Read Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) for Free Online Page B

stove and decided that making tea might be a bit daunting for this particular moment.
    ****
    She felt a kiss on her forehead, light enough for a baby.
    “It’s six in the morning,” he said. “Try not to cry.”
    “I’m late.”
    The schedule had her heading back up the mountain.
    “I’ve got breakfast ready,” said Slater. Allison recalled the gentle clinking sounds from the kitchen during the last half-hour, as she wormed her way to the surface of reality. And then, from even deeper down, she remembered the sensation of him dropping the quilt over her as she slept on the couch.
    “What time did you make it in?”
    “One-ish. You could use an answering machine.”
    “Yuck,” said Allison.
    “You were down for the count. Hard. Not that I even tried to wake you. The look on your face said done.”
    Allison crawled off the couch. She knew that moving wouldn’t cause any physical pain. It would be torture but she wasn’t hung over. That was one small blessing to count.
    “Are you working today too?” she said.
    “I wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “But we’ve got a problem.”
    “Problem?”
    He was all duded-up in his green, slightly rumpled uniform. She liked him best in blue jeans and old sweatshirts, sitting in an aspen grove in a high meadow, splitting a six-pack and slicing summer sausage to go with crackers, mustard and cheese. This wasn’t bad, the official dress of a US Forest Service resource conservation officer—once known as a forest ranger. But Slater looked uncomfortable in the uniform.
    “Missing people-type problem. One of the protesters,” he said. “Probably dead-type problem, given the storm. It’s one of them all-hands-on-deck things. The sheriff has already called his troops together and made it clear he doesn’t want anything that would keep the publicity rolling.”
    “Missing where?”
    Allison pulled on a fresh set of Wranglers, an undershirt and a green and black checked flannel shirt that deserved to be washed but would have to do.
    “Way up the canyon.”
    “Do they know who?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    The storm would have been rough enough if a hiker was prepared: brutal or fatal if he wasn’t. Allison had not heard the protesters, but by the time she had come over the top of Black Squirrel Pass, the storm had probably chased them to a lower elevation.
    “You must have had a rough day,” said Slater. “Snow pretty hard?”
    “Like the end of time.”
    “You get hung up?”
    “Not by the storm.”
    “Huh?” he said, stopping as he put butter and orange marmalade on two pieces of burnt toast.
    “I was late as it was, dawdling a bit as always,” said Allison. “Then I heard a gunshot. A minute later I saw a guy dragging who knows what through the snow. Whatever he was dragging, it wasn’t easy and required force. It was like I could see him straining at it. I worked my way down to the spot where I’d seen him and found a dead elk. Only the elk hadn’t been shot. There were no wounds. And the elk was such a monster there was no way he’d been dragged, not by one guy and not by three or four.”
    Slater stared back with concern.
    “He seemed angry,” she said.
    “How long between the shot and the time you found the elk?”
    Allison took a breath and tried to stick to exactly what she’d seen. Her grandfather had once claimed he watched a UFO set down in a lake outside of Longmont, but he had refused to embellish it with made-up details. He told her that anybody who wanted to know what the first-hand experience could find the original police report and read it.
    “An hour plus. You know the descent from Black Squirrel Pass.”
    “And you really couldn’t see what the man was dragging?”
    “No.”
    Slater pondered things for a second, his mustache-covered lip buried in the coffee, his deep brown eyes penetrating through the tabletop. He looked like a detective pondering clues.
    The idea that she was cozying up to a cop-like guy was a constant