public area—centered on the crossbars.
They entered a long, narrow room that was divided roughly in half by a waist-high counter, with bathrooms on either side: men on the left, women on the right. A door centered on the back wall led to the longer bunkhouse wing that finished the T-shape.
The walls of the front room were lined with maps, brochures and copies of the fliers the park service put out each year, complete with instructions on bear avoidance, trail safety and what to do in the event of an emergency. On the other side of the counter—the rangers’ side—the papers hung on the walls and office cubbies leaned more toward emergency numbers and scrawled notes.
Bert waved her through a flip-up pass in the counter, then gestured to a small desk. “That’s Tanya’s. So are the pictures.”
A row of sketches were tacked along the wall to the right of the desk. Tanya had captured dozens of moments: a stark, barren landscape of rocks and stunted trees; a doe and fawn silhouetted atop a sparsely forested ridgeline; ghostly wisps of mist rising off the surface of a pond as a coyote paused to drink; the curl of a fern, so mundane until seen through eyes that found something beautiful in it; a hawk’s flight, sketched so sparsely as to be mere suggestions of line and motion, except for the creature’s head and its bright, fierce eyes.
But Gigi’s attention was immediately drawn to a deft caricature off to one side. In it, a handsome young man—presumably Jim Feeney—and Bert were horsing around together there in the station. There was a hint of a Stetson-shadow just visible through a doorway, putting Blackthorn in the picture. Sort of.
“She’s talented,” Gigi commented past the sudden tightening of her throat.
Bert reached out to brush his thumb across the bold T at the bottom of the caricature. “She hasn’t woken up yet.”
There was guilt beneath the pain, just like with Matt. It made Gigi think that maybe rangers weren’t as different from cops as she had thought—both protected their people and their territories, and took it very seriously when one of their own went down in the line.
“Tell me about her,” she said.
“She’s a good kid, a good ranger, and practically has eyes in the back of her head. Whoever these guys are, they would’ve had to know the backcountry to get the drop on her.”
Which narrowed things down, but not by much. “Does she have any enemies you know about? Anyone who would want to hurt her?” Williams would have asked the standard questions, but it didn’t hurt to repeat them.
He shook his head. “No way. She wasn’t that kind of person.”
“How about a boyfriend?”
“She and Jim flirted, but I don’t think it was serious, at least not on her part. And before you ask, no, he wasn’t mad about it, and yes, he was here all morning. He’s at the hospital right now, driving himself nuts—just like we all are—wondering if there was something he could’ve done to prevent this and hoping to hell she wakes up soon.” His voice had sharpened, but before she could say something to bring things down a notch, his shoulders slumped. “Sorry. This really sucks.”
“Yeah. It does.” She touched his arm in sympathy. “I’m sorry to make you go through it again.”
“Don’t be. I’ll do whatever I can to help. It’s just …” He paused, then said slowly, “The rangers who work the outer stations tend to be out here for a reason. Some because they need space, others because they plain don’t like being around other people. Tanya is one of the first kind, or at least she was when she got here. Lately, though, she’s gone from this—” he tapped one of the lonely, barren landscapes “—to this—” his finger moved to the doe and her fawn “—to this.” He touched the caricature.
“She was healing from something?” Maybe something that had made enemies?
“That’d be my take. She didn’t talk about it, though, at least not with me. Just said she had made mistakes and wanted to move on. Recently, though, she seemed to be coming out of her shell.”
“Because of her relationship with Jim?” Or was there something else going on?
“Maybe. Or maybe it was just time. Who knows?” He straightened away from the pictures. “Come on. I’ll show you her room.”
Gigi followed him through to the bunkhouse wing, where a wide hallway was flanked on either side by rows of closed doors. The hall ended in a set of double doors leading out, their windows showing the pitch black of night beyond.
“That’s the boss’s office,” Bert said, jerking a thumb at the first on the left. “The rest are all dorm-type rooms from back when this was a research station. Matt’s house was the old observatory. He converted it when he came out here five, six years ago.”
“You don’t seem like the kind of guy who has trouble being around people.”
He shot her a look that said he knew exactly what she was asking. “My wife and I separated a couple of years ago, which made the ‘getting away’ part attractive. This is the perfect setup—close enough to the city that I can visit my one kid who stayed local for college and see the other two when they come back to town. Not to mention that room and board is included, which helps when you’re scraping to pay three tuitions.”
“And Jim?”
“Won’t last out here much longer. He came for the hiking and stayed because he was enjoying himself—and maybe a bit to see how things would go with Tanya—but I doubt he’ll be here come winter. He doesn’t need it the way the rest of us do.” A muted crackle of static had his head whipping around. “I need to get that.” He pointed to the end of the hall. “Her room is the last door on your right. It’s not locked.”
She watched him disappear through the door to the main room, wishing she had asked about Blackthorn just then. He had been there six years, and … what? Stalled? Healed? Found exactly what he was looking for?
As she headed for Tanya’s room, a faint shiver touched her nape. Under other circumstances, she would have thought it was her instincts telling her to watch her back, but she was safe in the station, and she knew darn well the threat wasn’t coming from outside.
She was on the borderline of a major crush.
And she needed to stop it.
“Okay. I’m stopping.” Blanking her mind of the lingering images of Blackthorn standing guard, silhouetted against the setting sun, she took a deep breath and pushed through into Tanya’s room.
Since it wasn’t a crime scene, she didn’t need to print the doorknob or wear protective gear. She just closed the door behind her, flipped the light switch, and stood there for a moment.
The room was maybe twice the width of the twin-size bed that sat along one wall beneath a colorful quilt. A desk and short chest of drawers took up the other wall, leaving only a narrow runway down the center of the space. The door was centered on one end, a window on the other.
The small space might have resembled a cell if it weren’t for the warm colors and bold textures decorating it, and the profusion of sketches tacked to the walls.
The pictures were similar to the ones out in the main station—mostly nature scenes, with a few caricatures of the other rangers, done on newer paper and layered atop the others. There was also a detailed sketch of blond, good-looking Jim, posed casually and looking at the artist with a seriously devilish glint that practically screamed “let’s get out of here and have some fun.”
Heart tugging for the victim, Gigi took another, longer look around the room, trying to get a sense of Tanya—or, more importantly, what she had been trying to escape.
Most everything in the room seemed to belong to her present incarnation: hiking and climbing equipment, sturdy clothes, trail maps, a few field guides on local plants and animals, a couple of paperbacks and a cache of chocolate bars. There was winter gear under