CHAPTER NINE
Monday, June 19
5:56 p.m.
Sharing a helicopter ride with a corpse wasn’t the worst thing Maggie had ever done, but it definitely ranked. By the time they made it back to headquarters, she wanted nothing more than a shower and twelve hours of sleep. It wasn’t in the cards, though. First, she had to brief Wyatt. She’d already passed on what little information she had to the initial SAR team, but there would be more people joining them before too long, and at this point, time was of the essence.
Sleep could wait.
So could a shower.
She very pointedly tried not to smell herself as she sank into the uncomfortable chair next to Vic’s. Wyatt looked more tired than she’d ever seen him, big bags beneath his eyes and the lines on his face deeper than they were yesterday. He pinched the bridge of his nose, not looking at either of them. “Three bodies. With another four missing, only two of whom might have gear to survive more than a night or two.”
It sounded bad when he said it like that—because it was bad. Exposure was a very real risk. The days might be in the seventies, but nights easily got down into the low forties, and that wasn’t even taking into account the misery waiting for them if it rained—which it was forecast to do. Rain wouldn’t make or break someone who was prepared, but it would make the risk of suffering from exposure skyrocket. Not to mention creating slippery surfaces and decreasing visibility, both of which upped the chance of a fall.
The chance of finding those hikers alive dropped with every hour they stayed lost.
She should be out there looking. Maggie rocked forward in her chair to say exactly that, but Wyatt spoke first. He pinned her with a look. “You stick with the Fed. I don’t have time to bring anyone else up to speed, and I need every man on deck for this search that I can manage. You focus on that goddamn killer and leave the missing hikers to us.”
She bit her words back before she asked if he was keeping Ava out of the search, too. He and Vic were right—she did have a chip on her shoulder. Every time they tried to protect her, it shined the light on her deep and dark suspicion that she wasn’t good enough—would never be good enough.
That’s your issue. Not theirs.
Maggie straightened and did her best to control her expression. “The killer and the missing hikers are connected.”
He shook his head slowly. “That doesn’t change a thing, and you know it. We have to process this like a normal SAR, because if there’s a chance of getting those kids back alive, that’s what it will take.”
“With all due respect, sir.” Vic spoke up for the first time since they’d sat down, startling Maggie. He leaned forward. “This unsub has been hunting people in national parks for months now. He’s escalating as we speak. I don’t think you should pull your people back, because you’re right—those hikers need to be found, and the faster the better—but they need to be aware that there is more at risk than the usual things they could encounter out there.”
Wyatt’s bushy brows lowered. “And, with all due respect, Agent Sutherland, I’m well aware that we have some nut job hunting folks in my park—as are my rangers.”
Vic’s mouth tightened, but he nodded. “Then I need to brief my partner and schedule a talk with the medical examiner. I’d like to be back in the park by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”
“No can do.”
Vic went still. “Excuse me?”
“You see, you make a good point about us providing this sicko with more people to kill. My rangers are familiar with the area and will know to report back anything unusual. You aren’t, and from what I understand, you don’t have more outdoors skills than your average joe—which makes you a liability.”
“He was a SEAL,” Maggie blurted. Embarrassment heated her skin as they both turned to look at her, but she refused to back down. “Don’t shelve us, Wyatt. Vic has been on this case from the beginning, and he knows this unsub. It’s a mistake to keep him back.” To keep them back. She didn’t say it, but the speculation in her boss’s eyes told her that he heard it all the same.
Vic rose. “Thank you for your time and assistance. Keep us updated?” He held out his hand, effectively ending the conversation.
He could have fought Wyatt. Control of the case was a flexible thing because of the murderers happening in a national park, and BAU was only brought in on cases to assist—not run them—but Vic was a Fed and, as such, he could have thrown his weight around and forced Wyatt to change his mind.
She couldn’t be sure if he hadn’t done so because he agreed with Wyatt or if it was politics.
Maggie hated politics—doubly so when there were lives on the line.
Wyatt shook Vic’s hand, looking like he’d just eaten something sour. “We’ll find the hikers, and you’ll find your guy.”
He didn’t sound like he believed that any more than she was starting to.
Maggie walked out of the office, practically weaving on her feet. Skipping sleep last night had been beyond stupid, and she was going to pay for it now. It was probably too much to hope for a full night without anyone calling in an emergency, especially when there was an SAR team on the ground.
First, though, she needed a shower and a warm meal. If she concentrated, she could almost feel the scalding water hitting her skin. Heaven.
“Maggie.”
She stopped short, almost having forgotten Vic was there. No, that was a lie. She could never forget Vic, not when he was standing mere feet away. It had been easier to ignore the way his presence affected her when they were on the trail. The park tended to overwhelm everything else, and it gave her plenty to focus on besides Vic.
Labeling the ranger station as civilization was a stretch by any definition of the word, but the immediate danger to them had passed, which opened the door for her to . . . notice Vic.
More than notice him.
Resisting the childish urge to flee into the encroaching night, she faced him. “Yes?”
“What’s your number?” When she blinked, he kept going. “We need to see Dr. Huxley tomorrow, and as charming as I find this park, searching for you for hours doesn’t hold much appeal.”
She blinked again. “You don’t need me with you to see Kat.” She hadn’t seen her friend in a couple of weeks since she’d been working from Goat Haunt. But Maggie had wanted to go have a drink with her—not meet her in their official capacities. Call her crazy, but it wasn’t quite the same thing.
“Not officially, but you’re the only person who saw all three of the scenes before anyone tampered with them. And as much as you hate to admit it, you have the same training I do. You might see something I miss.”
“We’ve had this conversation.” She didn’t want to get sucked back into the BAU, no matter how freakishly tempting she found Vic Sutherland.
He’s not married anymore.
Maggie dug her nails into her palm. It was exhaustion making her thoughts crazy. They’d shared one kiss a lifetime ago, when they were in the middle of a horrific serial-killer case and running on fumes. As she was evincing at this exact moment, sleep deprivation played hell on her decision-making abilities. She refused to let it get the best of her again.
“Wyatt all but gave you an order. You can try to slide out of it, but he’ll agree with me.”
She glared, all her good feelings disappearing. “That’s a dick move.”
“I don’t have time to dance around your feelings right now.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I need your eyes and your brain on this, Maggie, but I’m not going to drag you kicking and screaming along with me.”
He made her sound like a child . . . probably because she was acting childish. She sighed. “I hate you a little bit right now.”
“I know.” He didn’t sound too worried about it, but then why would he be? She’d never been able to maintain distance where Vic was concerned. It had started with her stupid crush on him when she was fresh out of the academy and had been assigned to the fabled Vic Sutherland as a partner, and solidified with that ill-advised kiss. She would have thought she’d learned from those mistakes, but apparently if she wasn’t careful, she was doomed to repeat them.
She rattled off her number and started for the ranger cabins that were tucked well away from the headquarters building She’d roomed with Ava since she was hired, but Ava would be out with the SAR team, which meant she’d have the place to herself. “I’ll see you in the morning.” Shower, food, sleep. That’s all she could deal with right now. Vic would have to wait.
Monday, June 19
8:25 p.m.
Vic slid into the booth across from Tucker Kendrick. The redhead barely looked up from his three plates. “Three bodies—five when we count the first two. Five is a lot of bodies, Sutherland.”
“Yeah.” He accepted coffee from the waitress and ordered the one meal guaranteed to be safe at any diner in the States—burger and fries. “There are going to be more before the week’s out, though it’s up in the air whether the park gets them or the unsub does.”
“I think we both know that bastard isn’t going to let nature cheat him out of his kills.” Tucker pushed a thin folder across the table with one hand while he stuffed a fry in his mouth. “ID on the girl they found by the lake.”
Vic scanned the details. Jennifer Haglund, twenty-six. As was often the case, she was much prettier in life than she’d been in death, her eyes shining with happiness in the photo pinned to the first page of the file. The scanned copy of her driver’s license put her as living in Whitefish—close enough to Kalispell to be considered a local—and married. He flipped through the other papers. “What’s her husband look like?”
“If I were a betting man, I’d bet Bill Haglund looked a whole lot like that stiff you brought in with you.”
“What I want to know is how their times of death line up.”
Tucker narrowed his eyes. “If taking down a couple was him escalating, that adds a whole lot of complications to his process.”
“Yep.” He flipped the file closed as the waitress approached with coffee. He put her as somewhere in her thirties—though she could be a tired late twenties—and the look she gave Tucker was as blatant an invitation as such things came. “Anything else for you two?”
Tucker gave her one of his slow southern smiles, and Vic almost rolled his eyes. He dialed up the drawl, too. “My partner would love some cherry pie if you have it once he’s done with his burger.”
“Your . . . partner.” She blushed, and then blushed a deeper red when Tucker didn’t jump to correct her.
Vic opened the file again as the flustered waitress backed away, waiting until she’d moved behind the counter to say, “You could have corrected that assumption.” They didn’t get it often, but every once in a while someone would mistake business partner for domestic partner and assume they were lovers. Tucker never played it up, but he never rushed to correct them, either.
“Maybe I’m harboring a serious unrequited hard-on for you, Sutherland.”
“You’re not.” Tucker was as straight as they came, and Vic had initially thought that he let people think the wrong thing just to be a dick. Six months later, he knew better. Tucker was a looker. He attracted female attention wherever they went, whether because of the red hair, the accent, or something else altogether, and Vic hadn’t missed that it was almost always in small towns that he let women think he and Vic were lovers.
Made it a lot easier to turn down offers if they didn’t come in the first place.
Even made investigating easier in some cases, because it put them firmly in the nonthreatening category when it came to interviewing women.
An interesting little insight to his partner that had created plenty of questions as a result—questions he hadn’t asked. They had time. Pushing too soon was a mistake. They had to have at least some trust between them, even if they were never going to be friends.
So he hadn’t asked.
Vic found what he was looking for—the scrawled report by one of the park rangers he’d met on the trail—David. “Quite the hike they had planned. North from the Loop, then west to Two Ocean Glacier, and north to Brown Pass, before circling back.” The ranger had noted that they’d been to the park several times a year for nearly a decade, and seemed well prepared for the trip. They weren’t supposed to be back for a few days yet, which explained why no one had reported them missing. “What do we know about this couple?”
“Not much more than what’s in the report. I’ve only talked to her family, but they’re as average as they come. She teaches high school, and he works the pipeline in Alaska. Both were born in Kalispell and never quite left, his job aside. They spend the weeks he’s home in the summer hiking, and have since they started dating five years ago. Solid middle-class folks—no kids, no crazy outstanding debt beyond the house they purchased last year, and no readily apparent skeletons hiding in their closet.”
“No, there wouldn’t be. It’s the park that connects them, not their history.” Vic sat back, smiling in thanks as the waitress—Judy, by her name tag—set his food in front of him. He let the expression drop the second she turned away. “Damn it, I’m making assumptions.”
“You’re tired.” Tucker’s blue eyes narrowed. “And you’ve been wrangling things on two fronts. Britton says you used to be partners with Ranger Gaines, and being a smart man, I put two and two together to make four. She’s the one who burned out during the Drover case, isn’t she?”
“She’s not up for discussion.” Britton should know better than to gossip like some kind of high school kid.
“Uh-huh.” Tucker took a drink of the Mountain Dew bottle that he’d no doubt hauled into this place since he didn’t drink coffee. His face turned as serious as it ever got. “The Drover case was bad—one of the worst I’ve ever seen. What the hell was Britton thinking, putting a baby Fed on it?”
“You know as well as I do that Britton has his own reasons for doing the shit he does.” But Vic had wondered the same thing. The FBI academy could only prepare students so much. Getting out in the field was a different world altogether. Nothing was in theory and the danger was all too real. There wasn’t such a thing as starter cases, but the Drover case had been in another world.
He and Maggie had come in after the third death—all preteen girls—and there had been four more deaths in the year they were on the case. It was after the seventh that she broke down, and it had taken two more murders before he and his new partner finally found the unsub—a lab tech whom he and Maggie had interacted with countless times during the course of the investigation.
Even after all these years, it made him sick to his stomach to know that they’d been so close, and that bastard had still pulled one over on them.
Tucker snorted. “Finish your food and get back to your hotel room. I’m pretty sure you just fell asleep while sitting up.” He wrinkled his nose. “A shower should probably be on the to-do list, too.”
The knowledge on his partner’s face gave the lie to his words. Tucker had been around long enough to know that some cases stuck with a person. Vic had failed six girls, and he’d never get the image of them out of his head.
It was a fitting sort of penance.
He pushed his plate away. “We’re meeting the medical examiner tomorrow at nine.”
“See you there.”
Vic strode to the counter and paid for their meals and then left without another word. There were too many things demanding his attention, and he wasn’t used to feeling conflicted like this on a case. Normally, he had no problem focusing on what mattered and setting aside the rest for a more convenient time. It was one of the things his wife had always despised about him—and one that she had cited as their reason for divorcing. Their marriage was constantly one of the things set aside, and there was never a convenient time to deal with it.
Part of him wished he could set Maggie aside so easily. If their time in the park was any indication, she wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t her fault—he was the one who kept getting distracted and moving his priorities out of order. He wanted her safe, but she was right—she was more than capable of taking care of herself.
Fuck if that helped him feel better about the whole situation.
He made it back to his hotel room in record time and showered as quickly as humanly possible. He needed to review the file one more time and then pass out for a few hours. He hadn’t missed much sleep last night, but the hiking had still taken more out of him than he’d realized. After drying off, Vic’s gaze fell on his phone. Maggie’s number was now in the contacts folder. It would be easy to dial it, just to check on her.
Except it was late, and she hadn’t asked him to babysit her.
He’d gone years without seeing her, and now that they were in the same general area, it was like they were two magnets that could barely resist the pull. He wanted to hear her voice, to sit her down and share a meal that wasn’t military issue, to actually talk.
His phone rang, which startled him so much he almost dropped it. Vic stared at the screen for several precious seconds, wondering if he was more tired than he’d thought, because it sure as fuck looked like Maggie was calling him. “Sutherland.”
“It’s me.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly painfully aware that he wore only a towel. It shouldn’t matter. She couldn’t see him, didn’t know what he was or wasn’t wearing, but it did matter. “Hey, Maggie.”
“I have to apologize.” He could almost feel her soft sigh. “You were right, and I was acting like a stubborn kid. This whole thing—the murders in the park and having to deal with my past and you—has got me all twisted up.”
Maybe it was the events of the last two days, but he was so goddamn tired of doing the noble thing. He never put himself or his personal shit before a case. Not once.
He’d never wanted to before.
“I twist you up?”
“As if you didn’t know. I had something of a crush on you when we were partners—which I’m sure you knew after I threw myself at you—and apparently I didn’t outgrow it as much as I thought.”
The dimness of the room evoked an intimacy he didn’t deserve. Was Maggie sitting in her bedroom in low light, too? He liked the picture that made. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I’ve been making an ass of myself since you stepped off that helicopter.” She shifted, the sound painfully loud in the near silence. “And I’m doing it again, apparently. My whole point was that I’m sorry and I’ll be professional from now on. You don’t have to worry about any breakdowns or hissy fits.”
It he was smart, he’d take her apology for what it was and allow it to move them back to solid ground. There were lives on the line, and a condensed timeline that was only going to get more condensed with each body that popped up.
But when Vic spoke, he didn’t move them back to firm ground. He threw them right over the edge of the cliff. “Fuck being professional. I want you, Maggie. Not the former FBI agent. Not the park ranger. I want you.”