Bear Bait (9781101611548) (25 page)

Then there were the illegal hunters and nasty sign posters of the world: the people who saw wild plants and animals either as pests or commodities. And the labelers, who took one look at her and named her a liberal intellectual feminist environmentalist, all descriptions she was proud to own in the Pacific Northwest, but which had somehow become epithets in other places.

But not every human was a disappointment. She did have friends. Mack and Blake and Joe up here, and in Utah, Kent and Rafael. She didn’t see any of them often enough; when they weren’t at work, they were understandably occupied with wives and children, or girlfriends. Or in Blake’s case, the occasional manfriend.

Mud squished underfoot as she crossed the wetland close to her parking spot. Yes, most people were more trouble than they were worth. But there was Chase. She couldn’t help smiling at the mere thought of him. Then again, he was trouble of a sort, too. He lived in Utah, she in Washington, and they both worked long days at weird and hazardous jobs. Would they ever truly get together? Did he really want to?

What did he see in her, anyway? Chase had plenty of women pursuing him. She’d noticed longing looks cast in his direction more than once.

It was frustrating to have no close female friends to talk this sort of thing over with. Laura Choi seemed nice, but they mostly talked about Joe and Lili. Which reminded
her—she still needed to find time for that talk about writing careers with Lili. Maybe she could find a way to get more information from the kid about those damned signs, too.

WHEN
she crawled into her sleeping bag that evening, Sam noticed it smelled like Chase. Where would she be tonight if she’d gone with him? In a hotel, having steamy sex? A delicious thought. Or more likely, sitting alone in a government car or sacked out on a couch in a nondescript office, waiting for Chase to come back from some rendezvous or surveillance activity. Pathetic. She didn’t want either Chase or his partner Nicole to think of her as some sort of groupie along for the ride.

The one place she knew she would be, had she gone with him, was out of work. Peter Hoyle would can her in an instant if Sam wasn’t absolutely diligent about wrapping up her three-month contract. Heck, Hoyle would probably fire her if he found out that Chase had stayed with her in a restricted area last night.

Chase probably hadn’t really meant that invitation, anyway. It was just a polite thank-you for sex. And such great sex, at least from her perspective. She closed her eyes and focused on the memories of making love with Chase.

JUST
before midnight, something woke her. Maybe the brightness of the moon? The skies were crystal clear, rare near the Olympic Mountains, and moonlight spilled in through the tent’s mesh window. She lay still and listened for a minute. A snapping sound, like someone had stepped on a dry stick. A couple of quiet thuds, muffled against thick forest duff.

After stuffing her penlight into her pocket and pulling on her pants and boots, she unzipped the tent as quietly as she could and slipped out. She crouched in the shadow under the fir, watching and listening.

A crunching among the ferns to her left drew her attention,
and she briefly flicked on her light and aimed it there, highlighting a thicket of legs among the greenery, then a little higher up, luminous globes of eyes. A trio of deer. They stared at her, trying to decide if she was a predator or a competitor, or maybe just hopeful that she’d provide entertainment. She turned the penlight off, but could feel their eyes still on her.

There. A splash of light in the burn area. Her breath stopped for a minute as she stared hard at the dark forest, trying to sort out the shapes. Had she imagined it? She saw it again, a bright spot flickering past blackened trunks. A flashlight. Someone was walking near the Lucky Molly Mine.

IN
his loaner cubicle in the Seattle FBI office, Chase booted up his laptop. What a long day of meetings and comparing notes; it was nearly midnight and he was only now processing the latest reports on his own case. On the other side of the padded blue cubicle wall, he could hear Nicole’s keystrokes as she studied evidence assembled from robberies across the country. Pulling up Google, he typed in
eminenten
, the mysterious word he’d come across a couple of days ago. A list of URLs and descriptions in what looked like German appeared, with words similar to
eminenten
highlighted.

At the bottom of the list was a URL with no description:
www.poeagle.org
. When he clicked the link, his laptop screen displayed a video of a bald eagle flying as the red, white, and, blue of the American flag rippled in the background behind it. Clever animation, but what was the point? And where did
eminenten
come in? The only words on the screen were “Let Freedom Ring!”

He clicked the center of the screen, then the words, tried moving his cursor around the screen to see if it changed over a hot spot link in the graphic. If there was a hot spot, it was tiny. He tried the bird’s eye, and congratulated himself on his brilliance as the screen displayed three horizontal strips laid out like odometers. The top one was labeled “Profits of Top Ten U.S. Corporations This Year.” Numbers in that row were flipping so fast that his eyes could barely focus on them. The numbers in the second row, labeled “Number of U.S. Citizens Living in Poverty,” rolled over
more slowly, but the total was consistently increasing. And the sum in the bottom row, “U.S. Dollars Spent Overseas,” was growing nearly as fast as the Profits counter.

In the lower-right corner was a pumpkin-colored square that read “In the Know? Make Some Dough. Apply for Eminenten Grants Now.”

Eminenten, finally. Leaning forward, he eagerly clicked the orange square. The screen redrew for the third time. His spirits dampened when he saw the Members Only message, followed by fill-in boxes for name and password. He took a couple of guesses. His third brought up a threat: This Is Not A Game. You Are Now Registered As An Intruder. Try Again and Penalties Will Result. He’d barely finished reading the words when the speakers made an exploding sound and the screen went completely blank.

“Chingada suerte!”
he cursed.

Nicole rounded the cubicle wall. “Found something interesting?”

“I’m making progress,” he said.

“Right.” She stared at the blank screen. “I can see that.”

SAM
considered turning on her radio to report the intruder in the woods, but that would be easily heard in the hush of night. The interloper would probably flee, and then she’d be no closer to finding out who was skulking around this area at night and what he was up to.

After she was sure it was only one person, she stealthily made her way toward the glow of the flashlight. Even with the moonshine, it was slow going without her own light; the ground was rough and clumps of giant ferns and hurdles of fallen logs barred her way. She groped along, trying to make as little noise as possible.

When she was about fifty yards away, the flashlight ahead winked out. She crouched behind a tree, afraid she’d been discovered. But after a minute she heard snuffling noises, and peeking around the tree trunk, she could barely make out the dark shape of a man.

He was simply standing there, barely moving. She froze. After another moment, he threw something away from his body. She could tell from the motion that his back was turned toward her. She crept closer.

His flashlight suddenly blazed again. The beam swept overhead. Sam pressed herself to the ground alongside a fire-blackened log, hoping her clothes and hair and skin were now filthy enough to blend into the scenery. She was afraid to breathe.

What the hell had she been thinking, anyway? If the intruder had a gun—and hadn’t the paintball warriors of a few days ago been armed with real bullets as well as paintballs?—he could easily fire a couple of bullets into her prone form. After another pass, the light flicked off again. His shadow remained still. Moving slowly and silently, she drew herself into a crouch behind the huge stump of an ancient cedar.

What now? She listened for a minute. Was that a sob? She peered around the charred and crumbling cedar. The man’s head was now softly lit by a patch of moonlight. He had dark hair, and she had the impression that he was young. That and his husky shape was all she could make out.

She pressed her back to the stump and waited. Suddenly the horrible thought flashed into her mind that he might be waiting for his comrades, in which case she’d made the worst possible choice she could have by sneaking up on him. As she debated her options, the distant rumble of a truck engine joined his quiet snuffling. Someone was driving up the track she’d hiked yesterday.

A pair of lights flickered in the far woods. Headlights. The fellow behind her noticed too, because he growled, “What the fuck?” and turned away from the mine pit. The snap of a twig told her he had stepped in her direction.

Oh jeez, not now. The adrenaline coursing through her veins urged her to run, but instead she stayed in place, raised her hand to her mouth, and bit down hard on the knuckle of her first finger.
Oh God, don’t let this be some sort of poacher rendezvous, with me in the middle.
Why hadn’t she brought the Glock? Why hadn’t she gone with Chase, even if she had to sleep in the car?

Her heart pounded so loudly in her ears that she was surprised to hear the crash of metal against rock. The movement of headlights stopped. She heard muffled thumps of heavy doors opening. Her booby trap had worked.

The footsteps behind her came closer.

Shit! She pressed herself harder against the stump, willing herself invisible. If he were focused on the vehicle in the distance, he’d pass right by. And he must have, because she could no longer hear him moving. She heard two angry male voices, interspersed with the grinding of gears and whine of wheels spinning against the ground.

She took a deep breath, crawled to the nearest tree, and pulled herself up with shaking fingers, staring toward the dim glow of headlights through the trees. It occurred to her that if the intruders wanted to hike out, the trail around Marmot Lake was the closest route back to civilization. They might walk right past her tent. If the sniffling man by the mine was waiting for the others, they’d surely come her way, because he had to have a vehicle parked at the end of the lake trail. Why hadn’t she thought of this before?

She waited for the confrontation of the three men. Instead, she heard the thuds of two doors closing, and after a painful squeal of metal against rock, the headlights backed away. The engine noise of the departing vehicle was loud in the night.

Did she dare move toward her tent? The throb of the engine died away, leaving only the rhythmic sigh of the wind. But she didn’t feel even a whisper of breeze. It hit her in a rush that she was listening to
breathing
. Her own breath stopped at the thought. Bile rose into her throat, burning and bitter.

She could feel him close, just behind her right shoulder.

“I could kill you right now.” His voice was surprisingly gentle.

“What’s stopping you, then?” She was amazed to hear her own voice come out so brazen. She wanted to step out and
confront him, go down like a fighter, but she couldn’t make her body move away from the solidity of the tree trunk.

“It’s not yet time.”

She heard him move away like a rattlesnake uncoiling and slithering into the brush. After a few seconds, she let her legs collapse under her and sat down hard on the ground. In the distance, the intruder’s flashlight flicked on. He was on the trail around the lake. He was taking his time, knowing that even if she called for backup, he’d still make good his escape.

After five minutes, her breathing slowed and her shaky legs would hold her again. Yeesh, she was a wuss. How had Caitlin Knight worked as a game warden, facing down armed hunters for a living? What had her last moments been like? Sam shivered.

She turned on her penlight and walked unsteadily to the edge of the mine pit. A white rose lay at the bottom of the crater, its half-opened petals a pale bloom against the dark rock.

The rose could only be for Lisa Glass. At least it proved that someone did miss her; she hadn’t been completely alone in the world. Unless, of course, the man was one of her killers and this was a show of remorse for his heinous act. He had certainly talked more like a killer than a lover.

As she walked back to her tent, every sound unnerved her. The tiny rustle of leaves now sounded like a stalker instead of a mouse; that thump a footstep instead of a pinecone dropping to the ground. But every time she flashed her light around, she was alone. At her tent, she found her radio and called in the two intruder incidents, more for the record than in any hopes of capturing the culprits. Maybe they could identify the guy on the track by damage to his vehicle.

Taking the sleeping bag from her tent, she carried it to the cover of another big cedar, just in case the whispering intruder had spotted her camp. In the second before she ducked under the drooping boughs, a primeval yell resounded through the forest.
“Ka-ka-ka-ka-wow!”
She held her breath as she waited for another savage to
acknowledge the attack signal. When the answering call, farther away, came in the form of
“Hoo-hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo!,”
she realized that she was listening to a conversation between two great horned owls. Damn that sniffling rose man! He had ruined a magical moment for her.

Providing she survived the night, she was heading home for a breather. She needed a cat in her lap and the security of a night in her own bed.

Pulling the bag over her, she awaited dawn with her back against the tree, opening one eye every time a chipmunk scurried through the pine duff.

BONE
or taupe? She couldn’t decide. Both pairs of heels clomped on the polished wooden floors of the cabin. Or maybe they clunked. Whatever the noise was, it wasn’t attractive. Surely other women didn’t make this sound when they walked in heels. Normal women would be able to put into action verbs other than
clomp
or
clunk
, verbs like
float
or
drift
or
sashay
. Sam tried to sashay across the living room, watching herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the coat closet. She swung her hips like a runway model, swishing the full skirt of her only good dress, the draped little coral number that Adam had given her a couple of years ago. The man may have been a self-centered social climber, but he had taste.