Читать книгу Wild Montana - Danica Winters - Страница 11

Chapter One

Alexis Finch forced her body up the steep trail and toward the location the hikers had described. Ravens swooped through the air above her, calling out secrets to their comrades as they flew west. Even though she hiked nearly every day through the backcountry of Glacier National Park, each step was torturous. The altitude made her breath come faster, but she focused her attention on the thick pines that surrounded them, and she ignored the pain that shot up from her tired calves.

“Ranger Finch,” the Customs and Border Protection agent called from behind her.

She was thankful as she stopped and turned back, taking the moment to catch her breath and shift the straps of her backpack, as they had started to cut into her shoulders. “Hmm?”

Casper Lawrence stopped beside her, his cheeks pink and a sheen of sweat covering his tanned face. She found comfort in the fact that after more than three miles of this uphill battle, the handsome agent was hurting just as badly as she was. “According to the GPS, this should be the spot.” He motioned around them.

The hillside was covered with thick, frost-bitten grasses, timber and patches of snow that hid in the shadows. No evidence of a struggle. No blood. No fresh tracks.

“Look,” she said, pointing toward the ravens overhead. “No matter what the GPS says, we follow the birds. Listen to nature. It’ll give us all the information we need.” She cringed as she realized how much she sounded like a bumper sticker, but as she spoke the words she knew they were true, especially when it came to finding a body.

If she’d learned anything in working as a law enforcement park ranger in the park for the last five years, it was that the only thing she could trust was Mother Nature’s fickle attitude. She did as she pleased, and danger could be found in the moments that a person underestimated her power. It was easy to identify the people who had misjudged her; they were usually the ones Alexis and the other rangers were sent into the backcountry to find—or the ones whose bodies they were sent in to recover.

“I like nature, but don’t you get tired of being stuck out here?” Casper looked up, taking off his Stetson and wiping away the thin line of sweat that it had collected. His slightly-too-long chestnut hair hung down over his caramel-colored eyes, obviously blinding him from the beauty that surrounded them.

He gazed toward the birds and slipped the hat back on his head.

“Stuck? Out here?” She laughed. It was hard to imagine being stuck in a place like this, where there was only open sky and rugged earth. “I’d much rather be out here than in some tiny apartment. I had enough of that kind of thing in college.” She glanced over at Casper and his tan-colored hat. The wide brim cast his face in shadows, accentuating his firm, masculine jaw.

“Your girlfriend give you that?” she asked, motioning toward his hat.

He looked at her like he was trying to get a read on her. “I bought it in Kalispell a few years back.” He took it off again, spinning the brim of it in his hands like he was talking about an old friend.

“Cowboy hats are a lost art,” she said as she started to move up the trail.

A lot could be learned about a man by the hat he wore, whether he was a rancher or a weekend cowboy. Each style meant something different, but from the dents, the line of the crown and the sweat marks, it was clear he wanted to look like a cattleman.

“You grow up on a ranch?” she asked, excited that maybe they had some common footing.

He gave her that look again, like he just couldn’t make heads or tails of her, but rather than making her feel uncomfortable, she liked the feeling of keeping him guessing. Maybe she spent too much time alone, but being an enigma to this too-handsome cowboy made heat rise from her core.

“No, my family comes from Butte.”

“Ah,” she said, forcing herself to look away from the agent. “A Butte boy... So you’re Irish?”

He sent her a sexy half grin that made her nearly trip over her own feet. “Yep.”

“You visit a lot?”

“Last time I was there was for my brother’s funeral,” he said, his tone hard.

“I’m so sorry.”

Casper shrugged. “Robert had a lot of problems.”

From his tone she could tell he didn’t want to talk about it, so she dropped it and let the sounds of their footfalls fill the space between them. It made sense that he, the man who seemed to constantly be looking at her as if he was digging for something, came from a family of secrets in the rough and tumble mining town.

They crested the hill that led to Kootenai Lake. The crystal-clear water mirrored the snowcapped, jagged outcrops of Citadel Peak; it was an almost perfect picture, like one of the many postcards they sold at their visitor center. A raven cawed, pulling her attention away from the breathtaking view.

The bird sat in an old snag and picked at a bit of meat that it held in its grip.

“I think we’re in the right place,” she said, motioning toward the feasting bird. “Where did the hikers say they spotted the body?”

“When they stopped at the border crossing to report their findings, they said there wasn’t much of a body to speak of. All they said they found was a boot. Apparently, they marked the area.” As he spoke, an icy breeze blew off the lake. Near the west bank a piece of pink plastic duct tape fluttered on the bough of a tree, catching his attention. “There,” he said, pointing in its direction.

She hurried over to the tape, the weariness she had been feeling suddenly dispelled by a surge of adrenaline.

Hopefully the hikers had been wrong. Hopefully this was nothing more than some tourist’s castoff and not what they had assumed. If it was, she and Casper would have a mess on their hands and that, at the end of the main season, was the last thing that either one of them needed.

She pinched the tape as if it would give her the answers she needed, yet the plastic remained silent.

There was nothing at the base of the tree except needles and pinecones. No doubt that since the hikers had left this morning, the birds and other scavengers had been at work.

Alexis dropped the heavy pack she’d been carrying and started searching the ground around the pine. The grass had been mashed, and there was a faint trail of broken stems that led into the forest. She followed the game trail away from the lake and deeper into the timber.

“Ranger Finch?” Agent Lawrence called out, with a hint of panic in his voice.

She looked up from the nearly invisible game trail and turned. Agent Lawrence was nowhere in sight. “Yep,” she called. “I’m over here.”

There was the sound of breaking twigs and his cussing as he bulled through the timber. He may have been an agent, but he was clearly no ninja. He broke through the grips of the trees and came into view. There was a scratch across his cheek, complete with a speckle of blood.

“Don’t run off. I don’t need two bodies to recover.”

She chuckled. Based on his trail-breaking skills, she was more likely to make it out of the underbrush long before he would.

“Don’t worry, city boy, I won’t leave you again if you’re scared,” she teased.

He wiped at his cheek. “All right, I had that coming, but seriously...”

She waved him off as she started moving. “Got it, Agent Lawrence.”

“And quit calling me Agent. Only tourists call me that. I’d like to think that since you let me tag along on this one, we’re at least kind of friends.”

Kind of friends... She smiled at the thought.

In truth, she had been glad when he’d called and, due to the proximity to the International Border, they had decided to work this case together. For the first time since she had started working here, she had been looking forward to the end of the main season so she could find a little more distance from the tension between her and her ex. Until then, this cowboy and their kinda friendship could be her perfect distraction.

There was a scurry of movement as a small brown animal sprinted through the underbrush. Her body tensed as she stopped and tried to see the animal, but it had disappeared through a line of bushes. It could have been a pine marten or any number of other small mammals, but the unexpected movement made her even more wary than she had been before.

There had to be a body around here somewhere if the smaller animals were scavenging. No doubt bears, mountain lions and wolves were in the area. The scent of death would have brought every hungry mouth from miles around. She turned to warn Casper but stopped. He had a gun in his hand; it was half-raised.

“Little jumpy, eh? You can put the gun away, Casper,” she said. “If that had been a bear, it wouldn’t have done you much good anyway.”

“Hey now, I’m a good shot,” he said, sheepishly dropping the gun back into its holster.

“I doubt that,” she said, thinking back to the days she had spent plinking cans off the tops of fence rails at her family’s ranch. Back at home in the Bitterroot Valley, everyone knew her family—and her history. It was nice to meet someone who couldn’t judge her for her faults.

She moved toward the brush where the animal had first appeared. There, tucked under the branches, was a man’s REI hiking boot. Its sole was worn where the ball of the foot would have been.

“I got it,” she called.

Casper stepped carefully, avoiding the dried twigs that littered the ground in what she had to assume was his attempt to be quiet. He stopped beside her. “What is it?”

“See for yourself.” She lifted the branch so he could see the man’s boot.

“Do you think someone just left it behind?” he asked. “Maybe it dropped out of their pack or something.”

“No one just leaves behind their hiking boots, not here. Not when they still have a few miles to get back to the nearest trailhead.”

She took a few pictures to document the scene and then gingerly pulled the shoe out by its well-worn laces. The boot’s leather had dark brown stains over the toe and around the ankle to the heel. She flipped it up.

Her breath hitched in her throat.

Inside the shoe was the mucky white color of bone and dried dark red strings of chewed tendons and eviscerated flesh.

Whoever had put this shoe on was still wearing it.

She let go of the laces and stepped back from the gruesome object. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies, but nothing quite like this. It was so deformed and mutilated that, if it hadn’t been in a shoe, she almost wouldn’t have believed it had once belonged to a person.

“What do you think happened to this guy?” she whispered, out of some instinctual response to being around the dead.

“I have no idea,” Casper said, shaking his head. “But we have a place to start finding out.”

“How’s that?” she asked, looking up at him.

“We know the guy didn’t hike out.” Casper ran his hand over the stubble that riddled his jaw. “Now we just have to find the rest of his body.”