Hold Your Breath (Search and Rescue) (5 page)

That did nothing to appease her curiosity. She tossed the cloth into the sink. “What’s that mean? Don’t you like him?”

“He’s fine.” Callum sliced his hand through the air as if to physically end that detour. “Did he have any ideas about who might be doing it?”

“No.” Leaning on the counter, she twisted the tip jar in circles until he stopped her with a big hand over hers. “I couldn’t think of anyone who didn’t like me.”

“Hmm.”

“That’s what Chris said.” His hand was still over hers. Heat was creeping up her arm from where his palm covered her fingers, and she knew a blush was imminent.
Thanks, Chris.
Now she was the one who was befuddled.

“What’d he say?” he asked, seeming unaffected.

“Hmm.”

“That’s not helpful.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he had some ideas he wasn’t sharing. Figuring out who the dead guy is should be his priority, anyway.”

“Had he?”

“Had he what?”

“Figured out who the dead guy was?”

“Nope.” She flexed her fingers. Had he ever touched her for this long before? “Rob got back as I was leaving. I happened to overhear a little bit of his conversation with Chris about that.”

Finally moving his hand, he propped an elbow on the counter, tipping his head toward hers in a silent request to continue.

“No one in Field County went missing around the time the coroner thinks the dead guy was dumped in the reservoir—no one who looks like our guy, at least. Chris’s checking all the people who disappeared in Colorado during that time, but he hasn’t found anyone yet.”

Looking thoughtful, Callum took another sip of coffee.

“Do you think you should mention your theory about the cult? Or the militia group?”

He shook his head. “Rob’s a smart guy, and he’s been doing this a while. He’ll look at all the possibilities.”

“Hmm.”

A corner of his mouth lifted. “Now
you’re
doing it.”

She laughed but sobered quickly. “It’s just… Rob said that they don’t have any leads in finding out who he is—well,
was
. It doesn’t sound like state will be much help, either. I feel kind of responsible for him—the dead guy, I mean. Because I was the one who found him, I think. I really want to help figure out who the poor guy is. His family is probably frantic.”

“Or they think he went for cigarettes and never came home.”

Horrified, she stared at him. “That’s even worse! His kids will think that he abandoned them. His wife probably thinks he was having an affair and… Okay, that’s it. I’m going to do a little digging.”

His eyebrows were raised in his
please-return-to-reality
expression. That was probably her third least favorite of his faces. “The entire Field County Sheriff’s Department is working on it,
with
the Colorado BCA. You really think you have resources they don’t?”

“I’m tenacious.”

With a sigh, he said, “You’ve already pissed off someone enough that they’re sticking knives in your tires. Do you really need to annoy more people by muddling around in a murder investigation?”

“Yes. I mean, I won’t annoy people. I’ll be discreet.”

He snorted.

“I can be discreet.”

Those damn eyebrows were up again.

“I can. Discreet and tenacious. Two of my best traits.”

Rubbing his forehead as if he had a headache, he sighed again and tugged his hat back into place. “Fine. We’ll do some research.
Discreetly.
”

“We?”

“Yes. God knows what trouble you’d get into on your own. At least if I’m there, I can make sure you don’t aggravate someone into sticking a knife into
you
. Now top off my coffee—please. I have to get to work. My real work, not this Nancy Drew shit you’re dragging me into.”

Stunned into silence and stupidly thrilled at the idea of spending more time with Callum, she did as he asked. After grabbing his newly filled travel mug, he stomped out the door, making those stupid bells ring again.

She stared after him for what felt like a long time. “Huh.”

* * *

It was a relief to leave the coffee shop at the end of her shift to find all four of her truck’s tires still fully inflated. Lou did feel a smidgen of guilt at disregarding the don’t-go-anywhere-alone advice both Callum and Chris had given her, but she hadn’t had a chance to talk to Ivy about scheduling a second person for evenings. Not that she’d really tried too hard to find that chance, since she was dreading Ivy’s reaction. Her boss could be a bit of a bear, especially when it came to the coffee shop’s bottom line. Having two people working the slow winter evenings was going to be asking a lot.

Lou had parked in the well-lit front lot, though, so she was following
some
of their advice, at least. Although her boss was probably not going to like her taking up a customer’s parking spot, it was the lesser of two Ivy-related evils.

With a sigh, Lou turned the key, patting her truck’s dash when the engine fired smoothly. She’d fight those battles when they came, she figured, reversing out of her parking space. When she pressed on the brake, the tires slid across the icy pavement for a few feet before slowing. Lou winced, glad that hers was the only vehicle in the lot.

The town of Simpson was as quiet as a ghost town as she drove the few blocks to the highway that would take her most of the way home. It was a tourist town, far enough away from the ski resorts that half of the shops closed for the winter. Summer was the busy time, when the road through town was bumper-to-bumper RVs and SUVs stacked with bikes and kayaks.

Now, only a few vehicles traveling in the opposite direction passed her on the nine-mile stretch to her turnoff. Plows had piled the snow twelve feet high on either side of the gravel road. Her headlights bounced off the white wall, making her feel as if she were in a tunnel—a tunnel that was slowly closing in on her. A claustrophobia-induced shiver touched her spine, so she reached for the radio preset buttons, looking for a distraction.

The DJ on a local station was in the middle of reading the news. Normally, that consisted of bake sale announcements and road closures, but the DJ’s voice had an urgency usually not heard in the lost-pet report. Lou turned up the volume and caught the tail end of what had to be a story about the body found in the reservoir.

“…remains unidentified. If anyone has any information, please contact the Field County Sheriff’s Department at—”

Lou punched the off button, interrupting the DJ mid-sentence. All day, between making lattes and serving muffins, her thoughts had kept returning to the dead guy—
her
dead guy. Although she had been flabbergasted when Callum offered to help with her unofficial investigation, she was also relieved. She couldn’t just continue to
think
about what happened. She had to
do
something. Especially when it looked like the actual authorities weren’t going to get anywhere. Wasn’t it always the plucky loners who solved the case in all the movies?

Or got themselves killed
, she thought.

Pulling up to her gate, Lou sighed. The wind had blown the dry, light snow, piling it into drifts across her long driveway. She hopped out of her truck and hurried to unlatch the gate. Shoving it against the fluffy piles, she used it like a snowplow to scrape the snow clear. Once the gate was open, she let out a relieved breath. If she wasn’t careful to keep it clear, the wind would pack the drifts into frozen concrete, and no amount of shoving would have made them budge.

Climbing back into her truck, she drove through the gate and then stopped to close it. Visions of an automatic gate that opened and closed with a touch of a button—a button located in the cozy warmth of her truck, of course—danced in her head, but an automatic gate was so far down on her “want” list that she shouldn’t even be dreaming about it.

The rest of her driveway was still pretty decent, although she had to back up to get a running start to plow through a couple of places where snow had drifted more heavily.

“Just three more months,” she muttered to herself as the wheels spun, flinging snow high into the air like an uncapped blender. “The rest of March, then April, then May, and then June will be here, and the snow will melt.” Hopefully. Maybe. “Summer has to come sometime, right? This is not fricking Antarctica!”

The tires finally caught and pushed the truck through the deep spot. Relaxing a little, she flexed her fingers, forcing her hands to release their death grip on the steering wheel. The rest of the short distance to her tiny cabin was manageable, and she tucked her pickup as close to the south side of her house as she could get.

Climbing out of her truck, she locked the door before swinging it shut with a thump. The sound made Lou realize how quiet it was. Evergreens surrounded her property, blocking any view of a neighbor’s house or the road. Her cabin defined the term “middle of nowhere.”

The wind blew through the trees, shifting the branches and their accompanying shadows.
Anything could be out there
, she thought, images of bears and mountain lions and horror-movie madmen flashing through her mind. With a shiver, she hurried toward the cabin door. If she allowed herself to think about what might be lurking in the shadows, she’d never be able to sleep that night.

On her way inside, she paused just long enough to grab several pieces of firewood from the stack, juggling them as she struggled to unlock her door. Nerves made her clumsy, and she almost dropped the keys twice. The dead bolt finally released, and she half fell inside as the door opened. Dumping her armload of wood onto the tile floor with little regard to the mess of bark she’d have to sweep up later, she leaned back against the door until it closed with a thump.

She was home. Safe. Completely alone.

Vulnerable.

Lou spun around, twisted the dead bolt, and then stared at the locked door, nerves jangling. She’d grown up in the city, where alarm systems and locks were the norm. In Field County, most of the people she’d talked to about it confessed to rarely locking their doors. Lou wondered if the higher percentage of shotgun ownership partially explained that. Most people in the area knew not to walk into someone else’s home without an invitation. A couple of months ago, she hadn’t given the locks a second thought.

But the tire-slashing had ratcheted up her paranoia. It made her uneasy, the idea that there was someone out there so enraged that he or she was willing to damage her personal property. It made it worse that she had no idea who it might be. She’d managed to drive someone to the point of criminal retaliation, and she’d had no idea she was even doing it. Not to mention there was an honest-to-God murderer on the loose.

With a shake of her head, she broke her focus on the lock and started shedding her outerwear.

Fifteen minutes later, she was curled up on the couch next to the woodstove, wearing her favorite fuzzy socks and long underwear—a clothing item that, up until four months earlier, she’d never dreamed she would own, much less wear. Now, it was her loungewear of choice. Gazing down at the red-plaid flannel, she smiled, imagining what her mother’s reaction would be to seeing her now.

She pulled her laptop closer and pressed the power key. Her electricity was limited to what was produced by a few solar panels and an ancient propane generator, but she’d learned to charge her phone and computer during the sunny part of the day. At night, she’d unplug everything except her refrigerator and use candles for light as much as possible. Candles didn’t use any electricity. Plus, they smelled good.

But the one thing she knew she had to have when she’d moved into her new rustic home the previous August was Internet. There was roughing it, and then there was just plain nuts, and not having Internet was solidly in the second category. The monthly satellite Internet fee required her to eat more meals consisting of ramen noodles or peanut butter than was probably healthy, but, in her mind, having Internet was worth a few cheap meals.

Opening a web browser, she stared at the search bar, considering. Finally, she decided to go for the obvious and typed in “missing person Field County Colorado.” A few of the results looked promising, including a site on missing people in Colorado. She clicked on that one. Once the website loaded, she was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities, and she felt sympathy for Chris’s plight.

She surfed through different sites for about an hour, until she started yawning. Closing the browser window, she felt a little disappointed by her lack of results. The idea of investigating the case was exciting, but she wasn’t sure how to start. To figure out who killed the man, she needed to know why. To figure out the motivation, she had to know who. Of the five “
W
”s, she had about half of one—the “what.”

With a discouraged sigh, she opened her email. One from her mom popped up immediately, which didn’t help her mood. She really hoped there wasn’t an e-ticket attached. If there was, though, maybe she could exchange it for a flight to Hawaii or something. Sunshine and a warm beach would be a nice change from the frozen mountains.

Her finger hovered over the touchpad as she debated whether to open it or not. But she figured she’d probably dwell on it more if she didn’t read it, so she reluctantly clicked on it. Immediately, she regretted the click.

“Louise,” she read out loud, “I am very disappointed…blah, blah, blah…your stepfather agrees…blah, blah, and more blah…disrespectful to Brenton…come to your senses…blah and blah…your mother.”

She hit the delete button with some satisfaction, although she did have one regret. “No trip to Hawaii, then. Bummer.”

* * *

He’d never been so cold. The wind was brutal, leaving him shaking, his hands and feet numb. The other side of the pine tree would have provided more of a windbreak, but he didn’t want to move out of the concealing shadows. He’d learned to put caution before comfort.

Tucking his head, he buried his mouth in the upturned collar of his coat, allowing the damp heat of his breath to warm his skin. She was torturing him, making him hide in the dark and frigid night just to get a glimpse of her. Resisting the urge to stamp feeling back into his feet, he stayed perfectly still and watched.