Chapter One:
The Second Friday in December. Morning.
I sat across the visitor’s table and stared at AJ. The inmates' orange Multnomah County jumpsuit complemented his light-brown skin. Slants of morning light broke through a narrow window near the ceiling, promising a beautiful, clear December day in the Pacific Northwest. Days like this during winter were such a rarity that locals would flood outdoors to soak up the vitamin D they’d missed over the past months. Yet AJ was stuck inside.
I picked at a chip in the linoleum tabletop, my nails scraping the plywood underneath. “I saw your mug shot. It’s very flattering, so at least the media shows an excellent picture of you every ten minutes. The entire pro football league is likely jealous. You’ll be known as the guy with the awesome mug shot.”
I wanted to slap myself upside the head for saying something so stupid. He was in jail, charged with murder. He wouldn’t care if his mug shot looked like a professional headshot. He was trying to salvage what was left of his freedom and would worry about his career next.
AJ dropped his head onto his arms, which were folded on the table. “Help me.”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll check in on Troy every other day, and if you want, I can take Simon to my place. I don’t know if they’ll freeze your accounts, so last night, I paid all your bills two months in advance. I also moved money into Troy’s account.”
Troy was AJ’s seventeen-year-old brother, and Simon was AJ’s dog. And I was his girl Friday, a gig I did along with working part time at the online shopping department of my local grocery store. I’d become a professional private investigator nine months earlier and hadn’t yet built my reputation enough to find steady work.
Without looking up, AJ said, “No, Sam, help me prove my innocence. I need to know I have someone on my side, trying to get to the bottom of this.”
He lifted his head, projecting his fear and uncertainty with his watery gaze. The weight of it sat uncomfortably between my shoulders, pressing me into acceptance. I would not be a bystander in this travesty. At less than twenty-four hours in jail, he was already broken. Of course I was going to help.
“Don’t forget you have Lockett," I said. "He’s one of the best defense lawyers to date. I trust him with my life.” In fact, I had trusted Tyson Lockett with my life in the past, and he’d come through. I was thankful he’d been willing to take on AJ’s case.
“And I have you, right? You won’t abandon me now, will you?” he pled.
I blew out a slow breath, trying to steady my nerves and hide my own fear. I was out of my element in Portland. Working as a private investigator in my hometown had been easy. I knew the cops. I knew the locals. Working outside of Wind River would be a new ball game, a playing field where the rules might be the same but the refs were unknown and could call the plays differently.
I put a hand on his arm and squeezed. “I’ll do everything I can to help.”
He looked over his shoulder at the guard standing ten feet away. In a hushed voice, he said, “Watch your back.”
“You too.” The one fact I knew about the case was that AJ was innocent. What I didn’t know was if he’d been framed out of convenience or if he’d been a target too.
Six days earlier. Saturday.
Bang! The handgun jerked upward slightly as it ejected its payload.
“I’m hit!” Toby Wagonknecht, my IT guru, clutched his shoulder and dropped to his knees, bending forward in discomfort. The berries he’d picked moments before tumbled from his palm and onto the ground as he braced himself with both hands and groaned.
“It hurts.” He moaned and rocked back. “I hate getting shot. I knew I should have stayed home.”
I crossed the forest floor, my steps muffled by the fallen western hemlock needles.
“Be glad I shot you.” I stood beside him and tapped the fallen berries with the toe of a hiking boot. “If you’d eaten these, the gastrointestinal grief they would’ve given you would’ve been far worse.”
“You could have yelled a warning.” He gripped his shoulder, red oozing between his fingers, a shocking contrast against his neon-yellow T-shirt. It made me think of ketchup and mustard.
I pointed my gun at his shoulder. “I think maybe red paintballs were a poor decision. From far away, that looks like actual blood.”
“From up close, it hurts like hell.”
“Worse than actually being shot?” I asked, hoping to give him some perspective.
He looked at me, wincing and clutching his shoulder. “I’m too emotionally scarred to answer that question objectively. Real gun, paintball gun—they both hurt.” He moaned again. “I think I might need some chips or a burrito to distract me from the pain.”
I rolled my eyes. “You and food. It’s incredible you’re so thin.” Waifish almost.
He nodded toward something behind me. “Shoot her and ask her how it feels.”
“Whoa.” Precious came up beside me and swiped at the red oozing between Toby’s fingers and played with it like a kid does with glue. “I knew I should’ve put money on you getting shot first.” Precious, real name Erika Shurmann, was my best friend and sidekick.
I asked, “Who would you bet with? Because the odds would be wack if we all bet against each other."
“Leo.” She gestured behind herself as if he were standing right there, which he wasn’t.
The forest cloaked him—no telling where he was hiding. His Native American roots made him the favorite to come out of our work excursion unscathed. Leo had skills—aside from being one of Wind River’s finest police officers, with a level head in sketchy situations, he could also track and live off the land for days with nothing but a piece of flint and a knife.
“Oh, look at those red berries.” Precious stepped across Toby to reach for them.
He picked up his paintball gun and shot her in the butt.
“Yow! What did you do that for?” She spun toward him and smacked the gun out of his hand.
“Sam shot me when I was reaching for the berries. I thought that’s what we were supposed to do.”
I groaned and smacked a hand to my forehead. “Why did I think this was a good idea?” I said mostly to myself.
Then a tiny pine cone dropped in front of me. I looked up, and though the needles were thick and heavy and I couldn’t see anything between the branches, I sensed more than saw Leo’s presence.
I said to the tree, “You can come out. This was a bad idea. We can go back to camp and do… whatever.”
We were staying at Sol Duc Hot Springs and Lodge and had the cabins for one more night. I’d planned to bring my friends—who also happened to be my investigative team when cases I worked on went sideways—out to the forest to teach them survival skills. But my plan was stupid. Precious and Toby had no desire to develop their survival skills.
The hemlock shook, and a few more pine cones dropped around us. A second later, Leo fell from the sky, landing on his feet in a squat.
He slowly stood and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Your heart was in the right place.”
“That’s not going to keep us safe.”
Toby said, “I’m ready to go back to the cabin. They’re having a fish fry today.”
Precious oohed. “That sounds delicious. And I wouldn’t mind a dip in the hot springs. It might take the ache out of this.” She rubbed her backside while giving Toby a pointed look of anger.
He totally misread it. “Yeah, good idea. I can soak my shoulder.”
Another groan escaped me, and Leo chuckled.
“Guys, you forgot why we came here. It wasn’t for fish or hot springs,” I said.
Precious adjusted her headband and smoothed her platinum hair. “But those are bonuses to being out here with all the bugs and critters.”
How this woman spent one weekend a month sleeping in a tent while searching for Bigfoot was beyond me. When given a choice, she would pick room service and pampering over roughing it any day.
Leo cleared his throat. “The point is that all three of you have been victims of an assault. And Samantha feels responsible for you two when you help her on her cases. So maybe keep that in mind while we’re out here.”
Toby looked confused. “You didn’t shoot me, Sam.”
Precious said, “And you didn’t push me down the stairs.”
I looked at my two friends. “You both were injured because of my job. We’re very lucky that none of us had more serious injuries. We have to get better at protecting ourselves. We have to get better at listening to our instincts. We need self-defense skills.”
Precious shook her head. “But why here? I can take a self-defense course at the rec center.”
Leo said, “You’re part of the same Bigfoot research team that Tupi Whitehorse is on, yeah?”
She nodded.
“That takes you out into these Olympics once a month. Do you know how many people disappear in the woodlands every year? Around one thousand six hundred people since 2011. That’s an average of seventeen people a year. That may not sound like a lot, but those are the ones we know of, and of those that disappear, only a small percent are found.”
“Alive?” Toby asked.
“Or dead. But found.” He crossed his arms and gave them both a steady, pointed look.
Toby grimaced. “And I thought the dark web was a scary place.” He looked around the forest. “Now I have the creeps.”
I watched Precious’s face, seeing awareness dawn.
She said, “But I’m out there with a handful of others and Tupi.”
Leo shook his head. “You can’t always count on Tupi. He was saying at the last tribe meeting that he was stretched thin and might have to give up something.”
I put up a hand, palm out. “Hang on. Let’s just say this right now. You can’t ever count on anyone.” I pointed at Leo. “Pure luck that he saw me get kidnapped. As much as I’d love to know he or any of you will always have my back, that’s just not realistic.”
Leo sighed. “You’ve been hurt too many times already, and I haven’t been there to stop it.”
I looked at each of them in turn. “I never want to be in a position where we are counting on someone and our luck runs out. Do you get that?”
Toby and Precious nodded.
I said to Leo, “I absolutely hate having to call you when I’m in crisis. I aim to head crises off at the pass.”
“That would be awesome. But you know you can always—”
“Yes, I know.” I bumped my shoulder into his. “You’re only a call away.”
He winked as a smile played on his lips.
I blew out a sigh. So far, nothing about the trip was playing out like I’d planned, but I hoped this conversation would stick in their minds, and maybe we could try again another time.
I said, “So, a fish fry, huh?” and looked at my friends.
Toby rolled back his shoulders. “Actually, can we try one more time? I promise not to get distracted by the berries.”
I said, “Little red round berries on a thorny bush called devil’s club are…?”
Toby answered, “Not for human consumption.” He gave Precious’s backside a pointed look.
“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “Red berries bad. And since we’re out here, we might as well try this weird-ass game of hide-and-seek again.” She held up one finger. “But I’m gonna be honest. If fifteen minutes pass and I don’t see or hear any of you, I’m gonna freak out. We came into this mountain forest together, and we’re leaving together.”
I looked between Toby and Precious. “Are you sure?”
They both nodded.
“Okay, I’ll go back to the trailhead and wait seven minutes. Then I’ll come in and start searching. Precious, start your clock then.”
She smiled and nodded. “And let’s make a bet. How about the first person to get shot treats us to the fish fry.”
Toby pushed up off the ground. “Well, if we do that, then we might as well call it a day. We all know I’m gonna be the first hit.”
Precious guffawed. “Try being positive. Visualize an outcome where I get hit or maybe you get Sam first.”
“Or even me,” Leo said.
“Never gonna happen,” I said.
“As if,” Toby said.
“Delusional much?” Precious asked.
Leo tossed up his hands in frustration. “Okay, then. If I’m so good and you all are so bad, then maybe I should be the one hunting you three?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You should be.”
Toby groaned. “I’m definitely going to need time with Lady M after this.”
Lady M—Lady Marmalade—was a sugar glider and Toby’s emotional-support animal, which he’d gotten after being shot earlier in the year.
Precious studied Toby. “I picture you sitting in the bathtub, holding Lady M and crying, with paint on your body while you rock back and forth. Don’t do that. No matter what happens here today.”
Toby rolled his eyes and headed down a trail. He stopped long enough to say, “I’m getting a head start.”
“Oh,” said Precious, “me too.” With a dainty wave, she jogged down a different trail, her ponytail bouncing with each stride. She was dressed in camouflage yoga pants and a green T-shirt. I had to give her props for that.
Leo touched my arm to get my attention. “At least they’re on board.”
I nodded. “Yeah.” I bit my lip.
“But?”
I faced him and locked our gazes. “But I have this dreadful feeling that something big and bad is coming and I’m not going to be able to protect anyone.”
That feeling had been with me for more than two weeks, a foreboding I couldn’t shake. It was the reason we were there. I believed if a person could use their wits to survive in the woods, they could use them in other places too.
“Maybe your feeling is more from the fact that you’re taking on more cases and you know, logically, that they’re bound to get tougher.” Leo arched a brow in question.
“Maybe,” I said. But I didn’t actually believe that.
I’d grown up having to trust my instincts, and they were sounding alarm bells. The best way to describe this feeling was by using Shakespeare’s words: “Something wicked this way comes.”
