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“Asteria is an adult and has a right to live as she chooses,” Metwater said. “No one who comes to us is held against his or her will.”
Nothing Kayla saw contradicted that, but she just didn’t understand the attraction. The place, and this man, gave her the creeps. “Your father would love to hear from you,” she told Andi. “And if you need anything, call me.” She held out one of her business cards. When the young woman didn’t reach for it, Andi shoved it into her hand. “Goodbye,” she said, and turned to walk away.
She passed Metwater without looking at him, though the goose bumps that stood out on her skin made her pretty sure he was giving her the evil eye—or a pacifist prophet’s version of one. She had made it all the way to the edge of the encampment when raised voices froze her in her tracks. The hue and cry rose not from the camp behind her, but from the trail ahead.
Camo-man appeared around the corner, red-faced and breathless. Behind him came two other men, dragging something heavy between them. Kayla took a few steps toward them and stared in horror at the object on a litter fashioned from a tarp and cut branches. Part of the face was gone, and she was pretty sure all the black stuff with the sticky sheen was blood—but she knew the body of a man when she saw one.
A dead man. And she didn’t think he had been dead for very long.
Chapter Two (#u7a19028b-0337-5afb-b52e-b6359dd5f709)
After ten years away, Lieutenant Dylan Holt had come home. When he had left his family ranch outside Montrose to pursue a career on Colorado’s Front Range with the Colorado State Patrol, he had embraced life in the big city, sure he would never look back. Funny how a few years away could change a person’s perspective. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed the wide-open spaces and more deliberate pace of rural life until he had had the chance to transfer back to his hometown.
It didn’t hurt that he was transferring to a multiagency task force focused on preventing and solving crimes on public lands promised to be the kind of interesting and varied work he had longed for. “For our newer team members, plan on spending a lot of time behind the wheel or even hiking into the backcountry,” FBI Captain Graham Ellison, the leader of the Ranger Brigade, addressed the conference room full of officers. “Despite any impression you might have gotten from the media, the majority of our work is routine and boring. You’re much more likely to bust a poacher or deal with illegal campers than to encounter a terrorist.”
“Don’t tell Congress that. They’ll take away our increased funding.” This quip came from an athletic younger guy with tattooed forearms, Randall Knightbridge. He was one of the Brigade veterans who had been part of a raid that brought down a terrorism organization that had been operating in the area. The case had been very high profile and had resulted in a grant from Homeland Security that allowed the group to expand—and to hire Dylan and two other new recruits, Walt Riley and Ethan Reynolds.
Next to Randall sat Lieutenant Michael Dance, with the Bureau of Land Management, and DEA Agent Marco Cruz. Behind them, Deputy Lance Carpenter from the Montrose Police Department, Simon Woolridge, a computer specialist with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Carmen Redhorse, with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, listened attentively. The veterans had welcomed the rookies to the team with a minimum of good-natured ribbing.
“We do have a couple of areas of special concern,” Captain Ellison continued. He picked up a pointer and indicated a spot on a map of the Rangers’ territory—the more than thirty thousand acres of Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, plus more than 106,000 acres in adjacent Curecanti National Recreation Area and Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area. “We’ve got a group camping in Dead Horse Canyon, some sort of back-to-the-land group. Not affiliated with any organized movement that we can identify. They have a legal permit and may be harmless, but let’s keep an eye on them.”
One of the other new hires, Ethan Reynolds, stuck up his hand. Ellison acknowledged him. “Agent Reynolds has some special training in cults, militia groups and terrorist cells,” the captain said. “What can you tell us about this bunch?”
“They call themselves the Family and their leader is Daniel Metwater, son of a man who made a pile in manufacturing plastic bags. He calls himself the Prophet, though he doesn’t identify with any organized religion. There are a lot of women and children out at that camp, so it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye open for signs of abuse or neglect. But so far, they’ve lived up to their reputation as peace-loving isolationists.”
“Right.” Ellison eyed the rest of them. “We don’t have any reason to harass these people, but keep your eyes and ears open. On to other areas of concern...”
The captain continued with a discussion of off-road vehicles trespassing in a roadless area, reports of poaching activity in another area and suspicion of hazardous chemical dumping in a remote watershed.
“Randall, you and Walt check out the chemical dump,” the captain ordered. “Carmen, take Ethan with you to look into the roadless violation. Dylan, you go with—”
The door burst open, letting in a gust of hot wind that stirred the papers on the table. “I want to report a body,” a woman said.
She was dressed like a hiker, in jeans and boots, a day pack on her back. Her shoulder-length brown hair was in a windblown tangle about her head and her eyes were wide with horror, her face chalk-white. “A dead man,” she continued, her voice quavering, but her expression determined. “I think he was shot. Part of his face was gone and there was a lot of blood and—”
“Why don’t you sit over here and tell us about it.” Carmen Redhorse, the only female on the Ranger team, stepped forward and took the woman’s hand. “Let’s start with your name.”
“Kayla Larimer.” The woman accepted the glass of water Carmen pushed into her hands and drained half of it. When she lowered the glass, some of the terror had gone out of her eyes. Hazel eyes, Dylan noted. Gold and green, like some exotic cat’s.
“All right, Kayla,” Carmen said. “Where did you see this body?”
“I can show you. It’s in a canyon on Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, land. The Family is camping there.”
“Your family is camping there?”
“Not my family.” She gave an impatient shake of her head. “That hippie group or whatever you want to call them.”
“The peace-loving isolationists,” Dylan said.
Kayla looked at him. She wasn’t desperate or hysterical or any of the other emotions he might have expected. She looked—angry. At the injustice of the man’s death? At being forced to witness the scene? He felt a definite zing of attraction. He had always liked puzzles and figuring things out. He wanted to figure out this not-so-typical woman.
“Are you a member of the Family?” Ethan asked.
“No!” The disdain in her tone dropped the temperature in the room a couple degrees. She slid a hand into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a business card. “I’m a private detective.”
“What were you doing in Dead Horse Canyon?” Graham Ellison asked.
She took another drink of water, then set the glass aside. “A client of mine has a daughter who cut off contact with him. He hired me to find her, and I located her living with the group. Then he asked me to check on her and make sure she was okay, and to ask her to get in touch with him.”
“He had to hire a PI for that?” Dylan asked.
That hot, angry gaze again. “He hired me to find her, first. He didn’t know where she was. After I located her, he thought she might listen to me if I approached her initially.”
“Most parents wouldn’t be too thrilled about their kid running off to join a group some people might see as a cult,” Ethan said.
“Exactly.” Kayla nodded. “Anyway, I found the young woman, gave her the message from her father and was leaving when three men rushed into the camp, shouting. Two of them were dragging a body behind them. The body of a man. He was covered in blood and...” Her lips trembled, but she pressed them together, her nostrils flaring as she inhaled. “Part of his head was gone.”
“What were they shouting?” Graham asked.
“They said they were walking out in the desert and saw him lying there.”
“Saw him lying where?” Carmen asked.
Kayla shook her head. “I don’t know. And before you ask, I don’t know why they thought they needed to bring him back to the camp. I told the leader—some guy who calls himself the Prophet—that his men shouldn’t have touched the body, and that they needed to call the police, but he ignored me and ordered the men to take the dead man back to where they had found him, then report to him for a cleansing ritual.”
“He refused to report the incident?” Graham’s voice was calm, but his expression was one of outrage.
“He said they didn’t have cell phones. Maybe they don’t believe in them.”
“Phones don’t work in that area, anyway.” Simon Woolridge, the team’s tech expert, spoke for the first time. “They don’t work on most of the public land around here. No towers.”
“That’s why I didn’t call you, either,” Kayla said. “By the time I got a signal on my phone, I was almost here.”
“Did anyone say anything about who the dead man might be?” Graham asked. “Did you recognize him?”
“No. Everyone looked as horrified as I did.”
“Did the men do as the Prophet asked and take the body away?” Dylan asked.
“I don’t know. I left before they did anything. No one tried to stop me. I wanted to get away from there and I headed straight here.”
“What time was this?” Graham asked.
“I don’t know. But it’s a long drive. So...maybe an hour ago?”
“More like an hour and a half,” Carmen said. “Dead Horse Canyon is pretty remote.”
“Lieutenant Holt, I want you and Simon to check this out,” Captain Ellison said. “Ms. Larimer, you ride with Lieutenant Holt and show him exactly where you were.”
“We know where Dead Horse Canyon is,” Simon protested.
“The canyon is seven miles long,” the captain said. “She can show you the location more quickly.”
Silently, Kayla followed Dylan to his Cruiser. He opened the passenger door for her and she slid in without looking at him. He caught the scent of her floral shampoo as she moved past him, and he noticed the three tiny silver hoops she wore in each ear. By the time he made it around to the driver’s side, she was buckled in and staring out the windshield.
“You holding up okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.” Her clipped tone didn’t invite sympathy or further conversation, so he started the Cruiser and followed Simon out of the parking lot. They followed the paved road through the national park for the first five miles, past a series of pull-offs that provided overlooks into the Black Canyon, a half-mile-deep gorge that was the reason for the park’s existence. Every stop was crowded with RVs, vans and passenger cars full of tourists who had come to enjoy the wild beauty of the high desert of western Colorado.
“How long have you been a private detective?” he asked.
She was silent so long he thought she had decided not to talk to him, but when he glanced her way she said, “Two years.”
“Do you have a law enforcement background?” A lot of PIs he knew started out with police or sheriff’s departments before hanging their shingle to do investigations, but Kayla hardly looked old enough to have had many years on the force under her belt.
“No.”
“How did you get into the work?”
She let out a sigh and half turned to face him. “Why do you care?”
“I’m making conversation. Why are you so hostile?”
She ducked her head and massaged the bridge of her nose. “Sorry. I think I’ve just had an overdose of arrogant, good-looking men today.”
She thought he was good-looking? He filed the information away for future reference. “I’m not trying to be arrogant,” he said. “Cops are trained to get the facts of a situation as quickly as possible. That can come across as brusque sometimes.”
She nodded. “I get that. It’s just been a tough day. A tough week, really.” She glanced at him, her expression a little less guarded. “I thought I was applying for a secretarial position when I answered the ad for the job,” she said. “My boss got sick and trained me to take over the business. When he died from cancer last year, he left the business to me.”
“And you like it enough to keep at it.”
Another sigh. “Yeah, I like it. Most of the time. I mean, it beats a job in a cube farm. I like it when I can help people, even if it’s just finding a lost pet or helping a woman locate her deadbeat ex so that she can collect child support. But you see the ugly side of people a lot.”
“What you saw today wasn’t very pretty.”
“No.”
She fell silent again, and he was sure she was back at the camp, picturing that bloody body again. He wanted to pull her away from the image, to keep her focused on him. “Who are the handsome, arrogant men who rubbed you the wrong way?” he asked.
“Daniel Metwater, for one.”
“The Prophet of this so-called Family?”
“Yeah. Have you met him?”
Dylan slowed for the turn onto a faintly marked dirt track that veered away from the canyon and the park. “No. What’s he like?”
“He talks a good game of peace and love and spirituality, or at least, that’s what he writes in his blog. But it all sounds like a con game to me, especially considering he preaches about the futility of cell phones and technology, yet he has a website he updates often when he’s away from the camp. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I wanted to shake all those women who were making cow eyes at him and tell them he didn’t really care about any of them. He’s the kind of guy who looks out for himself and his image first.”
“What makes you think that?”
He halfway expected her to slap him down again. Instead, she relaxed back into the seat. “My dad was a charming swindler like Metwater—good-looking, silver-tongued and scary intelligent. His game was as a traveling preacher. I spent most of my childhood moving from town to town while he conned people out of whatever they would give him.” She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face. “I guess that experience has come in handy in my work. I can usually spot a grifter as soon as he opens his mouth. Daniel Metwater may be preaching peace, love and communing with nature, but I think he’s hiding something.”
“Do you think he killed the guy you saw?”
“I don’t know. It depends on when the guy died, I think. Metwater was standing with me for a good while before his followers dragged the body into camp. He was wearing white linen trousers and there wasn’t a speck of blood or dirt on him, so he didn’t strike me as a man who had just come from a murder.”
“So you think the man was murdered.”
“I think he had been shot. Whether the wound was self-inflicted or not is up to you people to determine.” She shuddered. “I’m going to spend my time trying to live down the sight of him. The only dead people I’ve seen before were peacefully in their coffins, carefully made up and dressed in their Sunday best.”
“Violence leaves an ugly mark on everything.”
“Yeah, well, I guess you could say reality does that, too.”
She turned away, staring out the side window, as unreachable as if she had walked into another room and closed the door. Dylan focused on the landscape around him—the low growth of piñon and scrub oak, and formations of red and gray rock that rose up against an achingly blue sky. He had grown up surrounded by this scenery. The country here didn’t look desolate and hostile to him, as it did to some, but free and unspoiled.
Simon’s brake lights glowed and he stuck his arm out the open driver’s-side window, gesturing toward a gravel wash to their left. He stopped and the passenger window slid down as Dylan pulled alongside him. “That’s the south entrance to Dead Horse Canyon,” Simon said. “Where do we go from here?”
“Turn in here,” Kayla said. “There’s a trailhead about a quarter mile farther on. I parked there, but apparently the campers have been driving right into the camp.”
“I’ll follow you,” Simon said, and waited for Dylan to pull ahead of him.
As camping spots went, this one lacked water, much shade or access, Dylan thought, as the FJ Cruiser bumped over the washboard gravel road into the canyon. But it did offer concealment and a good defensive position. No one would be able to approach without the campers knowing about it.
As if to prove his point, a bearded man in camouflage pants and shirt stepped into the road and signaled for them to stop. Dylan braked and waited for the man to approach the driver’s side of the Cruiser. “You can’t drive back here,” the man said, his eyes darting nervously to the Ranger Brigade emblem on the side of the Cruiser. The words Law Enforcement were clearly visible.
“We’re here to talk to Daniel Metwater,” Dylan said. “Officers Woolridge and Holt.”
“I’m not supposed to let anyone drive into the camp,” the man said. He was sweating now, jittery as an addict in need of a fix.
“What’s your name?” Dylan asked.
“Kiram.”
Dylan waited for more, but Kiram had pressed his lips tightly together. “Well, Kiram, we’re here on official business and you don’t have the authority to stop us. We don’t want trouble, but you need to step out of the way.”
Kiram ducked his head and peered into the car. “Hey, what are you doing back here?” he asked Kayla.
“I brought them to see your dead body,” she said, giving Kiram a chilly stare.
Dylan let off the brake and the Cruiser eased forward. Kiram jumped back. The two vehicles proceeded at a crawl up the wash, around the knot of trees and into the side canyon the Family had chosen as their home in the wilderness.
Dylan shut off the engine, but remained in the car, assessing the situation. The motley cluster of campers, tents and vehicles shimmered like a mirage in the midday heat. A child’s ball rolled a few feet, stirred by the wind, which made the only sound in the area. “The place looks deserted,” Kayla said. “Do you think they left?”
“Not without all their stuff. Do you notice anything missing?”
She studied the scene for a moment, then shook her head. “Only the people.”
