Haven (12 page)

So she had probably been held nearby, at least as the crow flew. “Nearby” meaning within a three- to five-mile radius, most likely— and assuming she had escaped from where she had been held, and not during transport.

That still meant a lot of territory, virtually all of it incredibly rugged terrain.

Navarro ticked off the possibilities in his mind, detached because he had to be, because feeling too much for a victim’s life cut short was a sure route to burning out quickly and being unable to do his job.

Whoever she had been, the girl deserved justice, and whoever her killer was, he deserved…

Well, to Navarro’s way of thinking, he deserved a bullet in his brain, with no further human resources wasted on him. Navarro didn’t believe in rehabilitation, not when it came to twisted killers.

But Navarro wasn’t a cop, and he was no longer a soldier, so that sort of decision wasn’t his to make.

Not unless he was defending his own life, of course, or someone else’s, and that was always possible.

There were even ways to make it possible. If, that was, he was able to identify and find the killer.

“Not my job,” he muttered. Well, not exactly his job. His job was to find more victims, or find some other evidence that a serial killer was operating in this seemingly nice little town.

The town that felt rotten to him, somewhere down deep, and not just out here in the mountains.

“
SO YOU WERE
just hiking up here and found the body?” Police Chief Dan Maitland eyed the tall man standing with him several yards away from where his small forensics team worked over remains that could hardly be called a body.

“That’s right.”

“A fair bit off the path, weren’t you?”

“I like to explore. Paths are there because the exploring’s already been done.”

“Dangerous in these parts, to wander off on your own.”

Navarro’s wide shoulders lifted and fell in a faint shrug. “I’m no
novice when it comes to hiking in remote areas. I’ve a good sense of direction plus a compass, and picked up a map of the area yesterday to study before I set out. Besides, I know how to live off the land, and I always hike with enough supplies and equipment to see me through a week or more if necessary. Just in case.”

“Boy Scout?”

“Military.”

Well, that explains a lot.
It explained how the man was able to carry the obviously loaded backpack now at his feet with a deceptive ease. It explained the way he walked and the way he stood. It even explained the crisp report he had offered when he’d turned up at the Baron Hollow Police Department nearly an hour before.

He hadn’t wasted words, and he hadn’t seemed particularly disturbed by his grisly discovery. And he had led them back here without taking a single wrong turn, which would not have been an easy thing even for a hiker with years of experience in these woods.

I’d never have pegged this guy as a writer.
Not that Maitland had ever met one before, not a book writer anyway, so for all he knew they all looked like recently ex–Special Forces guys who had played quarterback in college.

Maitland said, “So you weren’t planning to return to Rayburn House tonight?”

“Hadn’t made up my mind, to be honest. I let the innkeeper know I’d be coming and going, out here as well as in town, so they gave me one of the ground-floor rooms with its own entrance. That way I won’t disturb any of the other guests no matter how late I’m out or how early I come back.” He paused, then added, “With storms forecast most afternoons for the next week or so, I decided to get in
some hiking before the weather got temperamental. I wanted to get a solid feel for the area. Lot of stories attached to these woods.”

“Lot of tragedies,” Maitland said. He hesitated, then added, “Not everybody is happy about a writer nosing around looking under rocks. In case you weren’t warned about that.”

“I was.” Navarro smiled faintly. “When you write fiction, nobody much cares how many rocks you turn over; when you write nonfiction, people tend to get a little more nervous.”

“Is that why you use a pen name? And why there’s no photo of you on the books?”

“Not really. More for my own privacy than anything else. As a general rule, writers don’t like celebrity. So Colin Sheridan gets all the fan mail—and the occasional threat—and I don’t have to listen to long, drawn-out stories on airplanes from wannabe writers.”

“Threats?”

“There have been a few along the way, when I was writing about something controversial. Goes with the job.”

“I guess everybody has stuff hidden under rocks they’d rather stayed there.”

“It’s human nature,” Navarro agreed. “But this time around I’m more interested in older history, in legends and local mythology, and the kinds of stories I’ve dug up so far here in the South usually aren’t much of a threat to the living.”

Maitland reached up to wipe away a trickle of sweat from his brow, and the gesture prompted by the usual oppressive June heat also prompted a thought. “Still, I’d be careful if I were you. Here in Baron Hollow, I mean. Many of the families in the area have been here since this place was nothing more than a footpath through the
mountains, and with families like that, old secrets can sting even after generations.”

Navarro studied him for a moment, head slightly tilted, then said, “I do my best never to make enemies, Chief, especially when it’s needless. Baron Hollow has quite a history, most of it already well documented, and the ghost stories of Rayburn House
and
Baron Hollow are already well-known enough to draw tourists.”

“And ghost hunters,” Maitland said rather sourly. “Constant parade of them now that it’s the sort of show really popular on TV. So they come here. With boxes of equipment and cameras and a tendency to scare themselves silly when a gust of wind slams a door shut or century-old wood pops and cracks because the weather changes.”

“They give you trouble?”

“Not all of them, but a few. I can hardly send them packing when they aren’t breaking any laws
and
they bring some much-needed tourist dollars to the community. And they’re mostly harmless, if incurably nosy.” He shrugged. “Still, a lot of the locals haven’t been very happy to see their homes show up on some of those cable programs, even in background shots. Enough so I was surprised when Emma agreed to your visit.”

Navarro offered the “official” version of events, even as he wondered about the real author and how persuasive Maggie had had to be in order to arrange for someone else to come in his place. Then again, perhaps she had simply doubled his book advance; Haven got what it needed, and being privately funded by a multibillionaire like John Garrett meant money was always on the table.

A lot of money, when necessary.

“When we spoke by phone months ago, I told Miss Rayburn I
wouldn’t make either Rayburn House or the town look ridiculous, and offered to let her read the manuscript before my editor sees it. That seemed to satisfy her. She’ll get approval of any photos I decide to include as well.”

“Uh-huh. And how does your editor feel about that?”

“I don’t talk much to my editor until a book’s done.” Navarro shrugged, hoping he wasn’t denigrating editors everywhere. “What she doesn’t know, we won’t argue about.”

“I guess when you’re as successful as you are, you get to call a lot of the shots.”

“A few, at least.” His gaze tracked across the several yards separating them from the remains he had found, and he changed the subject abruptly. In a sober tone, he asked, “Do you think there’s any chance of making an identification?”

“God knows. Unless my people find a skull, we won’t even have dental records to work with. All I can tell you is that she’s been out here at least a week, maybe longer.”

“She?” Navarro asked, reminding himself it was information he wasn’t likely to know, even as he focused his attention intensely on Maitland; he didn’t believe in mind control, but he had noticed that when he concentrated on the questions he was asking, most people tended to provide him with information. Even normally hard-nosed and closemouthed cops.

Whether it was part of his clairvoyance or something else, Navarro neither knew nor cared. He simply used it as another tool to do his job.

“According to my ME, enough of the pelvic bone is intact to determine sex. Definitely female, probably young. No fingerprints,
of course, and just about all the labs servicing law enforcement are so backed up on toxicological and DNA tests that it isn’t practical even to submit a sample except in an active homicide investigation. With what’s left here, I doubt very much Doc will be able to determine cause of death, and that means we play the odds and list the death as unexplained, probably accidental.”

He paused. “Or a potential homicide.”

“Homicide?” Navarro’s voice was mildly curious.

“Well, I have to consider it until I have evidence to the contrary. So we ship the remains to yet another backed-up lab in Chapel Hill. Might hear something back in a month. Or three. And even then the report will as likely as not tell us little more than we know right now.”
He shrugged, wondering with faint irritation why he was being so forthcoming with this stranger. “We’ll go through the motions, do what we can to try for an ID, but we have open files on dozens of missing people.”

One of Navarro’s dark brows lifted, giving his pleasant but unremarkable face a momentary and rather unsettling sharpness. “So many?”

“Over the last dozen years. And within a hundred-mile radius, most of it wilderness like this peppered with a few small mountain towns like Baron Hollow. Not a lot of residents to the acre, but plenty of tourists passing through, including a lot of campers or hikers who don’t exactly introduce themselves. And too many of them do something careless or just don’t understand how easy it is to get lost up here. So they do. And sometimes I doubt we even know about it, so the numbers of actual missing are probably higher.

“I was just looking at those missing-persons files no more than a week or so ago, because unresolved cases bug the hell out of me.” He shrugged. “We’re far enough off the Blue Ridge Parkway to provide hikers with the same thing you were looking for—unexplored territory. Mostly federal land, lots of it, and pretty damned unexplored. As in remote and dangerous. The terrain aside, there are bears, wild boar, at least a couple packs of feral dogs, and even sightings of big cats have been reported. Which is why I’m glad you have a rifle. And thanks, by the way, for stopping in when you got here to let me know that. Most don’t bother.”

“Like I said, I don’t see the sense in making useless enemies; registering a firearm with the local police is a reasonable and sensible precaution.” Not that he had mentioned his handgun, of course.

“True. So is carrying a letter from your law enforcement back home declaring that you can be trusted not to panic when a twig snaps and shoot another hiker—or yourself in the foot.”

Navarro smiled. “I assume you called him.”

“Naturally. You got a glowing recommendation.” The chief paused, then added dryly, “And I got a warning that when you dig, you tend to find things you weren’t looking for. Like this, I suppose.”

“It’s happened a few times, I’m afraid. Maybe just because I tend to explore off the beaten paths.”

Maitland grunted. “Well, too many of the usual hikers in these parts set out to explore without being as prepared as you obviously are.”

“Maybe I should put a chapter about that in my book,” Navarro offered wryly.

“God knows we put it in all the guidebooks and on the maps. People just figure it won’t happen to them.” The chief turned his own gaze toward the remains of the unidentified young woman, and
added slowly, “I don’t know, though. This one really doesn’t feel to me like a careless hiker.”

“Why not?”

“Two major reasons, the second one a lot more troubling than the first. Because she was apparently hiking alone, unusual for a woman, although we do get a few every year. And because there isn’t a scrap of clothing or equipment anywhere around her. Even out in the elements like this, we usually find some rotted cloth, the rubber or leather sole of a shoe or boot, part of a backpack. Something. But not this time. Not so much as a button off her shirt.” He shook his head, adding almost absently, “And if this was an accident, there should be, you know. There really should be.”

Emma didn’t sleep well. At all. Supper with Jessie had been strained, to say the least. Or, rather, Emma had been conscious of strain; her sister had appeared to be in a world of her own, and Emma had no idea how to join her there.

Or even if she wanted to.

More than once, she opened her mouth to at least attempt to talk about something serious, but in the end always stopped herself. The closest their conversation came to being serious was when they briefly discussed news of the poor woman found up on the mountain.

“I thought you said there hadn’t been any murders,” Jessie said abruptly.

“There haven’t been. I mean, obviously if that woman was killed…But it could have been an accident. In fact, it’s more likely than not. People die from falls in the mountains all the time. Well, often
enough that all the trails are posted and any hikers warned. We even leave brochures in the guest bedrooms warning them about the dangers.”

“Discreetly, I imagine. So as not to alarm the guests who
do
want to go hiking.”

Emma frowned at her. “We do what’s required of responsible innkeepers, Jessie.”

Jessie looked at her sister, also frowning. And then her frown cleared and she shook her head. “Sorry. I guess my mind was up there on the mountain. I’ve investigated a few suspicious deaths. They tend to stay with you.”

“Are you going to—”

But Jessie was shaking her head again. “Stick my nose in? I don’t think so. Vacation, remember?”

“I remember. I was wondering if you did.”

Jessie’s gaze slid away from Emma’s. “And wondering if I’m still fumbling my way through fuzzy memories? Well, I am.”

“No luck clearing anything up?”

“Afraid not.”

Emma opened her mouth to ask where Jessie was spending so many hours away from the inn, but then closed it. If Jessie wanted her to know, she’d tell her, after all.