The Nightmare Thief. Meg Gardiner

and march them to their SUV. Then Haugen and Von took the boat and headed for the rendezvous. Sabine and the other men on her team had driven away with the Edge game runners, transporting them to the leased big rig parked in the middle of the huge truck depot near Candlestick Park.

      The fact that Sabine was now on scene, and in position at the recreation area, meant she and her team had stuffed the game runners inside the big rig—gagged and zip tied in a circle with their feet chained to a ring in the center of the trailer. The game runners couldn’t lie down, couldn’t turn around, couldn’t even kiss one another, much less scream for help or kick the walls to draw attention. And the walls of the trailer were draped with heavy padding, the kind used by moving companies to protect grand pianos in shipment. The padding would deaden any noise. Nobody was going to miss the game runners for at least forty-eight hours. Just like nobody was going to miss Autumn and her friends.

      And that was all the time Haugen needed.

      He finally glanced at Von. “Do you think there’s the slightest chance I’ll risk shooting Autumn Reiniger here, at a public park?”

      Von stared at the beach. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

      Haugen smiled thinly. “Is that wit? A bon mot?” Intellectual gymnastics from the man—Von had just earned back a point or two. “You’re right. I was using a rhetorical device. We will not, I repeat, not risk damaging our investment by injuring Ms. Reiniger.”

      “I think I got it now, boss.” Von looked at the beach. “Just one question.”

      “Yes?”

      “Six people in her party, right?”

      “Correct.”

      “So why are there seven of them there on the sand?”

       Chapter 6

      Jo paused at the crest of the ridge. The sun was a gold needle in a deep blue sky. She leaned back against a boulder spackled red with lichen. A moment later, Gabe joined her.

      She swept back curls that had escaped her ponytail. “Thirty seconds. Gotta catch my breath.”

      Gabe shrugged off his backpack and got out a canteen. He took a swig and handed it to her.

      “Thanks.” She drank and wiped her lips. “You have an altimeter?”

      He shook his head. But the rise and fall of his chest told her they were at significant altitude.

      Her truck was parked two miles back and probably a thousand feet below them on a narrow logging road. She and Gabe had been hiking for ninety minutes. According to her Stanislaus National Forest trail guide and the map Evan Delaney had given her, they were still a mile from the abandoned gold mine where Phelps Wylie had been found dead.

      Gabe scanned the crown of the forest. All around, covering the mountainside, were lodgepole pine, white fir, and dogwoods turning crimson. He pointed at a soaring conifer whose dusty green boughs spread above them.

      “That’s Jeffrey pine. It only grows above six thousand feet.” He smiled at her, a challenge. “Still way too low to worry about supplemental oxygen.”

      “Yeah, sure—you could have HALO jumped and beaten me here. No need to brag.”

      “Nah. The government gets annoyed when a PJ uses Air National Guard resources to meet his girlfriend for a date.”

      He set his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head. He looked like he was in fighting trim, and he was talking like it too, as a deflective mechanism. But he couldn’t keep Jo from surreptitiously doing a visual sweep of his vital signs.

      His skin tone was good: bronze, with a ruddy glow from the hike. Respirations were rapid, but that could be expected because of the altitude. His pulse was strong. She could see it beating in his neck, where it met the line of his jaw. His eyes were clear, dark, and focused. On her.

      She slid her arms around him and kissed that beating pulse point. Wordlessly he pulled her tight against him and held her. She felt him breathing. He kissed the top of her head and then she tilted her face up and he kissed her right, on the lips. Twice.

      Then he smiled, patted her backside, and picked up his pack again. “Wasting daylight, campers.”

      Jo saluted. Don’t make a big deal out of it.

      But she couldn’t stop herself from keeping an eye on him. Tough cookie didn’t begin to describe Gabe, even on his worst day. And today was far from his worst.

      He was strong and young and resilient. But he hadn’t fully recuperated from being shot in the chest with a 9 mm bullet.

      He had only recently returned to work with the California Air National Guard, and to grad school at the University of San Francisco. He had not yet received medical clearance to return to active military duty. He hadn’t put back on all the weight he’d lost in the hospital or recovered his stamina. A patch of sweat darkened his USF T-shirt between the shoulder blades. He still had a considerable amount of pain, which he refused to dampen with medication.

      That, Jo knew, stemmed from pride and machismo and the determination to provide a clean and sober example to Sophie. And it stemmed from being a PJ, a pararescueman, with the Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing. Gabe worked search and rescue on land, sea, and air. And when on active duty, he performed CSAR, combat search and rescue, sometimes leaping into firefights from thirty thousand feet, using HALO parachute jumps—high altitude, low opening—designed to maximize stealth and speed and a PJ’s chances of reaching the scene of the rescue alive.

      Jo followed him along the crest of the ridge, through slices of sunlight in the cool air. The terrain was dry and spare and wild, beautiful and incredibly quiet. Looking up, past the green tops of the pines, she saw only sere blue. Her footfalls landed softly on dirt and pine needles. Beyond them she heard the rustle of the breeze through the boughs of the trees. The only signs of human encroachment were power lines strung from metal pylons that towered atop nearby ridges in the mountain range. The lines skimmed high above gorges and rivers, and for a moment Jo wished she could simply hang a zip line from one and slide directly toward the mine.

      Gabe followed her gaze. “No way.”

      She laughed. Ahead, the trail switchbacked to the bottom of a ravine before crossing a rocky stream and climbing up the other side. But upstream, where the slope steepened and began its climb to the timberline and snowcapped crags of the high Sierra, power pylons stood on opposite ridges of the ravine, linked by an aluminum catwalk.

      “It would cut three miles off our trip. Save us a couple of hours and hundreds of feet of climbing,” she said.

      Gabe leaned toward her. “Bzz.”

      “Okay, there’s high voltage, and the danger that the bridge would collapse.”

      “If it’s thrills you want, let’s get out of here and get a room. So come on and examine this mine, pronto.”

      “Right.”

      They had a reservation for the night at the Lodge at the Falls in Yosemite. That meant a couple of hours driving still to come, after the hike out. The wind sent a shiver through the trees. It sent a shiver through her as well.

      Phelps Wylie would never have chosen this as an afternoon’s recreation.

      Maybe he had taken a joyride in his warm, luxurious Mercedes, listening to Madama Butterfly on his German stereo system. But he never would have driven two hundred miles from home into a mountain range where, not much more than a century earlier, the Donner Party had become trapped for the winter and ended up eating each other.

      Wylie’s death was no accident.

      “Wylie had a map. Or he had a guide. He had some reason for being up here.”

      Gabe glanced over his shoulder. “Not a good one.”

      “Got that