Murder In Black Canyon. Cindi Myers

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      Kayla shook her head. “I don’t know. And before you ask, I don’t know why they thought they needed to bring him back to the camp. I told the leader—some guy who calls himself the Prophet—that his men shouldn’t have touched the body, and that they needed to call the police, but he ignored me and ordered the men to take the dead man back to where they had found him, then report to him for a cleansing ritual.”

      “He refused to report the incident?” Graham’s voice was calm, but his expression was one of outrage.

      “He said they didn’t have cell phones. Maybe they don’t believe in them.”

      “Phones don’t work in that area, anyway.” Simon Woolridge, the team’s tech expert, spoke for the first time. “They don’t work on most of the public land around here. No towers.”

      “That’s why I didn’t call you, either,” Kayla said. “By the time I got a signal on my phone, I was almost here.”

      “Did anyone say anything about who the dead man might be?” Graham asked. “Did you recognize him?”

      “No. Everyone looked as horrified as I did.”

      “Did the men do as the Prophet asked and take the body away?” Dylan asked.

      “I don’t know. I left before they did anything. No one tried to stop me. I wanted to get away from there and I headed straight here.”

      “What time was this?” Graham asked.

      “I don’t know. But it’s a long drive. So...maybe an hour ago?”

      “More like an hour and a half,” Carmen said. “Dead Horse Canyon is pretty remote.”

      “Lieutenant Holt, I want you and Simon to check this out,” Captain Ellison said. “Ms. Larimer, you ride with Lieutenant Holt and show him exactly where you were.”

      “We know where Dead Horse Canyon is,” Simon protested.

      “The canyon is seven miles long,” the captain said. “She can show you the location more quickly.”

      Silently, Kayla followed Dylan to his Cruiser. He opened the passenger door for her and she slid in without looking at him. He caught the scent of her floral shampoo as she moved past him, and he noticed the three tiny silver hoops she wore in each ear. By the time he made it around to the driver’s side, she was buckled in and staring out the windshield.

      “You holding up okay?” he asked.

      “I’m fine.” Her clipped tone didn’t invite sympathy or further conversation, so he started the Cruiser and followed Simon out of the parking lot. They followed the paved road through the national park for the first five miles, past a series of pull-offs that provided overlooks into the Black Canyon, a half-mile-deep gorge that was the reason for the park’s existence. Every stop was crowded with RVs, vans and passenger cars full of tourists who had come to enjoy the wild beauty of the high desert of western Colorado.

      “How long have you been a private detective?” he asked.

      She was silent so long he thought she had decided not to talk to him, but when he glanced her way she said, “Two years.”

      “Do you have a law enforcement background?” A lot of PIs he knew started out with police or sheriff’s departments before hanging their shingle to do investigations, but Kayla hardly looked old enough to have had many years on the force under her belt.

      “No.”

      “How did you get into the work?”

      She let out a sigh and half turned to face him. “Why do you care?”

      “I’m making conversation. Why are you so hostile?”

      She ducked her head and massaged the bridge of her nose. “Sorry. I think I’ve just had an overdose of arrogant, good-looking men today.”

      She thought he was good-looking? He filed the information away for future reference. “I’m not trying to be arrogant,” he said. “Cops are trained to get the facts of a situation as quickly as possible. That can come across as brusque sometimes.”

      She nodded. “I get that. It’s just been a tough day. A tough week, really.” She glanced at him, her expression a little less guarded. “I thought I was applying for a secretarial position when I answered the ad for the job,” she said. “My boss got sick and trained me to take over the business. When he died from cancer last year, he left the business to me.”

      “And you like it enough to keep at it.”

      Another sigh. “Yeah, I like it. Most of the time. I mean, it beats a job in a cube farm. I like it when I can help people, even if it’s just finding a lost pet or helping a woman locate her deadbeat ex so that she can collect child support. But you see the ugly side of people a lot.”

      “What you saw today wasn’t very pretty.”

      “No.”

      She fell silent again, and he was sure she was back at the camp, picturing that bloody body again. He wanted to pull her away from the image, to keep her focused on him. “Who are the handsome, arrogant men who rubbed you the wrong way?” he asked.

      “Daniel Metwater, for one.”

      “The Prophet of this so-called Family?”

      “Yeah. Have you met him?”

      Dylan slowed for the turn onto a faintly marked dirt track that veered away from the canyon and the park. “No. What’s he like?”

      “He talks a good game of peace and love and spirituality, or at least, that’s what he writes in his blog. But it all sounds like a con game to me, especially considering he preaches about the futility of cell phones and technology, yet he has a website he updates often when he’s away from the camp. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I wanted to shake all those women who were making cow eyes at him and tell them he didn’t really care about any of them. He’s the kind of guy who looks out for himself and his image first.”

      “What makes you think that?”

      He halfway expected her to slap him down again. Instead, she relaxed back into the seat. “My dad was a charming swindler like Metwater—good-looking, silver-tongued and scary intelligent. His game was as a traveling preacher. I spent most of my childhood moving from town to town while he conned people out of whatever they would give him.” She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face. “I guess that experience has come in handy in my work. I can usually spot a grifter as soon as he opens his mouth. Daniel Metwater may be preaching peace, love and communing with nature, but I think he’s hiding something.”

      “Do you think he killed the guy you saw?”

      “I don’t know. It depends on when the guy died, I think. Metwater was standing with me for a good while before his followers dragged the body into camp. He was wearing white linen trousers and there wasn’t a speck of blood or dirt on him, so he didn’t strike me as a man who had just come from a murder.”

      “So you think the man was murdered.”

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