Swiftwater Enemies
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Danica Winters
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Chapter One
Everyone was born into something, but it was left to the individual to define whom they became. Leo West was born a cowboy, and no matter how hard he had tried to escape it, he always found himself coming back to the world of whiskey, women and hard living. The only thing he had managed to leave behind was the ranch and the cattle, but he would be lying if he said he didn’t regret the loss. However, he couldn’t say he missed the scent of cows in the midsummer sun.
The call pulled him from the midday lull and away from busywork as a detective for the Madison County Sheriff’s Office. A woman had gone missing after being last seen in the parking lot at a particularly popular swimming hole on the outskirts of Big Sky, Montana. As one of only a few officers in the county, he was on the hook.
Luckily though, he and the other officers were a tight-knit group. Each person did their job to the best of their ability, but also did it with integrity. Well...at least he did. A couple of the other guys he couldn’t be sure of, as they liked to skirt a little close to the gray edges of the law, but he could say that their loyalty seemed to always be in the right place.
As law enforcement in a small community, it came with its own set of rules and procedures. Instead of writing tickets, they regularly gave their local low-key troublemakers rides home on rough nights and instead targeted the out-of-staters to keep their budget padded—not that he would have publicly admitted their norms.
That wasn’t to say they didn’t arrest their fair share of locals. There was always something—usually gun-or sex-related—that would lead to him stuffing and cuffing his former neighbor, girlfriend or football buddy on a Saturday night.
Hell, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had had a Saturday night off. It seemed like this time of year, he was called out on all kinds of odds-and-ends events, like the one that had just popped up on his computer.
According to dispatch, the woman was twenty-six years old and going through a contentious divorce. She’d been hiking in and around the area of the swimming hole, where her car was later found, abandoned.
It was going to be a long day.
Grabbing his keys, he got into his rig and hit the road. By the time he got to the public river access, groups of people were standing around a white Subaru with outdoorsy stickers in its back window, one of which read “Honk if you ski.”
He got out, and before he even had a chance to walk over, a woman rushed toward him. She was talking wildly, which made him reach down and instinctively put his hand on his sidearm. It was amazing how fast a normal situation could go sideways when high-voltage emotions entered the equation.
“Hello, ma’am,” he said, putting his hand up and hoping the woman would keep her distance.
As the woman lifted her sunglasses, he recognized her as Jamie Offerman, one of the high school secretaries whom he talked to on the phone on a far too often basis. She was a good woman, but she was always surrounded by drama thanks to her job.
“Jamie, how’s it going?” he said, his hand falling from his gun.
“Hey, Leo,” she said, smiling and nearly bouncing from one foot to the other in excitement. “We were starting to wonder if you were ever going to arrive. You must have been having one helluva day.”
He couldn’t tell her that he had been working on pulling together paperwork for a search warrant on a possible house where a guy was peddling drugs to the local students—providing them everything from marijuana to spiked methamphetamine. The dealer’s last batch had left one kid in the hospital after barely surviving fentanyl-laced meth. In other words, he had just been having another regular day in the office. “It’s been going. Are you the one who made the call to dispatch?”
“Come on,” she said, cuffing his shoulder, “you know if I’d been behind this, I would have just called you directly.”
“You know I’ll always answer your phone calls.” He sent her a blistering smile he knew she enjoyed.
She blushed and quickly looked away.
She was twenty years too old for him, but she was a sucker for the uniform and he wasn’t above using it to gain favor.
“So, tell me what I’m looking at here,” he stated, pointing toward the sandy beach where a group of teenagers were laying out in the early-summer sun, although it wasn’t quite warm enough to warrant the little bikinis the girls were wearing.
A few of them wrapped themselves in their towels as the wind kicked up.
“I’ve been asking everyone around here what happened while we waited for you to show up. From what I got, that lady over there called—” she pointed at a woman in her midthirties who was scowling over one of the bikini-clad teenage girls who was chatting with a boy “—and she said her daughter noticed that no one was touching a phone and gear left on the beach. Nor has anyone been near that car, over there,” she said, pointing at the white Subaru. “The girl opened up the last video on the phone, trying to figure out who it belonged to and there’s a video of a girl in a hot pink bikini playing with a dog.”
From what he was hearing, this missing woman could have been picked up or gone for a hike. Any number of things could have played out. If this went as he assumed, he’d be out of there in about an hour after the woman walked back onto the beach from a hike with her dog.
“How long has the woman’s stuff been sitting there?” he asked.
“More than three hours,” Jamie said. “At least that’s when the mom and daughter said they got here, but the stuff was here before.”
He appreciated the fact that Jamie had already seemed to collect all the witness statements; if she wasn’t careful, he would have to start putting her on the county’s payroll.
“Can you point me in the direction of the items?”
She motioned with her chin downstream. “They’re right over here.”
He followed her down the beach and behind a small copse of cottonwoods and willows. On the beige sandy beach was a neat stack of folded clothes. On top were an iPhone, car keys and an Apple watch.
Odd. He stared at the black key fob with the Subaru logo.
He had a few calls about abandoned items each summer, but he couldn’t think of a time when he had found someone’s keys at the top. Normally, a person would tuck their keys in a pocket or the folds of a towel, but never out and visible. It was like she was asking for someone to steal her car.
He took his phone out and took a few pictures of the stack. Moving to it, he lifted the black tank top from the top; it appeared to be worn but clean. The shorts beneath were the same. No blood or other bodily fluid. They simply looked as if she had stripped down, folded her clothes and intended to return.
“Did anyone see her go in the water?”
Jamie shook her head. “I don’t think anyone actually saw her at all, just her stuff. People have been coming and going all day, though. I didn’t talk to everyone. Ya know?”
Aside from the woman being unaccounted for, there wasn’t much that led him to believe anything had happened to her. For all he knew or could assume, she and her dog had gone into the water and floated down to the next pullout on the river. Maybe she had met with friends and would be coming back later. Any number of things could have occurred that would have led to this situation.
On the other hand, she very well may have gotten caught in a current and found herself submerged. Drownings happened in this river all the time. People underestimated the water conditions or would get caught in snags. Being as early in the season as it was, the runoff from the mountains was making the water cold enough in some areas that it could have easily been prime conditions for hypothermia.
He clicked on the screen of her phone and the camera opened. It started to autoplay the last video taken, a cute shot of a German shepherd jumping around in the water and then galloping after a stick. The woman was talking to the dog calling him by the name “Malice” as she recorded him returning to her with the stick in his mouth. The video ended.
So, there was proof she had been playing in the river.
His heart sank as the video replayed. This woman, something about this, felt off.
Though he hoped he was wrong about the feeling he was getting, and this woman truly was just at the next pullout or something, he had to make the decision. He shook his head. If he called Sheriff Sanderson right now and told him what was happening and preemptively started to get the word out to the search and rescue team, they would be going on a call, and the woman would likely show up, and Sanderson would be irritated. Leo needed to make sure there were no other possibilities as to the woman’s location before he called out the big guns and started blowing the yearly budgets for the sheriff’s office and the SAR unit.
A woman walked up beside him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Sir?”
Jamie shot him a look like she would have gladly been his bodyguard and push the woman back if he gave her the sign. He gave her a small, almost imperceptible nod.
He tried to push down his immediate annoyance at having been interrupted as he turned back to the other woman. “How can I help you?”
The woman was beautiful, blond, about five-foot-seven and curvy in all the best ways. As she looked up at him, her eyes caught the sun. He couldn’t recall seeing eyes the exact same color as the sky before, and he half expected to see clouds float by within them. She was stunning, and that was to say nothing about the red polka-dotted bikini she was wearing.
“So...” She balled her hands at her sides like she was trying to summon the strength and resolve to say whatever it was that was on her mind. “My name is Aspen, I’m on vacation here, but I’m involved in the Minnesota Life Savers group, it’s a private SAR unit.”
His hackles rose with her intrusion—he could hardly wait for this tourist to start telling him how she could have gone about this call better. “Is that right?” She may have been stunning, but she had already pissed him off twice in a matter of seconds since they had met.
“Yes,” she said, chewing on her lip. “I don’t want to step on your toes here, or question anything you may be working on, but in circumstances like these, I’m sure you are aware that every minute matters. If she’s in the water...”
Boy, did I call that one, he thought.
“If she’s in the water and has been gone for three hours...” Well, the woman was as good as dead. Minutes didn’t really matter.
The tourist waved him off. “I know what you’re thinking, but we still have a shot.”
It was crazy the number of people who came up to him at moments like these and tried to tell him how to do his job. If she was as professional as she was portraying herself, and in-the-know in his line of work, then she should have known better than to approach him as she had.
“I appreciate your attempt to help me out here, but I’ve got this handled.” He pulled out his phone. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind—and I’m sure you are aware, given your line of work—you need to move back from this area.”
She opened and closed her mouth as she heard his barely veiled request for her to stay in her lane. Frowning, she handed him her card and then turned and strolled away with the little polka dots on her butt jiggling as she moved.
As soon as she was out of earshot, he jumped the gun and called Sanderson. The tourist was right; there was a slim chance that they could still rescue the missing woman if she was in the water, but it would be close. He and his SAR unit would have to act fast if there was to be any hope of this girl being saved.
