He’d gone too far. He was a killer and she was only a pissed off romance writer but he was about to find out that when a romance writer starts plotting, well, more people take notice than listened to E. F. Hutton talk. They hadn’t gotten that fifty percent market share just for writing sex scenes.
* * * *
Matt hated starting an op tired. The tough part of the hunt was still ahead of them, the part that would require them to think on their feet, to react quickly and decisively. They couldn’t afford to make mistakes on this one. The margin of error was too narrow.
He turned back to his team. “Give me an update.”
Alice looked up from the map she had been bent over for the last three hours. “I think we’ve identified all usable tracks within the target area, but there are as many places they could veer off and still navigate.”
“Wouldn’t be easy, but it’s possible in the lower foothills,” the ranger added.
Matt spread his hands on the table to support his weight. “Let’s start with the most likely scenario.”
The ranger nodded. “I’m guessing he’ll cut up toward Storm Creek Pass trail. He could hike cross country from where he torched the truck and hit the trail in short order. The cover’s good and they’d make good time on a well marked trail.”
“And then what?” Riggs asked, pale and bandaged, but upright and thinking.
“From that trail he’s got a lot of options. He could head towards us here at Long’s Peak Ranger Station. We got a parking lot for hikers. No problem leaving a vehicle parked there for several days.”
“That makes sense,” Luke said, crossing over to join the briefing with a fresh cup of coffee for Matt. “We can have someone start running the plates on what’s here.”
“Do it.” Matt lifted the hot brew to his mouth, felt it kick start in his tired system. “What are his other options?”
“He could drop down into Bear Lake here,” the ranger touched it on the map. “Again, the hike isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible. If they hiked all night, they’d be there within the next hour or so.”
Alice looked up from the map. “We’ve got people there.”
“That’s a busy area this time of year. Be easy for him to lose himself in the crowd. And there’s a regular shuttle to the parking lot at Glacier Basin,” the ranger said, pointing to an area on the other side of the park.
“We got people at Glacier Basin, too,” Riggs said. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt tail.
“What’s this?” Matt traced another line on the map.
“That’s the East portal of a water diversion tunnel that runs the width of the park. They could hike out on it. Put them outside close to the convention center.” The ranger looked up. “He likely to have help?”
Alice shrugged. Matt frowned. “Unknown,” he said, “but unlikely. He’s not the trusting type.”
Henry, a pencil threaded through his fingers like a cigarette, tapped a spot on the map. “That’s the convention center there?”
“Yeah, it’s not far from where the tunnel comes out. Another parking lot to check out.” The ranger rubbed the back of his neck. “We’ve got people there, too.”
“If he goes into the park, the perimeter road is going to be a problem.” Alice pointed to a road that circled the park.
“If he has transportation waiting inside the park, he could circle around and try to slip out the Grand Lake exit over here. Or park it along the way and start hiking again.” The ranger looked at Matt. “How experienced a hiker is your girl?”
Matt looked at Riggs.
“She’s a romance writer from New Orleans.” Riggs slipped on his glasses.
“Who’s afraid of heights.” Luke lifted a coffee cup to his lips.
The man’s eyes widened. “Even at this altitude she’s gonna be one sick puppy. He tries to hike her higher…” Ranger looked grim. “He likely to ditch her if she gets to be too much trouble?”
“Probably,” Matt said, without hesitation.
“We think he’s got one of those obsession things going,” Alice said. “I don’t think he’ll hurt her unless she does something to piss him off.”
“Is she likely to do that?”
“No.” Alice looked at Matt. “She’ll keep her head. And keep trying to help us find her. Like she did with the toilet paper.”
“She’s a regular little Gretel. Let’s hope Hayes doesn’t start to notice the roll going down,” Riggs said.
First she had him staking out cookie counters, now he was following toilet paper bows. Had there really been a time when he thought the romance writer would be easy, Matt wondered?
“We gonna put choppers up?” Henry took the pencil out of his mouth to ask.
Matt hesitated, looked at the ranger.
The ranger looked doubtful. “Couldn’t do it without him knowing it. If he’s listening to our radio traffic—”
“What if we create a crisis, like a lost kid or plane gone down? We could put as many choppers up as we wanted.”
“Hayes would see through that, Matt,” Alice objected.
“Maybe, but we could insert chatter about the hunt for him, just him, into the traffic. He wouldn’t know for sure and it would help us stay mobile without tipping our hand if we do get a lead on where he’s headed.”
“It could work,” Riggs said, looking thoughtful. “Anything we can do to keep Hayes from knowing our moves can only help.”
“Let’s keep the number of people who know it’s bogus to a minimum. I don’t want any slip ups,” Matt told the ranger. “Have you warned your people that Hayes is extremely dangerous? I can’t emphasis this enough. No one approaches him on their own, no heroics. We don’t want dead heroes or the hostage put in unnecessary danger. Orders are to mark and follow only until back up is in place. Questions? Comments?” No one said anything and he was quiet, scanning for the weak spots in their planning. “Is that every way he could take her out?”
“If your hostage wasn’t such a novice, he could head up Long’s Peak trail.”
“Wouldn’t he ridge himself?” Luke asked.
“I thought there was a trail down to Wild Basin?” Matt said, trying to find the trail on the map.
“Yeah, there’s a trail—of sorts. It’s a real bastard. He’d have to know about it, have done it before to even find it, cause it’s not marked on the current maps.” The ranger pointed at the map, tracing a line down from Long’s Peak with his finger. “It would be crazy to try it with a beginner. Long’s Peak is over fourteen thousand feet above sea level. The altitude would wipe her out before they made the timberline.”
Crazy. It was the last thing they would expect him to do with Dani in tow. That trail was hard on seasoned hikers. Dani wasn’t even a hiker. Hayes knew that.
“Let’s put someone at Wild Basin, too.”
Luke arched his brows. “That doesn’t make any sense, Matt.”
“I know. It’s a long shot. But I’d rather err on the side of caution. One guy should be enough, have him check out any vehicles parked there.”
“Right.” Riggs nodded to Henry, who lifted his telephone. “You gonna stay here, Matt?”
“Yeah, I want one of the choppers so I can move once they’re spotted. You stay with me, Alice. Riggs, Henry, I want you at Bear Lake with the other chopper.” They nodded and moved off. Luke walked over to him, with a slight smile.
“You got marching orders for me, little brother?”
Matt looked up from the map with a quick grin at the mock-subservient tone. “Could you coordinate the license plate checks? I’ll have Alice get you any gear you want and hook you up with Sebastian. He can run checks on the names. If we can find his transport, we’ll know where he’s headed.”
* * * *
Dani choked down a breakfast of trail mix, half a power bar and stale water, with an ibuprofen chaser, pretending to listen to Spook as he gave her some hiking tips.
“We have to take it slow, you don’t
rush a fourteener—”
“Fourteener?” The question was just an excuse to quit eating for a minute. Even to her it was obvious what the fourteener was.
“Our fourteen thousand foot mountain,” he said impatiently. “Air’ll get thinner the higher we climb. Makes your heart work harder. The trick is to do what they call the step-pause. Take a step, pause, then take another step.”
“Can’t I just do the pause part?”
He ignored her. “If you try to push the pace, you’ll get sick.”
“I’m already sick.”
“It’s worth it, Willow.”
“Sure.” And some day the literary world will take romance writing seriously.
He crouched in front of her, his face turning intense. It gave definition to its blandness, made him almost handsome. “When you get to the top, you’ll be glad you made it. You’ll know what matters, what doesn’t. You’ll know what I know.”
She already knew what he knew. Nothing.
“Let’s gear up.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ll have to carry your own pack now, Willow. We need the supplies when we start down and I didn’t have time to stash what we’d need at both places.”
Great. Bad enough having to haul her butt up hill. Now she had to do with a bunch of crap she didn’t want or like on her back. He was lucky she wasn’t premenstrual and soda deprived.
They started hiking. A slow plodding walk, using Spook’s step-pause routine, with the pauses as long as he’d let her get away with. Since they were cutting across the mountainside, the hike wasn’t too bad, though the ibuprofen barely took the edge off her headache. Her stomach wasn’t a fan of the putrid breakfast and the straps of her pack cut into her shoulders. There was no kindly light up here, just the pale flicker of Spook’s flashlight marking the trail for her between tall, ghostly lodge pole pines. At a junction of silvery Aspen trees, Spook stopped and looked at her. She started to sit down, but he shook his head.
“Don’t. It’ll just make it harder for you to start up again. Drink a little water and eat a little trail mix as you walk. It’ll keep your energy level steady.”
Her energy level was already steady at rock bottom.
“You’re doing good. Just keep using the step-pause technique and Willow?”
“What?” She ground a piece of dry fruit between her teeth and washed it down with a drink of water. Tried to pretend one was chocolate, the other her soda, but her imagination wasn’t good enough for that either.
“This is a busy trail during the day. There’ll be other hikers, both ahead and behind us. Don’t call attention to yourself unless you want them to die.”
The dry mix went dryer. Her lashes lifted, her eyes found his. “I’ll hate you if you hurt anyone else, Spook.”
His lids drooped and his mouth curved in pleasure. She was everything he had hoped for. And now the mountain was remaking her, just like it had remade him. She was exhausted, in pain, even frightened, though she tried hard not to show it. As she ascended the refining hell of the mountain, it just made her more beautiful. He could barely keep his hands off her. She was so perfectly formed for him. He had waited so long for her. It wasn’t time yet. This wasn’t the place. He was more than ready, but she wasn’t. Wouldn’t be until she reached the peak cleansed of her past and ready for the new life he had planned for them.
He reached out to touch her cheek. His hand trembled with the effort of keeping the caress light, when he wanted to dig his fingers into her bare flesh and taste her. “I’ll love how you hate me, Willow. Just like I’ll love how you love me when it’s time. But no one has to get hurt as long as you do your part.”
It was the first time since he had smeared her with blood and she tossed her cookies that she felt something sexual from him. Up to now there had been no passion in the restrained, almost fatherly way he shepherded her up his mountain.
Now he looked at her the way a man looks at a woman. His eyes stripped her, took her apart and probed the secret places of mind and body. Even as her skin and mind shrank from his touch, she felt his strange attraction reach out to her, the way it had drawn her to him on the boards before she knew what he was.
It would have been more comfortable if knowledge had killed attraction, but this place didn’t allow for comfortable fiction. She wanted to fight him, to hate him, but passion of any kind was dangerous, too easily mistaken for love, by your own body and by the enemy that provoked it.
His goal was to break her, pitting his will against hers to get at her body and her mind. She was his hostage, dependent on him for survival. He had isolated her, taken control of her food, limited her sleep and oxygen until she could barely think straight, then applied shock therapy every time she started to get her equilibrium back. If he forced himself on her, he lost the battle of her mind.
And if he mixed kind with the cruel? The stroke of his hand against her skin was dangerously comforting. Two steps to his shoulder and her burdens were his. It shouldn’t be tempting. He shouldn’t be tempting. But she was so tired. He was so close. It was a more terrifying combination than the thousands of feet he wanted her to climb above sea level.
She could quit now. Patty Hearst would understand, even if no one else did. If she could just figure out how to do that quitting thing. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Especially when staring into the eyes of a killer.
“I’ll do my part.” She licked her dry lips, wished she hadn’t when the light in his eyes flared brighter. How much he wanted her, and his struggle to control that want, stabbed out of his eyes like his expertly wielded knife. “Shouldn’t we go?”
Hayes didn’t answer, didn’t hear what she said. He was too engrossed in what he saw. The defiant lift of her chin. The unconscious trembling of her mouth. She didn’t yet know how futile was her resistance. He had to show her. Now.
He slid his hand to the back of her neck. Her hair, soft as silk, brushed against the back of his hand. There was resistance when he pulled her toward him, but not enough to matter. Not enough to stop him from taking the shocked, moist circle of her mouth into his.
He only meant to take a small taste of her, but when pleasure speared deep in his groin, small wasn’t enough. He wanted all of her.
With teeth and tongue, he forced her mouth open and bit the soft flesh he found inside. A small explosion of blood filled her mouth, then his. One hand held her head so he could suck and bite. The other hand fumbled, tearing at her clothes—
Her elbow went deep into his gut, exploding the air from his lungs. A last minute twist kept her knee from delivering more than a glancing blow down below. Pain lanced through the pleasure. He shoved her away with a curse.
Dani staggered back, fell to her knees, blood dripping from her mouth. Pleasure pushed back the pain. Want rebuilt despite the pain. He stepped toward her.
That’s when he saw her eyes. Wide. Shocked. Void of want.
She had to want him. He had to see her want him. She would or she would die.
Every violated cell of her body screamed for her to run, but if she tried, he would be on her. His muscles were bunched to pounce again, his eyes those of an animal about to feed. She would never take him by surprise twice. If he got his hands on her again.
She moved slowly, so as not to provoke that attack, and wiped her bloody mouth. It was already swelling, the pain so bad it was all she could do not to weep her pain and fear. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She rose, straightening her body bone by bone until her shoulders were back, her chin up. Then she zipped her jacket, shutting the flesh he’d bared from his view.
“I guess,” she said with a steadiness of tone that surprised her, “those power bars do more for you than they do for me.”
He rubbed his mouth, found her blood there and licked it. “Soon, Willow, you’ll come to me. You’ll open your heart, your mind—your soul if there is such a thing. You’ll beg me to take you. You can’t fight what will be. If you don’t know it now
, you will by the time we get up there.”
The towering pines kept them in shadow, blocked what warmth there was from a sky just starting to be touched by the dawn. Pink, yellow, a touch of orange softened the velvet blue. It didn’t soften him. He preferred the shadow to the light.
How was she going to escape his shadow except by dying? Dani had always understood why Alice stepped off that cliff in Last of the Mohicans, had even admired her courage. Now Dani understood this wasn’t about courage.
It was about running out of acceptable options.
“And if I don’t want you when I get up there, what then?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I’ll kill you.”
“I see.” Between then and now she was going to have to answer Kelly’s question. Did she want to live? Because Spook’s offer came under the heading of guilt-free passage to the next world. And if she found she did want to live? She had assumed, based on no evidence at all, that Spook could be reasoned out of his fantasy. Now she knew he couldn’t. This wasn’t just about living or dying. This was about the survival of self. Dani’s self. If she lived, only one person would come down that mountain again. The person she was. Or the person Spook wanted her to be. He didn’t intend to lose, but she didn’t know how to quit.
She lifted her chin, not enough to be provocative, but enough to show him she wasn’t down yet.
“Nice to have a choice.”
He looked amused. It was a better look on him than brutal lover, but it wouldn’t make her want him. She brushed past, heard him fall in behind her. Still in shadow, they passed out of the protection of the timberline and into a world shrunk down to ground cover. Looming ahead of them she could see Spook’s mountain peak waiting like Tolkien’s Mount Doom for them to come up and play out the final standoff between the killer and the romance writer.
Too bad the lonesome lawman couldn’t be there, too. Or that last Mohican. She wasn’t too proud to admit she could use a little help.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Matt paced back and forth in front of the Long’s Peak Ranger Station, his mind turning over the information that arrived after the sun. He could only get the barest information from the tracker still following Hayes and Dani’s trail. They had to talk in code to keep Hayes from finding out Dani was leaving clues for them. So far the license plate checks hadn’t turned up a likely destination. Action was easy. Waiting sucked.
The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy Page 28