bunk out in the middle of nowhere.”

Sam bristled. “You think Lisa’s a criminal just because she’s tough?” Would he say the same about a young man?

“I’m saying she hangs out with criminals
and
she’s a tough character. Is she telling the truth about what happened out here?” He shook his head as if to answer his own question.

“She nearly died, Paul. She’s a victim.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But meth cooks set themselves on fire; hunters accidentally shoot their partners. Stay out here long enough; you’ll see what I mean.”

Sam wished she were going to be there long enough to discover all the park’s secrets. Across the lake, a creature was moving at the water’s edge; she squinted, trying to determine what it was.

Schuler followed her line of sight. “Canada goose,” he said.

He was right—the creature turned and now she could make out the slender neck and black-and-white head. “Did you see any sign of bears?” she asked.

“Nothing but a couple of paw prints. There were plenty of hoofprints—the elk came through here last night.” His stomach growled then.

Hers gurgled in response. She pressed a hand over her belt buckle.

“Dinnertime. Time to lock up.” He looked pointedly at the exit road, then at her.

She hesitated, still wanting to look for Raider. But Schuler was observant enough to notice bear tracks and identify geese from a distance. If he hadn’t seen bears or anything else unusual, she probably wouldn’t, either. And dinner sounded awfully good right now. She climbed back into her truck and drove toward Forks, leaving him to lock the gate.

Her thoughts turned to provisions for the fire tower. In the middle of her mental grocery list, she remembered that the tower wasn’t hers anymore. She braked to a stop.

When she’d first landed the job, there’d been an offer of a rustic bunk somewhere in the park. All the summer rangers were currently filling the main park dormitory building, so that hadn’t been it.

The trail crew bunkhouse—that was it. It was a dilapidated old boardinghouse a few miles from the Sol Duc Hot Springs. A bit of a drive, but…A spark of excitement rose through her fatigue. Bunking with the trail crew could solve two problems: it would give her a place to sleep and a chance to check out Lisa’s compatriots, satisfy her curiosity about Lisa’s kidnapping story. If they still had a bed for her.

But it was probably not wise to show up unannounced and it was getting late. If she was going to spend the night in town, she might as well embrace civilization. She was dying to use a computer. Since the Forks library and the district headquarters building were closed, Mack’s was closest. She still had his spare key on her key chain.

She stopped by the Best Burgers drive-in in Forks and ordered The Twilight on the Beach Special, which tonight was scallops and coleslaw. The place was busy, as usual. One of the joys of small-town life, she thought to herself, remembering all the hours she’d hung out at the Burger Corral in her tiny Kansas hometown.

Two booths were full of teens shooting the paper covers from plastic straws at each other. Another booth held a family of four tourists huddled over an Olympic Peninsula map. In the corner were another mom and pop and two little girls, but they looked local. And was it just her imagination, or were both adults glaring in her direction?

She ran her tongue over her lower lip. The stitches were ugly, she knew, but enough to make strangers frown at her? Her uniform shirt was clean, her ID tag straight. Even her hair was reasonably neat, imprisoned in a French braid at the back of her head.

The bell above the door jangled, and a gray-haired man with a mustache entered. He wore heavy work boots and well-worn jeans. He nodded at the local couple, placed his order at the counter, and then leaned against it to survey the room. When his gaze met Sam’s, his forehead furrowed and his eyes narrowed. What the heck?

Had they all seen her on the newscast? Was that it? Did they think she was a prima donna, too? I didn’t ask to be on television, she wanted to tell them. Damn Richard Best, anyway.

The ponytailed counter girl placed a paper bag on the scarred Formica and called out Sam’s order number. She slid out of the booth toward the counter and the glowering fellow. He took the booth she’d been occupying. Was that it? She was in the seat he wanted? She hoped it was that simple. She smiled at him.

He glared back.

THE
seafood was still warm when she dumped it onto a plate at Mack’s. She savored the scallops along with a
chilled Negra Modelo and a slice of lime. As far as beer sharing went, Mack was her idea of perfect: a die-hard Budweiser fan that wouldn’t dream of touching the imported beer she’d stashed in his refrigerator. Her housemate Blake’s tastes were too close to her own; anything she put in the fridge was fair game to him.

But Blake would never leave that stack of the dishes in the sink. Or the gray-ringed bathtub. She never needed to clear a path through Blake’s dirty socks. When the guy wasn’t baking bread, he was vacuuming. A sudden pang of homesickness struck. She wanted to walk barefoot across her own Navajo rugs. Hear her cat Simon purr. Sleep under the sunflower quilt her grandmother had made. She even wanted to hear the latest episode in Blake’s eternal quest to meet the perfect partner.

The urge to forgo Mack’s futon in favor of her own bed was strong. It was only seven thirty: with luck, she could make the nine fifteen ferry out of Kingston, be home by eleven thirty. She picked up her keys, considering. Yeah, right. And then get up at four in the morning to make it back in time to work tomorrow. She threw the keys down again. Simon and Blake and good housekeeping would have to wait until next weekend.

She parked herself in front of her friend’s computer and turned it on. Mack’s Internet connection was only dial-up out here, but at least he had one. She called up Google and typed in
black bear poaching
.

A list of articles assured her that, just as she feared, bear poaching was still thriving in the United States. And the Pacific coast, with constant Asian trade moving through its ports, was bear parts central. Nothing would keep her from looking for Raider tomorrow.

Next, she researched mining on public lands, and fell into a morass of articles and links to web pages. The overload of information made her eyes cross and each page took forever to download, but she read enough to determine that any American citizen or corporation could still stake a claim for mining rights on most forest service and
BLM lands. Thankfully, it looked like the national parks and wilderness areas were off-limits, except where active mining claims existed at the time of the area’s designation, which didn’t seem so bad until she read one document, which reported that in 1995, national parks in the United States contained over 13,000 mining claims.

The different rules for different areas were so confusing. She really needed to determine the history of that mine she had literally stumbled into, as well as which side of the forest service–national park boundary it was now on.

There had apparently been a few minor reforms to the 1872 law, but they didn’t seem to accomplish much. A 2007 reform set royalties for new mines at 8 percent and old mines at 4 percent, and established a cleanup fund. Before that, there’d been no royalties and no protection, and the Bureau of Land Management estimated that in the year 2000 alone, more than $982 million dollars worth of minerals had been extracted.

Next she came across a map of Western states with dots marking hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines, along with shaded areas indicating water polluted by minerals. Large sections of southern Oregon and a good third of California were nearly obliterated with dots and shading. The entire state of Nevada was freckled and blotched. Utah, Arizona, western Montana, and much of Idaho were disaster zones as well. And the top half of Washington State looked as if it had a severe case of measles. Several of those blemishes were close to her present location. The map was dated 2002. A note included with the map stated that two out of five watersheds in those areas were polluted by mines. Yeesh. Given the hands-off political climate and the downturn in the economy since the map had been created, it seemed unlikely that many of those sites had been cleaned up.

She gritted her teeth. Supposedly federal lands belonged to
all
the American people. The public had been getting ripped off for more than a century, not to mention getting stuck with the cleanup bill. Why didn’t the media ever do a story on this atrocity instead of plastering her photo across the television screen?