Bear Bait (9781101611548) (3 page)

The wind was rising; the acrid air licked across her sweaty brow and stung her eyes. She hazarded a quick glance at Lili. Tears streaked glistening channels through black smudges on the girl’s face. How long could the child keep up the hard work? For that matter, how long could she herself keep it up? Where was the rest of the crew?

To her left, an arrow of fire snaked up the skeleton of a dead cedar. With a whoosh like a sudden intake of breath, a limb overhead burst into flames, a Fourth of July sparkler that showered them with fiery bits of bark and needles. Sam curled her fingers into Lili’s collar and yanked her out of the rain of embers. Caught off-guard, the girl stumbled against her. Sam stepped back to recover her footing.

The ground disappeared beneath her boots. What felt like solid rock slammed first into her spine, and then collided with the back of her skull. Her jaws snapped together. Her teeth sliced into her lower lip. The Pulaski crashed down across her thighs. With a great roar, the flame-lit surroundings transitioned into nothingness like the screen pixels between photos in a computer slide show.

Was that Lili shrieking? The surge of blackness threatened to engulf her.
No! Shake it off, no time to pass out. Lili’s counting on you. Breathe. Now. Just do it. Now.

With Sam’s first painful intake of air, feeling and vision rushed back. The earth beneath her was cool. Far above the chaos of the fire, stars winked through thin streams of smoke. Lower, toward the ground, Lili’s smoke-darkened face peered anxiously down at her. And then there were other faces, rangers Paul Schuler and Mack Lindstrom and a gray-haired fellow whose name she couldn’t remember. The roar in her head drowned out all other sounds.

A stinging bumblebee of pain registered in front of her left ear, and she raised a hand toward it. Mack’s heavy boots thudded onto the ground beside her. He swatted a glowing ember away. As if the burning coal had blocked her ears, her hearing suddenly returned.

Mack’s square face blotted out everything else. “You shouldn’t move.”

Groaning, she pushed herself to a sitting position.

“Okay, so don’t listen to me. You okay, Sam?”

“Think so.” The air hurt her lip and tongue and the inside of her cheek, where her teeth had torn into the soft flesh. Her mouth filled with bitter liquid. She spat onto the ground. Blood ran down her chin. A quick exploration with her fingertips revealed a gash in her lip and a lump already growing at the base of her skull. Sam sucked in another deep lungful of air, coughed once, then gasped, “Just knocked the breath out of myself.”

Taking Mack’s extended hand, she pulled herself to her feet. “I’m too old for this shit.”

The last words came out “thith thit.” She spat again, dug a toe into the dirt, grabbed a root that spiked out of the earth wall overhead, and pulled herself skyward. Mack’s hands pressed against her buttocks, a gesture she would ordinarily have protested. Under the circumstances, she was grateful for the boost. On her hands and knees, she crawled out of the crater, feeling like a drunk who had just come to after spending the night on the barroom floor.

A low wolf whistle sounded from behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder to spy a man leaning on his shovel, leering at her, his teeth unnaturally white in his
smoke-darkened face. Just her luck, the only firefighter paying attention would be Arnie Cole, a smarmy forest service ranger she’d been trying to avoid since their first meeting over two months ago. A few yards away, Joe Choi, in full fire gear, clasped Lili to his chest. Catching a glimpse of her over Lili’s head, he raised a hand and gave Sam a thumbs-up sign. In a line that stretched into the hazy distance, ghostly yellow-and-green-clad figures wielded shovels and Pulaskis. Over the crackling and hissing, she heard the loud whine of the portable pump on the lakeshore. Its racket added a treble note to the pounding in her head.

Mack clambered up beside her, one fist clamped around her Pulaski. She stood on the edge, swaying slightly as she stared into the dark void. The crater was easily fifteen feet across and at least seven feet deep. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? “Was that always there?”

Alwayths theah?
The three syllables stabbed. Blood streamed down her chin, and sudden tears blurred her vision. She covered her lips with cupped fingers to smother the pain.

“How would I know? This is
your
area.” Mack pressed her Pulaski into her hands and reached for the shovel he’d left on the ground.

Ah yes. The fire was destroying her area. Suck it up, Westin. Raising the Pulaski, she stumbled toward the glowing edge. She’d kill it for sure this time.
Vengeanth ith mine
, sayeth the fat-lipped firefighter.

An hour later, the fire was out. Only a few acres lay in smoking gray ruins. Most of the firefighters, including Joe and Lili, had gone home, but the ones who remained divided the devastation among themselves and tromped through it toward the lake, stirring ashes and turning over smoldering chunks of wood to ensure the flames wouldn’t spring to life as soon as they departed. Sam was pulverizing a smoldering ember into ashes when Mack yelped from fifty yards away.

“Holy shit!”

It took her a minute to locate him in the moonlight among the skeletons of trees. He was on his knees beside a
charred tree trunk. Had he hurt himself? After making sure she had permanently blinded the glowing eye on the ground, she trudged toward him.

Side by side, they stared at the blackened log, still smoking on the forest floor. It was wearing boots.

THEY
both dug out flashlights to take stock of the situation. The body, dressed in ash-smudged camouflage trousers, khaki shirt, and leather boots, lay mostly in Elk Creek, which was now a slow trickle of sludge. The face was turned into the scorched ferns along the bank, the visible portion a mass of blisters interrupted by a singed eyebrow. Blackened hair was clumped into snarls by congealing blood that flowed from a gaping wound at the back of the head.

Sam’s stomach lurched at the odor of charred flesh. Not even an illegal hunter deserved this end. “Is he—”

A dribble of blood slid over her lower lip. She wiped it on her sleeve and pressed her lips together to lessen the flow from the gash her teeth had cut.

Mack pressed his fingers to the victim’s neck. After a few seconds, he said, “Can’t feel a pulse.” He placed his hand in front of the blistered lips, then, after another interval, shook his head. “We’re going to need a body bag.”

Slipping his fingers under the web belt at the broad waist, he tugged. With an obscene sucking sound, the body broke free of the mud and flopped over onto its back. A hand, its fingers curled, came to rest on the toe of Sam’s boot.

The transformation made her gasp. The side of the face that had been pressed to the ground was untouched by fire. An ivory cheek shone through streaks of gray mud. The
wisp of hair that hung over the half-moon eyebrow was a warm honey blond. Gold loops threaded both earlobes.

“Holy shit,” Mack said again. “It’s Lisa Glass.”

The name didn’t mean anything to Sam. “Who’s Lisa Glass?”

“Trail crew,” he murmured.

The trail crew, a group of seasonal workers Sam hadn’t met, had started work about ten weeks earlier in the north section of the park. The job—clearing existing trails of debris and hacking new paths out of the mountainous terrain—was grueling physical labor, most often performed by teenage delinquents working off community service sentences from juvenile court. It surprised her that this girl had been among them, although judging by her long muscular body, Lisa Glass would be physically able to wield a pickaxe and sledgehammer. Sam regretted not getting to know this tough young woman.

Mack’s head jerked up. “She’s alive! I just saw her take a breath.”

“What?” Sam knelt and gently pushed up an eyelid.

The pupil that stared back at her flashlight beam was an unmoving black well surrounded by ice blue iris. Suddenly the victim’s chest moved with a jerky breath.

“She’s unconscious,” Mack confirmed. “And I moved her. Oh God.” He wadded his jacket front in a fist, his sooty brow creased with anxiety. “I couldn’t feel a pulse or breath, I swear.”

“It’s okay, Mack, I would have done the same. You didn’t know she was still alive.” Sam brushed a tangle of burned hair away from Lisa’s blistered face. A wedge-shaped piece of skin from the girl’s cheek peeled away with the strand, and Sam froze, paralyzed by the horrible sight. In Lisa’s case, life might not be a blessing.

IT
was midmorning by the time Sam arrived at Mack’s apartment building. In its first life, the structure had been a
rambling farmhouse, as evidenced by its wide covered wooden porch and cedar plank floors. The flower-stenciled front door opened onto a tiny lobby with a sitting area and mailboxes for the three tenants. After stepping into the interior gloom, Sam raised her eyebrows at the unexpected sight of a lanky form sprawled across one of the two chairs.

The man had stretched out his gray-trousered legs and slouched down into the faded brown velvet armchair until he could rest his head atop the back cushion. A lightweight gray sports jacket had hiked up around his shoulders and waist. At least twenty-four hours’ worth of beard darkened his square jaw line, lending the olive skin a bluish cast above the neckline of his navy shirt. A loosened gray-and-white tie hung limply around his neck like a broken leash. His eyes were closed.

As she approached on tiptoe, the hand that had been lying relaxed on his thigh slipped back beneath the jacket. One eye opened a crack, revealing a deep brown iris and alert pupil.

She held up both hands. “Don’t shoot.”

His fingers slid away from the holster at the back of his belt out onto his thigh. “Sorry.” He pushed himself into a more upright position. “Reflex action.”

Special Agent Starchaser J. Perez rose and wrapped his arms around her. She tilted her face up. Their lips met briefly, a not-unpleasant pressure on her lidocaine-numbed mouth. He tasted like coffee. Suddenly she craved an espresso from Mack’s stovetop maker. “Come with me.” She motioned toward the stairs.

“Blake told me I could find you at this address. What gives? Last time we met, you were a writer.”

Sam grimaced. “Try to keep up, will you, FBI? The life of a freelancer is hectic. When we met, I was writing for the Save the Wilderness Fund. Then I had a weekly gig writing articles about hiking and outdoor equipment for an e-zine called
The Edge
, but a few months back they decided there’s not enough money in GORE-TEX jackets and hiking socks. In an attempt to fool us into believing that the economy’s
recovering, they’ve switched from rugged individualists conquering the great outdoors to beautiful people conquering luxury spas. Now they’re selling designer yoga wear.”

The last three words were especially difficult to enunciate, but her mangled mouth must have worked better than she thought, because Chase said only, “Really?”

“Really. So, courtesy of the park service, I’m a biologist again. A big area of national forest land is being added to Olympic National Park to create a protected continuous wildlife corridor from the mountains to the coast. They hired me to do an environmental survey and management plan for the new area. It’s only a twelve-week contract, unfortunately, and I’m already more than two-thirds of the way through it.” She dreaded the end of her contract. She had always wanted to be a park ranger, but her timing had never been right. After college, she was too short and too female; now the NPS budgets were too small.

“You’re living in this…place?” She could tell that he really wanted to say
dump
.

“It belongs to my friend Mack. We shared a cubicle during my online encyclopedia days at Key Inc.”

Chase raised an eyebrow.

“Another job I had before we met,” she explained. “Mack was botany; I was zoology.” Post-lidocaine talking was definitely easier than her pre-lidocaine efforts, although she still slurred the plosives. “We commiserated about seeing plants and animals only on computers. Then he up and abandoned hi-tech for Olympic National Park. He lets me crash here once in a while.”

“You outdoor adventure types do like to sleep around.” His steps echoed on the wooden treads behind her.

“What about you?” she asked. “Why are you here?”

“I just happened to be in the vicinity.”

“Chase, there’s
nobody
in this vicinity except hunters and fishers and hikers. I figured you were hot on the trail of those robbers in Salt Lake. The armored car bandits?” She’d seen the story on the news two weeks ago. Or was it three? Four?

“I was. I am. The trail led to Boise, and now it looks like the perps have moved to Washington State. We’ve been chasing these guys across three, no, four states for months. Now they’re taking on banks, too.”

Sounded like a major crime spree. “How are they getting away with it?”

“There’s always a distraction for the local police at the same time. We’re beginning to think it’s a huge group, not just a few individuals. It’s become a road show.” He sighed wearily. “On a tip, we staked out a First Interstate in Olympia through the wee hours, but nothing happened.”

That explained the whiskers. The “we” reminded Sam of Chase’s partner. “Where’s Nicole?” she asked.

“Some fancy resort in the San Juan Islands. Hubby picked her up in his private plane for a romantic weekend.”

The plane reference made her think about Lili’s school friend. Just how many people had their own planes, anyway? Was she living that far out of the mainstream?

She unlocked the door, pushed it open into the foyer off Mack’s compact kitchen. Although a pair of blue jeans dangled from a chair, she was relieved to see that no jockey shorts or balled-up socks littered the front room this time.

Opening the freezer door, she rummaged for the bag of coffee. She poured the last of the dark-roasted beans into the grinder and pressed the button.

Perez put his hands on the countertop, leaning close to be heard over the racket. His lips tickled her ear. “I was hoping for a romantic weekend myself.” His tone promised steamy embraces. He inhaled deeply. Wrinkling his nose, he drew back.