Merciless Read online

  “So the partner is in jail?”

  Special Agent Flack blew a big pink bubble, then popped it loudly. “No. The dude was alibied. Happens all the time down there, cousin vouching for cousin, hey.” Laughter. “Nothin’ the tribal cops or nobody else could do.”

  Seemed too cut and dried. Too … easily dismissed.

  “Is there a reason to get this backstory on previous and unrelated cases, Agent Gunderson?”

  “Yes. I have a gut feeling some of those old cases are somehow related to this new one.”

  Silence. Except for Shay’s disgruntled sigh.

  “Here in the bureau, we’re less about gut feelings and hunches than we are about solid evidence,” Shenker said.

  I let his doubt bounce off me, but I couldn’t keep the blood from rushing to my face. “Even if solid evidence is ignored? Or dismissed?”

  Shenker stared at me thoughtfully. “No offense, Agent Gunderson, but you are new to the bureau. Why haven’t the tribal police picked up on it? If it’s so obvious to you?”

  Since I’d started working here five weeks ago, I had mostly observed. I asked questions only when I hadn’t been able to find the answers myself. I wasn’t the timid mouse in the corner, but neither was I the roaring lion. I’d backed down on a couple of occasions. But I would not back down on this. “Maybe due to budgetary and manpower constraints, the tribal cops are conditioned to look for the easiest answer first, in order to get the case resolved and move on to the next one. Those officers see a lot of bad shit. It’d be easy to get jaded. My dad dealt with them when he was Eagle River County sheriff. And yes, he complained about the tribal police not wanting to cooperate with any other law enforcement agencies. Not on any level. Something as simple as the tribal police refusing to fax paperwork meant he had to drive from Eagle Ridge to Eagle River. Half the time they’d have no record of the paperwork he’d requested.

  “And now after I’ve been in the tribal police headquarters? I see the same problem. To be perfectly blunt, the place is a disorganized pigsty, with who knows what files spread everywhere. So if there is a connection or pattern to these deaths, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the tribal cops didn’t catch the similarities because they wouldn’t know where the hell to find the information.”

  No one looked at me.

  Maybe I had gotten a little vehement, maybe it was a shot to my ego they wouldn’t listen. As the highest enlisted rank in my squad, my opinions always commanded attention. I didn’t expect special treatment as an agent, but I sure as hell hadn’t expected my observation to be discounted immediately.

  Director Shenker steepled his fingers, just like the FBI honchos on TV. “Tell you what, Special Agent Gunderson. I’ll let you put your money where your mouth is. I don’t know what important case files you think you saw carelessly strewn around the tribal police department, but I have it on good authority the arrest records, case reports, and official police logs are locked up tight in the tribal HQ archives department. Alongside other sensitive matters to members of the tribe, like family lineage, land succession, recorded oral histories, births, deaths, marriages. You know where that department is, right? Since you registered as a member of the tribe, what … eight months ago?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He tapped his fingers on his lips a couple of times. “Since we have meetings scheduled Monday, starting Tuesday, you’ll backtrack through all the police files—cases, arrest records, police logs, plus the obituaries, the official death records, media articles, and whatever else you can find to document your theory. Get me proof. Then I’ll listen to your gut.”

  I’d just been demoted to flunky.

  I’d suck it up, like a soldier, and do my job, because I’d done a lot worse things under orders than paw through musty file folders. I managed a tight smile. “Thank you, sir, for the opportunity to test my theories.”

  Director Shenker frowned, unsure if I was being sincere or sarcastic.

  I wasn’t quite sure myself. As much as I loathed the idea of being stuck underground like a mole, I’d prefer doing something that might make forward progress on this case, or reopening cold cases, rather than sitting through more courses on FBI procedures.

  Turnbull could handle the particulars of the current investigation. He’d be thrilled I wasn’t impeding his lone-wolf investigative prowess anyway. I sent him a sidelong glance, expecting to see his superior smirk.

  But he was pissed, as evidenced by the telltale clenching and flexing of his jaw.

  Screw him. Nothing I ever did made him happy.

  “Now, on to the next order of business,” the director said.

  I listened, ignoring Shay’s stealthy interest in the notes I jotted down.

  As soon as Shenker announced the break, I booked it to the one place Shay couldn’t follow me: the ladies’ room.

  Might make me a chickenshit, especially when I’m normally ready to fire—either a gun or my mouth—but I didn’t slide back into my chair until after the meeting reconvened.

  Director Shenker liked to hear himself talk. And he didn’t seem to notice I didn’t participate. He dismissed us—not for lunch, like I’d expected, but for the rest of the day. He stopped my rapid exit with a curt “Gunderson.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ll clear you to be at tribal headquarters archive department. You’ll be assigned on this task until further notice. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Turnbull, I’ll need you to stick around for a bit,” Shenker added, allowing me to make a clean getaway.

  5

  It was an indication of how crappy my morning had been that I was actually looking forward to my trip to the dreaded Hellmart—aka Walmart. As usual, the parking lot was jam-packed, and I practically had to park on the moon. But I gave myself props for remembering to remove my gun, since I was always way too temped to use it in the store.

  Once inside the building, I cut through the health and beauty aisles to reach the dog food. Might as well stock up. I zipped past the gun department, briefly stopping to price bullets.

  I spent so little time in the household-goods section of the store it took me a couple of rows to find it. And holy hell, the color choices for comforters fanned out before me like a rainbow. Couldn’t go wrong with navy blue. I piled a blanket, a comforter, a sheet set, and matching plaid curtains on top of all the other junk.

  Seemed Hope was always running out of diapers, so I detoured to the baby section and threw two packs into the cart. I couldn’t resist a new outfit for Poopy, a darling pair of denim overalls with glittery butterflies appliquéd on the butt.

  I skipped the food section and wished for the hundredth time Sophie knew how to text so she could send me the weekly grocery list since I was already here.

  My cell buzzed while I waited in line. I debated ignoring it, except I wouldn’t want to miss sexting with Dawson because I was avoiding Turnbull. The text wasn’t from either man, but from Hope, asking me to pick up diapers. One step ahead of ya, sis.

  Since I had no place to be, I stopped at Wendy’s for lunch. Afterward, on a whim, I pulled into Runnings, a ranch supply store. Seeing the display of hunting gear, I realized I didn’t have the mandatory neon orange article of clothing required for all hunters. It went against everything ingrained in me to wear something so blatantly obvious. I picked the least offensive item I could find: a knit hat. I tossed one in the cart for Dawson, too. Checking the prices of various calibers of bullets, I was surprised they were a buck less a box than at Walmart, so I scooped up a box of .308 for my rifle, a box of .270 for Dawson’s Remington bolt action, a box of .223 for my AR, and a box of .22 for target practice.

  Since I’m a sucker for western clothes, I detoured through the women’s clothing department and found two rhinestone shirts a little on the tacky side that I couldn’t live without.

  My last stop was the candy aisle. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I’m the only one in my family. Sophie loved old-fashi
oned horehound candy. Jake had a thing for lemon drops. Dawson could eat black licorice by the truckload, and Hope preferred maple nut goodies. I bought two packages of each and wondered what kind of candy Lex liked.

  I flashed back to Levi as a kid and how crazy he’d been for circus peanuts—those disgusting molded blobs of orange fluff. But I hesitated to throw in a package. Sometimes the simplest thing would start Hope on a crying jag. She’d gotten better in the last few months. At least now she and I could talk about Levi without either of us breaking down every time.

  I loaded everything into the truck and finally started for home. I’d managed to shove aside the morning’s events during my shopping foray, but as soon as Rapid City reflected in my taillights, those suppressed thoughts surfaced unbidden and unwanted. Dammit. I’d been in such a happy—albeit girly—place with the lunch and the shopping. Needing to stay out of my head, I cranked the country music and belted out tunes about cheating, drinking, and more drinking.

  Hope’s car was parked next to Sophie’s. I unloaded everything myself. After I dragged the last bag into the kitchen, I heard Sophie and Hope talking in the office. Or were they arguing?

  “She says she’s fine, but I know she ain’t telling me all of what the doctor said.”

  Another conversation about the perils of Penny Pretty Horses.

  “Well, it’s stupid that she doesn’t let you go to the doctor’s office with her,” Hope retorted. “You never should’ve let her get away with it the first time. Demand to go with her.”

  Sophie shook her finger. “Don’t be pretending you know what it’s like to have this kind of confrontation. You always back down from conflict. Always. And you’re tellin’ me to make demands of my daughter … who is dying?” She snorted. “You have no idea—”

  “I’ve lost a child, too,” Hope snapped.

  This discussion was headed into dangerous territory, so I cut in. “Hey, ladies, what’s going on?”

  Hope’s angry gaze flicked to me from behind our father’s desk. “Hey, Mercy. Sophie is leaving early to spend time with Penny.”

  Sophie gave Hope her back. Her eyes were hard, and her jaw was tight.

  “I know this is hard on you. Is there anything I can do, Sophie?”

  A beat passed. She shook her head, but a sly smile appeared. “Just don’t leave no more of your clothes in the kitchen, hey.”

  I would not blush.

  Sophie patted my arm as she walked past me, and I wanted to hug her. Normally, I squashed such impulses, but today, I gave in to it. Her familiar scent, a scent that hadn’t changed in thirty years—Jovan musk perfume, a faint whiff of cooking grease, laundry soap, and Lemon Pledge—enveloped me, and I sighed. Maybe I’d needed the hug more than she had. “Tell Penny hi from me.”

  “Will do.” She stepped back and straightened her coat. “I stripped the bedding in Hope’s old room, so it’s ready for the boy.” Her dark eyes pinned me. “You’d better be washing them sheets before you put ’em on the bed, ’cause who knows what kinda chemicals and junk they got on ’em in China.”

  I was happy to see the flash of the old bossy Sophie. “Yes, ma’am.”

  After Sophie left, without saying good-bye to Hope, my sister said, “Since Sophie feels entitled to interrupt me whenever the hell she wants because I have nothing important to do”—she sneered the last part—“I have about an hour and a half left of bookwork. Are you gonna be around to listen for Joy?”

  And despite the tension in the room, my day just got a whole lot brighter. “Sure. Do your thing.”

  I shoved the bedding in the washer. Then I snuck upstairs to peek at my niece, indisputably the cutest baby on the planet. Tempting, to pick her up and snuzzle her chubby cheeks just to hear that darling giggle. But Mama would whup my ass if I woke her. Plus, the kid was so sound asleep, she snored.

  I ditched my FBI duds for my favorite pair of Aura jeans and slipped on my new red-and-black thermal “burnout” western shirt dotted with what looked like bloody roses. In the living room, I opened my laptop and logged on.

  Feet propped on the coffee table, pen jammed in my mouth, I didn’t move beyond getting up to toss the bedding in the dryer when the cycle beeped. I hadn’t found much information, and I suspected that was because the two local Indian papers had only recently started uploading content to the Internet.

  Hope passed by the living room with a blithe, “Joy’s up.”

  “What? I’ve been listening, and I haven’t heard her.”

  “She turned over in her crib, which is a signal naptime is over.”

  Whoa. Hope had heard that all the way in Dad’s office? Talk about batlike senses. I shut down my computer and grabbed the clean bedding. I met Hope halfway up the staircase.

  “False alarm. Joy is still sacked out.” She pointed to the bundle in my arms. “Need help?”

  “Sure.”

  In the bedroom, I stretched the fitted sheet across the top corner of the mattress.

  Hope tucked her end of the sheet around the opposite corner on the bottom of the bed. “So … Dawson’s son is coming to stay for a while.”

  We each automatically moved to the other end of the bed, the motions familiar from doing this a hundred times. “I guess.”

  “Have you ever talked to Lex?”

  I shook my head. “Dawson talks to him in the afternoon when Lex gets home from school. It worries him that Lex is a latchkey kid.”

  Hope snapped out and smoothed the top sheet. “Will that be different when he’s living here?”

  “A lot of that is up in the air until Lex is enrolled in school.”

  “Middle school. God, Levi hated middle school. Kids were so mean. It was probably the only time I thought about pulling him out and homeschooling him, but Daddy wouldn’t let me. Said I wasn’t gonna coddle the boy and Levi had to learn to deal with adversity.”

  “That sounds like something Dad would say.”

  “He also told me that since I’d barely graduated high school, I had no business teaching.”

  I hugged the pillow to my chest instead of punching it. “Hope, did Dad say mean shit like that to you all the time?”

  She shrugged. “When I look back on it, usually he only said that stuff when I was being a brat about something. It made him crazy because he always wished I’d be more like you. He’d hoped for that up until the day he died.”

  My sister knew so many more facets of my father than I did. In the time I’d been home, I’d discovered not all of those facets put Dad in a good light.

  We adjusted the comforter and piled on the pillows. I stood on the step stool to take down the sheer baby-blue curtains with layers of ruffles and hung the navy-blue and hunter-green plaid panels.

  “It looks great, Mercy. No remnant of me in this room at all.” She smiled wistfully and balled up the curtains. “Levi would’ve loved to have another boy around.”

  I experienced that crushing sensation around my heart again. “Think Lex will push boundaries with me because I’m not his mother?”

  “Yes. But you’ve got the tough love down pat, sis. Levi called you a ball buster, but he knew you’d give it to him straight. You expected more out of him than I did.”

  Joy screeched and added a ma-ma-ma-ma-ma that sent Hope scurrying. When I heard my niece bouncing up and down with happiness at seeing her mama, I smiled. The baby girl’s name was apt; she’d brought such joy into all our lives.

  • • •

  Dawson and I were up well before the crack of dawn on Saturday, eager as two kids on Christmas morning for our first hunt together.

  He hadn’t had a chance to scout the ranch for the best place to find antelope. Although it’d been several years since I’d done any hunting, I figured animal behavior patterns probably hadn’t changed. I’d find antelope in the same place I had two decades ago.

  We opted to use the ATVs rather than drive a pickup. Antelope were smaller than deer, and we could each easily strap a carcass onto the back of an ATV a
nd haul it home before the meat spoiled.

  By first light, we’d arrived at my suggested starting point and left the machines parked at the bottom of a small hill. At a balmy forty-five degrees, it didn’t feel like November. The wind blew like a bitch, which was actually good—antelope have a finely tuned sense of smell. With the fastest animal land speed in North America, once antelope catch a whiff of human, all you see are those white butts bouncing away.

  Antelope prefer wide-open spaces, so I’d chosen a two-mile-long bowl-shaped draw with water at the bottom and great vantage points above. The grass was tall in some places, providing excellent cover and hidden resting points as we zigzagged over the terrain.

  I’d slung my H-S Precision .308 takedown rifle over my shoulder. As a kid I’d hated using a shoulder strap. I preferred to carry my gun as I belly crawled. As an adult I wanted both hands free.

  Dawson wasn’t one of those never-shut-up types of hunters. The ones who really don’t give a damn if they shoot anything. For them, securing a hunting license, slipping on camo clothes, and toting around a fancy gun were really just excuses to hang out with the guys and drink beer.

  I kept my binoculars trained on the area around the water, while he kept scanning the ridges and hidden dips in the vast landscape. There wasn’t a speck of snow on the ground, allowing the antelope to hide in plain sight. The dead grasses with hues ranging from the faded gold of dried corn stalks to the darkness of coffee grounds provided perfect camouflage. The one advantage we had? This time of year the males were slaves to their baser instincts and deep in rut. The bucks were constantly sniffing for females, which meant they were always on the move, looking for more action. And if they couldn’t fuck, then they’d lock horns with other horny males of their species, trying to keep them from fucking.

  Dawson tapped my arm and pointed.

  I refocused, making minute adjustments for the change in distance and my eyes. About twenty antelope were hunkered down, on the edge of a ridge. But they were a good fifteen hundred yards away.

  Over the next ten minutes, we watched the group, comprised of does, probably hiding from the amorous attentions of the bucks. But rest assured, our targets were very close by.