Chapter 10 Annie
The phone on the nightstand rang shrilly, and Annie twitched on the bed, startling herself awake. She sat up, dazed, and wiped a string of drool from her mouth, blinking at the window where faint light was tinting the sky beyond the fir boughs.
Was it dawn or dusk?
Dusk. The headache throbbing behind her eyes was proof that she hadn’t slept nearly long enough.
The lamp was on, and an open novel lay splayed across the bedspread where it had fallen from her hand.
She hadn’t meant to drift off, only to read for a little while before dinner, to try to distract her mind from the thing it kept spinning back around to again and again: the woman on the rocks.
Yesterday afternoon, a few hours after they found her, Jake had called with the update that the recovery team had decided to wait until the storm blew through before retrieving the dead woman from the cliffside, and Annie had lain awake all night as it poured, thinking of the poor girl out there alone, her body cold and lifeless and soaked by the rain.
The phone rang again, and Annie reached across the pillow for it.
“Hello?”
There was a pause, and then, “Ms. Heston?”
“Speaking.”
Another pause—longer this time.
“I think I just heard the cougar. South side of the lake.”
It took a moment for Annie’s cobwebbed brain to catch up, to fill in the blanks.
“Is this Daniel?”
“Yeah.”
She glanced at the cluttered corner of the room where her gear was heaped in a pile. “Are you sure it was a cougar?”
“Not positive, but I think so.”
Annie stifled a yawn. “Did it sound like a woman screaming?”
“Bloody murder.”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
She hung up and stepped into her uniform.
She’d felt helpless all day, holding the terrible secret of the dead woman in the woods.
Jake was more stressed-out than she’d seen him in the month they’d worked together, calling the sheriffs of nearby towns to ask about missing women, with no luck.
But at least the body had finally made it to the morgue and was awaiting an autopsy.
Dental records would give them some clue as to her identity, and then he’d have somewhere to start.
And now, at last, she had something to do, too.
Tracking down the cougar was all she had to do at the moment.
It was the only task relating to the crime that fell within the boundaries of her job, and she clung to it.
Without some sort of purpose, she’d go insane, and beyond that, she was fairly certain that the big cat was still limping.
Plenty of maladies did not heal themselves in the wild, and without intervention, infection often walked hand in hand with death.
If he was suffering from an open wound on his leg or paw, she was his only chance at survival, and her conscience would not let her rest until she saw the job through.
Annie retrieved her tranquilizer gun, tucked three darts into her shirt pocket, and slung her headlamp around her neck. There were two snares, a radio collar, and a small bottle of skunk oil, the scent preferred for trapping cougars, in the back of the Jeep already. She had everything she needed.
She drove slowly up to the lake, the engine humming low over the hills. The less noise she made, the better. There was no telling how long the cougar would stick around for, but if he was out for a night hunt, she might get lucky.
As her headlights swung around the last bend, Annie was surprised to find the gate unlocked and wide open, and she pulled right up to the boathouse, killing the lights before they swept across the lake.
Daniel was waiting for her, sitting on the dock with his legs dangling over the edge, and he lifted a hand as she climbed out of the Jeep, but said nothing in greeting, so neither did she. She moved around to the back of the car, opened the hatch, and pulled her gear forward.
The last of the day’s light was settling down around the rim of the sky, and the lake was deeply indigo and smooth as glass.
In minutes, the stars would be out, and the forest, alive already with the song of crickets, would be pitch-black.
Annie pulled her headlamp over her head and flipped it on, bathing the inside of the Jeep with light, then loaded a dart into the tranquilizer gun and slid the snares over an arm before shutting the hatch and coming around to meet Daniel, still sitting on the dock with his hands pressed beneath his thighs.
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
He nodded.
“Where did the sound come from?”
Daniel raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare of her headlamp. “Can you lower that a little?”
“Sorry.” Annie set the snares at her feet and reached up to flip the light off. “Normally for night tracking I’d use a red filter, but I don’t have one with me. So, where’d you hear him? Was he close?”
“Straight across.”
He lifted an arm and pointed toward the south shore. Annie followed his finger to where the dark water met the even darker tree line in the distance.
The violet light on the lake had winked out in a sudden eclipse of night shadow, and trying to navigate the overgrown trail around the lake would be treacherous this late in the day, with or without a headlamp, not to mention noisy. Plus, the snares were heavy, and—
“I’ll take you,” Daniel said.
Annie turned to him. “What?”
“In my boat.”
He nodded toward the corner of the dock where a small skiff sat in the water, bobbing gently up and down.
She eyed him for a moment. It was as though he had read her mind just then, but was she really stupid enough to put herself in the middle of a remote lake at night with a man she didn’t know?
Annie studied him in the failing light. He looked somehow even younger than he had when they’d first met at the gate—perhaps because his face was cleaner than it had been then, his stubble shaved, and his skin free from the dirt that had smudged it that afternoon.
He wore the same torn jeans, but tonight’s shirt was a fraying, gray Mariners tee.
Again, Annie had the same overwhelming sense that she knew him from somewhere. The gnawing teeth of recognition were still chewing away at some forgotten memory in the back of her mind.
He dropped his gaze and Annie bent to grab the snares at her feet.
It was perhaps not the wisest idea, but he was watching her with the same sort of acute wariness she felt toward him, and in all likelihood he probably wanted to be out there alone with her on the water even less than she did.
“Okay,” she agreed.
Daniel rose to his feet without a word and offered a hand to help her onto the dock, but Annie handed him the tranquilizer gun and one of the snares instead, scrambling up after with the rest of the gear.
Daniel stepped down into the boat first and Annie climbed in after, taking her seat on the bench facing him as he untied the rope and nudged the dock with an oar, sliding them out into the lake.
He rowed swiftly and steadily, the silence only interrupted by the sound of water breaking over the oars.
His eyes stayed cast down at his lap as they left the boathouse behind, and Annie, catching herself staring at the coiling muscles in his arms as he rowed, turned to look at the dark woods instead.
A full moon was rising—broad and golden behind the trees.
She gazed at it as they moved stroke by stroke farther out into the lake.
The air was cooler up here, fragrant with the perfume of the pines that pressed in on all sides, and even as her eyes stayed trained on the forest, she felt Daniel watching her as he rowed.
They hadn’t said two sentences to each other yet, and Annie was starting to feel the silence as it swelled between them like an overinflated balloon.
She cleared her throat. “When we get close, I’ll flip on the headlamp and see if I can catch eyes. On the off chance I’m able to see and shoot him from the boat, I’ll collar him, but my guess is that he’ll see us coming and take off, so I’ll head into the woods and set up these traps before we go.”
The oars dipped beneath the water again, sliding through and emerging with a little splash.
“All right.”
Annie cleared her throat again and turned away. Fine. If he wanted silence, he could have it.
The southern woods were drawing near, rising up to meet them, and she squinted at the darkness beneath the trees, scanning for movement.
“How can I help?”
Annie turned in surprise, finding Daniel’s gaze fixed intently on her face.
She considered him for a moment, his expression unreadable in the darkness, then she pulled her headlamp off and placed it on the bench beside him.
“You know how to flip a switch?”
His chest rumbled in a deep laugh. “Yes.”
“Okay. Just turn the light on when I tell you and sweep it back and forth across the trees.”
He pulled the oars twice more through the water before he spoke again.
“You need to swear me in for the line of duty?”
She blinked at him and saw the hint of a smile on his lips. He was joking. This man was actually telling a joke.
“Okay.” She nodded seriously. “Do you solemnly swear to keep your mouth shut and not row away screaming if we see the cougar?”
He returned her nod. “I do.”
“Congratulations, that’s all there is to it.” She smiled as she turned back to watch the shore.
Daniel slowed the boat as they approached the southern rim of the lake, and it glided on its momentum to the bank, beaching itself quietly on the soft soil. Annie glanced up at the wall of pines before them. The trees were so tall here, a fortress of black shadow. They could hide anything.