Manhunter
Loreth Anne White
Sergeant Gabriel Caruso arrived in the remote Yukon wilderness with one goal: to erase all memories of the serial killer who had ruined his life. But he soon discovered that the madman was hot on his heels–and after anything that touched Gabe's heart. Including local tracker Silver Karvonen. As Silver plotted with Gabe to stop their predator, she matched more than wits with the Mountie. Even the icy tundra couldn't muffle the heat simmering between them. But for Silver and Gabe, love could very well be a matter of life and death.
“You must be Sergeant Caruso. Welcome to Black Arrow.”
He lifted his shades slowly, his gaze locking onto hers. Silver’s heart did a tight little tumble. Fringed by soft, black lashes, his eyes were a warm liquid brown. But the lines that fanned out from them spoke of something she recognized all too well.
This man had been hurt. But he was pretending otherwise.
Strong fingers closed around hers as he clasped her hand firmly. Silver’s pulse raced. Sergeant Gabriel Caruso oozed danger—not for Black Arrow, but for her personally. And by the sharp flicker in his eyes, she saw he’d felt something, too.
A Mountie was the last person on this earth she needed to be attracted to. Especially a homicide cop.
Not with her dark secret.
Dear Reader,
The North attracts a free-spirited and disparate sort. It’s wild country, a last frontier—a harsh and beautiful place where temperatures can plunge to-58º Fahrenheit, where inhabitants must endure long periods without sunlight, a sense of isolation and a culture foreign to most of us.
Those who weren’t born to the North are often lured above the 60th parallel in search of something—gold, silver, meaning. Adventure.
Others go to escape—the law, past relationships, bad mistakes, themselves.
But although the area is vast, it’s not an easy place to hide. The inhospitable terrain bonds unlikely allies, and the social circles are in fact small. Mistakes can mean death, and the loneliness forces people to look inward, to dig deep and find their true mettle. The North forms larger-than-life characters, larger-than-life adventure…and to me, it inspires romance.
I hope you enjoy the first book in my WILD COUNTRY series—tales from this vast land, and the characters it shapes.
Loreth Anne White
Manhunter
Loreth Anne White
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
LORETH ANNE WHITE
As a child in Africa, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Loreth said a spy…or a psychologist, or maybe marine biologist, archaeologist or lawyer. Instead she fell in love, traveled the world and had a baby. When she looked up again she was back in Africa, writing and editing news and features for a large chain of community newspapers. But those childhood dreams never died. It took another decade, another baby, and a move across continents before the lightbulb finally went on. She didn’t have to grow up. She could be them all—the spy, the psychologist and all the rest—through characters. She sat down to pen her first novel…and fell in love.
She currently lives with her husband, two daughters and their cats in a ski resort in the rugged Coast Mountains of British Columbia, where there is no shortage of inspiration for larger-than-life characters and adventure.
To Mary J. Forbes and RCMP Assistant Commissioner
Gary Forbes for helping me find the soul of my Mountie.
To Meretta Pater and Canadian Air Force Corporal
Clint Pater, my true north friends.
And as always, to my editor Susan Litman.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Prologue
Naked as the day he was born and smeared head to toe with slate-gray river mud, he crawled up the slope, circling above the cabin, careful not to stand in case he was seen from below when lightning flashed.
The night was black and evil, rain slashing horizontally, wind ripping branches and crashing them down to the forest floor, rivers rising and breaking banks.
There would be dogs soon, he knew. And he was leaving a heavy trail of blood.
But tonight the weather was his friend.
He flattened himself into the wet loam, his breathing ragged as he studied the small cabin in the clearing below, the whites of his eyes stark against his mud camouflage.
Lightning cracked open the sky, and for a brief moment the darkness split, revealing a monochromatic snapshot of the churning gray river beyond the cabin, giant logs spinning violently among bobbing flood debris.
Then the image was gone.
He waited for a second for his vision to readjust, then approached the cabin slowly on hands and knees, creeping round to the side with no windows.
Rain leaked into his eyes and blood continued to gush from the ragged bullet trough across his left thigh.
Pain was his friend, he told himself. Adrenaline was his friend.
Twelve months in maximum security might have blunted the brutal edge of his massive physique, but not the steel of his mind. Being a prisoner of war had trained him for this.
U.S. military black ops had trained him for this.
His art was combat. Tracking. Evasion. Infiltration. Torture. He was a killing machine.
A human hunter.
He inched around the cabin, peered up into a window. He needed clothes. Equipment. A needle. Thread. Disinfectant. Then he needed to make it appear as if he’d drowned in that river while he was heading south for the Canadian-U.S. border.
But he was really going north, to the Yukon. To the small town of Black Arrow Falls where they were sending Gabriel Caruso, the cop who had put him behind bars.
He wanted that Mountie.
The game isn’t over yet, Caruso, he told himself. It’s not over until one of us dies.
He found a rusted piece of crowbar buried in the grass. Ducking round to the front door, he quickly jimmied the bar between the lock and the door. One sharp jerk, and the lock splintered away from wood.
He stilled. Listened. The heavy iron fisted at his side, he entered the dark cabin.
The real hunt had just begun.
Chapter 1
Black Arrow Falls
Northern Yukon
Population 389
Silver Karvonen swung her hunting rifle round to her back and hefted a bag of feed into the bed of her red pickup, three husky-wolf crossbreeds milling around at her feet. The bag landed with a dull thud, releasing a cloud of fine gray glacial dust.
Everything was dry. Hot. The leaves had turned brittle gold and the bush was redolent with the scents of late autumn, the air adrift with the white fluff of fireweed gone to seed, blowing on the hot afternoon breeze like summer snow.
Silver swiped the perspiration from her brow with the back of her wrist as she returned to the shade of the airstrip hangar for another load.
Although the night had brought fresh skiffs of snow to the high granite peaks, the mid-September afternoon had spiked to sweltering temperatures. Even so, it would be a mere matter of days before snow blew into the dusty streets of Black Arrow Falls itself, blanketing the small northern town for six months of long, dark and isolated winter.
Silver didn’t mind. She liked winter best.
That’s when her work at the hunting lodge was over. Time was her own, and she could run with her dogs.
But right now she was tired, and in need of a shower. She’d been tracking a large grizzly sow for the better part of the day, arising when the grass was still stiff with night frost and the trail easy to follow.
She’d set off at first light with her three favorite hounds, moving quickly, wanting to sight the grizzly one last time before nightfall.
Silver had encountered her quarry in a wide valley colored rust with fall berry scrub. She’d observed her bear quietly from up high on a ridge, downwind of the animal.
The omnivore was massive—maybe five hundred pounds, close to her peak hibernation weight, sunlight glinting on a majestic golden-brown coat that rippled over powerful haunches as she foraged along the valley bottom.
Within a week the bear would be digging a den oriented leeward of prevailing winter winds. She’d enter it a few days later when she scented the first winter storms in the air. Hopefully her troubles would then be over.
This grizzly had mauled a British hunter last week.
Silver had been contracted by the understaffed conservation office to hunt—and shoot—her.
But after tracking and watching the sow for the last three days, Silver did not think she was a predatory man killer. The British hunting party had alleged one story, but the tracks had told Silver another.
From the evidence around the attack site, Silver deduced that the men had encountered the sow shortly after she’d been injured in a fight with an aggressive and mature male grizz who’d just killed her male cub-of-the-year.
The sow had fought off the much larger male but lost her cub and a claw on her left front paw in the process.
From that point Silver had dubbed her Broken Claw, and as always, she began to emotionally connect with the creature she was tracking.
Injured and severely stressed, Broken Claw had been guarding her cub’s dead body when the hunters had startled her along a narrow trail high on the rocky outcrop. She had charged the group in an attempt to warn the hunters back. The men fled, triggering chase.
The grizz swiped at the last hunter who’d been spared death only because the power of her blow had sent him tumbling like a rag doll down the sharp scree of a narrow ravine; he’d later been airlifted out. This much Silver knew from the conservation officer’s report. The scuffs and tracks, the remains of the cub, told her the rest.
Retreating quietly from the rock ridge with her dogs, Silver had made up her mind this afternoon to let the bear be.
There was no way she was going to kill that bereaved mother to satisfy a misguided lust for vengeance. Things had played out as nature had intended. Wild justice, she called it.
Silver understood what it meant to lose a child to an aggressive male. She knew just how far a mother would go to eliminate a threat.
It didn’t make her a killer.
In a few days the healing snows would come, and Broken Claw would be asleep in her den.
She lifted another sack of horse feed from the airstrip hangar, lugged it to her truck, perspiration dampening her T-shirt as she launched it into the back. One more to go, and then she’d be done with the delivery Air North had flown in for her that morning.
But she stilled at the distant drone of a plane. Silver squinted up into the hazy sky and saw the small twin-engine prop used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police emerge shimmering between gaps in the massive snow-capped peaks.
The new cop, she thought, shading her eyes, watching as the plane banked around Armchair Glacier, coming in for the steep descent necessitated by the valley formation and prevailing crosswinds.
In a community this small, everyone already knew the new Mountie’s name—Sergeant Gabriel Caruso. Big shot detective from British Columbia.
This would be the first time an RCMP officer with the rank of sergeant had been posted to this tiny self-governing First Nations community—one of the only two Yukon communities with absolutely no road access—and already everyone was wondering why the Mounties were sending a veteran homicide cop to Black Arrow Falls where nothing much happened beyond a marauding moose, an overturned snow machine, or a domestic spat spurred by bootleg liquor.
Harry Peters, chief of the tiny Black Arrow Nation for which the town was named, had explained to his people that the RCMP were enlarging what was traditionally a three-man detachment because of the new copper mine opening about 150 miles south of here. The new mine would bring a new road next summer. And more people to town.
More trouble, too, thought Silver.
The wheels of the plane touched dirt with a sharp snick, and the craft bounced along the gravel runway, trailing a cone of silt, coming to a stop across from her as the props slowed.
Silver leaned back against the warm hood of her truck, hooking the ankle of one boot over the other, swatting at a cloud of tiny black insects as she watched the cop alight from the plane. His formidable size and stature struck her instantly, and her pulse quickened.
He hesitated briefly at the top stair, taking in his surroundings, dark hair gleaming in the sun. Then he shouldered his gear, coming quickly down the rest of the steps and striding confidently toward the hangar where she was standing. She noticed that he favored his right leg slightly and was trying to hide that fact.
It spoke of pride, or vanity maybe. Or perhaps an unwillingness to admit weakness or failure.
Newcomers were always a diversion, and Silver studied this one unabashedly, reading his posture just as she read creatures in the wild. And as he neared, she could see right off that there was something different about this cheechako.
Something dangerous.
He telegraphed the classic command presence of a cop, walking with a tall, broad-shouldered gait, his spine ramrod straight, jaw held proud. But there was an additional edginess about him that the neat yellow stripes down the sides of his pressed RCMP pants, and the polished gleam of his weapons belt and boots, couldn’t quite hide.
Trapped inside that crisp Mountie uniform was a renegade, someone gone a little wild. Someone who might have a problem with authority.
The man was trouble.
If Silver were picking a dog for her team, she’d be leery of one with body language like his. He didn’t look like a team player. He looked unpredictable.
His rank and bio suddenly made sense—the RCMP had sent damaged goods. And what better place to dump a problem cop than the backwaters of Black Arrow Falls, just south of the Arctic circle?
A whisper of irritation and wariness laced through her instinctive interest in the man.
Silver had bad experience with the federal force. The Mounties had let her down when she’d needed them most.
And they had the power to put her away.
She turned away from him as he approached, ordering her dogs to sit with a soft whisper as she bent to lift the last feedbag into her truck. Her hounds regarded him warily as he neared.
“Need a hand?” His voice rippled like dark wild honey over her hot skin. Silver froze, startled by the shock waves he’d sent through her system.
Her answer was to tighten her grip on the sack of feed and heft the bag up, dumping it into the truck herself with a heavy thud. She slapped the tailgate closed with a dull clunk before locking it into place, trying to tamp down the energy crackling through her body before facing him again.
She turned, dusting her palms against her jeans and swinging her long, heavy black ponytail back over her shoulder. “Hey,” she said, extending her hand, unable to read his eyes behind the mirrored shades. “You must be Sergeant Caruso. Welcome to Black Arrow Falls.”
He lifted his shades slowly, his gaze locking onto hers, and Silver’s heart did a tight little tumble. She hadn’t anticipated eyes like that. They were a warm liquid brown, fringed by soft black lashes, but the lines that fanned out from them—the way they etched into his ruggedly handsome features and olive skin—spoke of something she recognized all too well.
This man had been roughed up, hurt. But he was pretending otherwise.
Strong fingers closed around hers as he clasped her hand firmly, the charge as his skin connected with hers instant. Silver’s pulse raced.
Sergeant Gabriel Caruso oozed danger—not for Black Arrow Falls but for her personally.
Silver had not experienced this kind of visceral response to a man since a brutal assault and rape five years ago had emptied her of all feeling. She’d remained hollow since then, beginning to think she was incapable of ever feeling physical lust again. And by the sharp flicker in his eyes, she saw he’d felt something, too.
A quiet fear snaked through her belly.
A Mountie was the last person on this earth she needed to be attracted to. Especially a homicide cop.
Not with her dark secret.
Not with the cold case files buried in the Black Arrow Falls detachment drawers.
She valued freedom too much.
“I’m Silver,” she said, words suddenly dry like dust in her mouth, an irrational urge to flee surging through her. But she held her ground, outwardly calm. Flight triggered chase. It showed weakness.
Silver hated appearing weak.
And she wanted to do nothing that would pique the new cop’s curiosity, nothing at all that might send him digging back into the old murder files.
His eyes swept over her, taking in her rifle, the brutal hunting knife sheathed at her hips, her dusty scuffed boots, the faded and torn jeans.
He was reading her, thought Silver. Sizing her up just as she had done to him, taking in his new surroundings, yet he gave nothing away in his features. This was a man from whom a person didn’t keep secrets. The instinct to pull away intensified as fear rustled deeper into her belly, the raw kind of fear that came from being a so-called criminal faced with the penetrating eyes of law enforcement.
The kind of fear that came with the surprising reawakening of her body.
Gabe felt her hand in his, noting the bracelet of leather knotted with small colorful beads around her slender wrist. She wore no ring.
He was conscious of rings. Engagement rings.
He couldn’t help seeking the small circle of promise on other women’s fingers. A promise a killer had denied him. His chest tightened as he recalled the reasons that had brought him here.
She answered his handshake with a startlingly firm grip despite her willowy stature. Her palms were rough, not like the hands of any women he knew.
Even Gia’s—his hardworking, no-nonsense, cop fiancée’s hands—had been softer. Yet there was something alluring—challenging even—in Silver’s assertive grip.
She met his gaze just as directly, her indigo eyes showing an unveiled interest that sent a tingle down his spine.
The startling color of her almond-shaped eyes stood out dramatically against skin the color of burnt sienna. Her cheekbones were equally exotic, angled high, and her sleek black hair was harnessed into a waist-length braid that shimmered in the sunlight as she moved, reminding Gabe of the multifaceted rainbows hidden in a raven’s feathers.
Gabe had never seen a woman quite like Silver.
And a woman had never looked at him with quite the same intensity. Her eyes cut into him like blue lasers, as if she could see straight through to his soul. It was as intimate as it was provocative, and he felt his energy instinctively darken and hum.
“He’s on his way,” she said, sliding her hand free from his grasp, backing away, her voice husky, low. Smooth. The kind of voice that made a guy think about whiskey and sex, things Gabe hadn’t thought about in a long time.
“Pardon?” he said, distracted.
Silver swung open the cab door of her truck and whistled for her dogs to jump in the back. “I said your constable is on his way. He’d have waited until he saw your plane come in. No rush up here. There he is now—” She jutted her chin to indicate a column of gray dust churning along the distant dull-green tree line beyond the runway.
Gabe squinted, making out the distinctive white truck with bold RCMP stripes and logo as the police four-by-four neared.
“That would be Donovan.” She climbed into her truck as she spoke, folding those impossibly long denim-clad legs under the steering wheel of her cab.
Gabe replaced his shades, uneasy with his own physical reaction to this unusual woman, not wanting her to read it. She seemed to be reading everything.
“Mostly he uses the ATVs.” She slammed the door, leaning her elbow out the open window as she started the ignition. “Can’t go far with that vehicle in a town with roads that don’t lead anywhere.” She threw him a final glance, or was it a challenge?
“How long is your posting? Two years?” she asked, a shrewd look in her eyes.
He was glad for his shades. “You’ve only just welcomed me, and you’re ready to see me leave?” She wouldn’t be the first to want to see the back of him.
Amusement whispered over her lips. “Everyone goes back to where they came from, Sergeant. Sooner than later. Cops included. Most come north of 60 looking for something, you know? Gold, silver, escape, freedom. Some don’t even know what it is they’re searching for.” She shifted her truck into gear. “Sometimes they find it. Sometimes they don’t. But eventually they all do go back.”
She smiled, an incredible slash of bright white teeth against her brown skin, a wild glimmer of light in her eyes. “Apart from a few special ones.”
Then she hit the gas, leaving him standing in a cloud of silt, her wolf dogs yipping with excitement in the back.
Gabe couldn’t help thinking the woman was like this place—strikingly gorgeous and seemingly open, yet hostile to those unequipped to deal with the terrain.
She’d left his blood racing.
And for the first time in what had been a very long year, Gabe thought that maybe he didn’t want to die after all.
Chapter 2
Gabe’s bitterness resurfaced as soon as the RCMP truck drew to a stop and a young, eager, and smiling Constable Mark Donovan stepped out to greet him.
Gabe reached forward to shake his hand, thinking how much he’d been like Donovan once, filled with idealistic notions of a bright future, of what it meant to be a Mountie, to maintain le droit across this vast country in a tradition dating back to the 1800s.
As a young boy growing up in the Italian quarter of Vancouver, Gabe had devoured heroic tales of the Northwest Mounted Police sent to crush the U.S. whiskey peddlers controlling the prairies. After that came the Klondike gold rush with hordes stampeding from Alaska over the Chilkoot Trail, crossing into Canada’s harsh, frigid and unforgiving Yukon, with the most famous Mountie of all, Sam Steele—Lion of the Yukon—guarding the pass in his red serge, wide-brimmed Stetson and high browns.
The legends of those Mounties staking claim to the great North, keeping order and saving lives, were the stuff that had fueled young Gabriel Caruso’s boyhood dreams and driven him to become a cop.
Ironic, he thought, to be posted to Yukon soil now that he was facing the end of his policing road after 17 years of exemplary service, now that his childhood dream had been darkened by the grit of realism.
Working the major crimes unit in a tough urban centre could do that to you. But it was a more recent incident that had sunk his soul.
On passing his sergeant’s exam two years ago, Gabe had accepted a promotion as sergeant of operations at Williams Lake in British Columbia’s interior. He’d have preferred to stay in major crimes as a senior investigator, but he’d taken the more administrative job because Gia, the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, had been posted as a new corporal to the Williams Lake detachment.
But a shocking run-in with Kurtz Steiger—a psychopathic serial killer the media had dubbed the Bush Man—had ended Gia’s life shortly after they’d gotten engaged.
And life as Gabe knew it was over.
Now, a year later, he was here. Alone. About as far north as you could hang a Mountie out to dry, facing a looming godforsaken winter of 24-hour darkness, endless snow, and a bleak future. Steiger’s words slithered back into his brain.
I saw her eyes, Sergeant. I watched her die. I was the last thing she saw, and it was a great pleasure…
Gabe’s jaw tightened and his head began to pound.
Shaking Constable Donovan’s hand, he tried to remind himself he’d wanted this. He’d asked for this remote post.
He’d needed to get out from under the never-ending media scrutiny, away from Gia’s family, his own relatives. Away from his own overwhelming burden of guilt.
He’d been through the critical incident stress debriefings, through the private specialists, been through the physical therapy, the hearings, the protracted internal investigation, his every action examined and requestioned.
And his force had stood by him. They all said he’d done what any good cop would have done.
Trouble was, Gabe didn’t believe it.
He should have guessed when they’d had no response from a member on a supposedly routine call to a disturbance at a Quonset hut on a farm on the outskirts of town that it could be a trap. There had been claims the Bush Man had recently been seen in the wilderness around town, but although the Williams Lake detachment was put on alert, these sorts of sightings were not unusual. The Bush Man had achieved near-mythical status, and civilians had been sighting him in the wilds from Saskatoon to Prince Rupert since his first murder.
Kurtz Steiger, a consummate survivalist and U.S. Special Forces soldier trained in unconventional warfare behind enemy lines, had been defying a federal manhunt in the Canadian wilderness for almost three years following his escape from U.S. court martial for heinous war crimes in the Middle East and Africa.
He’d fled north into the Canadian Rockies where he’d begun killing and torturing again—living for the thrill of the hunt, picking hunters off in the woods, raping and terrorizing campers and hikers, breaking into remote cottages, and living off the land.
The military had been called in, and people in rural towns lived in mounting fear as the notorious killer continued to elude and taunt law enforcement.
But then the Bush Man had simply disappeared, gone quiet after a horrific killing spree near Grande Cache north of Jasper. People speculated that he’d fled over the Rockies, crossing the Cariboo Mountains and then perhaps gone down to Bowron Lake, or Wells Gray Provincial Park. But the terrain was hostile, and talk turned to suggestions he might finally have perished.
Until a hunter had gone missing near Horsefly.
There was no evidence that the hunter had been killed, but the rumors started again. With them came fear. And the expected sightings.
A logger said he thought he may have picked up the Bush Man hitching between Quesnel and Williams Lake. Two German hikers believed they’d glimpsed him north of town. Again, nothing was substantiated, but Mounties in the region were put on alert.
Then came the call to the Quonset hut. Two constables responded, went radio silent.
In the teeth of an unseasonably early snowstorm, darkness falling, the Williams Lake staff sergeant had dispatched every member at his disposal, including Gabe, his operations sergeant, while he’d called in the Emergency Response Team—the Mountie SWAT equivalent—from Prince George. The military was also put on standby.
But the blizzard drove down. The ERT guys were socked in, hours away, choppers grounded. And Gabe, as the senior officer on site, had led his members straight into an ambush in the middle of whiteout.
It had been orchestrated by Kurtz Steiger. He had one officer and one civilian down inside, and one constable hostage.
Gabe was backed into a corner, with no help in sight for hours, perhaps days.
And somehow the bastard knew.
He knew that Gia belonged to him.
He’d been playing them all, lurking around town for God knew how long, watching, learning, searching for his next thrill, and the ambush was it.
Gabe should have done anything but send Gia round the back of the Quonset hut with a young constable, where the Bush Man had come barreling out, blazing a pump-action shotgun as the hut had exploded in a ball of fire behind him.
Steiger had felled Gia and Gabe’s constable, taking time to get down and look into Gia’s eyes as she died in the snow while the other officers, stunned by the explosion, battled through the blaze to find their fallen comrades and the civilian victim.
Steiger had then fled into the woods on a snowmobile.
Blinded by rage and adrenaline, Gabe had given chase, finally running him down and wounding him. In the bloody battle that had ensued, Steiger had managed to crush Gabe’s leg by pinning him between the snowmobile and a tree before Gabe tasered him several times. Steiger, passing in and out of consciousness, had looked directly into Gabe’s eyes, and smiled, told him that he’d enjoyed watching Gia die. Gabe had been about to slit the bastard’s throat with his own hunting knife just as one of his corporals arrived on scene, saving him from an act that would have cost him his badge had there been a witness. The notorious Bush Man was finally taken into custody.
But the cost was high. And personal.
The RCMP, while a paramilitary organization, was different from the military in one vital sense. Soldiers were trained to take life. But a Mountie lived and breathed to preserve life. Lethal force was only used as a last resort, and only to protect life under immediate threat. This was so powerfully ingrained in the Mountie psyche that when things turned violent—when people got killed—it was close to impossible to get over.
Especially when the lives lost were those of fellow members. Especially when that fellow member was your fiancée.
And her death was your fault.
But the internal investigation had cleared Gabe. The metal pin in his leg didn’t hurt so badly anymore, and physical therapy had helped him walk again. The funerals in Ottawa were long over, and the shrinks had okayed Gabe for active service.
But they didn’t know.
They didn’t know how close Gabe had come to killing Steiger even once the bastard had been incapacitated. They didn’t know that Gabe didn’t trust himself with his own gun anymore.
He’d never told the psychologists how quickly his rage flared now. How he had to bite down to stop clearing leather with his 9 mm. That he’d become his own worst enemy.
Perhaps he should have told them, but they would have sidelined him. And he’d needed to work to stay half-sane.
But until he figured some things out, Gabe thought it best to go work someplace where he could lie low, where the crime rate was virtually zero.
Where he couldn’t goddamn hurt anyone else.
Like Black Arrow Falls.
A deeply buried part of Gabe figured he might just disappear up here. Walk into the wilderness with a fishing rod, maybe dissolve into the fabric of the mountains. Never come back. Forcing himself to embrace living was going to be his ultimate test.
“So this is the Black Arrow Falls detachment,” Donovan was saying as he wheeled the RCMP vehicle into a gravel parking lot behind a rustic log building atop which a red-and-white Canadian flag flapped in the warm wind.
Gabe struggled to focus as he followed Donovan into the building.
His sole absolution was that he’d put Steiger behind bars.
It was the only way he could justify his sacrifices. The only way he could accept the loss of Gia’s life, the other officers’ lives.
Steiger would not kill again.
“And this is Rosie Netro’s desk,” said Donovan, showing Gabe into the reception area of the tiny RCMP detachment. It was a far cry from where he’d worked in the city. Even Williams Lake was sophisticated compared to this.
“Rosie’s one of our two civilian clerks who handle dispatch and admin. She’s off-duty now, usually works nine to five weekdays. Tabitha Charlie is our weekend dispatcher, a fairly recent addition, but she’s off on maternity leave.” Donovan smiled his clean, earnest smile in his square jaw. “Baby should be along any day now.”
Donovan waited for a reaction from Gabe, some platitude. A smile, a nod, perhaps.
Gabe registered it was a great thing, a birth. But he couldn’t seem to make himself respond.
His reaction was buried down somewhere in his repertoire of expected and acceptable social behaviors, but he didn’t have the inclination to set it free. Emotional dissonance, the shrinks had called it.
It had grown out of his habit of compartmentalizing things as a homicide cop, and now he seemed to have locked himself down permanently somewhere inside. It was the only way he’d gotten through this past year. It had kept him alive. But it sure as hell wasn’t living.
Donovan turned his eyes away, a subtle but visible shift in his demeanor. “And this is where we all sit. Constable Annie Lavalle at that desk over there. That’s my station,” he pointed. “And that’s Constable Stan Huong’s desk, and that station by the window will be for the new member, Cade McKenzie. His transfer comes through in a couple of months.”
“Where are Lavalle and Huong now?” Gabe asked, surveying the mini-bullpen.
“Huong’s on compassionate leave. His mother passed away. We expect him back in two weeks. Lavalle is attending a court case in Whitehorse—hunting violation. She was called to testify. It’s her first case. She’s fresh out of Depot Division.”
A new recruit straight out of the academy. Gabe didn’t like the sense of responsibility that gave him. Call him chauvinist, but he didn’t want to put another woman in jeopardy. Ever. It went against his grain as much as it was drummed home to him that they were all equal in the force. He was a born protector. That’s what had given him the black eyes and broken arm at school when he’d stood up in defense of his kid sister and her friends.
It’s what had made him a good cop.
“Name like Lavalle—she Québécoise?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Donovan. “Accent and feisty temper to match.”
Gabe grunted. At least there was little to threaten young Constable Annie Lavalle up here in Black Arrow Falls. Apart from wild animals and his own morbidity. He’d have to be careful not to spread the poison—it wasn’t fair to these young officers.
“Lockup’s down this way.” Donovan led Gabe down a hallway. “Interview room is in there, evidence and equipment room over here on the right.” He unlocked and swung open a door, revealing shelves with snowmobile helmets, two satellite phones, and other equipment on the left, racks for rifles and shotguns down the centre, and shelves with evidence bags near the back.
“And this is the gym.” Donovan squared his shoulders as he opened another door into a small square room furnished with rudimentary weights, a treadmill, and a bike.
It was painted stark white, with a small window. Like a cell. Gabe could imagine snowdrifts piled so high they covered that tiny window. A small fist of tension curled in his stomach. Along with it came a tingle of claustrophobia.
This was going to be tougher than he thought.
This was going to be his prison, his self-inflicted punishment for what went wrong that day.
He wondered now, as he stared at the small room, if he’d ever find his way back, or if Black Arrow Falls really was the end of his road, his permanent rock bottom.
“And this here is your office,” Donovan said, moving back into the main room and opening a door into a partitioned-off area. The fist in Gabe’s gut curled tighter.
A large window looked out over the desks in the mini-bullpen, while another offered a view out the back of the building over a few tired clapboard houses, leafless scrub, and mountainous wilderness beyond.
He stared silently at the cramped alcove with its ancient computer and regulation desk, his blood beginning to thump steadily in his veins.
“Look,” said Donovan suddenly, his cheeks reddening slightly as he spoke. “For the record, I think you made the right decision that day. You got the Bush Man.”
“I lost four members and a civilian.”
Donovan’s cheeks burned redder. Gabe wasn’t making it easier for the guy, but his will to ease things for his young constable was buried somewhere inside him, too.
Donovan cleared his throat, his eyes flicking away. “I…should finish showing you around.”
“Right.”
He cleared his throat nervously again. “As you know, there are no telephone landlines into Black Arrow Falls,” he said.
Gabe didn’t know. Didn’t really care, either. He hadn’t bothered to read up on his new detachment beyond the mere basics. The posting had come fast once he’d put in the request. He’d taken it just as fast.
“Phone service and high-speed Internet are provided to the town via satellite dish,” Donovan was saying. “The dish picks up the signal, feeds it to individual homes and businesses via local landline. We have our own sat dish and radio antennae mounted on the detachment building. There’s a repeater on a hill some miles out, so radio range is fair, but we take a sat phone to communicate with dispatch when we need to head into the bush for any distance.”
“Power?”
“Supplied by Yukon Electrical via a diesel-generating plant. Diesel is flown in. Same with regular gas. The Black Arrow Nation runs the gasoline outlet. The Northern Store across the street sells groceries, some dry goods, and provides mail pickup. Mail plane flies in once a week, so does passenger and delivery service with Air North. We have a resident doctor now and two nurses at the community health clinic. The clinic has videoconferencing facilities. Dentist flies in once a month.” He snorted. “Most months.”
“How long you been here, Constable?” Gabe asked suddenly.
“Five months, sir.”
“Your first posting?”
“Second. I was in Faro for two years. I like the north, Sergeant.”
Gabe inhaled deeply, reaching for patience. “So it’s just you and me for now, then, Constable?”
“And Rosie.”
“Yeah.” And Rosie. Gabe walked over to the wide window cut into rough-hewn log walls. It looked out over the dusty main street.
“It’s not like much happens up here from fall into winter,” Donovan offered. “Apart from the odd domestic or drunk disturbance.”
That’s what ate at Gabe.
Seventeen years had come to this?
“And there was the grizzly attack last week,” he said. “That caused a bit of a stir. The file is on your desk.”
Gabe wasn’t listening, his attention suddenly snared by the woman striding down the road with the hunting rifle slung across her back and a troop of wolf dogs following in her wake.
Silver.
She’d cleaned up, and be damned if she didn’t look even more alluring.
Wearing a denim jacket over a white cotton dress that skimmed her tall moccasin-style boots, her long black hair had been released from its braid and swung loose across her back, reaching almost to her butt.
Donovan came to his side. “That’s Silver Karvonen. She’s the tracker the conservation office contracted to hunt the man killer. Like I said, file is on your desk.”
Gabe’s eyes shot to Donovan. “Man killer?”
“Well.” The constable cleared his throat again, “The grizz didn’t actually kill the guy, but the CO said he would have if the hunter hadn’t rolled down into the ravine. Bear probably has a taste for human blood now.”
Gabe’s pulse accelerated slightly. “That your opinion or the CO’s?”
He flushed again. “Well, mine, actually, Sergeant.”
Gabe glanced back at Silver making her way toward the general store. He hadn’t been this interested in anything for a long, long time. “You say she’s a tracker?”
“One of the best north of 60. Does man tracking, too. They fly her out for some of the real tough search-and-rescue missions, mostly across the North, and especially if there are kids involved. She has a real thing for the lost children. She just won’t give up if there’s a minor missing.”
Intrigue stirred something to life inside him.
“Otherwise she manages the Old Moose Lodge during the summer months for an outfitter based out of Whitehorse. The Old Moose property lies just beyond the town boundaries on the shores of Natchako Lake, where she has a cabin. The outfitters own the hunting concession up here,” he said. “And Silver occasionally guides parties who fly in and pay megabucks for the big game.”
Gabe watched Silver order her wolf pack to sit before climbing the old wooden stairs of the Northern Store across the street. Gabe knew the population of Black Arrow Falls was 90 percent Black Arrow Gwitchin, a very small subgroup of the Gwitchin Nation that stretched across the Canadian North and into Alaska, but Silver had gotten those laser-blue eyes from somewhere else.
“Karvonen,” he said quietly, contemplating the woman vanishing through the store door. “That’s not a local name.”
“Finnish. Her mother was Black Arrow Gwitchin, but her father was apparently some crazy maverick prospector from Finland. Most of the prospectors who came up this way were looking for Yukon gold. They called him The Finn, tell me he came looking for silver.”
“He ever make a strike?”
“No, but he found a wife and had a kid. That’s where she got her name, Silver.”
They all come looking for something. Sometimes they don’t know what it is.
Gabe almost smiled. So, the prospector got what he came for. He just didn’t know it was a family he’d been seeking.
“You up on the local gossip, eh, Constable?”
Donovan shrugged, a grin sneaking across his face, and Gabe felt himself warming to the guy in spite of himself.
But before Donovan could say anything more, the phone on the desk in Gabe’s tiny office rang, startling him back to his present predicament.
Donovan jerked his head toward it. “Your direct line, Sergeant. Goes straight through and into voice mail if Rosie’s not on duty.”
Gabe strode into his new cell, snatched the receiver up to his ear. “Caruso,” he barked.
“Gabe, it’s Tom.”
His RCMP pal from Surrey homicide.
“Tom? How—”
“Where in hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
“Cell reception out here is a nonexistent luxury.”
“You see the news?”
Something inside Gabe quieted at the tone in Tom’s voice. “What news?” he said softly.
“The Bush Man—he’s on the loose. Kurtz bloody Steiger busted out of max security during the storm last night.”
Chapter 3
Gabe’s head began to buzz. His fist tightened around the handset.
“How?” he said, barely audibly. “How in hell did he get out?”
“Floodwater was seeping into the underground electrical systems at Kent Institution with this deluge we’ve been having,” said Tom. “Correctional services was sandbagging like crazy while putting together contingency plans to transfer inmates to the Mountain Institution if things got worse.”
Gabe could picture it. Kent was in the low-lying area of the Agassiz delta. The neighboring Mountain Institution was on slightly higher ground.
“The water levels rose too fast. Power shorted, backup generator blew as they were trying to switch over. Wardens had to hustle inmates out in the dark.”
Gabe’s knuckles turned bone-white as he struggled to grasp what he was hearing. Steiger was being held in that institution while lawyers wrangled over his extradition and jurisdictional issues. He vaguely noted Donovan staring at him through the glass. “Go on,” Gabe said, words like gravel in his throat.
“Steiger took advantage of the outage, stabbed an inmate with a spoon, it looks like. Sparked a riot in pitch blackness. Two wardens are dead, several others in critical condition. The bastard actually stripped one, put on his uniform, and drove the prison van right out of the main gates of the pen. No one saw it coming—they thought he was one of their own. Steiger dumped the van off the highway near Manning Park. Looks like he ducked into wilderness there, heading south for the U.S. border.”
“With a U.S. court martial hanging over his head?”
“Borders don’t matter to that guy.”
No. Everything mattered to Kurtz Steiger. Gabe knew him too well now. He’d studied—memorized—everything the RCMP criminal investigative analysts had come up with. He’d looked right into the monster’s eyes himself that snowy night in the woods. He’d almost taken his life. Gabe pinched the bridge of his nose.
“It’s all over the news,” said Tom. “I…thought you might have heard.”
“I’m in the bush, Thomas. North of bloody nowhere.”
“The CBC is working up a feature that will air during their regular news slot tonight. I…I wanted to be sure you knew. They’ll probably bring up…Gia, and all that.”
An inexplicable emotion welled up through Gabe’s chest and burned into his eyes. He felt so damn defeated.
Having Steiger behind bars was his way of rationalizing Gia’s murder. And the loss of those officers’ lives. It was his sole foundation for going forward.
Now it was gone.
He sank down, leaning against his tiny new desk. “Where are they looking for him?” he asked quietly.
“They’ve got a major manhunt going down in Manning Park along the U.S. border. Dogs, choppers, military, the works. They’re expanding the search over the border into Washington state with the cooperation of U.S. authorities.”
“Why?”
A puzzled silence hung for a moment. “That’s where his trail leads.”
“Steiger doesn’t leave a trail,” Gabe said even more quietly. “Not unless he wants you to find it.”
Tom paused. “They’ve got him this time, Caruso. He was shot in the prison riot. He left a ton of blood in that van. He’s injured and on the run. The dogs are on him.”
“Right,” said Gabe. Kurtz Steiger could survive anything. It’s what he did. Survive. And kill.
“The guy is not superhuman, Gabe. They figure they’ll have him in a matter of hours.”
“Right,” he said again.
Silence hung for several beats. “Is everything okay up there?”
Up there.
It sounded like something Gabe’s Roman Catholic mother would say in reference to limbo—that peculiar place where doomed souls were destined to hang between hell and heaven for eternity.
“I’m fine,” Gabe lied. “You’ll keep me updated, Tom? I…I’m kind of out of the loop right now, and…I’d like to know.”
“Hey, it’s why I called, buddy.”
Gabe hung up, his knuckles bloodless. He flexed his fingers, stared at his hands, then looked up at Donovan who’d moved into the doorway.
“He got out,” said Gabe. “The Bush Man.”
Donovan’s features were grave. “I gathered.”
Gabe launched to his feet suddenly, pushing off his desk. “Is there a television set anywhere in this town?”
Donovan eyed him steadily. “We have Internet. You can get the news on—”
“I want a television. I want to see the CBC feature airing on Steiger tonight.”
And he wanted a beer. No, a couple of beers. He wanted to drown himself in whiskey—and this was a dry town.
“Mae Anne’s diner has TV. She gets the two Yukon channels. There are satellite systems in private homes and one at the Old Moose Hunting Lodge, which is outside the town boundary. They serve a pretty decent meal there, too.”
Gabe checked his watch as he stalked through the reception area. Shoving the door open, he stepped out onto the small log porch that fronted the detachment building. He needed air. What he got was a surprise.
The sinking sun had brushed the rugged, snow-capped massifs with a soft peach alpenglow, and the air had turned heavy and cool. Gabe drank it down hungrily as he braced his hands on the wood balcony, heart thudding in his chest. It was so beautiful it had shocked his mind clean for a moment.
“Sergeant?” Donovan said from just inside the door.
Gabe tightened his hands on the balustrade. “What is it, Donovan?” he said quietly, without looking at the man.
“I know you’re technically not on duty until tomorrow, but Chief Peters at the band office is expecting you, and I…uh…mentioned you might come around and meet with him this evening.”
Black Arrow Nation Chief Harry Peters functioned as a small-town mayor would. His band had contracted the RCMP to police their community, and, as the new sergeant in town, Gabe would need to liaise with Peters in the same way a top cop would work with any local mayor and council.
“Not right now,” said Gabe, trying to control the rage mushrooming steadily through him. His short fuse, the murderous impulse that could fill him instantaneously, had become his weakness, a black cancer he couldn’t cut out. And he felt it now.
Taking life went against everything that had defined Gabe as an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force. But if his corporal hadn’t arrived when he had the night Gabe had chased Steiger, Gabe knew he would have killed Steiger.
He’d have ripped out the bastard’s sick throat with his bare, bloodied hands.
And now he wished he had.
The violent strength that had coursed through Gabe’s veins that night had startled him. The sheer power was almost intoxicating.
Locking eyes with Steiger in the woods on that snowy night in Williams Lake just over a year ago had unearthed something dark and atavistic in Gabe.
Because he still wanted to kill him.
It was this that made him question whether he really was still fit to wear his red serge and carry a gun.
“I’ll see him tomorrow,” he said coolly without looking at Donovan. He didn’t want to talk to anybody right now. What he needed right now was to find his cabin, get out of his uniform, and find a television and a beer.
He cursed to himself.
They’d locked Steiger in prison, but Steiger had locked him in one, too. Now the bastard was free.
But Gabe was still trapped behind his own damn bars.
In the general store Silver bought rounds for her rifles, a new skinning knife, and she picked up the mail Edith Josie, the owner, was holding for Old Crow. She’d take it out to his camp in a day or so.
Old Crow was a Black Arrow elder and Silver’s tracking mentor. She had no idea how old he was—older than time, older than the river, Edith had told her. And Edith was no spring chicken herself.
Whatever his age, to Silver, Old Crow was eternal. A part of her felt he’d always be there for her and that she’d never stop learning from him. It was an education that had begun after her mother had died when Silver was nine. She stopped going to the small Black Arrow school, and her father had been too grief-stricken to make her do otherwise.
Her dad had eventually gotten done with mourning and shacked up with a cheechako nurse who took it upon herself to try and homeschool Silver. But during the summers of endless sun Silver would go prospecting in the wilds with her father.
And from time to time she and Finn, as everyone called her father, would run into Old Crow working his traplines, and they’d spend the night in his camp listening to his stories, their campfire shooting orange sparks into the pale sky.
Old Crow could paint pictures in the air with his gnarled brown hands. With a deft sweep of his arm he could show weather patterns, or the animation of a small forest animal. He could tell chapters of a lynx’s life from a single footprint in mud, even tell you how to find that lynx—just from the clues in that one track. To a young Silver he was fascinating, a wilderness detective, and she’d started following him around like a lost little bear cub soaking up any stray bit of information she could.
Old Crow had finally, officially, taken Silver under his wing, teaching her how to read the wilderness like an ordinary child might learn to read a book, but he never gave her the information straight. He’d point the way with a riddle, conning her into using her innate curiosity to unravel mysteries with her own effort and skill.
Her own discoveries had thrilled her, and in this way Silver had learned to speak another language, one written right into the fabric of nature. Over time she’d become one of the best trackers in the country, all because of Old Crow. And she’d learned everything else she’d needed to know about life from nature’s classroom.
But a good tracker never stops learning, and Silver still thoroughly enjoyed her visits to Old Crow’s camp where he lived up on a remote plateau in his teepee, in the old way.
She smiled inwardly as she thanked Edith, tucking his wad of mail into the leather pouch hanging from her shoulder. Old Crow might prefer living in the traditional way, but he still liked to get his mail from Whitehorse, via plane.
“Massi Cho,” she said in the Gwitchin language of the Black Arrow Nation. “Gwiinzii Edik’anaantii. Take good care of yourself, Edith.”
Edith smiled, her eyes disappearing into brown folds of skin behind her thick glasses as she waved Silver on.
Descending the stairs of the Northern Store, Silver whistled for her dogs as she swung her rifle to a more comfortable position at the centre of her back. But just as she was about to stride up Black Arrow Falls’ main road, she caught sight of the new cop standing on the detachment porch, the Canadian flag with its symbolic red maple leaf snapping up over his head against a clear violet sky.
Her heart fluttered awkwardly—and annoyingly—in her chest.
She should have kept right on walking, and she’d have been okay. But she felt him watching, and she made the mistake of looking up at him. Instantly she was snared by the intensity of his gaze.
Silver suddenly forgot how to breathe, a tumult growing inside her coupled with an overwhelming urge to flee. “Hey,” she said, stopping instead.
“Any word on that grizz?” His muscled arms braced wide and solid on his detachment banister as his eyes bored down into hers. The posture was proprietary, almost aggressive. Something seemed to have changed in him since she’d met him at the airstrip.
She squinted up at him, disadvantaged by the backlight of the evening sky.
“What about the grizz?” she asked.
“I hear he got a taste of human blood. Donovan tells me you’re hunting him.”
“The bear’s a she, not a he,” she said, her voice husky to her own ears. Damn, how could one man have an effect like this on her body, and so quickly? It was beyond her control. And Silver liked—needed—to be in control. “Besides, it’s not police business.”
“Sure it is.”
She bristled. “The other officers were content to let the conservation office handle this. And the CO contracted me to take care if it. So it’s my business.”
“I’m not the other cops, Silver.”
“Sergeant—” she stepped closer, which further disadvantaged her because now she had to angle her head to look up at him. “The sow was defending her dead cub’s body. She was stressed and threatened. Her attack was not predatory. It was in self-defense, so I let her be.” Even though she spoke softly, she made sure her words were delivered with authority. Whoever this Caruso was, she was not going to let him go after her bear. That really was her territory, and she couldn’t back down.
“She won’t become a problem?”
Me or the bear?
The way he said it, the way he was looking at her, she couldn’t be sure.
Silver repositioned her rifle and squared her shoulders. “The attack could affect her interaction with humans down the road, so, yes, she could become a problem, but we should give her the winter. Time has a strange way of healing things out here, Sergeant.”
His arms tensed, eyes narrowing sharply onto her.
She turned to go, finding her legs like water as she tried to walk up the road, feeling his eyes burning hot into her back.
“Any place a man can get beer round here?” he called out after her.
Silver stilled.
She turned slowly to face him, irony tempting the corners of her mouth into a wry smile. “This is a dry town, officer. I believe it’s your job to make sure it stays that way.”
“I hear the Old Moose Lodge is out of town limits, and it has a television. I need to watch the news tonight.”
She studied him, trying to weigh the paradox that was this man. “It’s a public place, Sergeant.” She hesitated. “But I’d leave that uniform at home if you plan on drinking in my bar. Wouldn’t want Chief Peters and the band council thinking you were officially trying to undermine his efforts to keep our people dry.”
Sergeant Gabe Caruso stared at her with a directness that sent another hot tingle into her belly. She turned quickly, calling her dogs to heel.
She concentrated on walking smoothly and calmly down the street. She felt anything but.
The cop was coming to her lodge. Tonight.
He was making her feel things she didn’t know she was capable of feeling anymore. That scared her. Because like Broken Claw, Silver was a bereft and wounded mother.
But unlike the grizzly, Silver had actually killed a man.
And if the cop found out, he had the power to put her away for it. For good.
Chapter 4
Gabe tucked his 9 mm into the back of his jeans under his leather bomber jacket and snagged his radio and flashlight off the table. Donovan was on call tonight, and Gabe hadn’t yet officially reported for duty, but he took the gear anyway.
He surveyed his tiny cabin for a moment before leaving—his new home for the next two years. It was small, built from thick-hewn logs, the decor utilitarian. A rough table and bench divided the living room from the tiny kitchen area where a woven rag mat rested in front of an old blackened Aga stove. His kitchen window afforded a view of Deer Lake, which was still as glass this evening, reflecting strands of violently pink cirrus in an otherwise pale Nordic sky.
In the living room a small couch faced a stone fireplace, and to its side hunkered one other chair, a great big wingback with stuffing straining to pop out the back. A small bedroom and bathroom led off the main area. His pine bed was covered with a patchwork quilt made by the wife of the corporal who’d been transferred south, a homey touch that seemed to underscore his loneliness.
He couldn’t expect more. He’d sold every last thing he and Gia had owned together. The memories stirred by their shared possessions had become unbearable.
He hadn’t accumulated anything new, either.
Gabe stepped out onto the porch, locked the door to his tiny log cabin, and stood for a moment, trying to ground himself, his breath misting in the rapidly cooling air.
The earth in front of his humble abode had been freshly tilled, a vegetable garden put to bed for the winter. Gabe could imagine the previous RCMP officer’s wife planting food for their table. He could picture the couple using the red canoe that had been pulled up onto the bank and tied under a trembling aspen down near the water. Crisp gold leaves covered the canoe now, a few left clinging at the topmost branches of the tree. One lost its grip and rustled softly to the ground as Gabe watched.
He jacked his shearling collar up around his neck, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and began the trudge to Old Moose Lodge, wondering how in hell he was actually going to survive six long snowbound months in that little wooden box on the lake, buried under drifts.
Who would care if he didn’t?
And he’d still have another winter to endure after this one coming. Where would they send him then?
There wasn’t even anywhere else he wanted to go.
Time stretched interminably before him as he crunched along the narrow rutted path, dense spruce and berry scrub closing in on either side, shadows dark in the undergrowth.
He could have taken the ATV, but the lodge was only about six miles from his new home, and he needed to do something physical, or he was going to go insane. But as he walked, a very real sense of being watched crept stealthily over his skin.
He stopped, listened. He couldn’t pinpoint why, but something didn’t feel right. A slight crunch in the woods sounded suddenly to his right.
He spun, pulse quickening.
Gabe concentrated on the ambient noise of the bush, trying to identify anomalies of sound. Then he heard it again—a crack. Sweat prickled across his brow.
Slowly drawing his weapon, he peered into the arachnid-like shadows of dry willow scrub, twilight toying with definition between shadow and form.
Something rustled sharply again in the dry leaves, and twigs crunched. His pulse kicked up, and his throat turned dry. He removed his flashlight with his free hand, directing the beam into the dense willows, the barrel of his weapon following.
His flashlight caught the quick glint of eyes, then the shape of a large animal seemed to quietly separate itself out from the background, and he found himself gazing into the liquid eyes of a doe, standing still as stone in the shadows.
Gabe’s breath whooshed out of him.
Laughing lightly, he reholstered his weapon. The deer skittered back into cover, white tail bobbing, and Gabe laughed again, running both hands over his hair, trembling slightly. He continued along the grassy track, a sudden lightness in his chest.
Yeah, he was still jumpy. But he hadn’t shot the damn deer. He still had the jockey of logic to control his quick impulse to shoot.
Looking into the big innocent brown eyes of that doe, feeling a rush of adrenaline in his body that wasn’t spawned by malicious human intent, had shifted something fundamental inside Gabe.
Maybe there was hope for him after all.
A split cedar fence lined the approach to the Old Moose Hunting Lodge, a large log structure that hunkered on the shores of the clearest aquamarine lake Gabe had ever seen, a few outbuildings standing off to the side.
A fish eagle circled up high, feathers ruffling on air currents as it craned its neck for prey. Small bats were beginning to flit after mosquitoes just above the water, competing with fish that sent concentric circles rippling through mercurial reflections as they broke the lake surface. The air was heavy and cool, redolent with the scent of pine and the spice of juniper.
Gabe stopped a moment to drink it all in.
Then he saw Silver, leading three horses to a paddock near the shore. There was a wild abandon in her stride, her heavy hair swaying across her back, and she was laughing as her dogs cavorted with a puppy at her side.
Everything inside Gabe quieted.
She looked so free.
It was clear she hadn’t realized he was there and that she was being watched. And with mild shock, Gabe realized he wanted to watch, quietly, without announcing his presence. There was something about the way she moved that grabbed him by the throat. He was jealous of her freedom, her spirit. It made him feel furtive. Hungry.
But she saw him, and stiffened instantly. He raised his hand to greet her, but she simply pointed toward the main building before continuing down to the paddock with her horses.
Gabe climbed the big log stairs onto a veranda that ran the length of the lodge. Massive bleached moose antlers hung over a heavy double door. He scuffed his boots on the mat and entered the lodge.
A fire crackled in the stone hearth, and two men and a woman chatted at the bar as an Indian barman with a sleek black ponytail down the centre of his back filled a bowl with peanuts. The television set was mounted behind him, a hockey game playing.
Gabe grabbed a stool and bellied up to the bar. He asked for a Molson, and if he could switch to the CBC news channel.
“You the new cop?” asked the barkeep as he slid a cold beer along the counter to Gabe. He was a young and strong man with copper skin and a small silver earring in his left ear.
“Sergeant Gabriel Caruso,” Gabe said, holding out his hand.
The trio at the other end of the bar glanced up. Gabe nodded at them, and they tipped their glasses slightly. Not exactly smiles of welcome, thought Gabe. It was the same with Silver. Beneath surface civility he could detect simmering hostility.
“Jake Onefeather,” said the barkeep as he flipped to the news channel and handed Gabe the remote.
There was a commercial on. Gabe checked his watch, and tensed. He’d made it just in time. The CBC news logo flashed across the screen, and he bumped up the volume, his mouth already dry, his pulse accelerating. He knew he’d see Steiger’s photo. And most likely his own.
And Gia’s.
If Tom was correct—that CBC had prepared a news feature—Gabe would likely see file footage from the RCMP funeral where thousands of mourners had come to pay their respects to his colleagues gunned down in the line of duty. Mounties from across the country had stood shoulder to shoulder in a sea of red serge far exceeding the capacity of the Notre Dame Basilica cathedral in Ottawa as the coffins were carried in—one of them holding the body of the woman he’d planned to marry.
The anchor began to speak. But before Gabe could catch a word, a soft and husky female voice brushed like velvet over his skin.
“You’d make a better impression visiting the chief and council than sitting here drinking beer on your first night, you know?” Silver said quietly as she came up behind him.
Abruptly, the competition for Gabe’s attention was cleft in two—the sensually beautiful tracker at his side and the image of Steiger’s rugged face filling the screen, pale ice-blue eyes staring coldly at the camera. Steiger’s hair was pale, too. Ash blond, shaved short and spiky. By contrast, his skin was olive-toned, his features angular, strong. Handsome, even. Almost mesmerizingly so. And the psychopath knew it.
Gabe’s heart began to thud. He felt dizzy. He held up his hand, quieting her, and he made the sound louder. Everyone in the bar looked up in surprise, then fell dead silent as they watched.
Silver stared at the screen in shock as the anchor announced the escape of the Bush Man, and then footage segued to file images of the dead Mounties, and Gabe—the cop who had led the Williams Lake takedown. The cop who had lost his fiancée to a monster.
As a tracker, Silver had been interested in Steiger’s story, in how the killer had managed to evade law enforcement for almost three years, but she hadn’t put two and two together with the new cop.
Her eyes shot to Gabe.
Suddenly he made sense. She now understood what she’d glimpsed in his eyes.
She’d been right. He was damaged goods. Badly damaged.
Silver listened to the news, but she watched him. She was a veteran observer of creatures, human and otherwise. She instinctively noted the way they moved, talked, how their emotions translated into body position, how it made them plant their feet, leave trace. It was in this way that she could often tell the prints of one villager from another without even analyzing why. And more often than not she could tell what they’d been doing, even thinking, at the time they’d left prints.
Right now, in his leather bomber jacket and faded jeans, Gabe Caruso didn’t look like a cop. His hair was roughed up, a five o’clock shadow darkened his angled jaw, and his neck muscles corded with aggression. Strong neck. Strong man. She liked what she saw—too much. And again she felt the disturbing warmth spread through her stomach. She didn’t feel safe around this man—not at all.
She swallowed the shimmer of anxiety in her chest and pulled up a stool beside him. Closer than was necessary, close enough to feel the tension radiating from him like heat from a desert tarmac. She noted the way he fisted the TV remote in one hand, knuckles white, his beer glass in the other. She thought he might just crush it and wondered if she should remove it or remind him that he was holding glass in his fist.
She slanted her eyes up to the television as another image of Gabe filled the screen. It was a shot taken a year ago of him standing alongside one of the coffins. Propped up by crutches he was dressed in formal RCMP red serge, Stetson at a slight angle atop short-shaved hair, no expression on his face. Just hollow, dark eyes.
The anchor reminded viewers of how the sergeant had pursued Steiger on a snowmobile, racing after him into the teeth of a blizzard on that fateful night. A gunfight and hand-to-hand combat had ensued, seriously injuring Gabe before he’d managed to subdue Steiger using a taser.
And given what they were saying on the news about Gabe having been a fast-climbing career cop who’d taken the sergeant’s job in Williams Lake to be with his now-deceased fiancée, Gabe must be seething about this Black Arrow Falls posting. It was a dead end for him.
Silver guessed everything that meant anything to Gabe lay in that coffin in that image. The news feature cut back to the presenter, and Silver felt anger burn through her veins. She knew what that kind of emptiness felt like.
Everything that had meant anything to her was buried under a small cairn of river rocks northwest of town, at Wolverine Gorge. Rocks she’d stacked with her own bloodied hands.
Silver was torn between resentment that the RCMP had sent them someone who didn’t want to be here and compassion for a man tormented over the loss of his fiancée and his career. His life. Black Arrow Falls deserved better treatment.
But so did Sergeant Gabriel Caruso.
The RCMP had clearly washed their hands of a dedicated cop, given the résumé they’d just flashed on screen. It sure didn’t endear the federal force further to Silver, but suddenly this man wasn’t overtly her enemy.
Or was he?
She slanted her eyes back to study his jagged profile. A man like him would now have something to prove. And if the big city homicide detective had nothing better to do in Black Arrow Falls, he just might go sifting through the cold case files.
He might come after her.
The news feature was over, but he sat staring blankly at the television screen. Silver didn’t know why she did it, but she reached over and quietly pried the remote from his clenched hand.
“They’re tracking him wrong,” she said as she bumped down the sound, and set the remote on the bar counter.
Gabe’s eyes whipped to hers. “What?”
“The Bush Man. They won’t get him like that.”
He leaned forward suddenly, intense interest narrowing his eyes, energy crackling around him. “Why do you say that?”
“They’re combat tracking. It’s how you chase down a fugitive on the run.”
“That’s what he is.”
“No,” she said softly. “That man is not a fugitive. He’s not running. He’s a predator. He’s hunting again.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s what natural-born predators do. They hunt. And when they’re injured and backed into a corner, they don’t flee. They just become more dangerous. They come at you—attack.”
A muscle began to pulse at his jaw. “And how would you track him?”
“The same way I track any animal predator.”
Gabe shook his head. “No. No way. Steiger is a borderline genius, a strategic combatant. This guy is not an animal. He’s a psychopath.”
“Which is exactly what makes him like an animal. A very smart and very dangerous one.”
Gabe swigged back the rest of his beer, plunked the glass down hard onto the counter, and surged to his feet. “Don’t kid yourself, Silver.” He pointed to the TV screen. “You could never track that man. Our force hunted him for months. I saw the profilers’ reports. I studied every goddamn word. I got inside his sick head.” His eyes bored down into hers, giving Silver that strange zing in the base of her spine again. “You’d be dead before you knew it. You may be a good tracker, Silver, but you’re no match for Kurtz Steiger. You’re not a man hunter.”
Her mouth flattened, and her eyes narrowed. “Don’t presume to know anything about me, Sergeant,” she said very quietly as she got to her own feet, meeting his aggressive posture toe to toe, her pulse accelerating. “Do you even know where the word ‘game’ comes from?”
Uncertainty flickered briefly in his eyes. She held his gaze, well aware of what her blue-eyed stare could do to a man. “Some say,” she continued, “that it was derived from the ancient Greek word gamos, meaning a ‘marriage,’ or ‘joining,’ as in a special kindred relationship between hunter and prey. And yes, when I hunt, Detective, that’s my game. A relationship, an emotional connection with my quarry. It’s the way things are done out here. We are all connected. And it’s the same game Kurtz Steiger plays.”
“What makes you think you know anything at all about this man?”
“Because I saw right there on that newscast that the Bush Man doesn’t use humans for simple target practice. That would be too easy. He flushes them out, strips them down to their most basic, atavistic impulses, then he puts them on the run, chases them for days sometimes, toying with their minds, playing on their mental weaknesses. He needs them to know he is out there, watching them, hunting them with an expectation of kill. He wants this relationship, and he wants it up close and personal, because he feeds off the smell of human fear.”
“And you think you’re telling me something new?”
She was angering him, but she was not going to back down and concede defeat now. “Yeah, I do think so,” she said. “It’s a small matter of perspective, Sergeant. It makes a huge difference.”
He exhaled angrily, dragging his hand over his hair. “Will you please just call me Gabe?”
Surprise rippled through Silver, and a smile tempted her lips. She almost gave in to it, but didn’t. “You need to see the wilds differently before you can ‘see’ Steiger,” she said. “Some of those law enforcement and military trackers might know how to cut from one footprint to the next, but the ones who can really ‘see’ know where to find their quarry without even looking, just from one track. Like an archaeologist can reconstruct an entire animal using a single bone, a good tracker can use one print to piece together an elaborate story of interlocking events. And that can lead him right to the source without taking a step.”
“That’s psychic bull.” He leaned closer, his mouth coming near hers, and her blood warmed. A tiny warning bell began to clang in the back of Silver’s brain, but she couldn’t stand down. She stared him straight in the eye instead.
“And a woman like you shouldn’t even begin to think of messing with a monster like Steiger.” His voice was low, gravelly.
“Why? Because I’m female?” she asked softly.
“Because I’ve seen what that man does to women. You may be good, Silver, but you’re not that good. You’re no match for him. I know this.”
“Maybe where you come from, Gabe, but out here, things are different. We know that the wolf, while strong, can still be outwitted by the hare.”
Silver turned and walked away, her pulse racing much too fast, her palms clammy, her mouth dry. She hadn’t meant to press him like that. God knew she should have let him be.
She was only making trouble for herself.
She sucked air in deeply, conscious once again of the tight ragged scar pulling across her chest—a reminder of just how carefully she needed to tread with Sergeant Gabriel Caruso.
He trekked down the hill toward Dawson City, late-morning mist shrouding the old gold rush boomtown that lay at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. It was almost three days since his escape, and his face had been plastered all over the news. He needed to be careful.
In the town’s small library, he pulled the flaps of his fur-lined hunting cap down low, shading his profile as he began searching the Internet for information on Black Arrow Falls.
He’d taken the cap and some clothes from the small cabin by the river where he’d sewn up his leg. At a gas station a few miles out from the cabin, he’d crawled from the shadows and strapped himself under a logging rig. He’d heard the driver say he was heading north. He’d then liberated weapons from a hunting camp outside Whitehorse, busted into another remote cabin farther up the Klondike Highway, and found food and antiseptic for the leg wound still troubling him.
He’d cleaned up thoroughly each time, leaving no trace. He didn’t want to telegraph his actions to Caruso.
He wanted to surprise him.
And he felt controlled, the steady, throbbing pain in his leg keeping him on a keen edge. Pain was his friend. Patience the art of the predator.
Scrolling through the Yukon newspaper online archives, his attention was instantly snared by a Whitehorse Star online report about Silver Karvonen, a tracker who’d located an eleven-year-old boy north of Whitehorse last month, after everyone else had given up hope. He leaned closer. The story said she possessed a tracking skill bordering on psychic. But it was what the next line said that made the blood in his groin grow hot—Silver Karvonen was from Black Arrow Falls.
He quickly punched her name into a search engine.
Almost immediately he came across several articles dating back five years—Karvonen had been a person of interest in an RCMP homicide investigation into the death of an Alaskan bootlegger named David Radkin.
That man had been the father of Karvonen’s seven-year-old son, Johnny, who’d been found drowned and buried under a cairn of rocks near the remains of Radkin’s body in remote bush northwest of Black Arrow Falls near an abandoned gold mine.
It appeared that a bear had been lured to the site by bloody rags hung from a tree. This had piqued police interest. The RCMP had questioned Silver but hadn’t been able to prove anything. The bear had destroyed much of Radkin’s body, along with any evidence.
It remained an unsolved mystery.
He leaned even closer, poring over the grainy black-and-white photograph of what was clearly a wild and beautiful woman.
He felt that familiar tingling thrill of anticipation begin to flood through his belly, that glorious rush into his blood. And Kurtz Steiger knew immediately what he wanted.
Whatever game he chose to play up in Black Arrow Falls, Silver Karvonen was going to be the centerpiece. Worthy prey. A real hunt.
He logged out of the library computer and sensed the librarian suddenly watching him intently.
He paused, thinking fast.
The library was quiet.
The only other librarian had stepped out earlier. There were three elderly patrons besides himself in the facility, and they sat hidden from sight at a big square table situated behind a row of shelves. Steiger slid his eyes slowly up and met the librarian’s gaze squarely.
She swallowed.
He could see a quick flicker of recognition, yet there was also uncertainty in her eyes. She seemed unable to move, or to tear her gaze away from his riveting stare, mesmerized by some quality in him. He had that effect on people. He knew how to use it.
And he had maybe seconds before she reached for that phone sitting just inches from her hand.
Trapping her eyes with his, he scribbled something on a piece of paper, then surged smoothly to his feet, allowing a smile to curl over his lips as he approached her desk.
She looked up, terrified. “Can…I help you?”
He held out his hand, deepening his smile. “Could you tell me where this guide book is located?”
Confused, she dropped her gaze to his hand. Steiger used the instant to whip his hand to her shoulder, where he pressed down and dug his fingers down hard and fast into a pressure point at the base of her scrawny neck.
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