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I peer down as I think of how I’m going to handle this.
“I shouldn’t have gone after him.”
I glance over. “Gone after who?”
“The miner guy. I know the rules. No going into the forest, but I was up in my perch, and I saw him skulking around, and I didn’t like it. Yeah, his dead wife’s body is in town, and maybe he decided he doesn’t trust us, but I just…” A one-shouldered shrug. “I didn’t like it.”
“Okay. So you took off and just happened to have clothing to stage up there?”
“Yeah, well, sometimes I make it look like I’m there while I take a walk in the forest. The stuff was already in the loft.”
“So you just took off after a potential killer.”
“I should have gotten you or your husband or Will. But no one was around, and so I figured I’d check it out myself. Only apparently, I make a shitty detective, because he caught me.”
“Caught you…?”
“Sneaking up on him. He tricked me. Damn—” Gunnar pauses, and I notice sweat trickling down his face, as if talking is costing more energy than he’s letting on. “I fell for a really obvious trick, and he caught me. He said he knew another woman had been brought to town and wanted to know if it was the missing one.”
“He noticed us bringing in Penny.”
“Seems so. He wanted to know if she was alive. I said yes, and he freaked out, demanding to know what she said. So I said Penny saw him the night she was hurt.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I’m a shitty detective. Or a pretty good one whomakes shitty choices. He was already freaking out, so I threw that in.”
“You lied and said Penny recognized him to see what he’d say… while he had you at gunpoint.”
“When you say it like that…” He tries to pull a face but only winces in pain. “I hit a bull’s-eye, though. And he didn’t shoot because he wanted more information—what had Penny said, who knew about it. I played along, buying time, and then I ran.”
“And he shot you.”
“Eventually.”
I shake my head.
Gunnar continues, “But he’s obviously the one who tried to kill Penny, right? That’s good to know.”
How sure am I that Gunnar is telling the truth? Not enough that I’d turn my back on him, but what he’s saying clicks a few more pieces into place.
Penny says she saw Bruno at Mark’s camp… and then everything went black and she woke to Bruno leaving her in the cave. Which means Bruno was definitely there, so if Mark panicked when Gunnar said Penny saw him…
Gunnar isn’t Bruno’s partner.
Mark is.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I leave Gunnar with a promise that he’ll be fine, and I’ll get back as quickly as I can. Then I go after Mark. Getting to him is as dangerous as getting to Gunnar. More dangerous, because by this point, he’s given up on climbing down to me. Yolanda has gone silent, and he’s realized he’s better off focusing on the bird in the hand. He’s heading back to his original path to Gunnar. That means I need to head left and then up. It also means there’s almost no way to do that without being seen, and being seen means being shot.
I do love a challenge.
I have the advantage of Mark thinking I’m down below, cowering in the bushes, far enough away that I can’t shoot him with my handgun. He’s moving resolutely, confident that I’m out of the game and Gunnar is flat on his back, possibly bleeding out, but definitely not hopping up to attack him anytime soon.
I consider my options and decide to get fancy. I’m going where Mark will least expect trouble: over his head.
There’s a scrabble spot to my right. That’s where Gunnarmust have been heading when he’d been shot. He’d seen the gentler slope and been hurrying toward it with the intention of sliding down the mountainside as fast as he could. I want to go up—not down—but the theory holds. The only problem is that Mark is heading this way, meaning he could see me. I move fast and get past the easiest stretch to make it to one with more scrubby trees and bushes. From there, it’s a relatively easy run up the mountainside. If I make noise, I don’t care. I just need to move.
