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  “Christopher Rawlins and Troy Johnson are regarded as persons of interest.”

  “No way.” Sam shook her head. She’d spent time with both Kyla’s boyfriend and Kim’s husband. Neither seemed remotely capable of premeditated murder. “Troy’s the one who convinced me to take this damn job.”

  “At least it’s a normal job,” Chase said.

  “Is it?” She’d had so many crazy assignments in the past, she couldn’t be sure.

  In less than three hours, she needed to be back in Bellingham at the offices of Washington Wilderness Quest. There she would take charge of a troop of troubled teens whose surly attitudes would supposedly be changed forever by a twenty-one-day trek into the backcountry.

  * * * * *

  “Please, Sam, I’m desperate,” Troy Johnson had begged her only a week ago.

  Troy was Kim’s grieving husband, Kyla’s grieving father. Although their talk was supposed to be about business, and they were in a busy brewpub, it was proving to be a painful experience for both of them.

  “I can more or less cope with Kim’s admin jobs,” he confided, sliding his eyeglasses up his nose. The glasses were thickly framed in black, an old style that was all the latest rage. “I can’t take Kyla’s place out in the field. Our other field guide already left for his teaching job in Montana.” He drew a line down the side of his sweating beer glass with his fingertip. “We have several grant applications out right now, and there’s no way we’ll land a single one if we don’t have a full contingent of qualified staff. You’d be a perfect field guide, Sam.”

  She’d scoffed at that idea. “I am a wildlife biologist, Troy. I have zero experience with counseling troubled kids. Zero experience with kids, period.”

  If Kim were still alive, she could have told her husband that humans were Sam’s least favorite species.

  They were seated in a corner of the tap room at Boundary Bay, and the ambient roar was growing as the pub filled with drinkers.

  “You have all the skills we need in the field.” Troy leaned in to be heard, his elbows on the table as he ticked off the requirements on his long fingers. “You have a college degree. You’re a mature, stable adult.”

  Sam speculated that the “stable” part might be stretching the truth a bit.

  “You have extensive wilderness experience in all sorts of weather; and you are a certified Wilderness First Responder for medical emergencies. And since you taught tracking skills for us earlier this year, you already know the system.”

  “I was only there for a few days,” she argued, leaning forward, too.

  “We’ll teach you some techniques for dealing with the kids. Maya will be with you. She knows the ropes now. Aidan Callahan will be your other peer counselor. He knows what he’s doing. The peer counselors carry gear, help set up and break down camp, keep watch on the client kids, and generally do whatever you tell them to. In the field, you’re their boss.”

  Wow. She’d never had assistants before; she was usually a team of one.

  “You’ll have the backup of the mental health counselors in the office, and they’ll take your place for two days halfway through the session to give you a break and check up on the kids.”

  Lifting his beer, Troy took a sip. Deep lines carved his forehead above weary gray eyes, and his cheeks were hollowed above his carefully trimmed white beard. Like Kyla’s, Troy’s hair was straight and pale, although his was more white than blond now. “You can’t say you’re not experienced in working with challenging teens; I see what you’ve done for Maya.”

  Sam still wasn’t sure how she’d developed such a soft spot for the tough juvenile delinquent she’d met on a trail crew two years ago. “Maya has done everything for herself. It’s not like I adopted her. She glommed onto me like a remora.”

  Just as Sam had feared, Maya Velasquez had been booted out of her foster home in Tacoma only days after she turned eighteen. She’d insisted on living in a tent in Sam’s back yard for a few weeks, until Kim Quintana took pity on both of them and gave the girl the summer job as peer counselor with Wilderness Quest.

  The edge of Troy’s pale eyebrow lifted. “I have no clue what a remora is.”

  “It’s a fish,” she told him. “Remoras suction-cup themselves to bigger fish for a free ride.”

  Setting down his glass, Troy reached across the table to place his hand on top of hers. His fingers were cool and damp. “My point, Sam, is that Maya accomplished a lot with your guidance, and that’s exactly what these six kids need.”

  Pulling her hand from beneath his, she fingered the beer-stained coaster on the table in front of her.

  “It’s only for twenty-one days,” he continued. “The parents signed their kids up long ago; they’re counting on us. It’s the last expedition of this year, and there’s no way I can find someone to fill the job now. I’ll pay you three times the usual salary.”

  The last was a hard offer to turn down. Had Kim told her husband that Sam’s last writing contract had fallen through, leaving her unemployed? Awkward emotions of guilt and shame wrestled with each other in Sam’s head.

  “You know that Wilderness Quest was Kim’s dream,” Troy pressed. “She wanted this to be her legacy, helping troubled kids find the right path.”

  Oh, yeesh. Of course Sam knew; mother and daughter had often sung the praises of the wilderness therapy program Kim had created.

  Cupping both hands around his beer glass, he stared into the amber liquid. “I didn’t even kiss Kim goodbye that morning. And I hadn’t seen Kyla for weeks; when she wasn’t out in the mountains with the Quest kids, she was with Chris.” His voice wavered, and he paused to swallow before adding, “Kim left a chicken in the fridge to thaw for dinner.”

  Sam struggled to bring into focus her final moments with her friends.

  Kim, her face damp with perspiration after their climb from Iceberg Lake to Herman Saddle. She’d swept her arm across the panorama of Mount Shuksan to the east and Bagley Lake far below them, saying, “This is what cures the kids: nature.”

  Kyla, laughing with Sam after they simultaneously turned the wrong way during a dance lesson at the Kickin’ A Saloon.

  At least her last memories of her friends were happy ones.

  Troy’s tired eyes glistened. “I can’t let Wilderness Quest fail. Kim and Kyla...” His Adam’s apple bobbed down and back up. “They’d be so happy to know you’re taking Kyla’s place. That you’re helping us go on.”

  No fair playing the murdered friends card.

  How could she say no?

  * * * * *

  “Summer?” Chase’s voice shattered the memory, abruptly dropping her back into the present. He always called her by her given name, insisting that Summer perfectly matched her fair coloring and outdoorsy inclinations. “We really need to go, or I’m going to miss my flight.”

  Sam gazed at Pinnacle Lake one last time. Shouldering her pack, she murmured softly to the atmosphere, “Kim. Kyla. I miss you guys so much.”

  Putting a hand on her shoulder, Chase squeezed gently.

  “We always said that if we died out in the wild, we’d die doing what we loved,” she told him. “But we were talking about being mauled by bears or falling off cliffs or getting swept over a waterfall. We never imagined being slaughtered by a madman.”

  “No one does, querida.” He tilted his head toward the trail.

  They started down the steep path, the soles of their boots obliterating dozens of other prints from hikers who had trudged up and down this trail over the summer.

  The authorities had recovered bullets from the bodies, but no casings from the scene. She’d learned enough about guns from Chase to understand that without bullet casings or the rifle or revolver that fired them, the slugs recovered from her friends’ bodies were useless except to explain the cause of death and narrow down the types of weapons used. One 30-06 rifle, one revolver. Or perhaps even two revolvers.

  Was the killer a man? A woman? One killer or two? So many unansw
ered questions. Detritus collected at the scene might contain traces of DNA and maybe even fingerprints, but those were useless without a specific individual to match.

  She followed Chase’s lean figure down the mountainside. Had the killer hiked this same winding trail? Were they trampling vital evidence? The hundreds of bits of rubbish ground into each mile of trail would drive any crime scene investigator crazy. She routinely picked up stray items every time she hiked, a small good deed to keep wild areas pristine. On her way up the trail, she’d bagged a button, two candy bar wrappers, a torn nylon strap with a rusty buckle, and a small packet of tissues that had slipped unnoticed out of a hiker’s pocket. She knew other hikers who collected garbage along the routes they traveled. Evidence could easily have been carried away by environmental do-gooders.

  Hell, for that matter, half the debris in her trash bag might have been transported here by investigators. Dozens of officials had tramped up and down this trail since that day, photographing the scene, carrying the bodies, or just coming to gawk like humans did anytime something exciting happened.

  Why didn’t perpetrators ever conveniently isolate their clues from the background mess?

  “Too bad the real world is nothing like CSI on television,” Chase said over his shoulder, reading her mind again.

  She needed to change the subject. “I so wish you lived here, Chase.”

  “I put down the Seattle office as my OP. But it’s a long shot.”

  Sam understood that meant that Agent Starchaser Perez had requested a transfer from his Salt Lake City FBI office to his “office of preference” in Seattle, but the Bureau seemed to run like the army; agents had little say in where they were assigned. Today, after a three-day visit, her lover was rushing off in typical spook fashion to an FBI explosives training course in a location he refused to disclose to her.

  “I’m trying,” he added.

  Was there was an unspoken “Are you?” after that sentence? She still felt guilty about turning down Chase’s proposal to move in with him in Salt Lake City. Did he truly understand her reasons, or was he only pretending to be patient because he hadn’t yet found a replacement girlfriend?

  There was no time to sort it out now. Chase had a plane to catch and she had to get to this blasted job. Just thinking about the assignment knotted the muscles between her shoulder blades. Twenty-one days, she reminded herself. She couldn’t save her friends, but she could help save their dream. Three weeks, and she would be done with this commitment to the ghosts of Kyla and Kim.

  She paused to pick up a plastic bottle top and a gum wrapper from the side of the trail.

  “Summer?” Chase prompted, glancing back over his shoulder. “I know we came in separate cars, but I want to make sure you get back safely to yours.”

  “I’m right behind you.” Sam stuffed the trash sack into her pack and focused on hustling down the mountainside, keeping a wary eye on the thick forest around them, watching for the glint of a rifle barrel or some obvious sign of evil lurking along the trail.

  “Think you can find your way out of here?” he asked as they neared the parking lot.

  “I got here, didn’t I? My trusty GPS lady helped.”

  He ran a knuckle over the dark whiskers already starting to shadow his jaw line. “The GPS unit you haven’t updated in a decade?”

  “Forest roads haven’t changed much in ten years either, Chase.”

  “Touché.” He practically galloped to his rental car, but she grabbed him before he slid into the driver’s seat and wrapped her arms around him, pressing her ear against his heart and squeezing hard. For a change, he was the first to pull away. “I’ll see you again in a few weeks.”

  “You never know,” she murmured. Every goodbye could be the last.

  “We’ll talk tonight.” His kiss was too quick.

  They both slid into their cars, and Chase waited until she’d started up her Civic before he peeled out of the lot in a cloud of dust.

  Sam shut off her car engine. Walking back to the memorial, she plucked out the Mylar balloon and stabbed it through the heart with a car key before stuffing the deflated remains into her back seat and heading for Bellingham.

  ~ END ~

  About the Author

  Pamela Beason lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she writes novels and screenplays and teaches workshops. She has worked in many fields at many different jobs, including as a private investigator. Every chance she gets, she explores the natural world on foot, on cross-country skis or snowshoes, in her kayak, or underwater in her scuba gear.

  Books by

  Pamela Beason

  Sam Westin Mysteries

  ENDANGERED

  BEAR BAIT

  UNDERCURRENTS

  BACKCOUNTRY

  Neema Mysteries

  THE ONLY WITNESS

  THE ONLY CLUE

  THE ONLY ONE LEFT – COMING SOON

  Langston Green Romantic Suspense Series

  SHAKEN

  BOOK 2 – COMING SOON

  Run for Your Life Young Adult Trilogy

  RACE WITH DANGER

  RACE TO TRUTH

  RACE FOR JUSTICE – COMING SOON

  Nonfiction E-books

  SO YOU WANT TO BE A PI?

  SAVE YOUR MONEY, YOUR SANITY, AND OUR PLANET

  Keep up with Pam on her website:

  http://pamelabeason.com

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WILDWING PRESS

  3301 Brandywine Court

  Bellingham, Washington 98226

  Copyright © 2013, 2015 Pamela Beason

  ISBN 978-0-9912715-8-0

  www.pamelabeason.com

  Formerly published by Berkley Prime Crime, a division of Penguin Random House LLC

  Cover design by Christine Savoie

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Dedication

  To my sister Jeanine,

  who can always find the silver lining.

  Acknowledgments

  My agent Curtis Russell always deserves a special acknowledgment for all his efforts on my behalf and for maintaining his enthusiasm about my writing. I also owe a special thank you to my critique partner Christine Myers, for her help in making this a better book. And I want to salute all the conservation groups out there for their courageous efforts to preserve the wild places on our beautiful planet.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Epilogue

  Discussion Questions for Readers and Book Clubs

  Preview of Backcountry

  About the Author

  Books by Pamela Beason

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

 

 

 
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