Bear Claw Conspiracy

by Jessica Andersen

  Instead of leveling him off, kissing her had only made things worse.

  “It’s Osage,” Tucker confirmed. “I’d put money on it. If I remember the story right, he moved out here to be with his girlfriend, who was a competitive skier of some sort. We never followed up on her because he looked like collateral damage.” He glanced at Gigi. “Impressive.”

  Her eyes lit a little, but she stayed on task. “Bert mentioned how most of the rangers who request isolated postings are trying to get away from something.”

  She walked the detectives through her thought process, but Matt was only half listening, his mind hung up on what Bert had said. Not just because he wondered whether she had asked about him—and, if so, what Bert might have said—but because he wasn’t sure he knew the answer anymore.

  For a long time, he had believed he came out to Fourteen because out in the backcountry he could contribute without being on the front lines. And because he didn’t need anybody but himself.

  Over the past few months, though, he had found himself making the trip down into the city more and more often. And feeling restless, edgy, the way he used to get when his subconscious was trying to tell him that he had missed an important connection.

  But although he didn’t know what he was looking for these days, or what it meant, he knew for damn sure that it wasn’t an overly impulsive crime-scene analyst who seemed to want to play cop.

  “Good work.” Jack gave her a one-armed hug. “I mean it. Seriously impressive.”

  Matt had to fight not to growl. Or think that the detective would look better without that arm.

  She returned the friendly embrace. “The profile was your idea. If you hadn’t suggested it, I might’ve just gone straight home from the crime scene.”

  If she had, Matt thought, he would have been in the station when the arsonists showed up, and she never would have been endangered. But they also wouldn’t have known about the Osage connection, which could prove to be a critical break in the case.

  Damn it.

  “You going to put together a task force?” Jack asked Tucker.

  “That’s the chief’s call, but we should definitely hit up Fairfax and his people. They’re the ones who rooted out the embedded terrorists within the ARX Prison and the Bear Claw P.D. If there’s a connection to Osage, they’ll find it.”

  Gigi said, “I’d like to be in on the task force, if there winds up being one.”

  Jack nodded. “You can ride with me.”

  Matt’s gut churned, especially when Tucker didn’t immediately turn down the offer. He cleared his throat. “No offense, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  She flicked him a cool glance. “Prefacing that with ‘no offense’ doesn’t make it any less insulting. Lucky for me, you don’t get a vote here.”

  The fact that he even wanted a damn vote went to show how off-track he’d gotten. He turned to Tucker. “You can’t seriously be considering this. She’s just an analyst.”

  Jack snorted. “She’s also a sniper-level marksman, a seriously dirty street fighter, and a better than decent security-system hacker. She’s been doing a couple of ride alongs per week with me, sometimes more.”

  A pit opened up in Matt’s gut. He looked down at her, eyes narrowing. “You’ve got a badge?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it.” There was a flash of pride beneath her answer. “Denver’s piloting an accelerated crisis response program aimed at analysts. I’m in line for one of the first slots.”

  Crisis response. He wasn’t sure if he said the words aloud, or just thought them, but either way they sounded like a curse, and put a nasty, slippery knot in his gut. “You’re kidding.”

  Anger blazed in her eyes, but beneath it, he thought he caught a look of hurt. “I can take care of myself. And what do you care, anyway?”

  He didn’t. He shouldn’t.

  “You’re right. Sorry.” He touched the air near his temple—where the brim of his hat would have been if he hadn’t lost it in the fire—and said, “I’ll let you guys do the cop thing. Give a shout if you need anything.”

  Then he turned and headed for where Bert was organizing the volunteers into teams to search the surrounding scrub for hot spots.

  They all had jobs to do, and he had come out to Station Fourteen precisely to avoid conversations—and frustrations—like this.

  GIGI WOKE UP THE NEXT morning with the bedclothes tangled around her legs, her lips tingling and her mind awash in half-remembered dreams of glittering green eyes.

  Banishing the memories—and the warm churn they brought—she blinked at her surroundings. The short-term rental had come furnished in Early Ski Bum, complete with old wooden poles tacked on the wall. Some days she woke up, looked around and thought, What am I doing here?

  Today was one of those days. She liked Bear Claw well enough, but she wasn’t much of a skier.

  Unlike Tanya, she thought, who appeared to have quit after Jerry Osage’s death.

  That was enough to get her up and moving. But it also got her thinking again about the fire. And Blackthorn.

  She had held herself together until she got home last night and then let herself have a good cry, needing to get the fear and the shakes out of her system so she would be clear-headed today.

  In the light of day, though, it was even more patently obvious that she had been dumb.

  Yeah, she’d gained major points with the cops by making the Jerry Osage connection, but that didn’t change the fact that she had been reckless, maybe even showing off a bit. And she could have died. Probably would have if Blackthorn hadn’t come after her.

  The idea of being killed in the line wasn’t a new concept. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what she was getting into in fighting for a place in hazardous response.

  But on a response team, she would be working with the best available information and wearing serious protective gear. And, most importantly, she wouldn’t be working solo. She would have a team surrounding her, or at the very least a partner to watch her back.

  A partner would have been scouting the bunkhouse while she went through Tanya’s room; a partner would have noticed the men outside and sounded the alarm, and the fire never would’ve gotten started.

  And a partner wouldn’t have pinned her against her ride and kissed her to the point that her priorities flew right out of her head.

  Which she so couldn’t think about right now.

  Instead, she headed for the P.D. and let herself into the basement complex that housed Bear Claw’s crime lab.

  She was early enough that she had assumed she would be the first one in, but Alyssa was already in the outer office, hammering away at one of the computer stations.

  Bear Claw’s head analyst scowled. “I thought I told you to take the day off. Go home.”

  Gigi returned the frown. “I thought I came here to fill in for Maya so you could take it easy while Baby McDermott gestates. Go home yourself.”

  “I’m not the one who nearly got crispy crittered yesterday.”

  “I…” Realizing she wasn’t as steady as she had thought, Gigi held up a hand. “Give me a couple of hours before we talk about it, okay? I need some time to process.”

  Process evidence. Process events. Think about that damned kiss.

  She traded her light, subtly studded blazer for her lab coat and headed for the inner lab door. And she felt Alyssa’s worried eyes follow her as she pushed through into the first of the lab’s interconnected rooms.

  The main space housed workbenches, hulking machines, and a row of evidence lockers. On the far side, an airlocked door led to the “clean” rooms, where the more technical procedures—DNA testing, chromatography and other assays—were carried out under negative pressure, fume hoods and other fail-safes.

  The whole place was well-lit, painted a creamy white, and hung with brightly colored posters and prints that ranged from the ridiculous to the macabre. But as far as Gigi was concerned, it still felt like a basement. A
nd for a second, she really, really wanted to be back in her Denver lab, with its wide windows and view of the mountain-flanked city.

  Or, better yet, on a deserted tropical island with a lifetime supply of Twix, Caesar salads with full-fat dressing and movies on demand.

  Might have to rethink Bert’s whole “get away from the world” theory. She was a social creature by nature, but certain topics made her want to head for unoccupied territory. Having people worried about her was one of them.

  She got that caring for someone and worrying about them went together. Her mom was six years cancer-free, but Gigi still got nervous when recheck time came around. And she’d found herself watching Alyssa too closely at times over the past few weeks, her instincts pinging a warning every time she thought the mother-to-be might be overexerting herself.

  When it came to her work, though, friends and family worrying about her too often made her feel like they didn’t think she was good enough to do the job. She had worked her butt off learning to fight harder and shoot better than the other people in the running for the accelerated program, but her family thought it was a phase, and a good chunk of her coworkers still looked at her and saw a lab rat who dressed with a bit of flair.

  Or, as in Blackthorn’s case, a city slicker who didn’t belong anywhere near the backcountry. Even once she’d proved to him that she could hold her own, he’d wanted to shut her out of the action.

  She looked around and scowled at the realization that she was exactly where he wanted her—shut up in the lab while he and his rangers searched the foothills. But logically, she could be more use here than there. For the moment, anyway.

  So she got to work.

  Cassie had collected physical evidence from Tanya at the hospital and started running it last night—the rape kit didn’t show any evidence of sexual assault, but there had been some skin under the ranger’s fingernails, and she’d had a few defensive wounds. The DNA was processing and Cassie had printed out photos of Tanya—mostly close-ups of her injuries—and stuck them on the magnetic wipe board, where they joined a copy of the Jerry Osage sketch and some earlier, candid photos of Tanya.

  Gigi took a long look at Tanya’s face in the hospital photos—still pretty and patrician beneath the narrow bruise running along her jaw and the gash on her opposite temple. Then her hands, which were bruised along the knuckles, and splinted at one thumb. Her nails were short and neat, practical. And she had fought back.

  That resonated. But it was the last picture in the line that had Gigi pausing. It was a middle-distance shot taken through the door into Tanya’s hospital room. A uniformed officer sat by the door, but it was the man inside the room who was the focus of the shot. Cassie had caught Jim Feeney perched on the edge of a visitor’s chair, with most of his body angled over Tanya as he held her hand in both of his. Although his face was partly turned away from the camera, the edge of his profile read “grief” and the set of his jaw conveyed “I’m going to stay for as long as it takes”…but the weary lines of his rangy body said he wasn’t sure his being there was going to make a difference.

  Gigi touched the picture and swallowed to loosen her too-tight throat.

  Initially, she had been committed to the case because she was committed to every case that came through her hands, especially when it was a violent crime. More, the victim was a woman close to her age, working in a male-dominated field. There was kinship there. Sympathy.

  Another layer had been added when she tangled with Blackthorn, making her determined to show him what she was capable of.

  Now, though, she shifted all the way onto the treacherous footing of involvement…which could either help or hinder an analyst.

  Usually, with her, it helped.

  “So get to work,” she told herself.

  In the evidence locker, she hesitated over the pencil sketch of Jerry Osage, but decided to wait on processing it. Copies had been sent around, and the rangers were going to check out a couple of the depleted waterfalls in their sectors and see if they could match the background, but she had a feeling they had gotten what they were going to get out of the sketch.

  Tanya’s clothing was bagged and tagged, as were the hikers’ duds, but Tanya had been moved around so much that trace was likely to be a nightmare, and the hikers were incidental. Of the stuff Gigi herself had collected at the scene, there were really only two things that sparked her instincts: the feather and the radio.

  She started with the radio, on the theory that if Tanya had been attacked somewhere else, the radio smashed there, then her attackers had probably been the ones to move it. Which might mean they had handled it, maybe even left a print or two.

  An hour later, though, she didn’t have much. She had gotten three smudged partials that matched Tanya’s prints, a couple of hits for each of the other rangers—which was consistent with what Blackthorn had said about the radios being up for grabs—and one really smeared thumb print that didn’t belong to any of them, but had retained almost zero detail. She could make out part of one whorl and guess at a couple of the other landmarks, but it wouldn’t hold up to any sort of database search.

  That was usually the score when it came to crime-scene analysis: five percent big foam fingers, ninety-five percent packing peanuts.

  “Let’s see if the tech-heads can make anything out of you,” she said to the smashed radio. “Maybe they can resuscitate you and get your GPS to cough up something interesting.” She rebagged it, put her name on the next line down, and logged it back into the evidence locker.

  Then she went for the bag with Blackthorn’s shirt in it. And caught herself hesitating.

  For crap’s sake, Lynd, it’s just a shirt. You can process it without picturing him naked. Half naked. Whatever.

  She did her best, anyway. It helped that Blackthorn had ended the evening by trying to run her off the case again. It was really too bad the fates had matched such a truly excellent body with that superior—and totally annoying—attitude.

  Remembering his look of horror when he’d heard she wanted to be a critical response cop made it easier to pull the uniform shirt out of the bag, spread it out and start going over it, working her way toward the chest pocket.

  His name tag was still in place, the engraved letters spelling out Matthew H. Blackthorn. She spent way too much effort not staring at it and wondering about the H. Under other circumstances, it would have made her nervous to realize how much she was thinking about him. As it was, she gave herself a pass and called it what it was: a defense mechanism.

  If she was thinking about Blackthorn’s great ass and borderline personality, she didn’t have to think about the fire…or worry about how she was going to smooth things over with Alyssa.

  They were good friends and clicked on a level that Gigi didn’t connect with many other people on, but now they were heading square into an argument they had skirted around once or twice before, knowing they weren’t going to agree.

  She was just teasing the feather out of the shirt pocket when the door swung open and Alyssa came through, expression set. She was moving slowly in the final week or so of her pregnancy, but that only added to the impression that she was, in her own way, as much of an immovable force as her husband.

  Gigi could be a solid wall when she needed to, though. And if her family hadn’t managed to get her to stick with the lower-risk analyst’s position, her new best friend didn’t have a prayer.

  Alyssa lowered herself to a swivel chair, put her feet on the waist-high desk that ran the perimeter of the room, folded her hands atop the curve of her belly…and fixed Gigi with a look. “Officially, I’m impressed with the drive and dedication you showed last night. That will go in your file. Unofficially, though, I’ve decided that being your friend isn’t for the faint of heart.” She paused, and a crack of hurt and concern showed through. “What were you thinking, Gigi? You could’ve died.”

  “I know that.” She met Alyssa’s baffled stare. “But right then, all I was thinking about was gett
ing that sketch. It was evidence, and my job is to collect the evidence, period. Not to mention that ‘identify the goal and go for it’ is pretty much a family motto.” She tried a smile. “I think it got cribbed by a sneaker company in edited form: Just do it.”

  “This isn’t a joke, damn it. How do you think I felt, sitting down here while Tucker blasted up into the park, with no clue whether you were okay or not? And then to find out what you did do? God.” She knotted her fingers together. “I was up half the night thinking about what it would’ve been like to have you lying in a hospital bed like Tanya, or worse.”

  “Sorry.” The word was an automatic knee-jerk response, but Gigi followed it up with, “Seriously, I’m sorry. I know you care, and I…” She was going to say “I appreciate your concern,” but that was a total brush-off line and Alyssa deserved better. The thing was, she did appreciate the concern…but it also made her feel squirrelly and trapped, made the basement walls seem suddenly closer than they had been last week, or even an hour ago.

  “You can’t promise to stay out of trouble,” Alyssa finished for her, “because you’re hardwired to play hero.”

  “I’m not playing anything,” she said, trying to make her friend understand. “This is my life we’re talking about—not just the safety part of it, but the living part of it, too. If I compromise on this, I’m giving up part of what makes me…me.”

  “I just want you to be a little more careful. You admit that going back into the station was stupid, right?”

  “Now? Yes. But that doesn’t happen often.” And there had been extenuating circumstances. Distractions in the form of one Matthew H. Blackthorn. She didn’t say that, though, partly because she didn’t want to go there, and partly because it was no excuse. There would always be distractions during a crisis. “The thing is, I can’t promise that I won’t make the same mistake again.” She paused, trying to choose words that would get across to Alyssa something she hadn’t yet gotten even her family to understand. “If I get picked for the program and make it through the training—”