Bear Bait (9781101611548)

by Beason, Pamela

  Chase noticed marks on the underside of the page Nicole was holding. “There’s something on the back of that printout.”

  She turned it over. “Looks like someone used it as a writing pad.” Holding it at an angle to the light, she sounded out the letters. “Eminen-tur? Eminen-ten? She held the page out to him.

  The one handwritten word was fairly legible, except for the last letter. E-M-I-N-E-N-T-E-R, or maybe E-M-I-N-E-N-T-E-N. “A place name?” he asked. “Or a foreign language? Looks like it could be German.”

  Nicole shrugged. “The techs will deliver their research on any marks along with the AFIS report on the prints. I got us top priority, but it’ll still take a day or two.” She pointed at his stack and went back to her chair.

  He set the page aside in the stack of interesting finds. If only they’d nabbed the actual robbers instead of their Ford Explorer, they could be grilling the criminals instead of sorting through all this detritus. At least the locals had headed off the robbery this time, but somehow the perps had vanished into the surrounding woods, along with their automatic rifles.

  A buzzing sensation thrummed against his chest. Reaching into the breast pocket of his sports coat, he pulled out his cell phone. His spirits lifted when he saw the readout. Summer Westin. Turning his back to his partner, he pressed the Talk button. “Querida,” he murmured in his best sexy voice.

  “Chase.”

  He could tell just by the way she said his name that she was fighting back tears. “Bad day?”

  “You could say that.”

  Yes, there was a definite catch in her voice. “Did they get your bear?”

  “No. Actually, that’s the only good part of this day. I saw Raider; he’s alive. He might have been wounded, but he was running fast and he felt pretty strong to me—”

  “Felt?”

  “We sort of collided.”

  “Collided? With a bear?” He glanced over his shoulder at Nicole. She rolled her eyes. He turned back around. This was the good part of Summer’s day? “Spill it.”

  She told him about being shot at while investigating gunfire around Marmot Lake. He felt the blood drain from his face, thinking about how close he had come to losing her.

  “Give me the license number of that pickup.” After she’d read it to him, he said, “Now go have a glass of wine, querida. You have had a bad day.”

  “That’s not the worst,” she said. “She died, Chase.”

  He searched his memory. “Lisa Glass?”

  “Yes, Lisa died this afternoon. From that head injury.” He heard a quick intake of breath, and then she continued, “Just yesterday she told me she’d been kidnapped.”

  The muscles between his shoulder blades were tensing up. “What more could happen out there?”

  “Maybe I should mention the C-4.”

  He came out of his chair. “What about C-4?”

  “What about C-4?” Nicole echoed behind him.

  “Apparently there’s a bunch missing from a mine south of here,” Summer said into his ear. “Do you think that could have caused the boom that Lili and I heard? Remember that crater around the mineshaft?”

  He remembered it well. C-4 could have easily created the hole. The noise of the explosion would have been heard for miles. C-4 and guns and kidnapping and dead women. What in hell was going on out there on the Olympic Peninsula?

  “Summer,” he said, “if there’s the slightest chance that guys with C-4 are romping around Marmot Lake, you need to get out of there now.”

  There was dead air for a minute. Then she said, “I was hired to do an environmental survey and develop a management plan for Marmot Lake. That’s my area.”

  In other words, nothing short of a nuclear blast was going to keep her away from Marmot Lake. “Is your job worth your life?” he asked.

  There was another long moment of silence. Then she said, “I don’t recall telling you to give up your job because it might be dangerous. That’s because I’ve always had the feeling that your job was important to you.”

  Touché. He sighed heavily. “Watch your back, Summer. I want you in one piece the next time I see you.”

  “So, enough about me,” she said, a little too brightly. “How was your day?”

  “A robbery thwarted, escaped perps, piles of paperwork. Pretty boring stuff. So far the only thing I’ve learned is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are money-laundering exercises by the Jews and their corporations.”

  Silence drew out on her end of the phone. “I was kidding about that last part,” he added.

  “I was thinking it was as good an explanation as any I’ve heard so far.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’ll let you get back to the battle. Stay safe, FBI,” she murmured, her voice suddenly husky. “I want you all in one piece, too.”

  He groaned. Just hearing the words I want you out of her mouth had an effect on body parts that shouldn’t be so sensitive while he was on duty.

  “Call me when you can.”

  “I will. Stay out of trouble, querida.”

  He stuck the phone in his pocket and swiveled around. Nicole’s calm gray eyes were focused on him. “This is better than the soaps.” She tapped a manicured nail on the table. “Tell me the latest episode.”

  SAM felt stronger after talking to Chase. The fact that right now her job matched his for excitement filled her with a perverse pride. The bullets and violence and dead people, she could live without.

  Most of the time her solitary lifestyle felt tranquil. But at times like this, it was just plain lonely. Mack was with Jodi. Chase was more than a hundred miles away. The same went for her housemate, Blake, who was probably at work, anyway. She couldn’t quite picture herself whining about bombs, bears, and dead trail workers to him while he repotted orchids in a greenhouse. Next weekend, she’d trek back to her own home in Bellingham and eat Blake’s cooking and pet her cat, Simon. Soft fur and purring made anything—even murder—less horrendous.

  She cleaned herself up as best she could in the restroom at the district office, bandaged her knee, combed the bark out of her hair, and changed into relatively clean clothes from the bag she kept in the pickup.

  Before heading back to the bunkhouse and the trail crew, she bought white wine and supplies for s’mores at the QFC and then stopped by the local liquor store for a bottle of whiskey. If Blackstock didn’t invite her to his truck tonight for a drink, she was going to invite him to hers. She needed to talk to someone old enough to understand all the world’s evils.

  As she was opening the door to her pickup, a maroon SUV zoomed up beside her.

  “We thought that was you,” Joe said through the open window.

  The passenger door slammed and Lili, dressed in a warm-up suit and cleated shoes, dashed to Sam. “Aunt Summer!” She gave Sam a quick hug, making the bottles clink inside the brown paper bag. “Can you come to my soccer game? Mom has to work tonight.”

  Sam turned toward Joe, who silently mouthed, Please.

  “Please, please!” Lili echoed. “It’s Forks against Rushing Springs, the division finals. I’m one of the best players. I want you to see me.” Her huge brown eyes moved to the paper bag and then back to Sam’s face. “Please?”

  Sam felt like an alcoholic who had been caught preparing for a binge. Her stomach growled.

  “I’ll buy you a hot dog,” Joe promised. “And we can talk during the game.”

  She put her hand on the door handle of her pickup. “I’ll follow you.”

  “Yes!” Lili raised a fist in the air as she trotted back to her seat.

  LILI was as good a player as she’d promised, and Joe and Sam yelled themselves hoarse cheering as she scored several goals for the Forks Middle School team. They sat at the far end of the bleachers, a little apart from the crowd so they could talk business.

  Sitting separate from the community made Sam a little uncomfortable, but she often had the feeling that the citizens of Forks might scoot away even if she plunked hersel
f down in their midst. Townsfolk glanced in their direction and then leaned their heads close to whisper. One handsome dark-haired fellow stared at her. Under other circumstances, Sam might have been flattered, but he was at least a decade younger, and his gaze did not hold even a hint of warmth. A heavyset, graying man with a weathered, pockmarked face and a ragged mustache sat several rows below them and off to the left, but he glanced up and his eyes met hers once before skidding away. The guy from Best Burgers who had glared at her.

  “We can’t find a single person who knows anything about the explosion or fire,” Joe said bitterly. “Let alone about this alleged kidnapping. We can’t even find anyone who knew Lisa, outside of the kids on the trail crew.”

  Joe’s dark eyes shone too brightly, and his jaw worked for a moment before he said, “She was someone’s daughter. If I lost any of my kids—”

  Sam wanted to put her arm around his shoulders, but was reluctant to provide fodder for gossip, so she settled for a quick pat on his thigh. “I understand.”

  “And nobody seems to be missing her.”

  “That is odd.” She worried that her own emotions were not as bruised as Joe’s. Or Mack’s or Jodi’s, for that matter. But how much could a woman take in one day?

  Joe shrugged sadly. “She was from Philadelphia. The park service gets those types from time to time; kids that want to have an adventure as far away from home as possible. The contact phone number she gave us is bogus. The lady it belongs to finally answered to tell us it was a wrong number; she didn’t have a clue who Lisa Glass was.”

  “Maybe Lisa just wrote it down wrong, by accident?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe she’s a runaway. We’ve turned the case over to the FBI in Seattle; I hope they can find her relatives.”

  Sam thought about her own FBI agent, about how nice it would be to have Chase around to talk to. To touch.

  “What kind of a world are we raising our kids in?” Joe shook his head and moved his gaze to the playing field. “There’s a guy looking for his daughter down in Rushing Springs. I hear he’s a drunk and she’s twenty-one, so everyone seems to think she finally had enough and just ran off.” He suddenly leapt from his seat as the Rushing Springs team kicked the ball toward Forks’s goal. “Block it! Block!”

  When he sat back down, he continued morosely, “Running off without a word sounds like something Lili would do.”

  “Oh, Joe, I don’t think so,” Sam responded automatically. But that was just her opinion. Or maybe her hope? Lili could be planning to skip town for Katmandu, for all she knew. She’d find a way to ask next time she was alone with the girl.

  Joe blinked and cleared his throat. “I hear you had a pretty awful day, too.”

  After they’d covered her afternoon incident in the woods, Sam said, “Sometimes I have the feeling that the park service isn’t exactly welcome in these parts. Do you feel at home here?”

  His gaze met hers briefly before darting back to the field. “For the most part,” he said warily. “It helps to have family; I’ve got the kids in school and Laura at the library. You have to work at it, though.”

  “Work at what?”

  “Being part of the community.” He took a sip of his Coke and shrugged. “Don’t wear the uniform or drive NPS vehicles off-duty.”

  Strike one. She often didn’t change until she swapped pajamas for the gray-green. Was that the reason for those hostile stares at the burger place? Thank heavens she was wearing civilian clothes at the moment. But her NPS pickup was in the parking lot right now.

  “Don’t talk too much about the environment or conservation issues.”

  That was a hard one. She’d made up her mind even as a teenager not to stay mum while people around her cursed tree huggers and government regulations.

  “Buy from the local merchants.”

  That much she could and did do, although Forks had little to offer in the way of shopping, unless you were a fan of the Twilight Series and all things vampirish.

  “And go to church.”

  “Hmmm.” It was hopeless, then. She could barely bring herself to enter the church she’d been raised in, let alone a strange one.

  On the field, Lili passed the ball to a skinny boy on her team.

  Sam asked, “Does Lili like being on a coed team?”

  “More than her dad likes her being on one.”

  Sam laughed. “I’ll bet.”

  “I’m not too sure about her coach.”

  Sam checked out the bench, where the coach was talking to a girl. “He’s the science teacher that she likes so well, right?”

  At that point, Lili attempted a steal, then collided with the other player and fell. Joe gasped and rose. She was back on her feet almost instantly, but limping, favoring her right leg. The coach and his teenage assistant ran onto the field and carried Lili off between them.

  “She’s okay,” Sam said. “She was walking.”

  “I’ve gotta know for sure. She’ll be ‘mortified,’ but I’m going down there.”

  Sam stood up. “You wait here. I’ll go. I don’t want you to embarrass Lili any more than you do every day.”

  He snorted and then grinned. “Thanks, Sam. She idolizes you.”

  If that was true, Lili was hard up for role models, Sam thought as she walked to the stairs.

  JACK tracked the blonde with his eyes as she stepped down the bleachers. Just like a typical fed, she sat with that slant-eyed ranger apart from everyone else. In or out of uniform, they were like some sort of fungus, the way they clumped together.

  She seemed to favor her right leg; she must have hurt it somehow when she ran through the woods after them.

  His mother jumped up and cheered as his cousin on the Rushing Springs team scored a goal, then she shouted in joy again a minute later as his youngest brother, Derek, kicked one into the net for the Forks team. When she sat down again, she punched him on the shoulder. “This is great! No matter which side wins, we can celebrate.”

  Jack had quit cheering a while ago, and instead clapped for every goal. His childhood loyalty was for Forks, his old school, but he lived in Rushing Springs now and some of the people around him were his neighbors. Anyone might be a future customer for his custom furniture business. If it had any future at all.

  Throwing her arm around him, his mom gave him a squeeze. “Thanks for coming, Jack. It means a lot to everyone, you being here.” She gave him a little smile before turning back to watch the game.

  Jack wondered if everyone included her new husband, Ed Tilson, sitting on her left side. Thanks to the land grab by the park service, Gideon Lumber had to cut back, and in two weeks, Ed was losing his job as a scaler. There’d be unemployment for a while, and he was still sniffing around for another job, but right now it looked like the family might have to move someplace where they still believed in logging. And then the rambling farmhouse that Jack had grown up in would belong to someone else. Probably to some Seattle billionaire who used it only during summer vacation. Jack took another sip of the Bud in his soft drink cup.

  Down on the field, Roddie strutted back and forth in front of the Forks bench, shooting a fist in the air now and then, lecturing the soccer kids. He was only an assistant coach, and as a junior in high school, he was way too old for the middle school girls on the team, but it had to be a kick, the way they gazed at him like he was some kind of god. Showboat kid. With his con artist personality, Roddie—who insisted on calling himself Rocky now—would end up owning half the Olympic Peninsula. Jack hoped he knew when to keep quiet as well as when to talk.

  “FOR heaven’s sake, it’s soccer, Dad,” his daughter complained. “I’m going to get injured sometimes. Coach says it’s only strained, not sprained.” Lili flipped her braid over her shoulder. She slid her arm from around Sam’s shoulder and perched on the passenger seat of the SUV while Joe stood outside, holding the door open.

  “I could have finished the game, but no, Coach wouldn’t let me,” Lili whined. “I know we could have won
by at least five points, not just two.”

  “But you won, Lili,” Sam said. “And you were great.”

  “Thanks,” Lili said a bit grudgingly, “but George Fishkiller scored the most goals.”

  “You’ll beat him next year, Lili,” Joe told her, although he hoped that the big Indian kid would not be on the team next year. It was a little creepy to see such a hulk sitting next to Lili on the bench. He wished the school district had enough students to have separate boys’ and girls’ teams.

  He stared at the elastic wrap on his daughter’s right ankle. He couldn’t help noticing how slim and shapely her legs were under her skimpy shorts, and how tight her top was. Ever since those female soccer players stripped down to their sports bras on nationwide TV, all the girls thought it was okay to run around practically naked. He always knew his daughters would be beauties like Laura, but he thought Lili would grow into a young woman at sixteen or seventeen. Not at thirteen.

  Lili brightened a little. “Martian—I mean Coach—did say I was the best player on the team. He whispered it in my ear.”

  Joe clenched his jaw. He’d checked Gale Martinson’s record in NCIC and with the DMV, and found nothing beyond a parking ticket in Seattle. But that meant only that he hadn’t been caught yet. The man always seemed to be surrounded by young girls. And—Martian?—the girls had nicknames for him? That didn’t sound good.

  “A little ice and I think it’ll be okay, Joe,” Sam said. “Lili’s tough.”

  His daughter shot Sam a grateful look.

  “Does Mr. Martinson bandage every girl’s leg?” he asked Lili.

  “Uh-huh. Helps us get dressed, too.”

  He jerked his head up. “What?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I was kidding, Dad. Get a grip. He’s the coach.” She looked over his shoulder and raised her hand.

  Joe turned to see who Lili was waving to. A teenage boy held up his hand briefly, smiling in their direction.

  “Scoot in.” Joe closed the passenger door, walked to the other side, and slid into the driver’s seat.

  Lili slouched in her seat and propped her good left foot up on the dashboard.