“I was hoping you could answer some questions for me. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get some details. You know, fill in the gaps in the story.”

On the other hand, there was always the grim possibility that she never stopped talking. She had been talking to the mule when he had first brought her up in the cross hairs of the Leupold 10X scope.

“Quinn told me you didn’t come across the body until two days after the fact, but I was wondering if you might have heard anything or seen anything that day she was shot?”

The images flashed before his eyes-darkness, moonlight, the woman running. Suddenly blind to his surroundings, he stumbled on the trail and jerked himself back to the present, cursing himself mentally and cursing the woman. He could hear her ragged breathing, roaring in his ears as if it were coming over loudspeakers. He could hear the dogs. His heart pumped hard in his chest.

“… Anything might be helpful. I just need to know-”

“I don’t know!” he screamed, wheeling around so fast he frightened the horse. The gelding spooked and, wide-eyed, jerked back against the reins. Del ignored him. His gaze was hard on the blond woman, a corpse sitting in his saddle with a ragged, gory hole blown through her chest so that he could see straight through her, halfway to the Spanish Peaks. “I don’t wanna know what happened to you! I don’t wanna know about the tigers! Leave me alone! Leave me alone or I’ll leave you for the dog-boys, damn you!”

In a blink, the corpse was gone and the new woman was staring at him as moon-eyed as the horse, her face chalk white.

“L-Lucy,” she stammered weakly. “Her name was Lucy. I’m Mari.”

Del jerked around, ashamed and embarrassed, and kept on walking. This was why he stayed at the summer camp. He couldn’t be around people. They broke his concentration, snapped it like a thin rubber band, and then everything in his head came apart, the jagged fragments exploded outward, bright and dark and bloody. Beneath the metal plate, his brain began to throb.

The sky rumbled overhead and rain began to fall.

Mari didn’t say another word on the ride to his cabin. Del Rafferty had told her to begin with that he would radio for someone to come and get her. After his little break from reality, she could only hope it wouldn’t take that somebody too long to get up here. His mind obviously wasn’t firing on all cylinders. It would have been nice if someone had seen fit to tell her that right from the start. Of course, Quinn hadn’t believed she would find the man, and J.D. had warned her off-twice-which would have been enough in his mind. He probably couldn’t conceive of anyone going against his high-handed dictates.

The camp finally came into sight through the branches of the pine trees. A small cabin, complete with outhouse, a three-sided shed, and a corral with four horses in it. A trio of dogs raced out to meet them, barking, baying, yipping with excitement as they dashed around the horse and their master. Rafferty ignored them. He tied the horse to a hitching rail and went into the cabin without so much as glancing at Mari.

The rain came a little harder. Mari slid down off the gelding and darted for the shelter of the cabin before the man could lock her out. As she reached for the door-knob, she turned her head casually to the left and came face-to-face with a rattlesnake.

A scream ripped from her throat and she threw herself back, clutching at her heart. The snake sat coiled and poised to strike inside a box constructed of a wood frame covered with two layers of chicken wire. The cage was one foot square and nailed to the wall of the cabin at head height half a foot away from the door. The snake looked big enough to wrap itself around its prison several times over. It was as thick as her wrist, tan and brown and black with elliptical eyes as bright and shiny as jet beads. It flicked its tongue at her, its tail quivering.

What kind of lunatic kept something like that nailed to the side of his house?

The door swung open and Del Rafferty glared at her. “Leave my snake alone. Get in here where I can see you.”

He grabbed ahold of her wrist and pulled her into the cabin, jerking her past the snake so quickly that she had no time to worry about the thing striking her.

The cabin consisted of just one large room. There was a kitchen area with a one-burner wood stove, a tiny refrigerator, a crude table with two chairs. Open shelves were stocked with necessities. Canned foods, condiments, canisters of sugar and flour, cans of Dr Pepper. There was a sink with a pump-action faucet. The rest of the cabin was taken up by an old couch, a narrow, neatly made iron bed, and a dozen or more rifles, cleaned and polished and lined up in racks along the end wall.

Mari stared at the arsenal, jaw slack. The guns were all huge and deadly looking, some with scopes of exotic size and shape. Del Rafferty slipped the one he’d shot at her with off his shoulder and went about the business of unloading it and wiping it down, completely ignoring her as he did so. She thought of the way he’d fired at her, never offering so much as a word of apology afterward. She thought of Lucy riding into that same clearing.

Sheffield claimed he hadn’t seen her. Had Del Rafferty?

She backed away from him, her gaze locked on the scar that disfigured his jaw. The backs of her knees hit the edge of a kitchen chair, and she sat down abruptly, her hand landing on the tabletop, sending a hunting knife skittering.

Her stomach rolled over like a dead dog as she turned and, for the first time, took in the knives neatly lined up beside a sharpening stone and a can of 3-In-One oil. Del walked straight up to her, picked up the buck knife with its wide, vicious blade, and set it out of her reach, as if he thought she might somehow spoil its edge just by touching it. Her heart slid down from her tonsils to the base of her throat.

He called the Stars and Bars on a radio tucked among the condiments on the small kitchen counter. His only words on making contact were “Get up here. There’s a woman. I want her gone.” Then he went out to tend to his horse, leaving Mari alone with her imagination.

It took J.D. an hour to reach the camp. An hour in the cab of his truck, lurching up the side of the mountain on the old logging trail, a torrential downpour obscuring his vision to a watery blur and turning the trail into a quagmire. The old truck slid and skidded, bounced and jolted, rattling J.D.’s temper with every bump. By the time he climbed out of the mud-splattered 4X4, he was fit to wring somebody’s neck. Del hadn’t named names, but there was little doubt in J.D.’s mind that the woman plaguing his uncle’s solitary existence was Mary Lee.

Del’s hounds came running through the puddles, baying. Zip jumped out of the truck bed with a bark of welcome for his pals. The four dogs trotted around the pickup, sniffing and peeing on the tires. The rain had moved on to the other side of the Absarokas, on toward the Beartooth range, leaving everything dripping, glistening, fragrant. A million bugs filled the air, and the birds sang sweet spring songs.

All J.D. noticed was the mud that sucked at his boots as he stomped across the yard toward the cabin. When he got back home, they would be inoculating steers and heifers up to their asses in muck. On the up side, he could put off changing the irrigation dams to the hay ground for another day or two. He would give that job to Tucker and let Chaske get a start on trimming and shoeing the cow horses while he drove into New Eden to meet with the banker about the Flying K deal. The plans and schemes and worries zoomed around in his head like the swallows swooping through the air to feast on the post-rain insect swarms.

Del appeared out of the shadows of the woodshed looking pale and angry. His forehead was banded with lines of tension. The scar on his jaw jerked his mouth down at the corner.