Cindi Myers - Avalanche Of Trouble

“I want to have another quick look around first.” This was his last chance to size up the scene for himself, before the techs and photographers, ambulance personnel and reporters trampled everything into dust. Oh, they’d do all the right things—cordon off the scene and establish an entry corridor—but never again would the scene look like this, unmarred by tape and markers and footsteps.

Moving carefully, Gage stepped around the tent and bent down to look inside. “Who called this in, do you know?” Dwight asked. He remained standing near the bodies.

“Milo Werth called it in,” Gage said. “Said he saw the car parked here two days ago when he delivered propane to Windy Peak Ranch, at the end of the road. He came by this morning to pick up a heeler pup Jim Trotter at Windy Peak had for sale and said the car looked like it hadn’t moved. With the pup and his little boy in the truck, he didn’t want to stop and look, but thought we should check it out.” He unhooked the collapsible baton from his utility belt and extended it, then used it to pull back the tent flap.

Inside was a jumble of sleeping bags, a plastic tote with a lid, and a scattering of clothes. A battery-operated lantern hung from a hook at the center of the tent’s dome, and a backpack sat propped to the left of the door. Then he spotted a woman’s purse next to the backpack. He pulled out a camera and took a picture of it in place, then pulled on latex gloves and, using the baton, hooked the straps of the purse and carefully lifted it out.

“Looking for ID?” Dwight asked.

“I’m looking for anything that tells me why they were up here.”

“That’s easy enough to figure out,” Dwight said. “They came up here to camp. A nice break from city life.”

“Except this isn’t National Forest or BLM land,” Gage said as he pulled a red leather wallet from the purse. “This is private property. This whole area is patented mining claims.”

“Maybe they didn’t know that,” Dwight said. “Maybe they thought they could pull over anywhere and camp. Nobody bothered them, so they thought it was all right.”

“Maybe.” The sheriff’s department had been called in before to explain to clueless campers that even if the land they were on wasn’t occupied, it wasn’t free for them to set up camp. Gage opened the wallet and studied the driver’s license in the little plastic window opposite the checkbook. Angela Hood had been a pretty brunette with long, straight hair, green eyes and a wide smile. She was thirty-two years old, five feet five inches tall. Gage flipped through the credit cards and store loyalty cards in their clear plastic sleeves next to the license and stopped when he came to a bright yellow card. In Case of Emergency, Contact Maya Renfro, (sister). A phone number and address were neatly printed in the space below.

Gage made note of the number, then dropped the wallet back into the purse and replaced the purse inside the tent. “I got a number for her emergency contact,” he said. “Looks like it’s her sister.”

“You could let Travis contact her.” Travis Walker was the Rayford County sheriff—and Gage’s older brother.

“No, I’ll do it,” Gage said. Not that he looked forward to telling a woman her sister had been murdered, but he hoped Maya Renfro could lend some insight into what Angela and Greg had been up to that might have gotten them killed.

He made his way back around the tent to the rough track that led into the clearing. “I’ll be back as soon as I make the call,” he told Dwight.

“I’ll be here.”

Gage took another look at the SUV parked at the road—a dirty white, late-model Chevy with a cooler and a black plastic garbage bag in the rear compartment. The couple had probably stashed the food and garbage there as a precaution against bears, which showed they were savvy campers. The techs would go over the vehicle, but to Gage, it looked as if it hadn’t been touched. And he spotted no other shoe or tire impressions in the soft soil on the verge of the road. So how had the killers gotten to the site?

He went over the details of the crime scene in his head as he drove the eight miles back to the highway. Once he had a strong phone signal, he parked on the shoulder and called the sheriff’s department. “Gage, I’ve been calling you for the last half hour. Where have you been?” Adelaide Kinkaid, the police department’s office manager, or, as she liked to refer to herself, “the woman who keeps everything going around here,” addressed Gage as if he was a sixteen-year-old delinquent instead of a twenty-five-year-old cop. But Adelaide talked to everyone that way. It was part of her dubious charm.

Gage ignored her question. “Is Travis in?”

“No, he is not. When I couldn’t get hold of you, he had to go over to the high school to take a theft report.”

“Fine. I’ll call his cell.”

“But where—”

Gage ended the call. Later, he would no doubt get a lecture from Adelaide about it being his responsibility to keep her informed of his whereabouts, but annoying her now was worth a little aggravation later.

Travis answered Gage’s call on the second ring. “What’s up?” the sheriff asked. Two years older than Gage, he had won a hotly contested election two years previously to become the youngest county sheriff in Colorado. Since then, even the detractors who had tried to hold his youth against him had admitted to being impressed with his performance. Gage hadn’t been surprised at all—Travis had always been the more serious and determined of the three Walker siblings. Gage, though equally smart and athletic, preferred a more laid-back approach to life.

But there was nothing laid-back about his current situation. “We’ve got a mess on our hands,” he said. “That abandoned car Milo Werth called in belongs to a young couple who got themselves killed up on Dakota Ridge.”

“Killed?” A sound like Travis closing a door. “How?”

“Shot in the back of the head. Execution-style—hands tied behind their backs. Greg and Angela Hood, from Denver. They were camping on land up there—probably a mining claim.”

“Who owns the claim?” Travis asked.

“I haven’t got that far yet. We need to call in the crime scene techs. And depending on what they find, we may need to get some help from the state. Everything about this feels bad to me.”

“I’ll call CSI as soon as we get off the phone,” Travis said. “You head back up there and guard the crime scene.”

“Dwight’s up there now. I found a next of kin notification card in the woman’s wallet. I figure I’ll make that call before I head back up. Says it’s her sister.”

“Hard,” Travis said.

“Yeah, but it needs to be done. And if it was our sister, I’d want to know right away.”

“Agreed,” Travis said. “Fortunately, I talked to Emily this morning. She was on her way to class.” Their baby sister was working on her MBA in economics at Colorado State University.

“Good to know. Tell the forensics team there’s a pull-off just after mile marker eight. I want it checked for any tire impressions or other evidence. There aren’t any signs near the Hoods’ car, so I’m wondering if the killers parked there and walked up.”

“Will do.”

The call ended, Gage pulled up the number for Angela Hood’s sister. A woman answered the phone. “Hello?” Her voice was raised to be heard over what sounded like a crowd.

“This is Deputy Gage Walker with the Rayford County Sheriff’s Department,” Gage said. “Is this Maya Renfro?”

“Speaking.” A cheer rose up behind her, momentarily drowning her out.

“I can hardly hear you,” Gage said. “Where are you?”

“High school gym. Hang on a minute.” The crowd noise rose again, then was abruptly cut off. “I ducked into the locker room,” Maya said. “This should be better.”