One Final Breath (Special Agent Ricki James Book 1) Read online

  What Eddie didn’t love was getting out of bed on a cold morning. But it was Thursday morning, and Wednesdays were Eddie’s night to spend at his father’s townhouse with its fancy kitchen that the man never actually used, and a large hot tub on the wide patio which he used a lot.

  Her ex-husband had lived in the Bay all his life except for the four years he’d attended the University of Washington to play football. His high school years as a jock had earned him the nickname of “Bear,” and it had stuck to this day.

  They were married their sophomore year in college, had Eddie their junior year, and were divorced seven years later. Bear had stayed in the Bay while she and Eddie had moved across the country so she could pursue her chosen career in the special investigative services of the National Park Service, and then with the US Marshals Service. She’d loved her work, and been good at it.

  Until that night a year ago on the docks of Seattle.

  It was the recurring dream she regularly had of that night, and the deep anger it always sparked in her, that had driven her out of bed and into the cold, misty morning. She needed to calm down and clear her head and a hard run was perfect for that. She couldn’t get back to sleep anyway.

  The dream had started about a month after she’d been released from the hospital. It was always the same, ending with her staring at her partner’s lifeless body before she was jolted awake, her breath caught in her throat and zero chance of getting any more sleep.

  It had been a routine prisoner transport, and they’d walked right into an ambush. Marie was dead, their prisoner was dead, and she should have been dead too. She had a scar running across her midriff to prove it.

  She knew the drill about what could happen after going through a traumatic event, so the nightmares were no surprise. She’d even been warned by a nurse at the hospital who’d dealt with PTSD patients before. So when the dreams had started, she’d dutifully taken herself off to a highly recommended psychiatrist, who’d insisted what she was feeling was all the same terror and helplessness she’d felt that night.

  Except it wasn’t that at all.

  That night replayed in detail in her sleep, and it forced her awake every time. But she didn’t feel afraid, or helpless. She felt anger, bordering on fury. She always told herself it was because she’d failed to protect her partner, that in the end, she hadn’t had Marie’s back. It had been another horrendous failure in her life. Even worse than the divorce because at least her ex-husband was still alive.

  But somehow accepting her truth that she hadn’t kept Marie from being killed didn’t seem to explain the deep-seated anger. Her gut told her that wasn’t it. Or at least not all of it.

  Three months ago she’d taken matters into her own hands by cancelling all her sessions with the shrink and running the boiling emotion off. It worked better than trying to convince Dr. Meaks that he was putting her into a pigeonhole that simply didn’t fit.

  The trouble was she didn’t know what did fit. Marie had been her best friend ever since they’d been thrown together as roommates in their college dorm. They’d celebrated, or commiserated, every big event in each other’s lives. Her marriage, the birth of her son, her divorce, Marie’s engagement.

  She’d left her investigating job with the park service to join Marie at the US Marshals district office in Seattle, right after Marie had become engaged to another agent. Except Josh worked for their rival, the much-disliked FBI. She’d enjoyed teasing her best friend about it every chance she got, always laughing at Marie’s staunch defense of her fiancé.

  Now all those moments were gone like smoke in the wind. And she still mourned their loss.

  The long driveway leading up to the St. Armand, the only resort hotel in the area, loomed ahead. It marked the three-mile point from where she’d parked her jeep in the alley behind her main source of income, a small diner she’d named the Sunny Side Up. It seemed appropriate for a place that started the day with a breakfast special of eggs and ham and sat next to a rainforest.

  Once she reached the drive, she jogged in place and glanced at her wristwatch. She wanted a longer run, but she needed to get back to the diner. She and the cook took turns opening it up, and today was her day. Wishing she had time to run up to the hotel and linger over a cup of coffee while admiring a panoramic view of the bay, she sighed when the need to pay bills won out.

  Just yesterday she’d received a letter from the nursing home taking care of her mom, outlining all the reasons why they were increasing their rate. Seeing the 10 percent jump in the monthly cost had spawned an immediate headache. Where was she going to find that extra money? So far she’d come up blank, but she was going to have to figure it out. And quick.

  Turning around, Ricki started back down the road, reaching the outskirts of town twenty minutes later. The cluster of small businesses on this side of Brewer included Alice’s Market, a small mom-and-pop grocery store that had been there as long as Ricki could remember. A man with a long beard and a beat-up heavy plaid jacket with a scruffy wool collar sat on the curb out front. He peered at Ricki from underneath a battered baseball cap.

  “Hey, Agent James. Looks like you still got that dog.”

  Ricki smiled and lifted a hand in greeting. Old Chip was a regular at her diner and a personal favorite of hers since she’d known him most of her life. He’d been the janitor at the local school all the years she’d been there, finally retiring when the arthritis in his back made it too painful for him to push a broom. Now he lived in a small cabin out in the woods, making the trek into town every few days to have breakfast, and then usually hanging around for lunch as well, to hear every morsel of the latest gossip making the rounds.

  “I’m not an agent anymore, Chip. And yeah. We still have the dog. I can’t find his owner and he doesn’t seem inclined to leave.” Not that she’d given it all that much of a try. But she had put up a poster or two. She figured in a place as small as the Bay, that should be good enough.

  Chip dropped his chin to his chest and peered up at her from beneath shaggy brows. “Guess he’s yours now. Are you going to be opening soon?”

  “You come on by anytime. I’ll have a cup of coffee waiting for you.”

  “When’s Anchorman getting in?”

  Ricki stopped jogging in place and put her hands on her hips. Anchorman was the former Marine who, after twenty years of service, had traded his rifle for a spatula and become the cook at the Sunny Side Up. Her blue eyes narrowed as she raised an eyebrow at the elderly man. “Are you saying you don’t want my coffee?”

  He raised a scraggly brow right back at her. “It’s like tar, Agent James. And not in a good way like the tar we drank in the navy. Yours is bad tar. And your food is always burnt a bit.”

  Ricki glared at him. One time. She’d been forced to cook the breakfast shift one time seven months ago, and no one would let her forget it. So she wasn’t as good in the kitchen as her mom. The only thing she knew how to cook that didn’t come frozen in a package was a batter-fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Put some salty potato chips inside it and you had the perfect bite.

  But her customers preferred a bit more variety.

  Fortunately, Anchorman was an excellent cook. That was the simple truth, so Old Chip was right all the way around. Her coffee not only looked like tar—it tasted like it too. And, like he’d put so bluntly, in a very bad way.

  “Then you’ll have to wait an hour or so,” Ricki said with exaggerated politeness.

  She started moving again, ignoring Chip when he yelled, “That’s okay,” at her back.

  So all right, she groused to herself. She couldn’t cook. And owning a diner might seem a bit strange for someone who was a complete failure in the kitchen, but she really did love the Sunny Side Up.

  When you lived in a small town with limited career options, you grabbed on to whatever worked, and her little diner was doing pretty well. It was gradually becoming a favorite of locals and tourists alike.

  She was two blocks away
from her jeep and a change of dry clothes when her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of the side pocket of her windbreaker and glanced at the caller ID. Someone was getting an early start to his day.

  “Hi. What’s up?”

  The deep voice on the other end didn’t bother with a greeting. “I need you to get out to the Elkhorn campground. We’ll meet you there.”

  Ricki frowned. The Elkhorn campground was on the state land bordering Olympic National Park. “Who’s ‘we’? And I need to open the diner. I can be there in a couple of hours—”

  The voice on the other end cut her off. “I mean now, Ricki. Consider it a consult job. I’ll see you in thirty minutes.”

  Thirty minutes? Well, shit.

  “And Ricki? Bring your gun.”

  When the connection went dead, Ricki held the phone out and stared at it.

  Chapter 2

  “Anyone care to explain why I’m trampling through the local foliage before I’ve had a cup of coffee?” When her question went unanswered, Ricki looked over her left shoulder and aimed a pointed stare at the man walking along behind her.

  His craggy features didn’t arrange themselves into his usual easy smile, or even into the sideways, half-annoyed look he favored whenever she voiced a complaint. Anything would have been better than the carefully neutral expression he was doggedly keeping in place.

  What was going on? Whatever it was, it had the supervisor of the park’s law enforcement unit out at the crack of dawn. And he was dragging her along with him.

  She shook both arms, sending droplets of water spraying in all directions. It was cold, it was wet, and it was damn early for a hike in the mountains. She really, really did not need this right now.

  She should be sitting at the long counter in her diner going over the daily food order and munching on a fresh donut dusted with powdered sugar. Okay, so she wasn’t a fan of donuts, but there were a hundred other things she needed to do instead of walking down a deserted trail in a national park before eight in the morning.

  There was that letter from the nursing home, not to mention the payments she had to juggle to meet her own expenses. Right now her bank account could not handle both. It had been an early winter, and a long one. The high-traffic tourist months had cut off early last fall, so money was tight. She couldn’t afford to lose even one morning of sales.

  The man who was the object of her sour thoughts topped Ricki’s five-foot-eight frame by another four inches. The thick hair falling in a wave across his forehead was no longer the same jet black he’d had for most of her life, but now was peppered with white and several shades of gray.

  Cyrus McCormick had been part of the law enforcement unit at Olympic National Park for more than three decades. He’d worked his way up to supervisor, commanding a dozen other rangers who were responsible for protecting hundreds of thousands of acres inside the park, as well as for the safety of the millions of visitors every year.

  Quiet and known for always being fair with his staff, Cyrus was well liked by all the park employees and was definitely Ricki’s favorite cop. But then there was no big surprise there. He was her uncle.

  When she continued to stare at him, Cyrus stuck his large hands into the pockets of his well-worn leather bomber jacket. The badge of the park ranger’s law enforcement unit pinned to its front flashed an occasional glint of gold in the early-morning light.

  “I’ve never known you to whine about taking a hike, Ricki.”

  Her eyebrows snapped together. She didn’t whine. She never whined, and her uncle damn well knew it. Knowing he was trying to distract her from the wet and the cold, and mostly from asking any more questions, she smoothed her features out and ignored the deliberate insult.

  She shrugged, sending her Uncle Cy a silent message that she wasn’t taking his bait, before flipping up the collar of her coat. It was lined with sheep’s wool, which was the reason she’d purchased it ten years before and why it remained an essential piece of her wardrobe. That and purchasing a new one was a luxury she couldn’t afford at the moment.

  Thankfully, her trusty go-to coat still kept her warm through the Washington winters. It might have been a month into spring according to the calendar, but a last-minute near-blizzard was not unheard of in these mountains. Luckily the sky was starting to clear up, but whatever sun was going to make a showing hadn’t been around long enough yet to warm up the air.

  Once the trail along the Dosewallips River had evened out a bit, Ricki risked a turned ankle from a hidden rock jutting out of the dirt to spin around so she was walking backwards. “Since I’m being paid to be a consultant, it would be helpful if I knew what I was consulting on. What are we doing out here that required me to bring my gun along?”

  She kept moving as she patiently waited for an answer, but all she got was silence and another shake of her uncle’s head. Fine. If they wanted to pay her to look over the local plant life, then that was what she’d do. She’d even shoot it, if that was why she’d been told to bring her gun along.

  Facing forward again, she pointedly ignored her uncle and kept trailing after the man in front of her. Tommy Parmer was one of the many rangers stationed at the park, and one of the reasons this whole hike was a mystery. He spent his days keeping the natural beauty of the forest bruised as little as possible by the annual hoard of human invaders, as well as giving lectures on the ecosystem of a rainforest. He wasn’t a member of the enforcement unit, so what was he doing here?

  “It won’t be long now,” Tommy called out, but the puppy-dog friendly ranger didn’t look back at her. Instead, he kept his gaze straight ahead and his feet moving forward.

  Staring at his jacketless back, she thought he needed to keep up a brisk pace to ward off the cold. She rolled her eyes when a visible shiver ran across his shoulders and down his arms. Not wearing a jacket against the frigid early-morning air wasn’t Tommy’s style. He usually saved that kind of tough, macho act for his favorite extreme sport—skydiving.

  At twenty-four, the young ranger was ten years behind Ricki. His blond hair and youthful face made him look more like a surfer than a park ranger. Except he was missing the tan. Not much chance to get one of those when you spent your days in the Olympic Mountains with their perpetually mist-shrouded tops and the two hundred inches of rain that fell on the park every year.

  Ricki let out an audible groan when Tommy turned right and headed up the Lake Crescent trailhead. She’d just assumed they would be sticking to the river trail that continued toward the campgrounds that were part of the ranger’s regular route.

  “Oh great,” she grumbled under her breath, ignoring the solid poke in her back from her Uncle Cy. She didn’t care what he thought. Her grouching was completely justified. And if he poked at her one more time, she just might turn around and shoot him instead of the local plant life. In a spot that wasn’t lethal, of course, but would sting enough to get her point across.

  She was already wet, because you couldn’t hike the back trails in the morning without getting wet, and now they were headed up to Lake Constance on one of the most difficult trails in the park. She’d made the hike several times over the years but was in no mood to take it on today. She had a diner to run, and wasn’t too keen on leaving it to Anchorman to finish opening it up.

  When she’d called him to let him know she was needed on an emergency out at the park, his voice had had the rough, gravelly sound of someone who’d spent the previous evening with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And when he’d met her in the alley where her jeep was parked, he’d looked it too. The man hadn’t said a word, just stomped right by her and disappeared into the diner, only to reappear ten seconds later and toss a bagel out the back door in her general direction. She’d been forced to leap to the side in order to snag it with a one-handed catch.

  “Eat that,” he’d growled before calling for Corby and slamming the door shut behind the two of them with a loud bang.

  “No dogs in the kitchen,” she’d yelled after him, not that it
had done any good. She wished he’d thrown out a thermos of black coffee to go with the bagel, but no such luck.

  Adding to what had rapidly turned into a very aggravating morning, she still hadn’t heard a reason why her presence was required on this little jaunt through the woods, forcing her to leave her livelihood in the hands of a former Marine with a hangover.

  Doing her best to keep her irritation in check, mostly to spare herself from another of her uncle’s insults, she took a look around to get an idea of how far they still had to go to reach the lake. They’d already left the bottom section of the trail and started the mostly uphill hike toward the deepest body of water inside the park. The steep path took a fairly direct route, but it was a potentially leg-breaking climb to get there.

  The trail rose steadily, flanked by rows of boulders on both sides, with small breaks between the large rocks where shallow patches of young growth had taken hold. The area they were passing through now had been scorched by a wildfire years before, and evidence of the blaze was everywhere.

  Charred trees littered the ground, their dark gray and ash white clashing with the varied greens of the moss-covered rocks and young trees that had sprouted up to take their place.

  Life and death and then life again, played out in a never-ending dance on the forest floor. Since she’d grown up in the shadow of the park, Ricki knew the cycle well and had learned to respect it. She expected the same from anyone else who set foot inside it.

  “How’d this get started?”

  The question came from the fourth member of their little hiking group. Her uncle had introduced him that morning as Dan Wilkes, the newest addition to the law enforcement unit. The man had a firm handshake and looked to be well on the path toward fifty, although the deep lines around his mouth could mean he was a bit older.