Undercover Hunter. Rachel Lee

did she feel as if she needed to prove herself to him. She’d proved herself countless times in a much tougher organization, and she’d learned the hard way that conciliatory women were considered weak, and tough ones were called bitches. She preferred being a bitch. At least no one tried to take advantage of her that way.

      Stifling a sigh, she wished this drive would come to an end. Looking out the window, with the mountains still purple in the distance, had begun to bore her. She wasn’t used to sitting still for so long.

      She glanced again at Cade and decided that maybe she should back off him a little. She’d made her position clear repeatedly over the past few days, but they still had to work together. The question was how much she needed to back off. Except for their disagreement about who would drive, he’d done his share of backing off. And she’d let him drive only because he’d made the logical argument that he knew this country and these roads. It had been clear at that point that he wasn’t insisting because he thought the man should always drive.

      Okay, give him back a point, but after that expression when they’d been told they were working together, he still had a lot of points to earn.

      “I guess that you don’t know much about the sheriff we’re working with, unless someone gave you a dossier,” he said, disturbing the endless silence between them, a silence filled with the humming of the car engine and tires on the road.

      “Not a thing,” she admitted reluctantly, wondering if she had been deliberately left out of some loop. Men often tried that with her.

      “He’s good,” Cade said. “Not your average elected official whose chief accomplishment has been kissing babies.”

      Despite herself, she almost wanted to laugh. Even as an MP she’d had to deal with that kind of local law enforcement occasionally.

      “He’s former DEA,” Cade went on. “Undercover operative until a car bomb nearly killed him and wiped out his entire family. He still carries the scars.”

      DeeJay swore quietly. She knew a lot of stories of car bombs all too well. Some of them had involved families.

      “Yeah,” Cade answered, apparently hearing her. “Anyway, long story short. He came here to heal, got hired as a crime-scene investigator, and years ago when the old sheriff retired, he was elected. Folks still call him the new sheriff.”

      “Of course.” That didn’t surprise her at all.

      “His name is Gage Dalton. Runs a tight ship. His predecessor, Nate Tate, was sheriff for forty years and still sticks his finger in the pie. Let him. There’s no one and nothing he doesn’t know about this county.”

      “Except who the killer is.”

      “Obviously.”

      DeeJay hesitated. Then, offering a slender olive branch, she said, “Sounds like a couple of good men to have on our side.”

      “The best. The deputies are good, too. Nate started a trend of inviting his old military pals to come this way. He was Special Forces. Anyway, they joke sometimes that they have more Special Forces types in Conard County than most military bases. Makes for an interesting and sometimes useful mix.”

      He was trying to tell her to be careful of stepping on toes, she realized. Trying to warn her that she’d be meeting men with backgrounds similar to hers and who shouldn’t be casually dismissed. Or wisely dismissed. While she resented the implication that she made a habit of stepping on toes, she’d certainly been stepping on his since their first meeting. Since she couldn’t just come out and say that she only stepped on toes she meant to break, she decided to take it as a good omen that he was trying to fill her in. Much as it killed her, she said, “Thank you.”

      “The sheriff knows we’re both coming. It’ll be up to him to decide who to trust with that information, but from what little I know of him, I doubt he’ll trust very many. They’re already working the case, though, and as you know we’re here by invitation.”

      “Got it. Been there, done that before.”

      “I guess you have.”

      She hesitated, then asked, “You read my jacket?”

      “That stuff’s private. What I know about you is exactly nothing.”

      That wasn’t good, she thought. They were partnered and both of them had to have some basis for trusting each other’s instincts, as far as the investigation went. They didn’t have to like each other, just to develop a professional trust. Partners could succeed no other way. But she still had a burr.

      “You didn’t want to partner with a woman,” she said.

      “No.” He didn’t varnish it. “Nothing to do with you personally. Bad experience once.”

      “I could say the same about working with men, only more than once.”

      She felt him glance at her before he spoke. “Then I suggest we focus on the badge and not the packages we’re wearing. I trained at Quantico and I’ve been a cop in one shape or another for seventeen years.”

      She gave a short nod. “I did Quantico, too. Twelve years as a cop, mostly in investigations. All over the world.”

      “Good. Well, we’re entering a different world here. You let me know if it reminds you of any place you’ve been before. People in this town are pretty tight. Just about everyone’s going to be upset about the missing boys. Then there’s a ski resort they started to build this past summer. Some new people from that. Some who came with the semiconductor plant and didn’t leave when it died. But most folks were born here and will be buried here. That kind of place.”

      “I’ve been in villages like that.” She’d run into them in the Appalachians on a couple of cases involving military personnel, and overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tight, cliquish and distrusting of outsiders. How was that going to help them?

      She looked out the side window again, feeling as if the day’s gloom was settling into her bones. Some nuts were impossible to crack, and this sounded like one. How the hell were a couple of pretend travel writers going to get any real information from anyone? It would give them the freedom to move around without suspicion, but little else.

      The more she thought about it, the less she liked this whole cover story. Profiling, in which they’d both been trained, could only get you so far. After that, you needed solid information.

      “You know,” she said presently, “this cover story stinks. The whole town is going to be upset because kids are disappearing. Does anyone think they’re going to want to talk about that with travel writers?”

      He didn’t answer for a minute. The car noises seemed to grow louder until he spoke. “That crossed my mind. But you tell me, Dawkins, how else we can insert a couple of strangers into a small community like this? No matter how we do it, we’re going to stand out and nobody’s going to want to talk. This cover story at least elevates us above a couple of dubious drifters and doesn’t give away our real mission.”

      He was right. “So we back up the local law. I can deal.”

      “Yeah. They’ll probably give us most of the information. We’re the ones who need to help pull it together. And who knows? We’re talking about one thing and looking for another. We might learn something useful just by keeping our eyes and ears open.”

      “You mean the unsub could slip up.”

      “We can hope.”

      Amazing how much of law enforcement came down to someone slipping up and someone else having the wit to notice the slip. She drummed her fingers on her thigh. They had been called up because of their training in profiling. She didn’t have the highest regard for it, but it could occasionally provide some useful directions to an investigation.

      She spoke as they passed the sign announcing that they were entering Conard County. “We’d better get on a first-name basis fast.”

      “Yeah.