Manhunter

And given what they were saying on the news about Gabe having been a fast-climbing career cop who’d taken the sergeant’s job in Williams Lake to be with his now-deceased fiancée, Gabe must be seething about this Black Arrow Falls posting. It was a dead end for him.

Silver guessed everything that meant anything to Gabe lay in that coffin in that image. The news feature cut back to the presenter, and Silver felt anger burn through her veins. She knew what that kind of emptiness felt like.

Everything that had meant anything to her was buried under a small cairn of river rocks northwest of town, at Wolverine Gorge. Rocks she’d stacked with her own bloodied hands.

Silver was torn between resentment that the RCMP had sent them someone who didn’t want to be here and compassion for a man tormented over the loss of his fiancée and his career. His life. Black Arrow Falls deserved better treatment.

But so did Sergeant Gabriel Caruso.

The RCMP had clearly washed their hands of a dedicated cop, given the résumé they’d just flashed on screen. It sure didn’t endear the federal force further to Silver, but suddenly this man wasn’t overtly her enemy.

Or was he?

She slanted her eyes back to study his jagged profile. A man like him would now have something to prove. And if the big city homicide detective had nothing better to do in Black Arrow Falls, he just might go sifting through the cold case files.

He might come after her.

The news feature was over, but he sat staring blankly at the television screen. Silver didn’t know why she did it, but she reached over and quietly pried the remote from his clenched hand.

“They’re tracking him wrong,” she said as she bumped down the sound, and set the remote on the bar counter.

Gabe’s eyes whipped to hers. “What?”

“The Bush Man. They won’t get him like that.”

He leaned forward suddenly, intense interest narrowing his eyes, energy crackling around him. “Why do you say that?”

“They’re combat tracking. It’s how you chase down a fugitive on the run.”

“That’s what he is.”

“No,” she said softly. “That man is not a fugitive. He’s not running. He’s a predator. He’s hunting again.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s what natural-born predators do. They hunt. And when they’re injured and backed into a corner, they don’t flee. They just become more dangerous. They come at you—attack.”

A muscle began to pulse at his jaw. “And how would you track him?”

“The same way I track any animal predator.”

Gabe shook his head. “No. No way. Steiger is a borderline genius, a strategic combatant. This guy is not an animal. He’s a psychopath.”

“Which is exactly what makes him like an animal. A very smart and very dangerous one.”

Gabe swigged back the rest of his beer, plunked the glass down hard onto the counter, and surged to his feet. “Don’t kid yourself, Silver.” He pointed to the TV screen. “You could never track that man. Our force hunted him for months. I saw the profilers’ reports. I studied every goddamn word. I got inside his sick head.” His eyes bored down into hers, giving Silver that strange zing in the base of her spine again. “You’d be dead before you knew it. You may be a good tracker, Silver, but you’re no match for Kurtz Steiger. You’re not a man hunter.”

Her mouth flattened, and her eyes narrowed. “Don’t presume to know anything about me, Sergeant,” she said very quietly as she got to her own feet, meeting his aggressive posture toe to toe, her pulse accelerating. “Do you even know where the word ‘game’ comes from?”

Uncertainty flickered briefly in his eyes. She held his gaze, well aware of what her blue-eyed stare could do to a man. “Some say,” she continued, “that it was derived from the ancient Greek word gamos, meaning a ‘marriage,’ or ‘joining,’ as in a special kindred relationship between hunter and prey. And yes, when I hunt, Detective, that’s my game. A relationship, an emotional connection with my quarry. It’s the way things are done out here. We are all connected. And it’s the same game Kurtz Steiger plays.”

“What makes you think you know anything at all about this man?”

“Because I saw right there on that newscast that the Bush Man doesn’t use humans for simple target practice. That would be too easy. He flushes them out, strips them down to their most basic, atavistic impulses, then he puts them on the run, chases them for days sometimes, toying with their minds, playing on their mental weaknesses. He needs them to know he is out there, watching them, hunting them with an expectation of kill. He wants this relationship, and he wants it up close and personal, because he feeds off the smell of human fear.”

“And you think you’re telling me something new?”

She was angering him, but she was not going to back down and concede defeat now. “Yeah, I do think so,” she said. “It’s a small matter of perspective, Sergeant. It makes a huge difference.”

He exhaled angrily, dragging his hand over his hair. “Will you please just call me Gabe?”

Surprise rippled through Silver, and a smile tempted her lips. She almost gave in to it, but didn’t. “You need to see the wilds differently before you can ‘see’ Steiger,” she said. “Some of those law enforcement and military trackers might know how to cut from one footprint to the next, but the ones who can really ‘see’ know where to find their quarry without even looking, just from one track. Like an archaeologist can reconstruct an entire animal using a single bone, a good tracker can use one print to piece together an elaborate story of interlocking events. And that can lead him right to the source without taking a step.”

“That’s psychic bull.” He leaned closer, his mouth coming near hers, and her blood warmed. A tiny warning bell began to clang in the back of Silver’s brain, but she couldn’t stand down. She stared him straight in the eye instead.

“And a woman like you shouldn’t even begin to think of messing with a monster like Steiger.” His voice was low, gravelly.

“Why? Because I’m female?” she asked softly.

“Because I’ve seen what that man does to women. You may be good, Silver, but you’re not that good. You’re no match for him. I know this.”

“Maybe where you come from, Gabe, but out here, things are different. We know that the wolf, while strong, can still be outwitted by the hare.”

Silver turned and walked away, her pulse racing much too fast, her palms clammy, her mouth dry. She hadn’t meant to press him like that. God knew she should have let him be.

She was only making trouble for herself.

She sucked air in deeply, conscious once again of the tight ragged scar pulling across her chest—a reminder of just how carefully she needed to tread with Sergeant Gabriel Caruso.

He trekked down the hill toward Dawson City, late-morning mist shrouding the old gold rush boomtown that lay at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. It was almost three days since his escape, and his face had been plastered all over the news. He needed to be careful.

In the town’s small library, he pulled the flaps of his fur-lined hunting cap down low, shading his profile as he began searching the Internet for information on Black Arrow Falls.

He’d taken the cap and some clothes from the small cabin by the river where he’d sewn up his leg. At a gas station a few miles out from the cabin, he’d crawled from the shadows and strapped himself under a logging rig. He’d heard the driver say he was heading north. He’d then liberated weapons from a hunting camp outside Whitehorse, busted into another remote cabin farther up the Klondike Highway, and found food and antiseptic for the leg wound still troubling him.

He’d cleaned up thoroughly each time, leaving no trace. He didn’t want to telegraph his actions to Caruso.

He wanted to surprise him.

And he felt controlled, the steady, throbbing pain in his leg keeping him on a keen edge. Pain was his friend. Patience the art of the predator.

Scrolling through the Yukon newspaper online archives, his attention was instantly snared by a Whitehorse Star online report about Silver Karvonen, a tracker who’d located an eleven-year-old boy north of Whitehorse last month, after everyone else had given up hope. He leaned closer. The story said she possessed a tracking skill bordering on psychic. But it was what the next line said that made the blood in his groin grow hot—Silver Karvonen was from Black Arrow Falls.

He quickly punched her name into a search engine.

Almost immediately he came across several articles dating back five years—Karvonen had been a person of interest in an RCMP homicide investigation into the death of an Alaskan bootlegger named David Radkin.

That man had been the father of Karvonen’s seven-year-old son, Johnny, who’d been found drowned and buried under a cairn of rocks near the remains of Radkin’s body in remote bush northwest of Black Arrow Falls near an abandoned gold mine.