Bear Bait (9781101611548)

by Beason, Pamela

  The girl’s gaze moved to the far wall. “Yes.”

  So it hadn’t been just delirious rambling. Sam stood up, curled her fingers around the side rail of the bed. “Can you tell me what you remember?”

  Lisa cleared her throat before starting. “I was walking…before I went home.” The words sounded tentative, her voice hoarse. It seemed like she didn’t want to move her lips any more than she had to.

  “Where’s home?”

  Lisa’s eyes darted back and forth. “Oh…” She licked her lips. “I don’t really…have a place now. Weekends, I camp out…in my car. Save my money.”

  “Can’t you can stay in the dorm on weekends? I think most of the trail crew does.”

  Lisa’s gaze now seemed to be fixed on her toes under the sheet. “I don’t want to.” She swallowed. “Not with…those guys.”

  “Why? Did they do something to you?” They were mostly convicted delinquents, after all.

  Lisa shook her head. The motion caused tears to well up in her ice blue eyes. She blinked and said, “Nothing I could prove.”

  Strange answer.

  Lisa’s pale eyes connected with Sam’s. “I’m not one of them. They’d be in jail if they weren’t working there.”

  “Yeah, I heard that. So, you left work, decided to take a walk. Where did you park your car?”

  Lisa looked startled at the mention of her car. “I don’t know.”

  “What kind of a car is it?”

  “Chevy. Don’t know the license.”

  That seemed an odd thing for her to volunteer, but now Lisa’s expression was so troubled that Sam just shrugged. “That’s okay. You parked it somewhere, and then what?”

  “I was just walking.” She looked down at her lap again. “Then…three guys came out of the woods.”

  Sam’s heartbeat sped up. “What did they look like?”

  Lisa fidgeted, smoothing the sheet over her thighs. “I didn’t see. They threw…something…over my head, then put me…in a car trunk.”

  “You don’t remember anything about them?”

  “They were dark.”

  “You mean black? African-American?”

  “No. But black hair. Greasy. Dark skin…swarthy.” Her brows knitted together in a frown. “One had a big nose. Maybe a Jew.”

  What an odd, bigoted thing for a young girl to say. Squelching her irritation, Sam pulled a lined yellow tablet from her daypack. “Mack Lindstrom told me you were an artist. Could you sketch this guy with the big nose?”

  Lisa’s blistered lips twisted into a grimace. “I’m not really an artist.”

  Sam placed the tablet and pencil in Lisa’s lap.

  The girl curled her fingers stiffly around the pencil. “I could try.” The IV tube taped to the back of her hand whispered across the rumpled sheet as she made a few tentative strokes.

  “Why do you think they took you, Lisa?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe…” The smooth side of her face reddened.

  “For sex?” Sam guessed.

  Her chin dipped again. “’Cause I’m tall. Fair.” Her fingers patted the charred remains of her hair, then touched her burned cheek. The ice blue eyes filled. “Least I was. Now I’ll be…a monster.” A tear escaped her lashless eye and trickled over the ruined side of Lisa’s face.

  “I doubt that,” Sam murmured. But what the hell did she know? Lisa’s scars might make little kids run for the rest of her life. But she didn’t know how to comfort the girl, and she was determined not to get derailed. “Lisa, we found you near Marmot Lake.”

  The girl thought about it for a few seconds. “Where?”

  “It doesn’t really matter right now. Near where we found you there was an old mine. It looks like dynamite blew it open. There was a big explosion on the night we found you. Do you know anything about that?”

  Lisa’s eyes widened. “No. This thing was over my head.”

  “You thought they had rape in mind,” Sam stated bluntly. Lisa winced at the word. But the question had to be asked. “Did they rape you?”

  Lisa’s attention shifted back to her lap. She drew another tentative line on the tablet, then stopped. “Something…hit me. I don’t know anything more.”

  Sam noticed the momentary eye-to-eye contact after each question, then the girl’s averted gaze as the words came out. Had Paul Schuler guessed right? Was Lisa lying? Or was this just a very hard story for her to tell?

  Sam pressed. “You didn’t have anything over your head when we found you. Did these guys have guns? Explosives? Gasoline?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you estimate what time it was when you got hit?”

  “I don’t know—everything’s black!”

  A nurse cruised by the doorway, gave Sam a sharp look. From the bedside table, Sam picked up a plastic glass full of water and angled the straw toward Lisa. “I don’t want to badger you, Lisa,” she said softly. “But we need your help to catch these guys.”

  After taking a sip, Lisa closed her eyes and clutched both hands to her temples. A tear rolled down her cheek. “My head’s going to explode. Make this bed flat?”

  Sam set down the water glass, retrieved the tablet from the girl’s lap, and reached for the controls on the hospital bed. “Do you want me to get the nurse? Ask if you can have some more pain medication?”

  “No. I just want to sleep.”

  “Of course you do.” Sam patted the girl’s hand. “Thanks for telling me about the three guys. You did the right thing.”

  The girl turned her back to Sam. “No. I shouldn’t talk.” A soft moan, then what sounded like, “’Specially not to you.”

  “OLD man Craig was by here again,” Philip King said.

  “Glad I missed him.” That was the last thing Jack needed. He bent over his drafting board, trying to calculate the proper curve for the restaurant counter he was designing. Tears pooled in his own eyes when he looked at Ernest Craig’s mournful face; when he heard the guy’s voice break, his own throat closed up. He felt a lump growing there now.

  King was going on and on about how they needed to get rid of Ernest Craig. Jack didn’t ask the psycho what he had in mind. Could open up all sorts of possibilities he didn’t want to think about, just like the two long scratches on King’s left cheek this morning. He wasn’t going to ask where those had come from, either.

  “This’ll do it.” King stuck a postcard under Jack’s nose.

  Swallowing hard, Jack pulled the postcard out of King’s hand and forced himself to focus on it. It was a photo of that famous Hollywood sidewalk with the handprints of the stars.

  “My ma brought a bunch of these back from visiting her cousin. I wouldn’t be caught dead in faggot land, even if Schwarzenegger used to run the place, but her cousin’s married. To a man. I mean, her cousin’s a woman, married to a regular—”

  Jack interrupted, “How’s a postcard going to help?”

  King rolled his eyes. “You write on it, like Allie—you got some of her writing around you can copy, right?”

  Jack’s thoughts leapt to the note in the drawer of his bedside table. The one where Allie had written in big loopy letters that the times they spent together were the best times of her life. Turquoise ink. She’d signed her name with a heart over the letter i.

  “We mail it to Craig. And he thinks she’s run off to Los Angeles.”

  If only Jack could make himself believe she’d run away, that his golden girl was living down in the California sunshine. “But the postmark—”

  “Port Angeles.” King slapped a stack of envelopes down in front of him. “Check these out.”

  They were window envelopes—the kind he typically received invoices or checks in—from one of the restaurants in Port Angeles. He eyed King suspiciously. “Where’d you get these?”

  “Around.” King tapped a corner of the top envelope. “Check out the postmark.”

  Clearly, the Port Angeles post office needed to clean their stamping machine. The word Port
was only a smudge. On one envelope, he could make out geles, on another, Angel. A Port Angeles postmark could easily be mistaken for Los Angeles.

  “Besides, you think old man Craig’s going to check a postmark?”

  Ernest Craig would glom on to a postcard from Allie like a drowning man would grab a life preserver. Jack looked up at King, who was grinning. Sometimes, for a dim bulb, the guy had some pretty bright ideas.

  CHASE Perez sighed in exasperation when he got Sam’s voice mail. He was happy that she finally had her own cell phone, but she wasn’t much easier to get hold of now than she’d been before. At least half the time she was out of range or had the dang thing turned off to save the battery. Knowing her, she probably subscribed to the cheapest cell plan with the lousiest coverage.

  Yawning, he turned his back to the window of Starbucks and studied the cloudy sky overhead. He and Nicole had been up half the night watching crime scene techs take apart the Ford Explorer the would-be robbers had left behind, making sure the fingerprints and hair samples went to the front of the processing queue in New York. They’d caught a few hours’ sleep at a Days Inn, but not nearly enough to face the mountain of papers recovered from the vehicle.

  After the beep, he said, “Summer, it’s Chase. I’m thinking of you, too. I’m still in Washington State, and I’m sure going to try to find the time to see you again. I’ve been studying the manual, and believe me, the first chance I get, I am going to show you my special agent tricks.”

  “I’d like to see them, too.” Nicole stood at his elbow.

  He straightened, flipped the phone closed, and stuffed it in his pocket. “Stop sneaking up on me.”

  “Who’s sneaking?” She thrust one of the two lattés she held in his direction. “I’m just delivering coffee.” She nodded toward the car. “It’s your turn to drive. I want to have a look at this manual you mentioned.”

  He pretended not to see his partner’s smirk as he followed her back to the car.

  THE lobby of the main park headquarters was empty. As Sam passed the assistant superintendent’s office, she noticed Hoyle hunched over the desktop, staring at a computer screen.

  She stopped at the park superintendent’s office. It was empty, the lights off, the desk far too neat; the room looked as though Tracey Carsen had not visited it for several days.

  “Westin.” Behind her, Peter Hoyle had come out into the hallway. He pointed into his office like he was ordering a dog to lie down in the corner. Reluctantly, Sam obeyed. They settled into their respective chairs at the same time.

  “If you want to communicate with management, then you need to talk to me. Superintendent Carsen will be out for a while. She just had knee surgery and will be out on medical leave for six weeks.” Hoyle narrowed his eyes.

  “Okay.” This explained a lot. Sam had been hired by Tracey Carsen. Now Peter Hoyle was stuck managing a project and a person he had probably never approved of in the first place.

  “Why did you want to see Superintendent Carsen?”

  Sam slung her daypack into the adjacent guest chair, pulled out the sketch Lisa had penciled. “I want to talk about this.” She thrust the drawing across the desk. With only a few lines, the girl had captured the likeness of a hawk-nosed man. The drawing depicted an intense-looking fellow with slick-backed hair, bushy brows, piercing eyes, Fu Manchu mustache, and pointed goatee. Add horns and you’d have the devil, Sam thought.

  Hoyle’s eyebrows dipped into a vee as Sam told him about her conversation with Lisa. His frown deepened with each added piece of information, plowing horizontal furrows across his forehead.

  “Like I told you yesterday, you should have called me. A law enforcement ranger should have interviewed her.”

  “I was afraid that there wouldn’t be time for one to get there.” Plus the fact that she wanted to hear Lisa’s story for herself.

  Hoyle stared at the drawing. “This is all I need.”

  The assistant superintendent seemed immobilized by the course of events. Sam prompted him, “First there was deliberate fire setting, and now an alleged kidnapping on federal property. I thought you might want to call the FBI.”

  Hoyle slapped the drawing down on his desk. “Are you sure about this, Westin?”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “Why would I make this up?”

  “Publicity stunt for another Internet drama?”

  Sam chose not to dignify that with a response. “Do you want me to call the FBI?” she asked.

  All the way from the hospital to headquarters, she had struggled with the urge to phone Chase. But the park service was an entrenched federal bureaucracy, not unlike the military. Skipping the chain of command would anger the management and make her remaining contract time miserable. Like many other law enforcement agencies, NPS rangers tended to view FBI agents as glory-grabbing snobs.

  Hoyle sighed heavily. “You have an environmental survey to complete in three weeks. Not to mention writing the management recommendations; be sure to copy that form I gave you. I don’t need you sit with Lisa until”—he checked a page on the top of his out-box stack—“four to eight P.M. Wednesday.”

  “Got it.” Sam stood up.

  “And another fax from that Best guy came for you. I never know where you’ll show up, so I sent a copy to the west district building, too.” Hoyle glared at her as if it were Sam’s fault that she was a roving temp.

  What was she supposed to say here? “Uh, thanks, Peter.”

  “Get back to work, Westin. Write me a confidential report about everything Lisa said to you, and I do mean everything you learned about her. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  THE trail crew was hacking out new switchbacks up the mountain on the way to the first of the pools in Seven Lake Basin. When she first arrived in the park, Sam met the trail crew supervisor, Tom Blackstock. He was a burly Army Reserve sergeant as well as a seasonal worker with the park service. Word was that he ran his crew like a military unit, although today it looked more like a chain gang. The seven youths rhythmically hacked at the rock with sledgehammers and shovels.

  She made it a point to stand clear of the flying rock chips while she announced herself. “Yo, trail crew!”

  The closest youth stopped working to stare at her. Then the others fell silent as well. Blackstock peered around his workers. “Hi, little lady! Come to pay us hardworkin’ guys a visit?”

  She decided to ignore the “little lady” bit, just this once. “A short visit. I wanted to talk to you all about Lisa Glass.”

  From beneath his bushy brows, Blackstock gave her a skeptical look. “Why’d they send you?”

  “When I was sitting with her in the hospital, Lisa said some things that didn’t make much sense. We were hoping you’d be able to help.” She hoped he wouldn’t ask who else was included in the “we.”

  Blackstock leaned his shovel against the side of the cliff. “Good a time as any for lunch break, guys. Grab your bags and meet under the cedar.” He nodded toward a massive red-barked evergreen that spiked up from a group of boulders fifty feet below them.

  Sam climbed down and straddled one of the sun-warmed boulders, leaving the shade under the overhanging boughs for the trail builders. It couldn’t be more than seventy degrees out, but they were sweating. As a short muscular youth passed, Sam noted with surprise the protrusion of breasts under the damp T-shirt. That’s right, Mack had mentioned two females on the trail crew.

  The workers arranged themselves around Sam, catching quick glances at her out of the corners of their eyes as if they feared trouble if they examined her directly. None looked older than twenty. The still air was thick with the smell of sweat. She was glad she’d left her own lunch three miles downhill in her truck.

  Blackstock removed his hard hat and lowered himself onto a flat rock across from Sam, their knees almost touching. He pulled a mashed sandwich and a thermos out of a tattered daypack. “How’s Lisa doing?”

  “Her head was hurting her a lot this morning. And the burns on her fa
ce and body are pretty bad.”

  “Do they know what happened?”

  Sam shook her head. “It’s still not clear. That’s why I wanted to talk to you guys.”

  The youths looked uncomfortable, their eyes shifting nervously as they chewed. Most of them had records; they probably worried they’d be blamed even if they’d committed no recent crimes.

  Sam strove to reassure them. “Lisa seems confused, and we don’t know whether she can think clearly right now. I need to know what she was like; what you thought of her.”

  She noticed that several pairs of eyes strayed to a thin-faced boy.

  “Lisa was a good worker, had no trouble keeping up,” Blackstock volunteered. The group nodded in unison, still chewing.

  “Did you all get along with her?”

  Various gazes flicked back and forth among the group, many aimed at the same youth. Nobody spoke.

  Sam smiled at the boy. “What’s your name?”

  He peered at her from beneath his hard hat. As he tipped his head, gray eyes under thick brows, a sunburned face, and a thin nose emerged into the sunlight. “Rosen. Ben Rosen.” The kid needed a shave: about two days’ growth of beard peppered his narrow cheeks and chin. A silver skull earring dangled from one lobe.

  “Why does everyone keep looking at you?”

  Ben grinned, revealing a chipped front tooth. “Lisa didn’t like me much.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged, his eyes now focused on the sandwich in his hand as if trying to determine what it contained.

  A youth with a sparse mustache and ponytail spoke up. “Ben was always hittin’ on her.”

  Ben waved his sandwich at his accuser. “No more than I hit on any other girl.”

  “I can vouch for that,” the girl said. “He’s always hitting on me, too.” She’d taken off her hard hat. Her auburn hair was very short, almost a buzz cut. But despite this and her unisex work clothes, she oozed sexuality. The top of a tattoo was visible in the vee of her T-shirt. She jerked a thumb toward a blond-haired boy sitting behind her. “Jason here hits on me, too.”

  “And on Lisa?”

  The blond boy stared back defiantly. “Of course.”