CHAPTER TWO
Sunday, June 18
11:12 a.m.
Maggie looked around the small group of hikers who had just disembarked the Waterton Lake ferry from the Canadian border. She’d agreed to stick around Goat Haunt all day and check paperwork. No, not agreed. The truth was that she’d shamelessly begged her boss, Wyatt Thornton, not to force her to take any time off. The thought of sitting in her room with scenes of that woman’s corpse flashing through her mind was too much to bear. She loved this park. She didn’t want to fear it—or the human predator who might still be somewhere within it.
Wyatt gave her a choice—a day off or paperwork duty. She’d chosen the latter.
There were only two groups of people milling around, waiting for her to get to them. She dealt with the first group—a couple and their friend on a day hike to Kootenai Lakes—and then moved on to the second group. They were five—three women and two men—and she put their ages around midtwenties.
The tallest man, a big blond who could have passed for a linebacker, raked his blue gaze over her. “You’re awfully pretty to be a park ranger.”
The woman at his side—short, Hispanic, and pretty in a porcelain-doll sort of way—rolled her eyes. “Give it a rest, Josh. She’s not interested.”
“How do you know she’s not interested? Don’t be a bitch, Lauren.” The look he shot her was filled with barely concealed disgust, but he covered it quickly, offering Maggie a brilliant smile.
The smile didn’t seem to fool Lauren for a second. She shook her head. “Can’t block something that’s not going to happen in the first place.”
This is why I hate dealing with tourists. She managed a tight smile, even as the temptation rose to march into the woods and never come out again. The world might be getting smaller each year, but that truth didn’t apply to places like Glacier. With limited cell service, no Wi-Fi outside a few select locations, and more places to hide than a person could find in a lifetime, it was exactly the kind of private place that soothed her soul.
That soothing feeling didn’t extend to tourists who thought they were smoother than they actually were.
A second woman approached, shooting Josh a sharp look. “Stop it, both of you.” The smile she turned on Maggie was downright dazzling. “Sorry about them. We don’t get together too often these days, and when we do, it’s like all those years between now and high school never happened. I’m Madison.”
Maggie didn’t comment on the fact that there couldn’t be too many years since they’d all graduated, based on the look of them. This woman, in particular, was small and fresh-faced enough to pass for eighteen. Maggie accepted the paperwork and glanced over it. “Where are you all headed?” Their pass was for ten days in the park, which meant their destination could be literally anywhere.
Lauren slid past Josh to stand next to Madison. She was taller than Madison, but they could have been sisters or maybe cousins. They were both Hispanic, and similar enough in coloring—black hair, warm brown skin, brown eyes—but that’s where the similarities ended. Lauren’s long black hair was curlier than her friend’s, and she had the look of a woman who spent a whole lot more time outside than Madison, her skin a couple of shades darker. Even their posture gave the sense of polar opposites—Madison’s open and welcoming, Lauren’s closed off, whether from shyness or a general dislike of strangers.
Lauren cleared her throat. “We’re hiking down to Many Glacier, north to Elizabeth Lake, circling down to Helen Lake, and then back north to Goat Haunt.”
“Ambitious.” But she was still relieved that they seemed to plan to stick to the regular trails. It wasn’t a guarantee that they’d stay out of trouble, but it lessened their chances of getting hopelessly lost. “Any of you familiar with the park?”
“Oh, yeah.” Madison’s smile brightened, if that was even possible. “We grew up over in Kalispell, and we’ve hiked here nearly every summer since we were, like, twelve.”
“Until you got all fancy and ran away to the big city.” Lauren’s joke fell flat, but Madison didn’t seem to notice.
Laughing, she said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before. But I’m back for this trip, so that’s something.”
Their being relatively familiar with the park didn’t mean they wouldn’t do something stupid like lean over a slippery edge to get a picture of a waterfall or try to pet a moose, but it significantly raised the odds. The strange undertones to their friendship weren’t Maggie’s problem, though she kept an eye on Josh where he’d moved a bit away from the group to glare at the girls.
Maggie finally nodded. “Check in at the Many Glacier ranger station and let them know where you’re headed and if your plans change.” If something did go wrong, the rangers had a better chance of pinpointing their rescue efforts if they knew the hikers’ destination. The park might seem small in relation to the state, but it was plenty big enough that there were still people missing from decades ago—and even ones who’d disappeared as recently as five years ago.
Maggie handed the papers back. “Be careful. At least a few of your party should have bear spray.”
“We all do. You can never be too careful. Thanks, Ranger!” She turned, gave Josh a playful shove, and then darted back to where the other woman and man waited. As Josh and Lauren followed her, Maggie hesitated, wondering if she should warn them about the murder.
A onetime thing. That’s what the brass said.
She wasn’t sure she believed it.
It didn’t really matter what she believed, though. Since they had no reason to believe that anyone else was in danger from this killer, they had to treat it the same way cops treated normal homicide investigations—delivering information on a need-to-know basis only.
She watched them follow the trail that would lead them to Kootenai Lakes and beyond, and then checked her watch. Only a couple of hours left before the next ferry. She’d have to work to keep herself occupied in the meantime.
Anything to avoid thinking too hard about the dead woman.
Sunday, June 18
3:20 p.m.
Vic stocked up on gear before he drove into the park. If his instincts were right, he was looking at multiple nights spent in the outdoors, and that meant he had to be prepared for any eventuality. He needed to talk to the rangers who had found the body and actually see the place where the woman was found. Pictures could only tell so much, no matter how graphic.
He parked at the rangers’ headquarters and headed inside. It was like any other government building he’d come across in his travels—nondescript and sturdy. A man approached—a ranger, judging from his uniform—and Vic took him in with a glance. Midfifties, excellent shape, and kind eyes, though the man was currently glaring at him. “Took you long enough. Wyatt Thornton, park manager.”
He didn’t take it personally. Death made monsters of them all. Vic nodded. “Vic Sutherland, BAU. I’m going to need to talk to the rangers who found the body.”
“I suspect you’ll want a look at the site where the body was found, too.”
“Yes, sir.” He kept his tone respectful. It wasted everyone’s time to get into pissing contests with local law enforcement. National parks were a special kind of animal because they were federal land, and the park rangers handled most of the crimes that happened in the territory. When they needed the big guns, they called in the Feds. Whoever handled this area normally, they obviously had a decent enough relationship with the rangers that Wyatt wasn’t going into this expecting a confrontation.
Which wasn’t to say he looked happy to see Vic, but no one could blame him for that. Murder was messy business, and this particular murder was messier than most.
The whole thing made Vic so damn tired. He’d been doing this for more than a decade, and though each case revealed new and depraved depths that humans could descend to, some days he felt like he was simply going through the motions.
Learn about the murder. Travel to the murder site. Investigate to the best of his ability. Either catch that particular unsub or don’t. Fly back to Quantico.
The only thing truly different this time was Maggie.
Wyatt huffed out a breath, snapping Vic back to the present to find the ranger watching him closely. “Unless you’re keen to spend a few days on the trail, we’ll need to fly in.”
“We can’t waste any more time. Let’s take the chopper.” The Goat Haunt ranger station was at the very northern edge of the park—and the country—and the closest road was the one running just outside the building where he now stood. He’d done some quick calculations, and while someone could probably hike from here to Goat Haunt in a day if they pushed themselves hard . . . There were elevation changes to take into account, too.
No, a chopper could get them there long before they had to worry about nightfall.
Wyatt nodded like he’d expected the answer. “You got questions, I might be able to give you some answers while we wait.”
He had a lot of questions, and the condition of the body only created more. Dr. Huxley had e-mailed over her findings this morning, and he’d read through the information while he downed his coffee. The woman—whoever she was—hadn’t been dead long before she was found. Less than a day, in fact.
Since she was naked, and no clothing had been found at the scene, who she was presented the biggest mystery, second to who had killed her. Most crimes were solved by looking at the victims rather than searching blindly for the killer. He hadn’t had any luck with the last two murders, even knowing who the victims were, but there was always the chance that this one would highlight the connection. “Do you have any leads on her identity?”
“No.” Wyatt sounded like the answer was personally offensive. “We get hikers who come through without permits sometimes, but that close to Goat Haunt, it’s not common. When it happens, they avoid the ranger station. If she did have a permit, she didn’t come through via the ferry on her own, and none of the rangers who have seen her recognized her.” He cursed. “Though with her being in the condition she was found in, that’s not a big surprise.”
“Have you contacted the other stations to question the rangers there?”
“Of course.” Wyatt’s shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. “It might be well into summer in the rest of the country, but we’re barely into the beginning of our season here. There haven’t been enough hikers coming through for a single woman hiking to be forgotten.”
“Is that normal for a woman to be hiking alone?”
“We don’t make a habit of encouraging anyone to hike alone. This trail is relatively well traveled, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t troubles to get into. Hikers have a nasty habit of peering too close to waterfalls or leaning too far over edges. The rocks are surprisingly slippery in the rivers and streams, and the rock itself isn’t the granite you find in other mountain ranges in these parts. It’s sedimented, and so pieces break off without warning. We do what we can to maintain the trails and remind hikers not to be idiots, but we can’t stop them from coming into the park if they have permits.” Wyatt made a sound suspiciously like a growl and muttered, “Even in the middle of July and August, my people would have noted a lone hiker—woman or man—and passed along the information. Hiking alone is a goddamn fool decision.”
Hiking in pairs was recommended across the board—the buddy system was there for a reason. Vic didn’t think this hiker had gone out alone, though. What were the odds that she’d fallen into the unsub’s hands by chance?
Impossible, or next to.
Murder was often a crime of opportunity, but whoever shot that woman with two arrows had taken the time to treat her as if she were nothing more than meat. Didn’t go so far as to eat her, though. All her organs had been present and accounted for, which either meant the unsub had been interrupted before he could finish or—more likely, since he hadn’t eaten the other two—he was more interested in marking her as meat without actually treating her as such.
“Did you search the area around the body for her clothing?”
“I was more concerned with getting her out of the park before a grizzly or one of the cats came around for an easy meal.” Wyatt obviously found his question irritating, as if he was leveling an accusation at the man himself. Vic had run into Wyatt’s kind before. He wasn’t a bad man—on the contrary, he was a good one. He considered the people around him to be under his care, and he took it personally when they went and got themselves killed.
The question was more formality than anything else. The unsub had come prepared, and if the clothes weren’t on the woman, they probably weren’t in the immediate area. But we can’t know that for sure until we search the area.
“When’s the last time there was a murder in the park?” Vic asked.
“Back in 2013, when that fool girl went and killed her husband. The Newlywed Murders, I think the newspapers called it.” Wyatt snorted. “More like natural consequences. She pushed him off a cliff and then all but admitted her guilt by being the one to find him when our people weren’t moving fast enough. Girl wasn’t right in her head.”
And pushing a new husband off a cliff was a far cry from what had been done to that woman occupying a slab in the morgue.
Wyatt’s radio chirped and he gave a nod, almost to himself. “Chopper is here.” He eyed the pack Vic had set by his feet. “Looks like you came prepared. You hike often?”
“No.” Not since he left the SEALs. “I can hold my own, though.”
The ranger snorted again. “Heard that more times than I can count, usually before the so-called expert goes and gets in over their head. I’ll get you to Goat Haunt, and then my girl Maggie will act as your guide.” He gave Vic a long look. “She used to be a suit like you. Might push some buttons for her, so don’t take her shitty attitude personally. Murder makes everyone cranky, I imagine.”
Murder—and the fact that there wasn’t a scenario out there where Maggie was happy to see him. Lock it down. The case matters, not your history. He nodded. “Let’s go.”
The sooner he got out there, the sooner he dealt with this case, the sooner he got back the hell out of Maggie’s life like she’d always wanted.