Bear Bait (9781101611548) (24 page)

Handing one to him and then crooking a finger in his direction, she walked off through the trees, her pale hair shining as she flashed in and out of patches of early morning sun.

He snatched up the water bottle and followed her to a large cedar. When he had nearly caught up, she vanished under its prickly foliage. Ducking, he joined her in the cave formed by the drooping branches. “Your favorite make-out tree?” he teased.

“It was pretty huggable when bullets were flying two days ago.” She pointed to a groove dug into the bark at her eye level. “Fortunately, I was down here.” She demonstrated by briefly crouching against the tree.

Anger surged through his midriff at the sight of her pressed against the trunk. The bullet blaze was less than two inches above her head. Some trigger-happy numskulls had come so close…

She straightened and pointed higher. “But here’s what I wanted to show you. I just noticed this yesterday.” About six inches above the blaze was a number hacked into the reddish bark: 14.

“Fourteen? What does that mean?”

She shook her head. “Not a clue. There’s more.”

Taking his hand, she pulled him to another tree, into which was carved 8128. The numbers were crude and slanted to the right.

“And look at this alder.” She dragged him to yet another tree, one with white bark. He would have guessed it was an aspen.

“Some sort of code?” she asked.

4-19. The numbers on the alder made his blood run cold. “This one could be a date.” A date imprinted on every federal agent’s mind.

She stared at it. “What happened on April nineteenth?”

“Waco.”

She thought for a moment. “That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Nineteen ninety-three—the FBI showdown with the Branch Davidians. And then, on April nineteenth of nineteen ninety-five, the Oklahoma City bombing.” He took the pad out of his shirt pocket and wrote down the whole series of numbers.

“Good God.” Her mouth took on a grim line. “But that’s ancient history now, and these carvings look fresh.”

“To some groups, those dates are sacred. Let’s hope I just have a suspicious mind and four-nineteen means something else,” he said. “A lot of people were no doubt born, married, or died on April nineteenth, too. And maybe, at age fourteen, someone got lucky under that other tree?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Sex at fourteen?”

“It happens. Or it could mean fourteen times. Or number fourteen on the football team.”

“But 8128?”

He shook his head. “No clue. Probably just a personal code.” He sounded more optimistic than he felt. He had a bad feeling in his gut; too many coincidences were piling up in Washington State: 4-19. The Council for Conservation of America. The antigovernment propaganda his team had recovered from the robbers’ SUV. The missing C-4. The gunplay in the woods. The murdered game warden. He remembered he hadn’t yet told Summer about her.

“I’m glad your contract is almost up,” he said. “I’ll feel better knowing you’re not wandering around the woods here.”

She flashed him a dirty look. “Well, that makes one of us.”

Oh, yeah. She’d be without a job after her contract was up. But she was smart and resourceful; she’d find something. “There are ugly things going on around here,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Gee, ya think?”

“I mean even more than you know about.” He described the antigovernment literature he and Nicole had uncovered from their robbery suspects’ vehicle.

She shrugged. “That was in Blaine.”

He told her about the game warden who had been murdered on the Olympic Peninsula.

She put a hand up to her mouth as if she felt nauseous. Finally, something he said had made an impression on her. “That’s all they found?” she asked. “Just one hand?”

“So far. Someplace called Skylark Slough.”

“That’s about forty-five miles away. Just over the border between the park and National Forest.”

He touched her shoulder. “Maybe now you can understand why I’m worried. A group may be targeting lone women, or they may be targeting government agents, or both. If they find, uh, more…the agency will compare the corpses to see if there are similarities.”

“More corpses?” Her expression was shell-shocked.

“More of Caitlin Knight—the game warden, so they can compare her corpse to Lisa Glass.”

“Oh yes, Lisa.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth for a moment before continuing. “I’m still not used to thinking of her as dead. You suspect that Lisa was a victim of the same killer?”

“There’s not enough evidence to conclude that. Yet. The two incidents could be totally unrelated, or we could have a serial killer on the loose. All I know right now is that I want you to get out of the woods.” Realizing she was likely to bristle at the last sentence, he added in a gentler tone, “I can’t sleep at night knowing you’re out here with no protection. Why don’t you carry that Glock I got you?”

“We don’t all sleep with firearms.” She gave him a flirtatious look. “Some of us sleep with armed men instead.”

He pulled her close. “And which armed man would you have slept with if I hadn’t come along?”

“I’ll never tell.” She kissed him.

When she leaned back, he said, “I really wish you’d go back to the bunkhouse.”

“I know you do.”

She was unbelievably stubborn. Particularly when there were animals involved. “Look, Summer, you can sleep at the bunkhouse and look for that bear during the daytime, can’t you?”

“I saw him at the lake last night, just before you showed up.”

That close? It gave him a jolt. Turning his head, he studied the dense foliage around them, seeing how a bear could be hidden from view. How any number of dangers could be hidden from view.

She made a scoffing sound. “You chase criminals armed with automatic rifles. How can you be scared of a little ol’ bear?”

He squeezed his arms around her. Her body was lean and solid, but so small. Muscles and intelligence were no match for bullets. Or claws and teeth. “I’m scared of them all,” he told her. “You should be, too.”

*    *    *

AS
Sam walked Chase down the trail back to the parking lot, she told him about the way Garrett Ford had glared at her at the soccer game and the burger place.

“Sounds a bit like that Ferguson guy in Utah,” he said.

Her thoughts precisely, but then again, both men were woodsmen and she was in the woods, after all. “If they weren’t fairly common outdoor types, a girl could almost get paranoid about it. The park has had some threats against personnel and you’ve just got to wonder—”

He grabbed her arm. “What threats?”

How should she phrase it so it wouldn’t sound so bad? “Apparently, threats against rangers are not unusual. But I’ve been told that the number of threats picked up after the news report about the upcoming wildlife conference.”

“Wildlife conference?”

“It’s for federal employees and environmental groups, and its focus is endangered species this year. I guess it didn’t help that I was featured on the same news broadcast, too.”

His brown eyes blazed. “You? Why?”

She sighed. “With his typical unmitigated gall, this guy at
The Edge
promised I would speak at the conference, so the TV news stuck a photo of me in there, too, along with a summary of the Zack Fischer story from last year.”

“
You’re
speaking at a federal wildlife conference?”

She made a face at him. “Well, you don’t need to sound quite so surprised, Chase. I can be presentable when I try.”

“Of course you can.”

She stared at him. Did that mean he thought she needed to try more often?

He caught her look and said, “I mean, you always are. Presentable, that is.”

She laughed at his backpedaling. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t be
polite
with me. Half the time you’ve seen me, I’ve been swimming in muck or I’ve got stitches on my face and half my hair’s burned off.”

“Are you telling me that’s not normal for you?”

A small snort escaped from her nostrils.

“It’s just that I never knew you did public speaking,” he explained.

She sighed. “Unfortunately, it’s the only gig I’ve been offered after I finish ‘wandering around in the woods here,’ as you put it.” She walked on, and he followed.

When they reached the parking lot, she retrieved Lisa’s Bible and sketchbook from her truck and handed them to him. “Give these to whoever’s working on Lisa Glass’s case.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How did you—”

“The bunkhouse, remember? I’m sleeping in Lisa’s bed. And yes, I’ve been pawing through them; I never realized that these might become evidence. I was going to take them to her in the hospital, and then I heard—”
It’s Lisa Glass. She’s dead.

“Anything of interest in these?” he asked.

She swallowed hard, and then continued. “The inscription in the Bible mentions her loving family, which seems weird, given that nobody can find any of her relatives. There’s also a scrap of paper with addresses in Wyoming and Seattle.”

“Those might be meaningful.”

“I hope so. The sketches on the pad are mainly of the trail crew. She seemed to focus heavily on one kid, Ben Rosen.”

He frowned. “You think that’s significant?”

“I don’t really know.” She chewed her thumbnail, considering. “Ben has olive-colored skin and black hair, and Lisa described one of her attackers as dark with swarthy skin.”

“Swarthy? Who uses a word like
swarthy
?”

“It is odd, isn’t it?” she agreed. “Sounds archaic. Lisa was only nineteen.”

“Most likely she was repeating someone else’s words.” He held out an olive-skinned hand and studied it. “So I’m swarthy? I’ve been called a spick and a redskin and one time a Cuban—”

“Hey, I think swarthy is beautiful.” She took his hand in
hers and pressed it to her cheek. “The only reason I brought up Ben Rosen is that he’s darker than the average Scandinavian around here, and he’s on the trail crew because of some juvenile conviction, so he’s not exactly an innocent. Plus, Lisa drew a sketch that looks quite a bit like him. Maybe she was trying to tell me Ben was in on the crime, whatever the crime was.”

“I’ll check him out.” He tossed the items she’d given him onto the passenger seat of his rental car, and then wrapped his arms around her. “I don’t want to leave you here with all this going on. Come with me.”

Was he kidding? She pulled back. “To an FBI meeting in Seattle?”

“I was thinking more about the hotel afterwards.”

Really? Sounded a little slutty, but inviting, too. “Can you promise there’ll be a hotel afterwards?”

Chase hesitated. Probably thinking about the possibility of being ordered to travel after the meeting. He seemed to be perpetually on the road.

His arms felt so good. So strong and safe and warm. With her head pressed to his shoulder just above his heart, she could hear its reassuring rhythm. For some unaccountable reason, it made her want to cry.

“That’s what I thought,” she said into his jacket. “I think we both know I’m not a wait-in-the-car kind of woman.” There was never enough time. “I don’t want to make you late,” she reminded him.

His arms fell away. “I’ll get the Seattle office to work on Lisa’s case,” he promised. “And I’ll check out Garrett Ford and Ben Rosen. You better call me whenever you can.” His gaze lingered on her face. “Please move back to the bunkhouse, Summer.”

Although she knew that he had her best interests at heart, she still found his insistence a little annoying. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

The look he gave her said he knew she was lying. He pulled open his car door. “Well, watch your back. Stay safe,
mi corazón
.”

What did he expect her to call him? “Chase” seemed too brotherly now. “Lover” seemed tacky. She’d always hated “Honey” or “Dear”—they seemed like fill-ins used by people who couldn’t be bothered to remember your real name.

“Watch out for the bad guys,
querido
.” The Spanish word sounded a little clumsy, but a lot less frightening than English.

He grinned, and she felt ridiculously happy to know he was pleased. Then his lips brushed hers one more time, and he was gone.

She walked the trail back toward her camp and paused at the edge of the lake. A loon plowed a wake into the still surface near the far shore, a rare sight that would normally have made her heart soar. But she wished Chase were still there to share the moment.

It was not, precisely, a welcome feeling. It was as if a part of her had driven off with Chase. Did other women feel like this about their men? Some days she was positive that she knew more about butterflies and tree frogs than about her own species.

She walked through the forest—half black, half green—back to her tent. Last night, before Chase had shown up, she’d been so happy to be alone. Now, as she passed the trees and thought of the mysterious numbers hidden beneath their branches, her solitude felt ominous.

Sam worked on her field notes and cooked herself a brunch of reconstituted stew before heading out to do her survey work. She drove as close as she could to the eastern border of her area and then hiked in. Then she spent five hours patrolling, sampling, and noting species of animals in a sector she hadn’t yet documented. The rust-bellied salamanders and six-inch banana slugs and fuzzy-eared Douglas squirrels were common, but always a welcome sign of a healthy ecosystem. A porcupine munching the bark on the lower limb of a pine was a pleasant surprise: she hadn’t seen one for years. She did her best to list the plants, too, knowing that Mack would eventually follow up with a more thorough botanical survey.

She found no illegal signs tacked on trees, no ATV trails ripped into meadows, not even a rifle casing. The undamaged forest definitely lifted her mood. This had always been her dream, to get paid for exploring the wilderness, communing with plants and animals. Animals had never caused her even a tiny fraction of the grief that people did.

First it had been her father, insisting that she should give thanks to God that her invalid mother had lived as long as she had. Sam had never been in the least grateful. Would she make it through his wedding without adding more demerits to her abysmal record?