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“Where did you learn to track, then?” Her hand remained in the air, even though he’d already called on her.
“I took a class as a college student from the park rangers here to fulfill a phys ed requirement when I couldn’t get into weight training, and I liked it so much, I designed my own semester abroad to Botswana to study tracking and desert survival with the Kalahari San.” At their puzzled looks, he added, “You might know them as the Bushmen. They’re tribal people in Africa, and their tracking skills are legendary. As luck would have it, the group who took me in were also brilliant teachers. I came back here to do a mountain-tracking apprenticeship, and they hired me.”
After fielding a few questions about his Africa experience and telling them how he learned to always keep his tent zipped in the Kalahari—to keep the hyenas out—Alex headed down the trail once more, showing them how to spot the sign indicating where his coworker’s trail continued.
It wasn’t until he heard water rushing through rocks that he felt the first pangs of uneasiness.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
But that was where the trail led. Across the water. And a successful field trip meant following the tracks around the entire Dungeness Falls loop, at the end of which one of the park rangers would be waiting with a picnic lunch to tell them about Renegade Ridge’s history and point out some interesting sights.
What had she been warning him about? Should he just ignore her? Was she an overprotective parent who’d decided to be spooky and weird about her fear of having her child near water? Was she insane?
Maybe she was insane. An insane bomber who had rigged the bridge over the falls to explode once they set foot on it.
Ah, hell. Now he was being insane. But he also couldn’t just ignore her. If any of the kids under his watch got hurt because he ignored Ms. Batcrapcrazy’s warning, he’d regret it for the rest of his life. He should have just called the police and had them sort this out, but now it was too late. He was in charge of a group of thirty-odd fifth graders, and he alone had to decide whether they were going to cross the water in about fifteen minutes.
Pulling the radio off his belt, he brought it up to his mouth. “Hey, kids, here’s how we communicate with the ranger station during a search,” he said brightly. Probably too brightly, judging from the confused look one of the chaperones had just shot him. Toning down his Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood smile, he depressed the talk button with his thumb. “Base, this is tracker one-B, over.”
A burst of static, and then came, “Roger that, tracker one-B, how can we help you, over?”
“I need you to patch me over to Sabrina’s cell phone, over.” He hoped that Sabrina, who had set the tracks he and the schoolkids were following, had taken her phone with her on the way to her stepdaughter’s appointment.
“Hey, Al, what’s up?” Sabrina asked, never having been one for radio protocol via cell phone. “Uh, over.”
“Bree, I’m just about to cross Dungeness Falls. Did you see anything strange up here when you were laying these tracks last night, over?” Naturally, none of the kids were distracted at the moment, and all were hanging on his every word. Thirty pairs of eyes widened when he asked about “anything strange,” and then the kids started whispering excitedly among themselves. Great. Now he’d scared them all. Their parents would be overjoyed.
“No, Al. Everything was pretty normal. What in particular are you looking for, over?” she responded.
“Nothing. Never mind.” Without so much as an over, he clicked off the radio and returned it to his belt. “Okay,” he said to the kids, “let’s head around this bend to the falls, and you can all stop and take pictures if you want.” He didn’t know how many of them, if any, would have cameras, but he figured that sounded plausible. While they were resting, he’d head up the trail next to the falls and check out the far side of the bridge. And if he saw anything remotely threatening, this was going to be the world’s shortest field trip.
After leading the students to the lookout point near the falls, he told them to fan out so they could all see the spectacular rush of white water as it plunged down a steep, rocky incline to spray into a pool at the bottom. The falls weren’t particularly tall—maybe twenty feet or so—but they were beautiful.
Reaching across the fence to run his palm through the cloud of fine, cool mist at the foot of the falls, he scanned the crowd to make sure they were all busy oohing and aahing. Then, after a word to one of their teachers, he headed up the trail. With long, quick strides, he made short work of the switchbacks leading to the top of the falls, then jogged along the path beside the upper part of the Dungeness River until he reached a small wooden bridge.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
Resting a hand on the smoothly sanded pine of the guardrail, he looked across. The path curved just a few feet after the bridge into a dense stand of Sitkas, dripping moss and low-hanging branches obscuring his view. Whatever it was that the mystery woman had wanted him to keep the kids away from, he couldn’t see it from this side. So, did her message mean that it was all right for him to go across the water alone?
Curiosity. One of these days, it was going to get him killed. But today, he didn’t figure that a cryptic message from a strange curly-haired woman was going to accomplish that feat. He made his way to the other side of the gurgling stream of water and thumped his boot emphatically on the dirt path once he reached the other side, mentally daring said curly-haired woman to come and get him.
She didn’t. So he kept going.
A few minutes later, something large and white—a bright, pristine white that didn’t occur naturally in the forest—caught his eye a few yards off the path.
“She probably left you a body, champ,” he muttered under his breath. “You think she’s cute. Therefore, she must be a wack-job.” For some reason, he’d always been like a magnet for that type, and it was starting to get old.
Small twigs and leaves crackled under his feet as he left the path and made his way through the undergrowth. Batting a low-hanging branch out of his way, he squinted at the white object, hoping its brilliance would suddenly make sense, that its presence would be something perfectly innocuous.
He pushed through the last of the tall weeds and bristly shrubs in his way, and the thing was finally visible. And what he saw there chilled him to the bone.
“Holy—”
Backing away slowly, Alex pulled his radio off his belt once more. “Base, this is tracker one-B, over.”
“Tracker one-B, this is Base. What’s your twenty, over?”
“About one hundred yards above the falls on Dungeness.” He was nearly overcome by an overwhelming urge to get out of there as quickly as possible. That or throw up. But he had a job to do, and no one else was up here to do it. “I need you to call the police, and get every park ranger you’ve got to block off this trail.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, still unable to believe what his eyes were telling him.
“Alex, are you okay?” Skylar, the search-and-rescue coordinator slipped out of her usual radio-speak. He’d blocked off trails before, for less grisly reasons, but she’d obviously become alarmed at something she heard in his voice.
“Yeah, just—” He took a deep breath. “Skylar, I’ve never seen anything like this. Just call the police. I’ve got to get those kids away from here.”
Chapter Three
“Authorities are seeking this woman, wanted for questioning…”
Sophie Brennan jerked forward in her seat when she saw the composite drawing flash up on her television, which then sent her fumbling in between the couch cushions for the remote. Once her hand closed on the thing, she hit the button to turn up the volume, not taking her eyes off the face on the screen.
Her face.
“…in a bizarre murder that witnesses say could have been the work of a satanic cult.”
Okay, now that she hadn’t seen coming.
Her phone started ringing, but she just turned the volume up even higher, deciding to let the machine answer the call.
“The name of the victim and cause of death have not been released by the Port Renegade Police,” the newscaster said cheerily from her position off-camera, Sophie’s face still getting more than its share of screen time. “But a police spokesperson did confirm that the body was discovered around 9:30 this morning by a search-and-rescue worker for Renegade Ridge State Park.”
Sophie leaned toward the TV and squinted at her likeness. The nose was wrong, but other than that, they’d pretty much hit the mark. Which meant that her busybody neighbors were probably going to start calling the sheriff’s office any minute. God, someone had died. You’d think she would’ve known that.
“One witness who asked to remain anonymous said the body was covered by a white sheet and had been stabbed in the chest in a circle-and-cross pattern. Sources say the wounds were consistent with ritual murders.” Finally, the news channel took that awful drawing off the air, focusing on the newscaster’s face, which was framed by a bright blond helmet of hair. “Expert Marvin Wynter, author of Free Your Mind! Deprogramming Former Cult Members, is here to talk to us,” the reporter said. “Marvin, could this be the work of cult killers?”
The camera cut to a man in his fifties, with shifty little eyes and a thick beard. “Why, yes, all of the signs are there—”
Not waiting to hear the so-called expert pontificate further, Sophie hit the mute button. One didn’t need to be psychic to see that the guy was nothing but a fearmonger.
But as for the rest of the broadcast…She sat back against the couch cushions and grabbed a throw pillow to hug to her chest, trying to process what she’d just seen. She hadn’t thought for a minute that her warning to Alex Gray, search-and-rescue tracker extraordinaire, would result in a police sketch of her plastered on the evening news. And in her wildest dreams she hadn’t thought it would lead to a murder victim.
But it did, and it had. So now what?
Her pulse pounding in triple-time, she realized that the most rational option was to turn herself in to the police before someone else did—if she still had time. A Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Washington–Port Renegade, Sophie was pretty much the stereotypical impoverished grad student, so she lived in an inexpensive but nice and secure apartment complex to save money. Unfortunately, the reason that said apartment complex was such a steal when it came to rent was that it catered to an elderly clientele, and anyone under the age of retirement seemed to stay far, far away from it. So while that meant she could tap into the considerable wisdom of her elders just by wandering down the hall to see who was using the fitness room, it also meant that she was surrounded by more than her share of ladies and gentlemen of leisure who were bored out of their minds—and filled in the gaps in their daily schedules by keeping close watch on the goings-on around them. She’d bet the Port Renegade PD had had at least fifty calls from her neighbors ratting her out in the last five minutes alone, bless their hearts.
Okay, so she could wait for the police to come to her, she could go to them, or…
Or. She could go find Alex Gray and explain herself. After their meeting, she’d found it easy enough to unearth information about him—he’d been involved in so many public rescues of hikers lost in the state park, his picture was plastered across several issues of the Port Renegade Tribune-Herald’s online archive. Finding his house would be a snap.
Now there was a brilliant idea. She’d already weirded him out in a big bad way this morning at the Bagel & Bean. If she approached him again, he’d probably either run away screaming or have her arrested on stalking charges as well as brought in for questioning. Surely going to find Alex Gray had to be one of her worst contingency plans ever.
Then why wouldn’t the idea leave her alone?
She was saved from answering that question for herself when the phone rang again. She got up and padded in her stocking feet to the kitchen area of her apartment, where her phone sat. A glance at the caller ID told her it was her mom, and as much as she loved her mother, she just couldn’t deal with her right now, so she let the machine pick up.
“Sophie?” her mother’s voice rang out in the silent kitchen. “Sophie, why aren’t you answering my calls? I know you’re there—you’re screening me again, aren’t you? Sophie, your face was on the evening news. The police want you brought in for questioning! Sophie, what’s going on? Are you okay? Call your mother once in a while, all right? I’d like to know why my kid is being questioned about a murder. I’m so worried about you. Okay. Call me. I don’t know why you don’t carry a cell phone—” Beep!
Finally, blessedly, the machine cut her mother off. Sophie touched a button to erase the message and headed for her front door. If she didn’t get out of here, guilt would eat her alive until she called her mom back, and she didn’t want to do that until she’d gotten herself out of this mess. Kate Brennan worried enough as it was.
Pulling her black midlength leather jacket on, she zipped it up and wrapped a long scarf around her neck. Where to—police, Alex Gray or undisclosed hidden location? Undisclosed hidden location, Alex Gray or police?
Grabbing her keys off the little hook near the door, she peered through the peephole to make sure no one was lurking in the hall. Reasonably confident that she could make it to the stairwell to the parking garage without being accosted, she exited her apartment, locking the door behind her. A leaden weight seemed to settle in the bottom of her stomach, reminding her that for better or worse, she was inextricably tied to a murder. And what she did now could help the investigation or throw it way off track—or get her in some serious trouble.
Maybe she was in serious trouble no matter what she did.
TRY AS HE MIGHT, ALEX COULDN’T erase the disturbing sight of that sheet-covered…thing from his mind, no matter how many times Sabrina and Skylar asked if he was all right, no matter how many mindless South Park reruns he went over in his head, no matter how many times he closed his eyes.
He’d been inside the ranger station since the morning, after he’d gotten the schoolkids safely back on their bus without them being any wiser. He’d told their teachers he’d seen a bear, and the field-trip chaperones had been only too happy to clear on out rather than risk having one of their charges eaten by errant wildlife. And then, after leading the police to the body, he’d come back to the station and had answered questions: Sabrina’s questions, Skylar’s questions, the park rangers’ questions, the police detectives’ questions. Over and over and over again, further embedding the images in his brain. And they were horrific.
When he’d gone up the falls, he’d found a body. But not just a lost hiker or a suicide, as was usually the case on the rare occasions when someone died in the parklands. No, this person had most definitely been murdered, but unfortunately, the killer hadn’t left it at that.
Somewhere between the hours of 6:00 last night and 9:30 this morning, someone had constructed a stone altar, laid the body on it and covered it with a sheet. Then, just to make things nice and scary for the poor schmo who ended up finding the victim, they’d stabbed an upside-down cross pattern through the sheet and into the victim’s chest. The cops Alex had led to the scene had told him that the stab wounds had been inflicted postmortem and that the victim had most likely been strangled, but if that was supposed to make him feel better, it didn’t.
The police had long ago finished gathering evidence from the scene, and even though it was past time for him to go home for the day, Alex remained inside one of the ranger station offices, sitting at a desk with his head in his hands, waiting to see if he could be of any more use to…anyone. Anything rather than go home and be alone with his thoughts.
Someone had died. Within a mile of the ranger station, and no one had heard or seen or suspected a thing.
No one except the woman he’d met outside the coffee shop that morning.
He’d given her description to police, and they’d said they’d put an APB out on her to bring her in for questioning. Had he met a murderer? And if so, didn’t it just figure that she’d randomly choose to torment him with clues about her crimes?
A knock at the door brought him out of his thoughts. “Come in,” he called, and Sabrina popped her head through the door.
“Alex, there’s a woman wearing a very large pair of sunglasses outside. She’s asking to speak to you.” Sabrina narrowed her eyes, glancing quickly behind her. “I think it’s that woman from the coffee shop.”
Of course. Right on cue.
Feeling more exhausted than he could remember, he planted his hands on the desk and pushed himself wearily to his feet. “Seriously? You call the police?”
She nodded. “Of course. I don’t want to lose her, but what if she’s dangerous? Maybe you shouldn’t go out there.”
“If she’s that dangerous, she would have come in here, guns blazing.” Then again, the murder victim had been a healthy male in his fifties who’d outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. If she’d managed to take him down, she might be more formidable than she looked. The thought didn’t stop him from heading for the door. “I’ll stall her,” he said to Sabrina. “You tell the cops to hurry.” Someone had to keep her occupied until the police arrived, and he wasn’t going to send out Skylar or Bree and cower behind them.
He pushed through the ranger-station doors and headed outside. In the dimness of the parking lot lights, he could barely make out a lone figure standing next to a small gray compact car, a fringed scarf wrapped around her hair. Just as Sabrina had told him, she wore a pair of sunglasses so huge, they looked like they’d eaten half her face. As he approached, she got in her car, leaning over to open the passenger-side door in an obvious invitation.
Once he’d climbed inside, pausing briefly to scan the interior and make sure she didn’t have a tranq gun hidden on the floor somewhere, she unwrapped the scarf from around her head and took off the ridiculous sunglasses. And yes, indeed, it was her—the woman from the coffee shop. The insane woman from the coffee shop whose bizarre message had led him to the body of someone who’d died in a way that no one should.
“What do you want?” His words were harsh, and he didn’t feel the least bit sorry for her when she flinched at his tone.
She licked her lips, and he was close enough to her to see the light dusting of freckles on her face. The curls that he’d thought were mostly brown had taken on a fiery reddish hue in the light of the setting sun. “My name is Sophie Brennan, and I wanted to apologize,” she began. “I had no idea what I told you this morning would lead you to…what you found.” She shifted her weight slightly in her seat, so she was leaning away from him as if she were afraid. He scowled at the thought that he would have frightened her—he wasn’t the one sending people to find murder victims.
“What I found was a body,” he said, trying to keep himself from shouting at her. “And you knew something was there, across the bridge. You mind telling me how?”
“I don’t—” She flipped her palms upward, blinked a couple of times and then let her hands drop to her lap once more.
“Look,” Alex said, trying another tactic. “My coworker’s husband is a cop. He can help you, if you just tell us what you know.” He didn’t know why he’d offered her even that much protection. But then again, now that he was face-to-face with her, it was difficult to picture her as the one who’d performed that grisly killing. This quiet, somewhat shy woman with her too-intense eyes didn’t seem like the type to murder someone and then carry out some bizarre ritual with their remains. Plus, the victim had been a big man, and she barely cleared five feet. Strangulation? He didn’t think so.
Or so his gut told him. Then again, lots of people’s guts had told them Ted Bundy was an okay guy, before the whole being-outed-as-a-serial-killer thing had happened.
She shook her head emphatically. “I don’t need help. They won’t find any evidence on or near the body that ties it to me, because I had nothing to do with that murder.” Folding her arms, she looked him straight in the eye then, her deep blue gaze solid and seemingly filled with the naive belief that her proven innocence was a sure thing. “Look.” She took a deep breath, then continued. “I’m a little psychic. That was why I talked to you at the coffee shop.”
“You’re a little what?” Now that he hadn’t seen coming. “How can you be a little psychic? Isn’t that like being a little rich, or a little dead?”
She gave something between a snort and a laugh. “Not in my case.” With that, she pulled off the leather gloves she wore, squeezing them in one of her now-bare hands. “Basically, I’m a really bad psychic.”
Now it was his turn to laugh.
“I don’t get visions, I don’t see dead people, I don’t even hear little voices in my head,” she continued. “But sometimes, I just get this big, nagging sense that I have to say something or do something. It doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, but it’s like an itch I can’t scratch.” She stopped squeezing. “I saw you in the coffee shop, and I just had to talk to you.”
He shook his head, opening his mouth to reply and finding that he had nothing to say to that.
“Ummmm…” She swallowed. “I mean, I felt like I had to tell you something. And when I finally got up the nerve to approach you, that thing about the kids and the water just came flying out.” She fluttered one hand in front of her like a butterfly to illustrate, then pulled it back, curling both hands around her gloves so the leather squeaked slightly. “I had no idea if I was right about what I told you until I saw the news tonight.”
“Great.” It sounded so far-fetched, but something in him almost believed her. She seemed so sincere, so…normal. But there was nothing normal about a ritualistic murder in a state park. And there was nothing normal about warning someone not to take children near the place where a dead body waited. “You know the police think you might have something to do with that murder, right? And your defense is you’re a psychic who sucks?” He leaned back in his seat, stretching his arm across the ridge between the door and the window. “Sweetheart, I don’t have to have my own 1-900 line to know that that isn’t going to get you very far.”
“Then why haven’t you called the police yet?”
Just then, a wailing siren sounded in the distance, growing louder with every passing second. Oh, yeah, if she was what she said she was, she sure had the “who sucks” part down if she hadn’t seen that one coming.
“You did call them. Before you even got in the car.” She dropped her gloves and whirled around, clutching at the door handle and looking very much like a trapped rabbit—soft, scared and completely clueless as to what to do next. “I’m such an idiot.”
A police car careened into the parking lot, lights flashing, only to be followed by another. And another.
Several more skidded to a halt around the parking-lot exit, forming a haphazard line that would prevent any cars from going in or out. Their respective sirens blended together into one shrieking, cacophonous alarm, somewhat muffled inside the closed doors of the car.
“I didn’t think I warranted this much effort,” she shouted at him.
“Get out of the car, and put your hands in the air!” a tinny voice outside blared through a bullhorn.
She yanked the keys out of her car ignition and shoved them in her pocket. “You slept with a woman named Penny last month,” she said suddenly to the windshield.
“Wha—” How could she know that? Penny lived in another state and had claimed to have no friends in Washington when she’d visited on business.
“She has a blog, and she’s very, very peeved at you.” Sophie sighed, and her shoulders dropped in defeat. She switched off the car’s headlights. “See? I’m awful. I wish I could throw some secret or something that only you and your dead aunt Polly know at you, but I can’t. All I know is that when it’s really, really important, sometimes words come to me that are meaningful to someone else. I’m not a murderer.” She opened the car door and raised her hands as she got ready to exit the vehicle.
“And I don’t know why, but I’ll see you again,” she shouted over the noise that had grown significantly louder since she’d opened the door. “This murder is connected to you in more ways than you know. And I think I have to help you with something.” She rolled her eyes, her body half in, half out of the car. “Although why I would help a guy who thinks I’m a satanic cult killer is beyond me.”
With that, she got out, heading for the cops waiting for her with her head held high, and leaving him to wonder at the strength of her seemingly unshakable conviction in her innocence.
And how, with a seemingly random comment, she could have hit on the fact that he had a dead aunt Polly.
