The sound of footsteps crunching twigs and ice echoed somewhere in the distance. Footsteps... He was coming after her again.
This time he’d kill her.
She struggled to crawl forward, but her limbs were too heavy and stiff to move.
Her teeth chattered. Her skin stung from the cold, and her chest hurt as she tried to draw a breath.
The sense that she was in imminent danger overwhelmed her as scattered memories broke through the haze. Someone chasing her. A sharp blow.
She clawed at the ground, fingers digging into the brush and icy ground. Her feet pushed at the surface but sank deeper into the frigid snow. Tears of frustration blurred her eyes, then trickled down her cheeks, freezing on her face.
She had to move. Hide.
But her body wouldn’t cooperate. She tried to flex her fingers and grappled for a tree limb, something to help propel her forward. But the branch was too far away. She couldn’t give up, though. The cold could be deadly.
Summoning every ounce of strength she possessed, she managed to scoot on her stomach and dragged herself a few feet.
Every muscle in her body throbbed with the effort. Even her bones hurt.
Then a gust of wind shook the trees, sending a deluge of icy snow and more limbs down onto her, and she collapsed.
She cried out for help, but her voice faded into the howling wind. Terror bled through her as she sank back into the darkness.
* * *
FLETCH TUGGED HIS hat over his ears as he tracked the bloodspots on the ground. He’d been hiking for over an hour.
Something shiny caught his eye near a tree stump, and he waved his flashlight across the area. There it was. Glittering against the white ground. It was caught in the weeds. He hiked over to it, knelt and dug the object from the fresh snow.
A wedding ring.
Questions needled him as he examined it. A woman’s ring. Too small for a man. Silver. What was it doing out here in the wilderness?
Someone could have lost it while camping or hiking.
Judging from the fact that it wasn’t buried yet, it couldn’t have been here long.
He studied the tracks ahead. More blood. Did it belong to the woman who owned this wedding ring?
Another violent gust of wind snapped tree limbs and sent them flying to the ground. The snow was falling faster, accumulating so quickly that it obliterated the blood trail.
He needed to hurry, or he’d get trapped out here himself.
But the mantra he and his fellow rescue workers lived by reverberated in his head—leave no one behind.
If someone was injured and needed help, he had to find him. Or judging from the ring—her.
He jammed the wedding band in his pocket, then set out again. Another mile. Then another. Upward toward Vulture’s Point, named so because several suicides had occurred at the spot, the bodies drawing the vultures to the canyon below.
What if he was tracking someone contemplating suicide? She could have dumped the ring and then hiked toward the point. But...if so, why was she bleeding? And what about the drag marks? That indicated there was more than one person...
The storm intensified, snow thickening with each mile, the wind the kind of biting cold that stung your skin and clawed at your bones.
Finally he turned the corner past the boulder marking the rise to the point, and spotted something black. A boot? No, a dark red wool scarf...
Adrenaline churning, he took off running. The thick snow sucked at his boots, but he crossed the area and picked up the scarf. More blood drops. Indentations in the snow that looked like paw prints—no, hands digging.
He was close. He could feel it.
The flashlight fought through the blurry haze, and a minute later, he spotted a body. Facedown on the ground, body half buried in the blanket of white.
A woman.
He jogged toward her and lurched to a stop when he reached her. Long dark hair dotted with snow and ice lay in a tangled mass over the woman’s shoulders.
He sucked in a breath and stooped to see if she was alive.
Copyright © 2020 by Rita B. Herron
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ISBN: 9781488067273
48 Hour Lockdown
Copyright © 2020 by Harlequin Books S.A.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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48 Hour Lockdown (Tactical Crime Division Book 1) Page 20