Loreth White - Manhunter

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.”