Mountain Investigation. Jessica Andersen

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      Chapter One

      Mariah Shore paused on the ridgeline about a half mile from her isolated cabin. Standing in the lee of a sturdy pine, she scanned the woods around her with a photographer’s sharp eye. She wasn’t looking for a subject for her old, beloved Canon 35 mm, though. The camera was stowed safely in her backpack for the hike home.

      No, she was looking for a target for the Remington double-aught shotgun she held across her body.

      “There’s nobody there,” she told herself, willing it to be true. But the woods were quieter than she liked, and the day was rapidly dimming toward the too-early springtime dusk.

      With her curvy figure swathed in lined pants, a flannel shirt, a wool sweater and a down parka, and her dark curls tucked under a thick knit cap, she’d be warm enough if she stayed put. But her hurry to get home wasn’t about the warmth. It was about the cabin’s thick walls and sturdy locks, the line of electric fencing near the trees, and the motion-sensitive lights and alarms that formed a protective perimeter around the clear-cut yard.

      The cabin was safe. Outside was a crapshoot.

      She needed to keep moving, would’ve been nearly home if she hadn’t heard a crackle of underbrush and seen a flash of movement directly in her path. She’d tried to tell herself it was just an animal, but she’d spent the best weeks of her childhood following her grandfather through Colorado woods like these, and she’d lived in the cabin thirty miles north of Bear Claw City for more than a year now. She’d hiked out nearly every day since arriving, first for peace and more recently for some actual work, as she’d started to feel the stirrings of the creativity she’d thought was gone for good. She knew the forest, knew the rhythms and inhabitants of the ridgeline. Whatever was between her and the cabin, her sense of the woods told her it wasn’t a bear or wildcat. Her gut said it was two-legged danger.

      Her ex-husband. Lee Mawadi.

      Or was it?

      “He’s not there,” she told herself. “He’s long gone.”

      She’d kept tabs on the investigation, listening to the infrequent follow-ups on her small radio, and asking careful questions during her rare trips into the city for supplies. Because of that, she knew there had been no sign of Lee in the nearly six months since he and three other men had escaped from the ARX Supermax Prison, located on the other side of the ridge. She also knew—or logic dictated, anyway—that her ex-husband had no real reason to come back to the area, and every reason to stay away.

      After a long moment, when nothing could be heard but the muted sounds of the sun-loving animals powering down and the nocturnal creatures revving up as dusk fell along the ridgeline, she even managed to believe her own words.

      “You’re talking yourself into being scared,” she muttered, slinging the double-aught over her shoulder and heading for home. “There’s no way he’s coming back here.”

      Lee might be a terrorist, a murderer and a liar, but he wasn’t stupid.

      Still, she stayed alert as she walked, relaxing only slightly when it seemed like the forest noises got a little louder, as though whatever menace the woodland creatures had sensed—if anything—had passed through СКАЧАТЬ