Mountain Captive (Eagle Mountain: Criminal History #4)

Chapter One

Rand Martin had built his reputation on noticing details—the tiny nick in an artery that was the source of life-threatening blood loss; the almost microscopic bit of shrapnel that might lead to a deadly infection; the panic in a wounded man’s eyes that could send his vitals out of control; the tremor in a fellow surgeon’s hand that meant he wasn’t fit to operate. As a trauma surgeon—first in the military, then in civilian life—Rand noticed the little things others overlooked. It made him a better doctor, and it equipped him to deal with the people in his life.

But sometimes that focus on the small picture got in the way of his big-picture job. Today, his first call as medical adviser for Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue, he was supposed to be focusing on the sixty-something man sprawled on the side of a high mountain trail. But Rand’s attention kept shifting to the woman who knelt beside the man. Her blue-and-yellow vest identified her as a member of the search and rescue team, but her turquoise hair and full sleeve of colorful tattoos set her apart from the other volunteers. That, and the wariness that radiated off her as she surveyed the crowd that was fast gathering around her and her patient on the popular hiking trail.

“Everyone move back and give us some space,” Rand ordered, and, like the men and women he had commanded in his mobile surgical unit in Kabul, the crowd obeyed and fell back.

SAR Captain Danny Irwin rose from where he had been crouched on the patient’s other side and greeted Rand. “Thanks for coming out,” he said.

“Are you the doctor?” Another woman, blond hair in a ponytail that streamed down her back, rushed forward.

“Dr. Rand Martin.” He didn’t offer his hand, already pulling on latex gloves, ready to examine his patient. The blue-haired woman had risen also, and was edging to one side of the trail. As if she was trying to blend in with the crowd—a notion Rand found curious. Nothing about this woman would allow her to blend in. Even without the wildly colored hair and the ink down her arm, she was too striking to ever be invisible.

“My dad has a heart condition,” the blonde said. “I tried to tell him he shouldn’t be hiking at this altitude, but he wouldn’t listen, and now this has happened.”

“Margo, please!” This, from the man on the ground. He had propped himself up on his elbows and was frowning at the woman, presumably his daughter. “I hurt my leg. It has nothing to do with my heart.”

“You don’t know that,” she said. “Maybe you fell because you were lightheaded or had an irregular heartbeat. If you weren’t so stubborn—”

A balding man close to the woman’s age moved up and put his hands on the woman’s shoulders. “Let’s wait and see what the doctor has to say,” he said, and led Margo a few feet away.

Rand crouched beside the man. He was pale, sweating and breathing hard. Not that unusual, considering the bone sticking out of his lower leg. He was probably in a lot of pain from that compound fracture, and despite his protestation that nothing was wrong with his heart, the pain and shock could aggravate an existing cardiac condition. “What happened?” Rand asked.

“We were coming down the trail and Buddy fell.” This, from another woman, with short gray curls. She sat a few feet away, flanked by two boys—early-or preteens, Rand guessed. The boys were staring at the man on the ground, freckles standing out against their pale skin.

“I stepped on a rock, and it rolled,” Buddy offered. “I heard a snap.” He grimaced. “Hurts like the devil.”

“We’ll get you something for the pain.” Rand saw that someone—Danny or the blue-haired woman—had already started an intravenous line. “Do you have a medical history?” he asked Danny.

The SAR captain—an RN in his day job—handed over a small clipboard. Buddy was apparently sixty-seven, on a couple of common cardiac drugs. No history of medication allergies, though Rand questioned him again to be absolutely sure. Then he checked the clipboard once more. “Mr. Morrison, we’re going to give you some morphine for the pain. It should take effect within a few minutes. Then we’re going to splint your leg, pack it in ice to keep the swelling down, and get you down the mountain and to the hospital for X-rays and treatment.”

“But his heart!” Margo, who’d shoved away from the balding man—her husband, perhaps—rushed forward again.

“Are you experiencing any chest pain?” Rand asked, even as he pulled out a stethoscope. “Palpitations?”

“No.” Buddy glanced toward his daughter and lowered his voice, his tone confiding. “I had a quadruple bypass nine months ago. I completed cardiac rehab, and I’m just fine. Despite what my daughter would have you believe, I’m not an idiot. My doctor thought this vacation was a fine idea. I’m under no activity restrictions.”

“Your doctor probably has no idea you would decide to hike six miles at ten thousand feet,” Margo said.

Rand slid the stethoscope beneath Buddy Morrison’s T-shirt and listened to the strong, if somewhat rapid, heartbeat. He studied the man’s pupils, which were fine. Some of the color was returning to his cheeks. Rand moved to check the pulse in his leg below the break.

“Chris, come hold this,” Danny called over to the young blue-haired woman after he had hooked the man’s IV line to a bag of saline. She held it, elevated, while he injected the morphine into the line. Rand watched her while trying to appear not to. Up close, she had fine lines at the corners of her eyes, which were a chocolatey brown, fringed with heavily mascaraed lashes. She had a round face, with a slight point to her chin and a Cupid’s bow mouth with a slightly fuller lower lip. It was a strikingly beautiful face, with a mouth he would have liked to kiss.

He pushed the inappropriate thought away and focused on working with Danny to straighten the man’s leg. Buddy groaned as the broken tip of the bone slid back under the skin, and the gray-haired woman let out a small cry as well. Margo took a step toward them. “What are you doing?” she asked. “You’re hurting him!”

“He’ll feel a lot better when the bones of the leg are in line and stabilized,” Rand said, and began to fit the inflatable splint around the man’s leg. Once air was added, the splint would form a tight, formfitting wrap that would make for a much more comfortable trip down the mountain on the litter.

The splint in place, Rand stood and stepped back. “You can take it from here,” he told Danny, and watched as half a dozen more volunteers swarmed in to assemble a wheeled litter, transferred Buddy onto it, and secured him, complete with a crash helmet, ice packs around his leg and warm blankets over the rest of his body.

While they worked, another female volunteer explained to Buddy’s family what would happen next. In addition to the family and the search and rescue volunteers, a crowd of maybe a dozen people clogged the trail, so each new hiker who descended the route was forced to join the bottleneck and wait. The onlookers talked among themselves, and more than a few snapped photographs.

Danny moved to Rand’s side. “It’s a little different from assessing a patient at the hospital ER,” Danny said.

“Different from the battlefield too,” Rand said. There was no scent of mortar rounds and burning structures here, and no overpowering disinfectant scent of a hospital setting. Only sunshine and a warm breeze with the vanilla-tinged scent of ponderosa pine.

“Thanks for coming out,” Danny said again.

“You could have handled it fine without me,” Rand said. He had heard enough from people around town to know Eagle Mountain SAR was considered one of the top wilderness-response teams in the state.

“The family calmed down a lot when I assured them we had a ‘real doctor’ on the way to take care of their father,” Danny said. He glanced over to where Margo and her mother were huddled with the balding man and the two boys, their anxious faces focused on the process of loading Buddy into the litter. “But I won’t call you except in cases of emergency, if that’s what you want.”

“No. I want you to treat me like any other volunteer,” Rand said.

“You mean, go through the training, attend the meetings, stuff like that?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean. I like being outdoors, and I need to get out of the office and the operating room. I’m in good physical shape, so I think I could be an asset to the team, beyond my medical knowledge.”

“That’s terrific,” Danny said. “We’d be happy to have you. If you have time, come back to headquarters with us, and I’ll introduce you around. Or come to the next regular meeting. Most of the volunteers will be there. I’ll give you a training schedule and a bunch of paperwork to sign.”

“Sounds good.” Rand turned back to the crowd around the litter as it began to move forward. He searched among the dozen or so volunteers for the woman with the blue hair but didn’t see her. Then he spotted her to one side. She stood in the shadow of a pine, staring up the trail.

He followed her gaze, trying to determine what had caught her attention. Then he spotted the man—midforties, a dirty yellow ball cap covering his hair and hiding his eyes. But he was definitely focused on the woman, his posture rigid.

Rand looked back toward the blue-haired woman, but she was gone. She wasn’t by the tree. She wasn’t with the volunteers or in the crowd of onlookers that was now making its way down the trail.

“Is something wrong?” Danny asked.

“The volunteer who was with Mr. Morrison when I arrived,” he said. “With the blue hair.”

“Chris. Chris Mercer.”

“Has she been a volunteer long?”

“Off and on for four years. Her work has taken her away a couple of times—she’s an artist. But she always comes back to the group.” Danny looked around. “I don’t see her now.”

“She was just here,” Rand said. “I was wondering where she went.”

“There’s no telling with Chris. She’s a little unconventional but a good volunteer. She told me she was hiking about a mile down the trail when the call went out, so she was first on the scene,” Danny said. “She’s supposed to stick around for report back at the station. Maybe she’s already headed back there.”

“Looks like she left something behind,” Rand said. He made his way to the spot where she had been standing and picked up a blue day pack, the nylon outer shell faded and scuffed. He unzipped the outer pocket and took out a business card. “‘Chris Mercer, Aspen Leaf Gallery,’” he read.

“That’s Chris’s,” Danny said. He held out his hand. “I’ll put it in the lost and found bin at headquarters.”

“That’s okay. I’ll take it to her.” Rand slipped one strap of the pack over his shoulder.

“Suit yourself,” Danny said. He and Rand fell into step behind the group wheeling the litter. Morrison’s family was hiking ahead, though the daughter, Margo, kept looking back to check on their progress. Every twenty minutes or so, the volunteers switched positions, supporting the litter and guiding it down the trail or walking alongside it with the IV bag suspended. They continually checked on Mr. Morrison, asking him how he was doing, assessing his condition, staying alert for any change that might indicate something they had missed. Something going wrong.

Rand felt the tension in his own body, even as he reminded himself that this was a simple accident—a fall that had resulted in a fracture, free of the kinds of complications that had plagued his patients on the battlefield, and the motor vehicle collision and gunshot victims he often met in the emergency room where he now worked.

Heavy footfalls on the trail behind them made Rand turn, in time to see the man in the dirty yellow ball cap barreling toward them. The man brushed against Rand as he hurried by, head down, boots raising small puffs of dirt with each forceful step. “Hey!” Rand called out, prepared to tell the man to be more careful. But the guy broke into a run and soon disappeared down the trail.

“Guess he had somewhere he needed to be,” Danny said.

“Guess so,” Rand said, but the hair on the back of his neck rose as he remembered the expression on Chris’s face as she had stared at the man.

She hadn’t merely been curious or even afraid of the man.

She had been terrified.