Manhunter

“That would be Donovan.” She climbed into her truck as she spoke, folding those impossibly long denim-clad legs under the steering wheel of her cab.

Gabe replaced his shades, uneasy with his own physical reaction to this unusual woman, not wanting her to read it. She seemed to be reading everything.

“Mostly he uses the ATVs.” She slammed the door, leaning her elbow out the open window as she started the ignition. “Can’t go far with that vehicle in a town with roads that don’t lead anywhere.” She threw him a final glance, or was it a challenge?

“How long is your posting? Two years?” she asked, a shrewd look in her eyes.

He was glad for his shades. “You’ve only just welcomed me, and you’re ready to see me leave?” She wouldn’t be the first to want to see the back of him.

Amusement whispered over her lips. “Everyone goes back to where they came from, Sergeant. Sooner than later. Cops included. Most come north of 60 looking for something, you know? Gold, silver, escape, freedom. Some don’t even know what it is they’re searching for.” She shifted her truck into gear. “Sometimes they find it. Sometimes they don’t. But eventually they all do go back.”

She smiled, an incredible slash of bright white teeth against her brown skin, a wild glimmer of light in her eyes. “Apart from a few special ones.”

Then she hit the gas, leaving him standing in a cloud of silt, her wolf dogs yipping with excitement in the back.

Gabe couldn’t help thinking the woman was like this place—strikingly gorgeous and seemingly open, yet hostile to those unequipped to deal with the terrain.

She’d left his blood racing.

And for the first time in what had been a very long year, Gabe thought that maybe he didn’t want to die after all.

Chapter 2

Gabe’s bitterness resurfaced as soon as the RCMP truck drew to a stop and a young, eager, and smiling Constable Mark Donovan stepped out to greet him.

Gabe reached forward to shake his hand, thinking how much he’d been like Donovan once, filled with idealistic notions of a bright future, of what it meant to be a Mountie, to maintain le droit across this vast country in a tradition dating back to the 1800s.

As a young boy growing up in the Italian quarter of Vancouver, Gabe had devoured heroic tales of the Northwest Mounted Police sent to crush the U.S. whiskey peddlers controlling the prairies. After that came the Klondike gold rush with hordes stampeding from Alaska over the Chilkoot Trail, crossing into Canada’s harsh, frigid and unforgiving Yukon, with the most famous Mountie of all, Sam Steele—Lion of the Yukon—guarding the pass in his red serge, wide-brimmed Stetson and high browns.

The legends of those Mounties staking claim to the great North, keeping order and saving lives, were the stuff that had fueled young Gabriel Caruso’s boyhood dreams and driven him to become a cop.

Ironic, he thought, to be posted to Yukon soil now that he was facing the end of his policing road after 17 years of exemplary service, now that his childhood dream had been darkened by the grit of realism.

Working the major crimes unit in a tough urban centre could do that to you. But it was a more recent incident that had sunk his soul.

On passing his sergeant’s exam two years ago, Gabe had accepted a promotion as sergeant of operations at Williams Lake in British Columbia’s interior. He’d have preferred to stay in major crimes as a senior investigator, but he’d taken the more administrative job because Gia, the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, had been posted as a new corporal to the Williams Lake detachment.

But a shocking run-in with Kurtz Steiger—a psychopathic serial killer the media had dubbed the Bush Man—had ended Gia’s life shortly after they’d gotten engaged.

And life as Gabe knew it was over.

Now, a year later, he was here. Alone. About as far north as you could hang a Mountie out to dry, facing a looming godforsaken winter of 24-hour darkness, endless snow, and a bleak future. Steiger’s words slithered back into his brain.

I saw her eyes, Sergeant. I watched her die. I was the last thing she saw, and it was a great pleasure…

Gabe’s jaw tightened and his head began to pound.

Shaking Constable Donovan’s hand, he tried to remind himself he’d wanted this. He’d asked for this remote post.

He’d needed to get out from under the never-ending media scrutiny, away from Gia’s family, his own relatives. Away from his own overwhelming burden of guilt.

He’d been through the critical incident stress debriefings, through the private specialists, been through the physical therapy, the hearings, the protracted internal investigation, his every action examined and requestioned.

And his force had stood by him. They all said he’d done what any good cop would have done.

Trouble was, Gabe didn’t believe it.

He should have guessed when they’d had no response from a member on a supposedly routine call to a disturbance at a Quonset hut on a farm on the outskirts of town that it could be a trap. There had been claims the Bush Man had recently been seen in the wilderness around town, but although the Williams Lake detachment was put on alert, these sorts of sightings were not unusual. The Bush Man had achieved near-mythical status, and civilians had been sighting him in the wilds from Saskatoon to Prince Rupert since his first murder.

Kurtz Steiger, a consummate survivalist and U.S. Special Forces soldier trained in unconventional warfare behind enemy lines, had been defying a federal manhunt in the Canadian wilderness for almost three years following his escape from U.S. court martial for heinous war crimes in the Middle East and Africa.

He’d fled north into the Canadian Rockies where he’d begun killing and torturing again—living for the thrill of the hunt, picking hunters off in the woods, raping and terrorizing campers and hikers, breaking into remote cottages, and living off the land.

The military had been called in, and people in rural towns lived in mounting fear as the notorious killer continued to elude and taunt law enforcement.

But then the Bush Man had simply disappeared, gone quiet after a horrific killing spree near Grande Cache north of Jasper. People speculated that he’d fled over the Rockies, crossing the Cariboo Mountains and then perhaps gone down to Bowron Lake, or Wells Gray Provincial Park. But the terrain was hostile, and talk turned to suggestions he might finally have perished.

Until a hunter had gone missing near Horsefly.

There was no evidence that the hunter had been killed, but the rumors started again. With them came fear. And the expected sightings.

A logger said he thought he may have picked up the Bush Man hitching between Quesnel and Williams Lake. Two German hikers believed they’d glimpsed him north of town. Again, nothing was substantiated, but Mounties in the region were put on alert.

Then came the call to the Quonset hut. Two constables responded, went radio silent.

In the teeth of an unseasonably early snowstorm, darkness falling, the Williams Lake staff sergeant had dispatched every member at his disposal, including Gabe, his operations sergeant, while he’d called in the Emergency Response Team—the Mountie SWAT equivalent—from Prince George. The military was also put on standby.

But the blizzard drove down. The ERT guys were socked in, hours away, choppers grounded. And Gabe, as the senior officer on site, had led his members straight into an ambush in the middle of whiteout.

It had been orchestrated by Kurtz Steiger. He had one officer and one civilian down inside, and one constable hostage.

Gabe was backed into a corner, with no help in sight for hours, perhaps days.

And somehow the bastard knew.

He knew that Gia belonged to him.

He’d been playing them all, lurking around town for God knew how long, watching, learning, searching for his next thrill, and the ambush was it.

Gabe should have done anything but send Gia round the back of the Quonset hut with a young constable, where the Bush Man had come barreling out, blazing a pump-action shotgun as the hut had exploded in a ball of fire behind him.

Steiger had felled Gia and Gabe’s constable, taking time to get down and look into Gia’s eyes as she died in the snow while the other officers, stunned by the explosion, battled through the blaze to find their fallen comrades and the civilian victim.

Steiger had then fled into the woods on a snowmobile.

Blinded by rage and adrenaline, Gabe had given chase, finally running him down and wounding him. In the bloody battle that had ensued, Steiger had managed to crush Gabe’s leg by pinning him between the snowmobile and a tree before Gabe tasered him several times. Steiger, passing in and out of consciousness, had looked directly into Gabe’s eyes, and smiled, told him that he’d enjoyed watching Gia die. Gabe had been about to slit the bastard’s throat with his own hunting knife just as one of his corporals arrived on scene, saving him from an act that would have cost him his badge had there been a witness. The notorious Bush Man was finally taken into custody.

But the cost was high. And personal.