Avalanche of Trouble Read online

  A CHILD WITNESSES A MURDER

  AND BECOMES A KILLER’S TARGET...

  Murder doesn’t belong in the peaceful town of Eagle Mountain, Colorado. Yet Deputy Gage Walker has a brutal double murder on his hands and a missing deaf child. Gage’s only hope to find the little girl is her aunt, Maya Renfro. But nothing has prepared Gage for the intense chemistry between them...or just what happens when love gets mixed with murder.

  Eagle Mountain Murder Mystery

  “I knew I could count on you...

  “I’m so exhausted and relieved and grateful and sad,” Maya said. “Thank you—for everything.”

  “I haven’t really done anything,” Gage said, but he tightened his arms around her.

  “You were there,” she said. “When I kissed you earlier, I wasn’t really planning on that. It caught me off guard.” Her eyes met his and he felt a fresh jolt of heat. “But I’m not sorry it happened.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not sorry, either.”

  “Everything about the past two days is a little unreal,” she said. “Including you.”

  She was offering him an easy out—a safe way to dismiss what had passed between them and make it about the heat of the moment. But for once he didn’t want that.

  He kissed her—just a brief brush of his lips across hers, then he stepped back. “Oh, I’m real all right.”

  AVALANCHE

  OF TROUBLE

  Cindi Myers

  Cindi Myers is the author of more than fifty novels. When she’s not crafting new romance plots, she enjoys skiing, gardening, cooking, crafting and daydreaming. A lover of small-town life, she lives with her husband and two spoiled dogs in the Colorado mountains.

  Books by Cindi Myers

  Harlequin Intrigue

  Eagle Mountain Murder Mystery

  Saved by the Sheriff

  Avalanche of Trouble

  The Ranger Brigade: Family Secrets

  Murder in Black Canyon

  Undercover Husband

  Manhunt on Mystic Mesa

  Soldier’s Promise

  Missing in Blue Mesa

  Stranded with the Suspect

  The Men of Search Team Seven

  Colorado Crime Scene

  Lawman on the Hunt

  Christmas Kidnapping

  PhD Protector

  The Ranger Brigade

  The Guardian

  Lawman Protection

  Colorado Bodyguard

  Black Canyon Conspiracy

  Rocky Mountain Revenge

  Rocky Mountain Rescue

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com.

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  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Maya Renfro—A high school teacher from Denver, Maya finds herself thrust into a small-town mystery when her sister and brother-in-law are murdered and she has to protect her niece. All she wants is to get back to her exciting life in the big city, but a murderer—and a charming sheriff’s deputy—may change her plans.

  Deputy Gage Walker—Sheriff Travis Walker’s younger brother has a reputation as a carefree ladies’ man devoted to his job, but Maya and her niece have him looking at life differently. When they’re in danger, he’s forced to make difficult choices.

  Angela and Greg Hood—Maya’s sister and her husband had plans to develop their newly purchased mining claim as a demonstration project before they were brutally murdered.

  Casey Hood—As the only witness to her parents’ murder, Casey is hunted by a killer, but she proves more resourceful than anyone could have expected.

  Henry Hake—The real-estate developer went missing a month ago. So who is behind the mysterious goings-on at the once-dormant development site?

  Wade Tomlinson—The climbing guide and part owner of an outdoor store helps with the search for Casey and may have information about her parents’ murderer.

  Brock Ryan—Wade’s business partner is dating a mystery woman and has been spending a lot of time out of town lately.

  Ed Roberts—The old hermit is a convicted sex offender and general grouch—is he also a murderer?

  For my nieces, Morgan and Kelli

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Excerpt from Armed Response by Janie Crouch

  Chapter One

  Gage Walker wouldn’t have said he was a superstitious man, but he didn’t believe in tempting fate. Don’t brag about your bank account being full or a big bill will surely show up in the mail that will tap you out. Don’t plan a fishing trip in April and leave the rain gear at home just because it was sunny when you left the house. Don’t complain about being bored at work or you’ll get a call that will have you working overtime for the next week.

  When your work was as a sheriff’s deputy in a small, rural county, boring was good, or so he always reminded the rookies and reserve cops. Boring meant crime was down and people were happy. The adrenaline rush of a real crime might make your day go faster, but it also meant someone was hurt, or had lost something valuable to them, or, worst of all, someone was dead.

  The man and the woman in this camp up near Dakota Ridge were definitely dead, each shot in the back of the head, execution-style. They were both in their early thirties and had probably been a nice-looking couple before someone had tied their hands behind their backs and sent a bullet through each of their brains. The driver’s license in the man’s wallet identified him as Greg Hood, from Denver.

  Judging by the matching gold wedding bands they wore, Gage guessed the woman was Greg’s wife. The couple hadn’t been killed for money. The man’s wallet still had cash and credit cards in it, and in addition to the wedding rings, they both wore expensive-looking watches. They had been left lying on the forested floor between their tent and the cold remains of a campfire, eight miles from the nearest paved road, about a hundred yards from the late-model SUV registered in their name.

  “Creepy.” Gage’s fellow deputy, Dwight Prentice, came to stand next to Gage, staring down at the bodies. Dwight looked around them, at the still forest, lodgepole pine and aspen so thick in places a man could scarcely walk between the trunks, the evergreen-scented air now tainted with the stench of death.

  “Yeah, it’s creepy,” Gage said. “If someone had it in for these two, why not kill them in Denver?” To his way of thinking, murder belonged in the city, not in the peaceful mountains where he had been born and raised and made his home.

  Though he had been a member of the Rayford County Sheriff’s Department for four years now, Gage hadn’t seen death like this before. People in Eagle Mountain—the county’s only town—died peacefully of old age, of diseases or a heart attack, or maybe after a fall while climbing or hiking in the surrounding mountains. A little ov
er three years ago, a young lawyer in town had been murdered. People still talked about that case; it had been so unusual for the quiet community that primarily made its living from tourists.

  This case was going to give everyone something more to talk about. “I’ll drive down in a few minutes and call this in,” Gage said. No company had thought it worthwhile to build cell towers on Dakota Ridge, so this corner of the sheriff’s department jurisdiction had no coverage, and the radio wasn’t much more reliable. Besides, talking about something like this over the radio pretty much guaranteed that half the town would know about it, since so many of them made a hobby out of listening to police scanners. They would be out here to sightsee before the crime scene techs had even finished pulling on their Tyvek suits.

  “I want to have another quick look around first.” This was his last chance to size up the scene for himself, before the techs and photographers, ambulance personnel and reporters trampled everything into dust. Oh, they’d do all the right things—cordon off the scene and establish an entry corridor—but never again would the scene look like this, unmarred by tape and markers and footsteps.

  Moving carefully, Gage stepped around the tent and bent down to look inside. “Who called this in, do you know?” Dwight asked. He remained standing near the bodies.

  “Milo Werth called it in,” Gage said. “Said he saw the car parked here two days ago when he delivered propane to Windy Peak Ranch, at the end of the road. He came by this morning to pick up a heeler pup Jim Trotter at Windy Peak had for sale and said the car looked like it hadn’t moved. With the pup and his little boy in the truck, he didn’t want to stop and look, but thought we should check it out.” He unhooked the collapsible baton from his utility belt and extended it, then used it to pull back the tent flap.

  Inside was a jumble of sleeping bags, a plastic tote with a lid, and a scattering of clothes. A battery-operated lantern hung from a hook at the center of the tent’s dome, and a backpack sat propped to the left of the door. Then he spotted a woman’s purse next to the backpack. He pulled out a camera and took a picture of it in place, then pulled on latex gloves and, using the baton, hooked the straps of the purse and carefully lifted it out.

  “Looking for ID?” Dwight asked.

  “I’m looking for anything that tells me why they were up here.”

  “That’s easy enough to figure out,” Dwight said. “They came up here to camp. A nice break from city life.”

  “Except this isn’t National Forest or BLM land,” Gage said as he pulled a red leather wallet from the purse. “This is private property. This whole area is patented mining claims.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know that,” Dwight said. “Maybe they thought they could pull over anywhere and camp. Nobody bothered them, so they thought it was all right.”

  “Maybe.” The sheriff’s department had been called in before to explain to clueless campers that even if the land they were on wasn’t occupied, it wasn’t free for them to set up camp. Gage opened the wallet and studied the driver’s license in the little plastic window opposite the checkbook. Angela Hood had been a pretty brunette with long, straight hair, green eyes and a wide smile. She was thirty-two years old, five feet five inches tall. Gage flipped through the credit cards and store loyalty cards in their clear plastic sleeves next to the license and stopped when he came to a bright yellow card. In Case of Emergency, Contact Maya Renfro, (sister). A phone number and address were neatly printed in the space below.

  Gage made note of the number, then dropped the wallet back into the purse and replaced the purse inside the tent. “I got a number for her emergency contact,” he said. “Looks like it’s her sister.”

  “You could let Travis contact her.” Travis Walker was the Rayford County sheriff—and Gage’s older brother.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Gage said. Not that he looked forward to telling a woman her sister had been murdered, but he hoped Maya Renfro could lend some insight into what Angela and Greg had been up to that might have gotten them killed.

  He made his way back around the tent to the rough track that led into the clearing. “I’ll be back as soon as I make the call,” he told Dwight.

  “I’ll be here.”

  Gage took another look at the SUV parked at the road—a dirty white, late-model Chevy with a cooler and a black plastic garbage bag in the rear compartment. The couple had probably stashed the food and garbage there as a precaution against bears, which showed they were savvy campers. The techs would go over the vehicle, but to Gage, it looked as if it hadn’t been touched. And he spotted no other shoe or tire impressions in the soft soil on the verge of the road. So how had the killers gotten to the site?

  He went over the details of the crime scene in his head as he drove the eight miles back to the highway. Once he had a strong phone signal, he parked on the shoulder and called the sheriff’s department. “Gage, I’ve been calling you for the last half hour. Where have you been?” Adelaide Kinkaid, the police department’s office manager, or, as she liked to refer to herself, “the woman who keeps everything going around here,” addressed Gage as if he was a sixteen-year-old delinquent instead of a twenty-five-year-old cop. But Adelaide talked to everyone that way. It was part of her dubious charm.

  Gage ignored her question. “Is Travis in?”

  “No, he is not. When I couldn’t get hold of you, he had to go over to the high school to take a theft report.”

  “Fine. I’ll call his cell.”

  “But where—”

  Gage ended the call. Later, he would no doubt get a lecture from Adelaide about it being his responsibility to keep her informed of his whereabouts, but annoying her now was worth a little aggravation later.

  Travis answered Gage’s call on the second ring. “What’s up?” the sheriff asked. Two years older than Gage, he had won a hotly contested election two years previously to become the youngest county sheriff in Colorado. Since then, even the detractors who had tried to hold his youth against him had admitted to being impressed with his performance. Gage hadn’t been surprised at all—Travis had always been the more serious and determined of the three Walker siblings. Gage, though equally smart and athletic, preferred a more laid-back approach to life.

  But there was nothing laid-back about his current situation. “We’ve got a mess on our hands,” he said. “That abandoned car Milo Werth called in belongs to a young couple who got themselves killed up on Dakota Ridge.”

  “Killed?” A sound like Travis closing a door. “How?”

  “Shot in the back of the head. Execution-style—hands tied behind their backs. Greg and Angela Hood, from Denver. They were camping on land up there—probably a mining claim.”

  “Who owns the claim?” Travis asked.

  “I haven’t got that far yet. We need to call in the crime scene techs. And depending on what they find, we may need to get some help from the state. Everything about this feels bad to me.”

  “I’ll call CSI as soon as we get off the phone,” Travis said. “You head back up there and guard the crime scene.”

  “Dwight’s up there now. I found a next of kin notification card in the woman’s wallet. I figure I’ll make that call before I head back up. Says it’s her sister.”

  “Hard,” Travis said.

  “Yeah, but it needs to be done. And if it was our sister, I’d want to know right away.”

  “Agreed,” Travis said. “Fortunately, I talked to Emily this morning. She was on her way to class.” Their baby sister was working on her MBA in economics at Colorado State University.

  “Good to know. Tell the forensics team there’s a pull-off just after mile marker eight. I want it checked for any tire impressions or other evidence. There aren’t any signs near the Hoods’ car, so I’m wondering if the killers parked there and walked up.”

  “Will do.”

  The call ended, Gage pulled up the number for An
gela Hood’s sister. A woman answered the phone. “Hello?” Her voice was raised to be heard over what sounded like a crowd.

  “This is Deputy Gage Walker with the Rayford County Sheriff’s Department,” Gage said. “Is this Maya Renfro?”

  “Speaking.” A cheer rose up behind her, momentarily drowning her out.

  “I can hardly hear you,” Gage said. “Where are you?”

  “High school gym. Hang on a minute.” The crowd noise rose again, then was abruptly cut off. “I ducked into the locker room,” Maya said. “This should be better.”

  “You’re in high school?” Cold sweat beaded on the back of Gage’s neck. It was hard enough giving bad news to an adult, but to hurt a teenager that way? “Maybe you should get a teacher in there with you. I can wait.”

  “I’m a teacher,” Maya said. “Who did you say you were again? I didn’t catch it.”

  “Deputy Gage Walker with the Rayford County Sheriff’s Department.”

  Silence. He tried to picture her—probably dark-haired, like her sister, with the same green eyes and open face. “Ms. Renfro?” he prompted.

  “What’s happened?” she asked, her voice strained. “Why are you calling me?”

  “You have a sister—Angela Hood?”

  “Has something happened to Angie? What’s happened to her?”

  Better to get this over with. There was no way to cushion the blow. “I’m sorry to tell you your sister is dead.”

  More silence. No screaming or crying. Gage waited. He could hear her breathing, hard, on the other end of the line. “What happened?” she asked finally, her voice hoarse with unshed tears.

  “She and her husband, Greg Hood, were shot and killed at their campsite near here.”

  “Shot? I don’t understand? Was it hunters? Some kind of accident?”

  “It wasn’t an accident. Did your sister and her husband have any enemies? Anyone who would have wanted to kill them?”

  “No! Are you saying they were murdered? While camping?”

  “That’s what it looks like. Do you know why they were here?”