Bear Claw Conspiracy

Matt heard the copilot radioing ahead to let the hospital know they had a serious head injury on the way. He wanted somebody to look at her and say that she’d be fine, but it didn’t happen.

He slid the door closed, then ducked out of range as the rotors screamed and the chopper lifted up and away, heading for the city. He was relieved to have Tanya in the care of professionals, but there wasn’t any time to stand around congratulating himself on a job well done … especially when he hadn’t done his job well at all.

It was his responsibility to make Sector Fourteen as safe as he possibly could. His mind churned. Two men, she had said. What men? What had happened, and why was she out of her normal range? Had she followed them and been discovered, or had they brought her all this way and dumped her? And what was the deal with the feather? Was it important, or just something she’d been carrying when she was ambushed?

He winced as phantom pain sliced through his lower left abdomen, where a gnarled scar and low-grade ulcer formed a pointed reminder that it wasn’t his job to be asking those questions. Hadn’t been for a long time.

As the rotor noise dimmed, he pulled Bert aside, out of the Cochrans’ earshot. “Take those two back to the station and keep them there.”

The other man darted a look at the hikers. “You think they hurt Tanya?”

“No. But they may have seen something and not even realized it.”

Bert craned around, eyes widening as he followed Matt’s thought process. “You think the guys who got Tanya are still around?”

Probably, said Matt’s instincts. “Just get back to the station and put them in separate rooms so they can’t compare stories any more than they already have. Then you can relieve Jim on the radio so he can go to the hospital. If he balks, make it an order.”

He didn’t think the younger man would give even a token protest. Jim and Tanya had been circling around each other for the past six months, ever since she transferred up from Station Seven, and the fear and emotion in the younger man’s face had been real. While that kind of romantic connection didn’t work for Matt, he wasn’t about to make the choice for someone else. He had sworn off trying to run other people’s lives.

“Aren’t you coming back with us?” Bert asked, still looking around, searching for monsters in the shadows. But that was the thing about monsters. Most of the time, you couldn’t see them until the damage was already done.

“I’m going to stay and look around, scare off any scavengers who might be interested in the scene.” Human or otherwise. Matt tapped the butt of the shotgun riding over his shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”

Bert looked unconvinced, but there was enough of an enlisted man still left in him that he followed orders without further argument, collecting the Cochrans and getting them moving back toward the Jeeps.

When they were gone, Matt was left alone beneath a brilliantly blue sky, warmed by the summer sun. But the beauty and isolation didn’t settle him like they normally did. Instead, there was a heavy weight on his chest as he lifted his radio. “Jim, you reading me?”

“Here, boss. She get away okay?”

“Yeah. They’re en route. You can go down to the city as soon as Bert gets there. Right now, though, I need you to patch me through to Tucker McDermott.” This wasn’t a case for Homicide, really, but Tucker was a friend. One of his very few.

There was a beat of silence. “I thought she fell.”

“It looks like it wasn’t an accident.”

“What?”

“Just put me through to Tucker, okay? Bert will fill you in when he gets there.”

The patch-through from radio to telephone took a minute, but was necessary. There was no cell coverage in the back of beyond, and even satellite phones were hit-or-miss. So the rangers often relied on radios, especially for the more out-of-the-way sectors: Seven and Eight on the eastern side, Thirteen and Fourteen on the western side, and good old Sector Nine, which formed the bridge between the two lobes of the huge park … where the crime usually ran to vandalism and careless fires, not attempted murder.

Matt took a long look at the scuffed-up sidewall of the gulley and the three ropes that snaked from a big boulder and disappeared over the edge. He didn’t need to glance down there to know that the bottom of the wash was churned up and littered with scraps from the med techs’ sterile packaging. The scene was seriously contaminated, and it was going to take a hell of an analyst to make anything out of it. Fortunately, the Bear Claw P.D.’s crime lab was staffed by a group of talented analysts who were the ultimate professionals … with one glaring, purple-booted, on-loan-from-Denver exception.

Matt grimaced at the intrusive image of sparkling gray eyes in a sharp face framed by sleek dark hair. Gigi Lynd. Even her name sounded expensive and citified, not like anything that belonged out in the backcountry.

He would tell Tucker to send anyone but her. Hell, Station Two’s nature trail would be a stretch for someone like her … and the last thing he needed to be doing right now was babysitting some city-slicker analyst who dressed like she was looking for trouble.

Chapter Two

Gigi nailed three bad-guy targets, skipped the little old lady cutout, tagged the last two baddies and slapped her Beretta on the counter with a flourish that might not have been strictly necessary, but damn, she was on a roll.

Granted, the firing range’s offerings were pretty basic, but still.

She slipped off her headphones and turned, just catching the tail end of her friend Alyssa’s impressed whistle. The heavily pregnant blonde’s eyes glittered with appreciation behind her tinted safety glasses, but she faked a pained look. “Please tell me you didn’t just pick that up for the test, like you did the computer stuff you showed me.”

Gigi grinned and slicked her dark, asymmetrically bobbed hair behind her ears before pulling her clip, clearing the chamber, and giving the weapon a quick, practiced wipe down. “I shot my first rifle when I was nine, started with handguns when I was thirteen.”

“Thank God. I was starting to get seriously depressed, thinking that you’d only been shooting for the past six months or so.”

“Nope. More like the past two decades. And you don’t look the slightest bit depressed.” In fact, the head of the Bear Claw P.D.’s Forensics Division looked amazing—rosy cheeked and curvy, with the mysterious “I know something you don’t” look that Gigi associated with her sisters’ first pregnancies. “I take it you’re feeling better?”

“Incredible.” Alyssa smoothed her palm across the top of her protruding belly. “After the past three weeks of abject almost-time-to-pop yuckiness, I woke up this morning feeling amazing.” A smile touched her lips with an entirely different sort of knowing look. “Tucker did, too, much to his surprise and delight.”

“Ouch.” Gigi exaggerated the wince. “Taunting the celibate again, are we?”

Alyssa twinkled at her. “A girl who looks like you and shoots like that doesn’t need to be celibate.”

“Right. Because guys perform best at gunpoint.” When Alyssa gave her a “yeah, right” look, Gigi lifted a shoulder. “I guess I’m not a casual sex kind of girl.”

Her friend’s blue eyes narrowed. “I never thought you were.”

Maybe not, but plenty of guys looked at the outside packaging and thought they knew what was going on inside it. If she mentioned that, though, Alyssa would bring up the m word again—makeover—and that wasn’t happening. What might look a little too glittery in Bear Claw played just fine in Denver, and Gigi liked her personal style. There was nothing wrong with being different.

So as they crossed the parking lot toward her borrowed SUV, she went with a second, equally honest answer. “I’m not going to be here for much longer, which would make any sort of hookup, for entertaining sex or otherwise, casual by definition. No offense, but when the call comes, I’m out of here.”

The Denver P.D. was piloting an accelerated SWAT/critical response training program that would leapfrog a few select forensic analysts straight into existing hazardous response teams—HRTs—where they would act as both technical support and boots on the ground. Although the TV shows made it seem like every CSI was a badge-wearing, gun-carrying cop, that was far from the case in most jurisdictions, where the cops were cops and the lab rats were … well, lab rats.

Going from the lab straight to hazardous response was a heck of a leap, but the members of Gigi’s family were anything but conventional when it came to their ambitions. Whatever the Lynds did, they did it full throttle.

Alyssa glanced away. “I know you’ve only been here a few months, and we’re just really getting to know each other. And it’s not like I don’t have other friends. Good friends. But … I like how you bring a new perspective to things around here. I wish—selfishly, I admit—that I had the budget to hire you away from Denver and keep you here in the lab. Thanks to Mayor Tightwad, I don’t, so I have to think outside the box. If that means hunting down a few eligible bachelors …”

“Aw.” Throat tightening, Gigi nudged the other woman gently with an elbow. “Thanks. But let’s be realistic—I’m focusing on my career, which means you can’t tempt me with a guy.” The members of her family paired off in their mid-thirties, once they had a degree or two and a tenure track. She might not have inherited the Lynds’ love of academia, but she had gotten their ambition in spades. “Besides it’s not like I’m going to Mars or Timbuktu or something. I’ll visit.”

Alyssa shot her an “it won’t be the same” look. “Are you sure—” Her phone rang with the plain digital ringtone that said it was official business. Immediately straightening away from Gigi’s SUV, Alyssa pulled the phone and answered with a clipped, professional “McDermott, Forensics.” But then her face softened. “Hello, McDermott, Homicide. What’s up?”

Gigi started to wander off and give Alyssa privacy to talk to her husband. Baby McDermott’s arrival was so imminent that most of the couple’s business conversations inevitably turned personal, which made Gigi … Well, better to give them privacy.

“Station Fourteen?” Alyssa said, voice going worried. “Matt’s station?”

The name stopped Gigi in her tracks.

Matt. As in Matt Blackthorn, head ranger of the state park’s most remote outpost. The one guy she had noticed in Bear Claw, and not necessarily in a good way.

Her first impression had been positive—how could it not be? Blackthorn looked like one of the guys on the glossy brochures put out by the tourism bureau—edgy and gorgeous, with subtle bronzing and hard, commanding features that fit with his rumored Cherokee heritage. But unlike the professional models in the brochures, Blackthorn carried a rugged, purposeful energy and seemed to bring the mountain air down to the city with him—not the tame air of the ski slopes, but that of the wilderness, uncivilized and predatory.

The first moment she’d laid eyes on the big ranger, she had actually caught her breath.

They’d both been in the hallway outside of Tucker’s office, her coming in, Blackthorn going out. And for a moment, something had sparked between them. At first, she had thought it was mutual attraction—the heated flash in the depths of his dark green eyes had resonated with the “hell, yeah” her hormones had been chorusing.