In the Barren Ground (35 page)

CHAPTER 41

Crash spun into Crow TwoDove’s driveway and brought his machine to a stop. The place was in darkness. No light glowed from Crow’s house. No light showed through cracks in the barn. Unease whispered into him. He turned off his engine, and removed his helmet. Temperatures were plunging fast. The breeze cut like fine blades against his ears and face. Ice glistened. Everything was frozen. Heavy clouds scudded across the sky, revealing small glimpses of a yellow sickle moon. The storm was blowing in fast.

He’d found Markus Van Bleek at Wolverine Falls. The man had said he’d tried to give Mindy a ride, but that Heather had intervened and taken her instead. Crash had made it clear that he’d not believed Van Bleek, but Van Bleek had given him free rein to search his friend’s house and see for himself. Crash had.

There’d been no sign that Mindy had ever been there.

Heather had looked dead into his eyes at the airstrip when she’d told him that Van Bleek had taken Mindy—so what was up with that? He had more reason to trust Heather than a shady diamond industry hit man. He took out his phone, called Tana again. Once more, his call clicked over to an automated message system. He killed the call. She was probably busy organizing things with major crimes.

Pocketing his phone, he unstrapped his rifle from his machine. This quiet was not normal. Not even the dog was barking. Crow could be out, but not with his dog. He never took that poor animal off the rope. It never left this place.

He dismounted, and slowly made his way down the rutted and frozen driveway. He headed for the barn. Mindy was his priority and something here was off. Tana’s words followed him:

. . . would you have a read on a sociopath?

Van Bleek could well be exactly that.

He could have sent Crash on a wild goose chase back to Twin Rivers and this ranch. He could be doing Mindy harm right now. But there was no doubt things were wrong here, too. The closer he got to the house and barn, the more his sixth sense screamed and the hairs rose on his arms. He moved off the driveway and into the shadows on the snowfield that led to the barn. For a moment Crash stilled, and listened. Silence roared. He cocked his rifle, and resumed his cautious approach to the side of the barn, his mind acutely aware of the hunting knife at his hip. And he wished he had a smaller sidearm.

The barn door was ajar. Crash peered through the hinge gap on the side. A faint quavering glow came from the back. A gentle current of warmth touched his face, then it was gone. Entering the door, he moved slowly around the gleaming chopper, and froze.

His heart thudded.

His brain screamed as he tried to process the sight on the barn floor in front of him.

Crow.

His head had been partially severed, and he lay in thick, congealing puddles of dark blood. His eyes stared up, each impaled by a taxidermy tool. Blood leaked from his eyeballs like the black tears of a heavy metal rocker. Crash swallowed. His gaze tracked a line of bloody boot prints that led from Crow to the softly pulsating orange glow at the back of the barn. The glow seemed to be emanating from a hole in the floor—an open trapdoor that led down to a basement of some sort. The rear exit door at the very back of the barn stood wide open. Cold air breezed in.

No sound came from the open trapdoor.

Carefully, moving along the barn wall, he followed the footprints toward the trapdoor. Crouching down, closer to more light, he studied the bloody boot prints. His pulse kicked as he noticed the odd gap in the tread of the left boot prints.

The same as the print Tana had photographed at the Apodaca-Sanjit slaying. The same print they’d seen at Elliot Novak’s camp.

Heather?

Fuck.

His brain wheeled in on itself, shards of information slicing into place like a mirror shattering in reverse, and as a picture emerged, it started making sense—insane, depraved horrific sense.

. . . would you have a read on a sociopath?

Not Van Bleek. Heather. A dangerous killer. A female psychopath. One he’d slept with. And he hadn’t seen it. She was different—most people who came out here were, but this—he had not seen
this
coming.

A scream knifed the air outside. His head jerked up.

It came again—female, in pain. Raw terror. There was nothing like it, once you’ve heard a human scream like that. It cut to the quick of a human soul. Crash moved quickly to the open door at the rear of the barn. Pressing his back against the wall, he peered out through a crack between the wood slats. A small light bobbed in the darkness down by the lure shed. Another scream rent the icy air. The light went out.

Crash stepped out of the barn into night shadows. He stood motionless, watching, listening. Wind sifted through frozen branches, caressing ice crystals with a brittle, whispering sound. Moving at an oblique angle from the path, Crash edged slowly toward the lure shed down by the river. But it was impossible to move in silence. Ice crunched each time he carefully set his boot down. Every now and then, clouds would part and the moon would throw into relief a shadowy black-and-white scene. He came around the animal enclosure and a horse whinnied. He stilled, heart hammering. He could smell the manure and warmth of the animals. What in the hell was going on here? Where was Mindy?

Clouds parted again and moonlight fell on the shed. In the moment before darkness reclaimed the scene, he saw what appeared to be a snowmobile trailer with skis parked in front of the shed, next to the drum the dead biologists had used to mix their blood lure. A figure was lying motionless atop the trailer. Dead? Or alive, and hurt?

Mouth bone-dust dry, Crash watched for a few moments, assessing his surroundings, listening. Nothing but the brittle wind, the odd crack of ice freezing over the river. Time ticked, stretched.

Slowly, he moved forward again, first his left foot. Snow crunched. He paused, then carefully put his right foot forward. Another crunch. He cursed mentally. Waited. No movement came from the prone figure on the trailer. No movement anywhere at all apart from the breeze softly blowing across the frozen landscape. He put his left foot down, and a metallic snap sounded. Pain exploded through his shin and radiated up his leg as metal teeth rammed deep into his flesh, closing his leg in a vise. His brain roared as he swallowed a scream. His mind fought, even as he grappled in his pocket for his flashlight, but he knew before his beam hit the metal teeth and hinges what he’d stepped into.

An old grizzly bear spring trap.

Shaking with pain, shock, he panned his light over the monstrous thing. Rusted teeth speared through his Carhartts, through his thermals, into his skin, cutting deep into his leg. It had gotten him above his boot.

He crumpled to the ground in pain, quickly removing his gloves so that he could get a good grip on the metal. His fingers burned with cold as he closed his hands around the trap, and pulled, trying to pry it open. He heaved, shaking and sweating from the effort, from pain. He stopped to gather a breath. He knew his efforts would prove futile—he knew he needed to depress the spring release, and for a trap this size he needed a special tool to do that. As he tried again to relieve pressure from the teeth, a blow thudded his head from behind. Sharp claws raked across the back of his skull, ripping skin open. Blood was instant, copious, and hot down his collar. Head wounds . . . bled a lot. He tried to keep thinking, but his vision was going. Blood poured into his ear. With Herculean effort, he turned his head, looked up.

Heather.

A clawed plow tool in her hand, like the one in Novak’s shed . . .

She was panting, eyes glittering in the dark, her body hulked over him like a wild beast.

Fire roared through Tana’s veins as she tried one more time to call Crash. Still no answer. She needed to go out there. He could be hurt. Mindy could be hurt. Time could be of the essence.

She made for the gun locker. But as she passed the small room where Addy had stitched up the cut on her cheek, Tana heard Addy’s words.

You need backup . . . You need a full complement of staff here, so that you don’t have to be the one running in to physically break up a brawl at the Red Moose . . . I know what I’m talking about. My mom was a cop. She died in the line of duty when I was ten. . . . Be there for your baby, Tana.

She froze. Panic, fear, adrenaline—it all whipped through her like a downed and live electrical cable snapping along the ground.

You can’t do everything alone, Tana, my child. You need to learn how to ask for help. You need to let people help you. Everyone needs a tribe. Man is not strong without tribe . . .

She unsheathed her sat phone and hurriedly dialed her point person in Yellowknife.

She gave him the details of what she faced—two civilian lives possibly in jeopardy on a remote ranch. A female suspect on the loose who could be responsible for multiple brutal murders. She was armed, dangerous. Mobile.

Tana was told to stand by. Keelan came on the line and her body snapped wire-tight at the sound of his voice. He asked her to repeat her information. She did.

There was silence for a long, unbearably tense moment.

“Larsson,” he said coolly. “Find out if those two civilians
are
actually on that ranch, and whether they
are
actually endangered by this suspect, and
then
I will have authority to engage an ERT via military chopper at full expense. Understand?”

Fuck you, Keelan.

“Yes sir. Stand by.”

She hung up. Heat seared her face. Her heart slammed against her rib cage as she unlocked the gun room.
You fucking asshole
. A military chopper flew IFA—instrument flight rules, not just visual flight rules. It could negotiate fog and snowstorms. But even once engaged, an Emergency Response Team would still be two hours out. People could be dead in a few hours. Yeah, so, it was super expensive to send a military chopper and ERT personnel, and brass would have to justify it down the line. And yeah, she wasn’t one-hundred-percent legal-certain that Crash and Mindy were on that ranch and in trouble. But her gut screamed it was so.

She grabbed a shotgun, rifle, ammunition, thinking about all the reasons she’d come out here to this small and isolated fly-in town in the first place—to build a tribe, a community, a sense of family for her child. To be a good mom. To start over where people wouldn’t judge her on her past mistakes. To be
respected.
To keep her baby safe, unlike her mother who’d hurt her own child. To save the vulnerable, like Mindy. To pay it forward like that beat cop who’d picked her up out of the gutter. And yet, here was her past, her old nemeses, still ruling her life.

She’d just have to go out there herself, check things out, call it in again.

. . . you might be compelled to take a kick, or a bullet, but you’ve got another life to think about now. A little civilian life.

She stilled. Her brain churned.

If
MacAllistair was good for these murders—and Tana believed they were murders, and that MacAllistair was responsible for them—and if Crash had gone out there looking for Mindy and caught MacAllistair in her lie, she’d have been exposed. She’d likely have acted to protect herself. And if she’d somehow taken Crash by surprise, and now held him and Mindy hostage on that ranch, she’d be expecting Tana to come looking for them at some point. She’d be waiting, ready.

And the woman was lethally dangerous, a shrewd killer who did
not
want to get caught. Who went to extreme lengths to make her kills appear accidents of wilderness. A woman capable of depraved violence, one who’d survived this long, and gotten away with it.

Tana could ask for local help in going out there, but her number one priority of the job was protecting the lives of civilians. Engaging them in a police matter could cost her career.

Conflict warred inside her.
Maintiens le droit
—that was the motto of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—maintain the law.

But it also meant “do the
right
thing.” A tenet that Keelan and Cutter had lost a long time ago.