Wild Montana

She sighed again and his thoughts moved toward the other moments she would make that noise... How her body moved... How she would look without those green pants and that khaki shirt. Maybe she was the kind of woman who liked lingerie, or maybe not. A girl like her was probably more of the comfort type, real.

She glanced over her shoulder as she was stepping over a downed log, and the leg of her pants caught on a sharp branch. She stumbled, her body moved slowly through the air as she tried to pull her leg from the gnarled grip of the broken bit of deadfall. Yet as she struggled, she lost her balance.

He rushed to her side. “Are you okay?”

He released her pant leg from the stabbing bit of wood. It had torn through her pants, making an L-shaped hole.

“I’m fine,” she said, trying to move but her body was wedged between two logs.

“I thought you were the expert in the woods, Ms. Ranger,” he teased, trying in vain to make the embarrassed look on her face disappear. He held out his hand, waiting for her to take his peace offering.

She stared at his hand for a second. “Even experts make mistakes.” She struggled to push herself up.

He reached down and took her hand, not waiting for the beautiful, stubborn woman to accept his help.

There was a surge of energy between them and her eyes grew wide, her mouth dropping open almost as if she felt it, as well. He pulled her to her feet and quickly let her go. She was gorgeous standing there, her mouth slightly agape as she flexed her fingers.

“Thanks for the hand. I guess it’s been a long day.” She glanced in the direction they’d come, almost as if she was expecting to catch a glimpse of someone. “I’m off my game.”

“Don’t worry, I got your back.” He felt stupid as the words left his mouth. He wanted to say so much more, ask her so much more. Yet it wasn’t the time or the place. The spark he’d felt was probably nothing more than residual adrenaline leftover from their hike, or some misplaced stress from their findings.

She opened her mouth to say something, stopped, and turned away. He moved ahead of her, taking the lead so he could help her through the deadfall. This time her movements were slow, deliberate.

He stopped when he spotted a patch of animal hair on the trail in front of him. It looked like fresh fur, its golden tips still sparkling in the little bit of sunshine that managed to break through the trees. “I think we got something here.”

She moved closer. “Look at those tracks,” she said, pointing toward the gouges in the earth beside the tuft of fur. The holes were deep and massive, and they littered the ground in the shape of a nearly perfect circle. “There must have been some kind of fight.” Bending down, she picked up a piece of the dirt and inspected it, like she could read something from the way the dust felt in her fingers.

The woman was amazing. There was no way she would ever be interested in a man like him—nothing to offer, no place to call home and one screw up away from being unemployed. More than that, she seemed like the kind of woman who liked being on her own—except when she’d seen the other rangers.

She looked up at him, her green eyes nearly the same color as the moss growing on the trees that littered the ground. “These are griz tracks. More than one—the scent of death must have brought them in. I’m guessing it was probably from sometime in the last twenty-four hours.”

That’s exactly what they needed. Not one, but two hungry grizzlies in the woods near them. In the deep underbrush, it was more than possible that they could run into one. Hopefully it wasn’t a sow with cubs. They’d never make it out alive.

Maybe that was what had happened to the hiker—one misstep in the woods; a hike that had started out as some kind of goal or dream and then ended in tragedy.

“Be careful,” he said, moving closer to her.

Her mouth quirked into a sexy smirk, but she instinctively reached down and touched the plastic trigger of the bear spray at her waist. “If I go out by bear, at least I’ll go out fighting.”

He didn’t doubt her, but he could have sworn he saw a flicker of fear in her eyes. Then again, anyone who came into these woods and didn’t pay heed to the place’s ability to take them out at the knees was a fool. And maybe it was just that type of fool whose body they were trying to locate.

A branch snapped and his attention jerked toward the unnerving noise. The sound came from higher up the mountain, as if something was moving through the dense forest in a hurry. He could only hope whatever had made the sound was moving away.

Alexis was motionless, but her body was tense as though she had kicked into fight or flight.

“It’s okay,” he said, trying to calm her fears while at the same time trying to conquer his own. “Whatever made that sound is long gone.” He waved almost too dismissively.

She glanced over at him, and her frown reappeared. “If there’s an animal up there, it means there might be more of the body. We need to look.”

He paused. The last thing he wanted to do was end up like the victim they were trying to identify, but he didn’t want to come off like a coward to the sexy, dark-haired Alexis. “I’ll take point. Watch my six,” he said, trying not to think about the job he’d volunteered for as he followed the deep gouges up the hillside in the direction of the terrifying noise.

On a small patch of melting snow a square of army-green cloth caught his eye. He moved toward the object, unsure of whether or not the thing was really something worth looking at or just another green splotch in nature’s underbelly.

Moving closer, he knelt down so he could make out the square lines and straps of a backpack, the kind that could be found at any of a million surplus supply stores. There was a smear of blood on the bag, near the right shoulder strap. Before he touched it, he motioned for Alexis to take photos. She snapped a few, carefully documenting the scene.

She stuffed the camera back into her pocket and knelt down beside him just as his knees started to grow damp in the snow. She gingerly picked the pack up by its straps and set it upright.

Opening up the bag’s top flap, the bag was filled with clear, square packages of drugs. She took out the bricks and one by one laid them on the only dry spot she could find, a downed log, and took pictures of each item with a scale.

“Holy...” he whispered. “How many bricks are there?”

“Ten,” Alexis said. “You have any idea about what kind of drugs these are?”

He leaned in closer, and through the cloudy plastic he could make out hundreds of blue pills. “Without a drug test kit I can’t be a hundred percent sure, but I know they ain’t Viagra.” His face flamed as he realized what he had said to her, and he instinctively glanced to the hand he had held.

She giggled, like she had been able to read his thoughts, and the heat rose higher in his face.

He held his head low, fearing that if he looked in her direction she would be able to see how embarrassed he was, but instead of studying him, she reached in the bag and pulled out the last brick and documented it.

She flipped the bag over. At the bottom was a wad of cash, at least a thousand dollars, held together by a thick rubber band.

“How do you think the bag got up here? You think the bears stole it?” she asked with a slight laugh at her twisted joke.

“You know of any bears that need a thousand bucks and some drugs?”

She laughed again, the sound fluttering through the air like a rare butterfly, and just as quickly as it had come, it disappeared.

“But really, either the guy dropped it when he was running or...” He picked up the bag and showed her the claw marks. He flipped it so she could see the dark bloodstains that were speckled over its surface. “This is definitely arterial spray. Which means this guy must have been carrying this when he was mauled.”

She shrugged. “It definitely could have been a mauling. It wouldn’t be the first and I doubt it will be the last, but something about this whole thing—maybe it’s the drugs—it just doesn’t feel right. There has to be something more, something we’re missing.”

He felt it, too, the strange charge in the air that came with a great case. “Do you think someone murdered this guy, Alexis?”

“Call me Lex,” she said, interrupting him. “My friends...they call me Lex.” A faint tinge of pink rose in her cheeks.

He smiled. So they were friends, just as he had hoped.

“Anyway...what were you saying?” she asked, her voice soft and coy.

That place deep inside him—that place in his heart he often pushed aside for logic and reason—reawakened.

“I...I guess I was just saying that you might be right was all... I mean, if I was a killer and I wanted to hide a body, this is one heck of a place to do it. It’s late in the season. It would be easy enough to bring a person up here, shoot them and leave them to be reabsorbed by nature. Another few days and no one would have been back up here until next year. It could have been a nearly perfect attempt at a murder and cover-up.”

She nibbled her bottom lip, and it made him wonder what it felt like to kiss those lips. They were so perfect, pink and full, even a little suntanned from all her hours hiking. He ran his tongue over his lip and gave it a slight suck as his mind wandered to more sultry thoughts of all the places of hers he would like to kiss.

“How do you know that’s arterial blood?” she asked, motioning toward the stain on the bag.

He forced himself to look away from her mouth. “Arterial blood spatter tends to have a redder color, and the droplets are small or medium because they are expelled from the body at a higher speed.”

Her face pulled into a tight pucker and she looked up the mountain. “You thinking it could be from a bullet?”

He shrugged. “Without having the medical examiner go over the foot, and without more of the body...well, it’s hard to say exactly what might have happened. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we go get Travis and the other guys.”

“No,” she clipped. “We don’t need Travis. We’ll be fine.”

There was definitely something between her and this Travis guy. Jealousy zinged through him.

She snapped another quick picture of the drugs and the money, and stuffed everything back into the bag before she stood up. “Let’s keep moving up the mountain. Maybe we’ll find the rest of whomever this belongs to. If we do, it’s possible we can get a few more questions answered.”

Maybe it was selfish, or adolescent, or whatever his therapist would’ve called it, but what he really wanted more than to find this body—and open whatever can of questions it would entail—was to spend more time with Lex. Their time together was the first real human contact he’d had all summer. Sure, he’d seen hikers and tourists, but their interactions had been little beyond looking at passports and the normal small talk.

In the deepening shadows, they picked their way up the hill into larger and larger clumps of snow, which made their tracking easier. A squirrel chirped overhead, making him jump.

“There,” she said, pointing toward a reddish patch on the snow. “Look...”

There, half-buried in the snow, was a yellow patch of bone. On its surface were smears of blood. His stomach dropped. Hopefully he’d been wrong about this being a murder. Hopefully this was nothing more than a mauling. A death was always a terrible thing, but if this was a murder the ramifications would play out until the case was solved, and the deeper the investigation would go, the deeper he would be forced to go into his former world—a world he had promised to leave behind.

Alexis carefully snapped a picture and documented the scene. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and reached down and picked up the bone that was buried in the snow. The bone was round and, where it wasn’t tacky with blood, it was oily from fat.

It could have been his years of seeing the dead, but as he watched her work to gently move the heavy, wet remains from the ice that had formed around it, he wasn’t thinking about the life that this bit of flesh had once belonged to; rather, all he could think about was Lex and the way her face had paled the second her fingers had touched the bone.

“You don’t have to stay, Lex. You can go get the guys,” he offered. “I can handle this.”

She shook her head and wiped the back of her sleeve over her forehead.

“Seriously, Lex. You don’t have to do this.”

“No. I’m fine,” she said, but her voice was weaker than what he was sure she had intended it to be. “This is my job. I got it.”

Ever so gently, he reached over and took the bone from her.

She gave an appreciative sigh. “Do you think...it is him?”

“It could be,” he said. He slowly turned the bone.

Lex gasped.

In his hands, barely discernible thanks to the jagged holes and chew marks, was the partial face of what had once been a man.

Chapter Three

The coroner laid the skull down on the black body bag. There was a patch of hair, dark with dried blood and grease, and an ear that hung limp, tethered by only a thin strip of pale skin. “Look at this mark right here,” he said, pointing to a jagged, round wound at the base of the man’s skull. “If this was the entrance of a bullet wound, it would be smooth around the edges, and depending on the angle, there would be a large exit wound.”

“So this wasn’t a homicide?” Casper asked as he leaned in closer to look at the mark on the bone.

“If you look right here,” Hal said, “the margins of the wound are jagged. It’s the type you normally see associated with a high-pressure compression wound, consistent with that of a bite. However, without the rest of the body, it’s hard to say if this wound was the cause of death or was caused antemortem, perimortem or postmortem.”

She looked away. To get through this she had to think of him as just another man. A random being. A victim of the fates. It was nature.

“Are you okay?” Casper asked, putting his hand on the small of her back.

She swallowed a bit of bile that had managed to sneak through her resolve. “I’m fine,” she said, her voice hoarse.

Hal zipped up the bag, hiding the gruesome head from view. “I’ll get this to the medical examiner. Maybe he can tell us a little more, but for now I’m going to rule the cause of death as undetermined. Don’t be surprised if this comes back as being likely due to unintentional injuries. This bite,” he said, motioning toward the bag at his feet, “would have been fatal.” He stood up and wiped off the knees of his pants.

Travis tapped Hal on the shoulder, drawing his attention. “You ready? The pilot is starting to get antsy.”

Hal nodded. “You guys need a ride out?”

Casper took a step toward the copter, but Lex stopped him as she looked over at Travis. The last place she wanted to be was sitting next to her ex-husband in a flying death machine. “Thanks, but we’ll hike out.”

“Are you sure? Alexis, I think you should get back to the station—” Travis started to protest, but stopped as if he had realized, a moment too late, that he no longer had control over her. “Or do whatever. You never listened to me anyway.”

It wasn’t that she hadn’t listened, it was simply that she wasn’t the kind of woman who was ever going to have her actions dictated to her—especially not by someone who had once said that he loved her. “Would you and John let the other rangers know that we have a possible dangerous bear?” She carefully sidestepped his jab. “We’re going to need to send up the biologists and a ranger in the morning to track this bear down. We don’t need any more tourists getting hurt.”

“Maybe you should worry about yourself,” Travis grumbled, glancing over toward Casper.

Casper smiled, the motion so wide that it made her wonder if he had misunderstood Travis’s tone. “Don’t worry about Alexis,” he said, motioning toward her. “She’ll be safe with me.”

Travis gave a tight nod and turned away, muttering unintelligibly under his breath.

Watching him walk away, she was filled with mixed emotions. She thought of the first time she’d met Travis. It had been her first day at work, he had been so kind in showing her around and when she’d gotten a headache, he’d driven three hours to get her Tylenol. At first he had been so good at the little things, the love notes and wildflowers left on the counter. Yet after a couple of years, things progressively got worse and she hated him and what he had done to her, the way he had always put her down and treated her like she was less-than. Then again, such hate could only come at the cost of having once loved.

Casper looked over at her, and she tightened her jaw in an attempt to hide her thoughts from leaking into her expression. She didn’t need him asking her any questions about her past. “Thanks for everything, Hal. And please let me know how it all turns out,” she said, giving the coroner a quick wave.

“No problem. But wait, what about the drugs?” Hal asked, motioning toward the backpack at Casper’s feet.

“This whole thing’s going into evidence once we get down,” Casper said.

“You sure you don’t want me to take them with us? I can drop them off in evidence for you. Would save you a couple pounds carrying it out,” Travis said.

She would carry a thousand pounds just so long as she never had to ask for Travis’s help. “Nope. We got it,” she clipped.

“My team’s at your disposal if you need,” Hal added and then quickly made his way to the helicopter, disappearing behind its doors. She reached down and took Casper’s hand and pulled him, urging him to follow. His hand was hot in hers and she let go, the touch a jolt to her cold, exposed skin. Casper looked at her, a shocked expression on his face like he was surprised that she had touched him, but she pretended not to notice.

Hopefully Travis was watching and could see that no matter how they had left things, she was moving on with her life.

The helicopter lifted off the ground, the wash sending bits of dust and debris in every direction. Travis sent her a look through the copter’s window as he said something on his radio.

Casper turned toward her. “You do realize that now we’re going to have to hike out...in the dark.”

“That’s the easy part,” she said with a wicked smile.

He raised an eyebrow in question.

“The hard part,” she teased, “is that you won’t be able to beat me.” She took off with a laugh, relieved that once again she was alone with the cowboy.

* * *

THE CBP’S CHEVY always seemed to list to the left when he drove down the road, and it squealed when he applied the brakes, but as they got to the bottom of the trail, he had never been happier to see his old, beat-up, Fed-issued truck.

“You’re crazy. You know that, right?” Casper said between heaving breaths.

He’d thought five miles uphill going in was bad, but basically jogging five miles down steep terrain carrying not only his go-bag, but also the missing hiker’s drugs, had nearly killed him.

Even in the light of his flashlight he could make out the beads of sweat that were dripping down Lex’s temples. Her hair was damp and her cheeks were red, but she laughed like her body couldn’t be aching as badly as his. “Come on, that was fun.”

“Having a heart attack is never fun. You could’ve killed me. I’m getting old, you know.”

She lifted her brow, giving him a sexy “come on now” look. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out two protein bars and handed him one. “Here. Eat this, old man. It’ll make you feel better.”

He took it, dropping his bags on the tailgate of his truck parked at the trailhead. She lifted her bag up and set it beside his.

He looked over at her and tried to guess at her age. She was young; the lines on her face were barely defined in the thin light, but she had the eyes of a woman who had had her heart broken more times than once. “How old are you?”

“Young enough to be okay with it, but old enough to know not to answer,” she said, her sexy smirk returning.

He laughed, and some of his tiredness disappeared. “You wanna ride back to Apgar with me or do you want me to drop you off at the nearest station?”

She dropped her hand down on her backpack. “Apgar would be great. I don’t want to have to wait for another ranger so I can catch a ride.” She looked down at her watch.

“You don’t want to have to wait for another ranger, or is it that you don’t want to run into Travis?”

Her face puckered at the man’s name and he instantly regretted asking her the question.

“Sorry. Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business. Let’s go.” He slammed closed the tailgate and the topper. He jumped into the truck before she had a chance to answer.

After a minute she dropped into the seat beside him. They drove in silence for what seemed like an hour.

“How’d you know about Travis?” she finally asked.

“I was in the FBI for five years. Let’s just say I’ve learned how to read people.”

“If you’re so good at reading people, then how did you end up working at Goat Haunt? I thought only loners and outcasts liked that station. Last year it was manned by some lady...Gertrude or something. I swear the only word that woman ever said to me was, ‘Passport?’” Lex’s voice was soft, like she was trying to avoid hurting his feelings, but the blade had already sliced.

She was right. Goat Haunt was his own private version of Alcatraz.

“What can I say, I guess I’m just lucky,” he said, trying to make light of the situation.

He steered the truck around the sharp corners and down the narrow road of the Going-to-the-Sun Highway. The moon had risen and made it just bright enough that he could make out the snowcapped peaks of the jagged mountains around them. To their left was a steep drop-off; the only thing standing in the way of a car going over and plummeting hundreds of feet to the bottom of the mountain was a short rock wall.

He forced himself to focus on the road and ignore the tight knot of fear that always filled his gut when he came this way. At least the park was closed for the night, so there were only a few other cars—those that dared to spend the night in the park, or were hurrying to get out.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” Alexis started. “I...I’m just a little touchy when it comes to Travis. He’s my ex-husband. Lately things haven’t been going well between us.”

He knew all about exes. He’d had more than his fair share, but after the events that had transpired with the FBI, he’d taken the last two years off from dating. It was his way of protecting another person from getting hurt. Yet when he looked at Alexis, he was tempted to break his self-imposed vow of celibacy. There was just something about the tomboy next to him. She wasn’t the type of woman who worried about a broken nail. She was the type who would be happy hanging out, reading a book, maybe going for a hike—and no matter how he counted it, spontaneous and real were always a turn-on. No matter how badly he didn’t want them to be.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked, trying to avoid looking at her hand resting between them on the bench seat.

She shook her head. “What about you? I noticed you don’t have a ring.”

“It’s a long story,” he said, casting a look at her.

“I heard that kind of thing has been going around.” She smiled. “Relationships are tricky—when you think you have a good one, it’s easy to get complacent and take things for granted, and with bad ones you are always struggling to find an escape.”

His thoughts moved to his parents and how tricky their relationship had been. They hated one another and had fought every day when he’d been growing up. Though they were still married, the thought of the relationship they had made the word marriage sour on his tongue.

Though he didn’t like the thought of marriage—at least the type of marriage he’d seen as a child—he still held hope that one day he’d find something different. Yet from the way Lex spoke, he wasn’t sure if she was attempting to make him feel better, or if it was a way of telling him she wasn’t interested. Either way, whatever residual hopes he had held in making something out of their clandestine meeting were gone.