In the Barren Ground Read online

  “To see Elliot Novak.” Marcie walked back to the counter. “What can I get for you, Crash?”

  He stood there, looking at Tana. Then Marcie. Mindy got up, started coming over. Tana tensed. He did, too.

  “Why do you want to see Elliot?” he said, green eyes sparking into hers.

  Tana’s jaw tightened. “To talk to him.”

  Mindy reached them. “Hey, Crash.” She placed her hand on Crash’s arm, and he did not push her away. He kept his eyes locked with Tana’s. Animosity spewed through Tana. Mindy angled her head and gave a sickly sweet smile. “This lady cop is trying to tell me who I can sleep with, Crash.”

  He said nothing.

  Tana shoved her bowl aside, slapped her napkin on the table, pushed back her chair, and came to her feet. She grabbed her hat, jacket, gloves, and brushed past him as she made for the door.

  “No need to leave on my account,” he said.

  “Lost my appetite.” She yanked open the door, and let it swing shut behind her, slicing off warmth, light, the scent of food, sound of chatter. Him. Outside the air was sharp and awhirl with snow. She tugged on her gear as her dogs wiggled over. She crouched down to pet them.

  Everyone needs a tribe, Tana …

  She was trying, by God she was trying, but she seemed to be alienating herself at every turn.

  She inhaled deep, drinking in the cold, cold air, drawing comfort from her dogs. “Hey, guys,” she said softly, ruffling their fur with her mitts. “At least I got you two—” She stilled. Blood covered their muzzles.

  There was blood on her gloves.

  Fear, shock slammed through her. She glanced up, saw meat bones on the deck, near the stairs. Great, big, raw and bloody ones, pinking the snow where her dogs had been eating them.

  “Who gave you those?” She held Toyon’s head between her mitts. He was salivating, strings of drool hanging from his mouth. His body was trembling. Max’s, too.

  Oh, my, God.

  A screaming noise began inside her brain. Her heart began to pelt in her chest.

  “Come on.” She took them by the collars, and led them down the steps. Tana hurried with her animals through the blizzard toward the lights of the police station, panic rising, suffocating her chest. She took her dogs inside, brought them in front of the fire where she could examine them properly in the light. Her hands were shaking. Tears blurred her eyes.

  Max flopped onto his mat, his legs quivering. Toyon sat, listless, bloodstained saliva foaming at his mouth. As she peeled back his lips to check the color of his gums, glass tinkled behind her. A small windowpane shattered as a rock hit Rosalie’s desk and bounced onto the floor. Cold wind tunneled in through the broken window. Shadows darted in front of the light coming from the satellite-and-cell-tower communications enclosure outside.

  Her heart thumped. Fear kicked her. Triage. Dogs first. No vet in town. She had to do this herself, make them throw up. If she was lucky, it might get rid of whatever was poisoning them. But if it was rat poison, or something like that … they wouldn’t stand a chance. They could die a slow and horrible death over days.

  It had to have been in those bones. She needed to know what the poison was. Someone coming into the diner, or leaving the diner, could have poisoned her dogs.

  “Wait here!”

  She flung open the door and ran, head bent into the driving snow. She clumped up the stairs to the diner. The bones were gone. Just bloody spots remained. She bashed through the door in a flurry of flakes and wind. Everyone spun around. The place fell silent.

  “Who!” she yelled. “Who poisoned my dogs? Who gave them those bones!?” Her voice shook. Her arm trembled as she pointed to the window. Her eyes blurred with tears.

  “What’s on them? Marcie? Bones—who gave my dogs bones, I need to know what they ate, dammit!”

  Everyone just stared. Marcie looked frightened. Crash came to his feet. He gripped her arm hard.

  “Tana. Tana! Look at me. Focus.”

  Yes … Yes, focus.

  “Max and Toyon have been poisoned,” she said. “I … I don’t know with what.”

  “Go back to them. Now. Be with them.”

  He strode to the pharmacy section at the back of the building. “Peroxide, Marcie, you got hydrogen peroxide? I know you have charcoal. Tana—go! I’m coming.”

  She swore under her breath, face hot, and she raced out.

  CHAPTER 25

  Crash sat near the warm stove. At his feet Tana lay asleep on the dog mats with her arm over Max and Toyon as they slept.

  It was near midnight. The wind howled and outside the window snow shapes lurched and ducked and danced like spirits—bumping and ripping against the plastic that Crash had taped over the broken window.

  He wiped his brow, and realized his hand was trembling, just slightly. He held it out at arm’s length, stared at it, willing it still, reminded of the terrible heroin withdrawal. The methadone treatment. The rehab center.

  His past.

  It was leaking like a dark ink through the cracks—hairline fissures that this woman at his boots was feathering through him. He inhaled deeply as he studied her in repose, liking how the glowing embers behind the little smudged window in the iron stove cast a reddish glow on her dark-brown gloss of hair. It spilled around her now. She’d taken the hair tie out. Her gun belt and bullet-suppression vest had been removed and her top buttons undone. It made her look vulnerable. So young. Softly feminine.

  He’d found peroxide in the store, but had been forced to go wake Addy upstairs at the clinic for activated charcoal. He knew she used it for the not-so-occasional emergency overdoses in town. He’d helped Tana administer the peroxide to her dogs, showing her how much. They’d made them vomit on the porch outside the police station, and she’d sat there in the snow with them, tears streaming down her face and she’d repeated again, and again, “You can’t leave me … not now. Max … Toyon … Not now.”

  Crash had then administered the activated charcoal as per Addy’s hurried suggestions.

  Now they waited.

  If it was strychnine, or something in that vein, their efforts could prove useless. Her pets might yet succumb, and die, and the thought killed him. He could see how she needed these dogs.

  But their muscle tremors had quieted. The extreme salivation had stopped. They’d started drinking water. And now they slept.

  He watched the heave and exhale of the canine stomachs as they breathed, Tana’s hand rising and falling with the movement. No ring on her finger.

  No man in her life.

  His gaze moved down to her waist. A single mother-to-be. A cop on her own in more ways than the obvious. She had more spunk than most, too. He respected her, the way she’d handled him and demanded a flight out to WestMin on Sunday night. The way she’d stormed into the fray at the Red Moose, and how she’d tackled Jamie, shoving him to the ground, and cuffing him, but with compassion at the same time. She was strong, no question. Stubborn. But she’d been rattled, badly, by the assault on her animals. And yeah, he’d seen the rawness of fear in her eyes, in her face. He knew that kind of fear, too, that came when you were going to lose someone or something you loved, and were powerless against the forces coming to claim those lives from you.

  Unless this was an accident—unlikely, given the broken window, and the meat bones that had gone missing—whoever had done this to her had hit a home run. Tana Larsson had made enemies. Who, he wondered, hated her enough to do this? Damien and the gang from Wolverine Falls, because she’d confiscated their shipment of liquor?

  Guilt, unwanted and familiar, washed over Crash. He was behind the liquor shipment that could have put her in this position.

  Crow?

  Maybe, but Crow was more inclined to defend his home than come out on the attack.

  Not Jamie, although he’d seen Maximus latch onto Jamie’s leg outside the Red Moose. Perhaps someone else at the Red Moose had seen it, too, and taken offense?

  As he studied her features
, the way her mouth was open slightly as she breathed, his chest crunched, and a tendril of anger snaked around his heart. With the conflicting emotions came all sorts of complicated shit. He got up, paced, edgy again. Increasingly so. He needed to leave. He was desperate to leave, yet unable to abandon her like this.

  “Has anything like this happened in town before?”

  He jumped at the sound of her voice, spun around.

  “Pet poisonings,” she said. She was up on her elbow, hair falling in a soft and distractingly feminine frame around her face. Her eyes were large, fathomless hollows in this light. A strange kind of longing filled him, something quite apart from desire, yet totally a part of it. He shook his head.

  “Not that I know.”

  She weighed him. “How did you know?” she said. “How did you know how to treat my dogs?”

  “I had one—a dog,” he said, before he could catch himself from wading in further. “He was a Lab who ate everything, and one day he got into some toxic shit.”

  Her gaze locked with his. “When?”

  “Another life,” he said quietly. “When I was married.”

  Asshole. What in the hell do you think you are doing …

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. She was profiling him, trying to understand whether she could trust him—he could read it all in her face. And he wondered just how rounded a picture of him she now held in her mind. How true, or how false. And did he care? To her credit, she decided not to push him, sensing, perhaps, that this was a big revelation for him. And that a more gentle cracking of his balls might yield better results. She was a good cop. She had the instincts. She could have a long career road ahead if she didn’t get too jaded, or if this place and the oddity of her situation here didn’t break her first. And there was the baby thing.

  He’d do best to distance himself from her, but it was too late for that now.

  She turned and ruffled Toyon’s ear softly, her eyes filling again, and he wanted to touch her, hold her, kind of bury himself in the puppy pile on the dog beds in front of the fire. Cuddle her and the dogs, all together, close, which was just insane. He dragged his hand over his hair, tension crackling under his skin.

  A memory, sharp and hurtful, knifed through him—him lying with Leah, baby Gracie and the new pup between them, the smile on Leah’s face.

  And as if reading his mind, she said, quietly, “Kids?”

  He walked to the window, examined the plastic he’d affixed to the pane with duct tape, his heart beating a sudden tattoo in his chest. He heard her opening the stove door, clunking logs into the fire, stoking it, closing the door.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “A daughter.” And an unborn child. Also a baby girl.

  “How old?”

  “She’s twelve now.” The other one is dead. I could have saved her.

  Silence.

  He turned to judge her reaction. A strange intensity crackled in her eyes. He knew she had to be thinking of what he’d said to her at Crow’s ranch. She had to be thinking of her own baby. Crash returned to the fire, reseated himself, bent down to stroke Max.

  “Where is she now—your daughter?” Tana said.

  “Estranged. She and her mother moved to New York, last I knew.”

  “What happened?”

  Shit, Crash, how’d you get here—this place you never wanted to be again, talking about it? Caring what this young woman with a whole future in front of her thinks of you and your wrecked past?

  Wind howled, sifting between the houses, rattling at windows and locks, sneaking into any unattended gap, curling into the warmth of homes and touching those who slept.

  Eaves moaned. The whole building seemed to creak.

  He gave a snort and grinned suddenly. His fallback—his mask going up. He was good at masks. Too good. And he liked them. He’d made a living wearing them. It had cost him his old family, and at the time he hadn’t been able to dig deep enough to care before they were gone.

  “I could do with a cup of joe,” he said. “Want some coffee?” He surged to his feet, made for the small kitchenette.

  “Nice try, O’Halloran.”

  He stopped, turned. “Look, I don’t do past. Don’t talk about it, don’t like to think about it. A lot of folk come north to get away, leave it all behind, start new. I don’t know, maybe you did, too.”

  “I didn’t come north, I’m from the north. I was born in Yellowknife. And if you’re referring to that … incident on TwoDove’s farm, what you said, you’re wrong. But I’m guessing you don’t do sorry, either.”

  “Am I? Wrong?”

  Her gaze locked with his. She was fighting herself. He could see that—he was an acute and trained reader of the psyche. Body language, nuances, micro tells, things others didn’t even notice were all tricks of his past trade. It’s why he’d been so good, why he’d gone so deep, into the dark world of crime. Why he’d gotten so tangled between the rights and wrongs and the gray areas of justice. Why he wasn’t dead right now.

  And if he was a betting man—hell, he was a betting man—he’d bet his de Havilland Beaver she’d once been a kid like Mindy. Abused. Addicted.

  “It’s none of your business.” She got up, tucked in her shirt. “Thanks for your help here.”

  “And about Mindy and me—you’re the one who’s wrong there, Tana.” Why was he even bothering to explain—reiterate?

  She stilled tucking her shirt into her pants, continued to hold his gaze, wholly, fully, absorbing, sucking him down and deep and spiraling into places he did not want to go.

  “I found her frozen and barely conscious, blind drunk,” he said. “Late last spring, sleeping in that old shed on the river. Parents didn’t give a shit. So, I took her home, thawed her out, sobered her up. Fed her. And she told me she often slept there, had been doing it since she was eight years old.” He paused. “She tried to go home a few times. Or to a boyfriend, or others. And then I would find her again at the shed, because I knew to look. Others in town tried to help her but she has a screw-you attitude toward them that she doesn’t have with me.” He paused. “I’m simply giving her a place to stay. Read into it what you will, or what Mindy wills you to read into it. But that’s the truth of it. She has nowhere to go that’s safe.”

  She stared at him, things shifting in her features, a frown creasing into her brow. Both question and doubt in her eyes. She glanced at her sleeping dogs. Alive, for now. Her gaze went to the charcoal packet and bottle of peroxide on her desk, the dropper, the spoon, then to the plastic he’d taped over the shattered window.

  “A rescuer of women,” she said slowly. “And kids. And dogs.”

  He did not reply.

  “Yet you seem to hate it. So why do you do it?”

  He fought the answer, running a hundred lies through his brain, before being sucked back to that look in her eyes. And the truth.

  “Because,” he said quietly. “I fucked up my own life.” I lost an unborn child of my own. I got the baby and mother into the line of fire, and did nothing to stop them from being killed. “I don’t want to give a shit, and usually I get by pretty well.”

  “But then someone comes along carrying a baby and you feel you’ve just got to interfere and tell them how to do their job? What are you not telling me, O’Halloran? What’s giving you such guilt?”

  He snorted. Yeah—she was profiling him alright, putting the jigsaw pieces together, getting close. Life in Twin Rivers was over for him the way he’d known it before she blew into town.

  “The name’s Cam,” he said.

  She blinked, then said, “Maybe I’ll just try ‘Crash’ for now.”

  He smiled.

  Her mouth curved in response. And it was a slam to his gut. The most sensual, provocative, personal thing he’d felt. And it scared the shit out of him. So he did the thing that came naturally—deflected, avoided, grinned. “So, want that coffee? Or tea, cocoa, something?” He moved toward the small kitchenette, turning his back to her as he spoke.

 
; “Tea,” she said. “Bags are in that cupboard above the coffeemaker.”

  He plugged in the kettle, got mugs down from the cabinet, relieved to have something physical to do with his hands.

  But by the time he’d made her tea, she was asleep again, curled up with her dogs. Passed out from stress, fatigue. Her condition, probably. Slowly he set her mug down on her desk, and sipped from his own.

  Leave, Crash, sneak out while you still can …

  But she lay there defenseless. In more ways than one. He couldn’t leave her like this—he was in to the hilt. And he wasn’t so sure he was sorry about that. Now that was the most scary thing of all.

  He took his complex soup of emotions, and walked slowly around the detachment office. It was warm inside now, the fire crackling at full capacity in the stove. With the storm howling outside, Tana and dogs curled in front of the flames, it made him think of his old life. Home and hearth as he’d once known it.

  He shucked his flannel shirt, hung it over the back of a chair, paced, looking around. It was primitive in here. Old computers, old phones. Old desks. The stove itself was quaint. This little police cabin in a remote fly-in town, it cut to the heart of policing, Mountie style. It reminded him of history, of the stories he’d read as a kid about the NorthWest Mounted Police fighting off the American whiskey traders, of why he’d wanted to become a cop himself, since he was about ten. Kind of ironic considering what he was doing now.

  As he opened the door to the interview room he wondered about Tana, why she’d become one.

  He stilled.

  A whiteboard ran the back length of the wall. It was covered in autopsy photos, head shots, names, arrows, lines. Details of the wolf maulings. His pulse quickened. She was linking the attacks. What the? He stepped inside, made slowly for the board, a cold, inky feeling sinking through him.

  There, top left, was his own name under “Persons of Interest.”