He frowned. “Watch your back, Summer.”
“It’s not so bad now. Forks mostly depends on tourism these days, not logging.”
“I hear there are vampires in the area,” he said.
She laughed. “Werewolves, too. Serving as the setting for the Twilight Series was the biggest thing to hit Forks in decades.” She moved on down the trail. “Keep an eye out for anything that might be a bear carcass.”
“Yuck.”
Hardly the response she would have expected from a man who had examined dozens of human corpses. She approached the edge of the burn. Yes, there was the crater, dropping away in front of her toes. Before the fire, she’d walked through this area a dozen times. There might have been a slight depression in that spot, but she was positive the crater hadn’t been there before the fire.
Chase balanced beside her on the edge. “Is this the hole you fell into?”
“Uh-huh.” It was embarrassing to think about it. She had a bruise on her hip that exactly matched that knob of protruding black rock on the bottom. As she rubbed the injured area, her lower lip began to throb in sympathy. She turned away, pulled a tiny bottle out of her pants pocket, and pumped anesthetic spray into her mouth, working it around with her tongue. The initial sting brought tears to her eyes, but the pain was followed by a welcome dullness.
“What is this pit, anyway?” Stepping down from the rim, Chase slid into the hole, dislodging a large rock that rolled away from beneath his boots. He hopped agilely over the avalanche he’d created and came to rest at the bottom of the crater. A fog of fine ash swirled up in her direction, and she sneezed painfully.
“This is a frame of some kind.” His personal rockslide had collapsed one side of the pit, revealing thick blocks of wood wedged into the dirt. He knelt to examine two pieces of lumber joined with a thick spike.
Sam clambered down to join him. They clawed and kicked dirt away until a ragged opening about three feet high was revealed. The sides and ceiling of a rough tunnel were supported by insubstantial-looking lengths of weathered gray wood.
Chase said, “Looks like an old mine shaft.”
“Damn,” she said. She pulled a kerchief from a pants pocket and wiped her hands on it.
Chase was staring at her, waiting for her to continue.
“Used to be that almost any yahoo could stake a mining claim on National Forest land,” she explained. “But I’m not sure what the rules are now, and I’m not sure which side of the line this mine shaft falls on.”
She held the kerchief out to him. He spread the kerchief between his fingers. Finding a clean spot on the cloth, he scrubbed at his hands.
Every few years someone in the American Congress brought up the idea of reforming the Mining Law of 1872, but as far as she knew, only a few minor amendments had been passed.
She’d have to research this old claim and deal with it somehow in her management plan. With the price of minerals these days, some entrepreneur might try to blast it open over and over again. Could she hide the mine? She rubbed her hand across her aching stomach, which seemed to be suddenly awash in acid. First, illegal hunters; now, a mine.
“You mucking up our scene?”
Looking bleary-eyed under his gray-green NPS cap, Joe Choi stood on the crater rim, a clunky Polaroid camera slung around his neck. Beside him stood another ranger with a neatly trimmed goatee, one latex-gloved hand resting on his service pistol and the other holding a small wooden sign by its stake.
Sam wasn’t sure whether Joe was kidding or not; he knew that she had no real authority to be digging around here. She and Chase climbed out of the crater. Joe introduced Norm Tyburn, the other law enforcement ranger; Sam introduced Chase.
Joe glanced at Tyburn. “Management called the FBI?”
“Chase is a friend,” Sam explained, wanting to head off any weenie-wagging between macho cops.
Chase shot her an indecipherable look and then said, “I’m out of the Salt Lake office, up here investigating a string of robberies around the area. I found out Summer was in the area and stopped by to say hello.”
Trying to be surreptitious, Joe waggled his eyebrows suggestively at Sam.
Ignoring him, Sam pointed into the crater. “It’s an old mine, guys.”
“Uh-oh,” both rangers said simultaneously.
Then Tyburn said, “It just gets better and better. Check this out. We found it out by the road.” He held up the plywood sign in his hand. Blue stenciled letters had been spray-painted across the plywood surface.
THIS IS YOUR LAND
WELCOME ATV’S & HUNTER’S
“Not another one,” Sam groaned. “I’ve pulled down a dozen from all around the perimeter of the transferred section. But they keep reappearing.”
“That’s defacing federal property,” Joe said.
Sam pointed a finger at the sign. “It’s defacing the English language, too—the nincompoops don’t even know the difference between plurals and possessives.”
All three men stared at her as though she’d suddenly sprouted a horn in the middle of her forehead. Maybe this was not the time for a grammar discussion.
Tyburn finally cleared his throat. “You should have told someone about these signs. What did you do with them?”
“Superintendent Carsen told me to store them in the district HQ building,” she told him, answering both questions. Just because she was working on her own out here didn’t mean she was some kind of loose cannon.
Tyburn stroked his goatee and tapped the sign on his leg for a second, then murmured, “Well, all righty then.”
All righty then. She asked, “Did you two see any signs of illegal hunting around here?”
Joe looked surprised. “No. You reported an explosion and then the fire.”
“The explosion could have been a rifle shot,” she explained.
From his right jacket pocket, Tyburn produced a ziplock bag full of spent cartridges. “Plenty of rifles have been fired around here. But wait!” He changed his inflection to sound like a television huckster as he pulled another plastic bag of debris from his left pocket. “We also have fireworks of all types and sizes!”
“And we have definite signs of arson,” Joe added. “Smells like kerosene.”
“Containers?” Chase asked.
Joe rubbed his eyes. “No such luck.”
“Think the injured girl was involved?”
“Hard to say,” Tyburn responded. “Looks like she was kayoed by a falling branch during the fire. We’ve got the likely culprit in the truck; weighs a good twenty pounds.”
Joe yawned. “Technically, even though this area is off-limits to the public, Lisa Glass wasn’t trespassing because she’s a park employee. And she was off-duty, so nobody was keeping track of her whereabouts. But she didn’t come alone, because she left no car behind. The trail crew dormitory is way over by the hot springs, a good fifteen miles from here as the crow flies, and a lot more by road.” He yawned again. “I suppose we won’t know anything more until she comes out of her coma.”
Sam raised a hand to massage her aching temple. “If she comes out of her coma. That poor girl—” She accidentally brushed her fingers across her blister and ended the sentence with an involuntary yelp.
Chase’s dark eyes filled with concern. Joe asked, “You all right, Sam?”
“I’m okay,” she reassured everyone.
Radios crackled to life on Sam’s, Joe’s, and Tyburn’s belts. “Five-nine-two. This is three-one-one.”
Tyburn pulled his radio from its holder. “Five-nine-two, three-one-one. What’s up?”
“Vandalized vehicle, west side campground. Site twelve.”
Tyburn groaned. “Roger that, west side campground, site twelve. I’m on my way. Five-nine-two, out.” He shoved his radio back onto his belt. To Joe, he said, “I’ll check the campground registrations, ask around to see if any of the campers saw anyone leave or return in our time frame. Then I’ll grab Koch and we’ll hit the other campgrounds in th
e area and the houses on the periphery of 5214. Oh, and someone needs to interview the trail crew. They’re up north breaking rocks, six miles in on the Rain Mountain trail.”
Joe groaned. “Think it can wait till they come in tonight? I’m not up for a hike.”
“Blackstock rides herd on them pretty close, so that ought to be okay. They usually get back to the bunkhouse around five.”
“I’ll be waiting for them,” Joe said. “Probably asleep in my truck.”
“Sounds like a plan. Later, alligators.” With a wave of his hand, Tyburn turned and headed in the direction of the parking lot.
“How’s Lili?” Sam asked Joe.
He rolled his eyes. “The fire is the most exciting thing that’s happened to her, ever. She’s got plastic wrap around a lock of singed hair so she can save it to show off at school on Monday.”
“She’s going to talk about it at school?” Sam asked, horrified. That’s all she needed, for the whole town to know she’d taken a child to a forest fire.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Joe assured her. “But it’s not like she listens to me these days. She’ll probably start a trend of local teenagers setting fires so they can be heroes when they put them out.”
She stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I hope so.” He checked his watch, and then yawned again, this time so widely that he displayed several gold-crowned molars. “I’ve been on overtime for more than ten hours. I’m going home now, grab a few hours of shut-eye before I catch up with the trail crew.”
“Mind if we look around some more?” Chase asked.
Joe had already turned to leave. “Knock yourself out,” he said over his shoulder. “If you find anything of interest, you know what to do.”
“Roger that,” Chase responded to his retreating figure. Turning to Sam, he said, “Where was Lisa found?”
“I’ll show you.”
A strip of startlingly green grass marked the area where Lisa’s body had shielded the ground from the fire. Surrounding the green strip, the soil was smudged with footprints and indentations where their knees had rested in the mud.
“Her head was at this end.” Sam pointed. “The rest of her was in Elk Creek here.” It made her a little queasy to think about how she and Mack had manhandled the charred corpse before they realized it was a living woman.
She spotted a partial paw print on the creek bank. Impressions from two long toes, possible claw dents at the end. It could have belonged to a black bear, and she couldn’t help thinking of Raider. The print was overlaid by a heavy boot tread. Impossible to tell when it had been made.
Chase paced a spiral out from the area, examining the ground as he walked. At one point he stopped, knelt down.
Sam hastened to join him. “Find something?”
“They missed one.” He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and used it to pick up a brass tube lying in the dirt. The metal was blackened, but the bullet casing was easily recognizable. “Looks like a three-oh-eight.”
Sam’s mind leapt back to the illegal hunter she’d encountered. “Powerful enough to bring down a bear?”
“Yes.” Chase spiraled the pen, watched the casing twirl. “Blow a hell of a hole through a man, too. Or a woman.”
Sam’s thoughts had been on guns and bears. She hadn’t yet considered guns aimed at humans. “Lisa wasn’t shot.”
“But she wasn’t alone. Maybe she was running from someone.”
Horrible thought. But maybe he was right; maybe Lisa had stumbled across criminal activity. Like bear poaching. Or someone dynamiting an old mine.
After a short blast of static, her radio announced, “Three-two-five, this is three-niner-niner. Come in, three-two-five.”
She unclipped the instrument and held it to her lips. “Three-two-five.”
“Where are you? They told me you were en route over an hour ago. I’m due at Hurricane Ridge in fifty minutes. Over.” The voice sounded annoyed.
With a pang of guilt, Sam pictured Ranger Glen Crowder’s sun-lined face peering out the lookout window. “I’m at Marmot Lake, three-nine-nine. Just wanted to make sure no hot spots had flared up,” she lied. “I’ll be there in ten. Three-two-five, out.” She shoved the radio back into its holster on her belt.
Chase raised an eyebrow. “Checking for hot spots?”
“See any smoke anywhere?”
“No.”
“So, we checked. And we’ll come back later, or someone else will. I think the park service even has fire investigators now. Unless the budget deficit’s erased those positions, too.”
He wrapped the bullet casing in his handkerchief and handed it to her. “Have a ranger hold this in case you need it for prints. You never know how things are going to play out.”
Sam pocketed the tiny bundle. She hoped the casing was from a long-ago legal hunter, and that Lisa was going to wake up and tell them exactly what had happened. But it couldn’t be good.
5
AT the base of the lookout, Sam parked the truck in the shadow of a huge boulder, a few yards away from Crowder’s pickup. She turned off the ignition and put a hand on Chase’s arm. “Could you hide in the woods for a couple of minutes?”
“Ah, subterfuge. My specialty.” He silently opened the door and melted into the shadows of the forest.
Shouldering her daypack, Sam trudged up the rise. She hadn’t reached the foot of the lookout’s ladder when Glen Crowder leaped down the last few rungs. He landed with a thump before her, a scowl darkening his face.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said.
He snugged his cap lower on his brow. “Sure.” He trotted toward the parking area.
After she heard the gravel thrown by his departing pickup, Sam returned to her truck. Chase stood by the open rear door, a knapsack slung from one shoulder, a sleeping bag tucked under an elbow. “I take it I’m not here.”
“You dropped by, but then you had to leave.” She picked up the sack of groceries they’d brought. “I’m already going to be in hot water for taking a kid to a fire scene; I’m certainly not going to admit to mixing my love life with the job.”
His grin was broad. “Love life. I like the sound of that.”
THEY spent the rest of the afternoon in the fire tower, catching up on what they’d been doing since they last saw each other. Sam couldn’t help feeling that her tales of flora and fauna surveys didn’t quite measure up to tracking scam artists and armed robbers. She struggled to think of something that might sound interesting.
“The Save the Wilderness Fund invited me to a photo shoot in India.”
“That’s great!” he said. “When are you going?”
She wrinkled her brow. “It’s in December, but I don’t know if I’m going. They purchased some of my cougar photos from last fall for their website.”
“Congratulations!”
“The money wasn’t much.” She’d already ruled out professional photography as her next career.
“You shouldn’t measure success by filthy lucre alone. India would be an adventure. I think you should go.”
Easy for him to say. He had a decent job to come back to. SWF hadn’t mentioned travel expenses, which could easily amount to a couple grand. Why couldn’t she ever land a long-term job like a normal woman? A job with health care benefits. Paid holidays. Vacations. Unemployment pay if she got laid off. Her job history was a patchwork quilt of odd assignments that didn’t add up to a career by anyone’s measurements. She closed her eyes, raised her face to the setting sun, and said a silent prayer for inner tranquility. And for a bottle of aspirin. Her head was starting to ache.
By suppertime, her head and lip throbbed like the base beat of a rock song. The anesthetic spray had long ago been used up. She momentarily envied Lisa’s unconscious state, then cursed herself for such a horrible thought. Silently, she watched Chase mix stewed tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, and spices on the ancient Coleman two-burner on top of the lookout desk. Her stomach churned; she
couldn’t decide if she was starving or too nauseous to swallow a bite. But she knew he loved to cook, and she certainly wanted to encourage that.
“That spaghetti sauce smells good.”
“Liar.” He stopped stirring to study her face. “You look a little green. Didn’t the doc give you any pain pills?”
“Yeah, but I’ve got to take them with food.”
“And you will.” He uncorked the Chianti they’d brought and poured her a third of a glass. “But in the meantime, this might help.”
She eagerly reached for the wine. “Couldn’t hurt.” Well, it did, but the sting on the inside of her mouth was only temporary. She held her glass out for more.
He hesitated. “You promise not to drive or operate heavy machinery?”
She crossed her heart dramatically and then put her hands together in a begging gesture.
He handed her a full glass. “And you’re not going down that ladder alone, either.”
“You can carry me,” she told him, taking a sip. “All sixty-two steps.”
Sitting cross-legged on the balcony with plates in their laps, through the railings they watched the western horizon transition from gold to orange to crimson. The pain pills made Sam feel light-headed. It seemed vaguely wrong to bask in the glory of sunset when she knew that Lisa Glass was fighting for her life in the hospital, but Sam couldn’t tamp down the rainbow cotton filling her brain enough to make room for guilt or sadness.
The sky darkened to a deep purple. An occasional breeze fluttered the wisps of hair on her forehead, but the air rising from the forest below was still warm and gentle. Chase’s pasta was surprisingly delicious. Years ago she’d grown sick of her own cooking. Noncooking was more like it; at home she usually left food chores up to her housemate Blake. Nice to have someone make dinner for her again.
If only Chase lived closer, they could do this more often. She’d be thrilled to have a handsome Latino-Lakota FBI agent in her kitchen. And in her bedroom, too. Or in his. Oh yeah. She couldn’t wait to see every muscular inch of his lean body. She should find a way to tell him that. A romantic way. But she was fading fast. She was grateful for the rough cedar plank wall supporting her back; otherwise she might have fallen over.
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