LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Gage Walker wouldn’t have said he was a superstitious man, but he didn’t believe in tempting fate. Don’t brag about your bank account being full or a big bill will surely show up in the mail that will tap you out. Don’t plan a fishing trip in April and leave the rain gear at home just because it was sunny when you left the house. Don’t complain about being bored at work or you’ll get a call that will have you working overtime for the next week.

      When your work was as a sheriff’s deputy in a small, rural county, boring was good, or so he always reminded the rookies and reserve cops. Boring meant crime was down and people were happy. The adrenaline rush of a real crime might make your day go faster, but it also meant someone was hurt, or had lost something valuable to them, or, worst of all, someone was dead.

      The man and the woman in this camp up near Dakota Ridge were definitely dead, each shot in the back of the head, execution-style. They were both in their early thirties and had probably been a nice-looking couple before someone had tied their hands behind their backs and sent a bullet through each of their brains. The driver’s license in the man’s wallet identified him as Greg Hood, from Denver.

      Judging by the matching gold wedding bands they wore, Gage guessed the woman was Greg’s wife. The couple hadn’t been killed for money. The man’s wallet still had cash and credit cards in it, and in addition to the wedding rings, they both wore expensive-looking watches. They had been left lying on the forested floor between their tent and the cold remains of a campfire, eight miles from the nearest paved road, about a hundred yards from the late-model SUV registered in their name.

      “Creepy.” Gage’s fellow deputy, Dwight Prentice, came to stand next to Gage, staring down at the bodies. Dwight looked around them, at the still forest, lodgepole pine and aspen so thick in places a man could scarcely walk between the trunks, the evergreen-scented air now tainted with the stench of death.

      “Yeah, it’s creepy,” Gage said. “If someone had it in for these two, why not kill them in Denver?” To his way of thinking, murder belonged in the city, not in the peaceful mountains where he had been born and raised and made his home.

      Though he had been a member of the Rayford County Sheriff’s Department for four years now, Gage hadn’t seen death like this before. People in Eagle Mountain—the county’s only town—died peacefully of old age, of diseases or a heart attack, or maybe after a fall while climbing or hiking in the surrounding mountains. A little over three years ago, a young lawyer in town had been murdered. People still talked about that case; it had been so unusual for the quiet community that primarily made its living from tourists.

      This case was going to give everyone something more to talk about. “I’ll drive down in a few minutes and call this in,” Gage said. No company had thought it worthwhile to build cell towers on Dakota Ridge, so this corner of the sheriff’s department jurisdiction had no coverage, and the radio wasn’t much more reliable. Besides, talking about something like this over the radio pretty much guaranteed that half the town would know about it, since so many of them made a hobby out of listening to police scanners. They would be out here to sightsee before the crime scene techs had even finished pulling on their Tyvek suits.

      “I want to have another quick look around first.” This was his last chance to size up the scene for himself, before the techs and photographers, ambulance personnel and reporters trampled everything into dust. Oh, they’d do all the right things—cordon off the scene and establish an entry corridor—but never again would the scene look like this, unmarred by tape and markers and footsteps.

      Moving carefully, Gage stepped around the tent and bent down to look inside. “Who called this in, do you know?” Dwight asked. He remained standing near the bodies.

      “Milo Werth called it in,” Gage said. “Said he saw the car parked here two days ago when he delivered propane to Windy Peak Ranch, at the end of the road. He came by this morning to pick up a heeler pup Jim Trotter at Windy Peak had for sale and said the car looked like it hadn’t moved. With the pup and his little boy in the truck, he didn’t want to stop and look, but thought we should check it out.” He unhooked the collapsible baton from his utility belt and extended it, then used it to pull back the tent flap.

      Inside was a jumble of sleeping bags, a plastic tote with a lid, and a scattering of clothes. A battery-operated lantern hung from a hook at the center of the tent’s dome, and a backpack sat propped to the left of the door. Then he spotted a woman’s purse next to the backpack. He pulled out a camera and took a picture of it in place, then pulled on latex gloves and, using the baton, hooked the straps of the purse and carefully lifted it out.

      “Looking for ID?” Dwight asked.

      “I’m looking for anything that tells me why they were up here.”

      “That’s easy enough to figure out,” Dwight said. “They came up here to camp. A nice break from city life.”

      “Except this isn’t National Forest or BLM land,” Gage said as he pulled a red leather wallet from the purse. “This is private property. This whole area is patented mining claims.”

      “Maybe they didn’t know that,” Dwight said. “Maybe they thought they could pull over anywhere and camp. Nobody bothered them, so they thought it was all right.”

      “Maybe.” The sheriff’s department had been called in before to explain to clueless campers that even if the land they were on wasn’t occupied, it wasn’t free for them to set up camp. Gage opened the wallet and studied the driver’s license in the little plastic window opposite the checkbook. Angela Hood had been a pretty brunette with long, straight hair, green eyes and a wide smile. She was thirty-two years old, five feet five inches tall. Gage flipped through the credit cards and store loyalty cards in their clear plastic sleeves next to the license and stopped when he came to a bright yellow card. In Case of Emergency, Contact Maya Renfro, (sister). A phone number and address were neatly printed in the space below.

      Gage made note of the number, then dropped the wallet back into the purse and replaced the purse inside the tent. “I got a number for her emergency contact,” he said. “Looks like it’s her sister.”

      “You could let Travis contact her.” Travis Walker was the Rayford County sheriff—and Gage’s older brother.

      “No, I’ll do it,” Gage said. Not that he looked forward to telling a woman her sister had been murdered, but he hoped Maya Renfro could lend some insight into what Angela and Greg had been up to that might have gotten them killed.

      He made his way back around the tent to the rough track that led into the clearing. “I’ll be back as soon as I make the call,” he told Dwight.

      “I’ll be here.”

      Gage took another look at the SUV parked at the road—a dirty white, late-model Chevy with a cooler and a black plastic garbage bag in the rear compartment. The couple had probably stashed the food and garbage there as a precaution against bears, which showed they were savvy campers. The techs would go over the vehicle, but to Gage, it looked as if it hadn’t been touched. And he spotted no other shoe or tire impressions in the soft soil on the verge of the road. So how had the killers gotten to the site?

      He went over the details of the crime scene in his head as he drove the eight miles back to the highway. Once he had a strong phone signal, he parked on the shoulder and called the sheriff’s department. “Gage, I’ve been calling you for the last half hour. Where have you been?” Adelaide Kinkaid, the police department’s office manager, or, as she liked to refer to herself, “the woman who keeps everything going around here,” addressed Gage as if he was a sixteen-year-old delinquent instead of a twenty-five-year-old cop. But Adelaide talked to everyone that way. It was part of her dubious charm.

      Gage ignored her question. “Is Travis in?”

      “No, he is not. When I couldn’t get

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