An excerpt from the upcoming release of the latest in the WILD Mystery Series, WILD SORROW by Sandi Ault ©2008 and beyond by Sandi Ault
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Chapter 3: Morning

  When the first gleam of alpenglow began to shimmer on the horizon, I saddled Rooster and brought him outside into the dense, cold air. I walked him around the schoolyard, studying his gait. His leg seemed well enough to go the short distance I would need to ride to regain radio contact. The night winds had pushed snow into drifts against the west walls, and patches of white clung to low depressions, but most of it had blown across the mesa toward the mountains to the east.
While Mountain scampered around methodically marking everything in the area, I assembled a pile of large stones and a weathered sign and used them to secure the doorway so the cat could not reenter the chapel. The air was so frigid that even lifting and carrying the heavy stones did not make me break a sweat. When I returned to Rooster to mount up, he had a slick coat of frost on his rump.
I rode east under a thick, dull sky that had nearly strangled the light out of the sunrise, back toward Tanoah Pueblo. As I went, I watched for tracks of any kind that might have led to the school. But the winds had disrupted the soil, leaving the loose dirt of the desert ravaged.
An hour later, I saw the ATV on the horizon. Two men approached at high speed. My field superintendent, Roy, sat in the driver's seat, and before he could kill the engine, Kerry Reed, my forest ranger boyfriend, flew out of the other side and up to me. "Babe, are you all right?" He took my shoulders in his two hands and looked into my face.
"I'm okay," I said. "My horse took a big splinter, but he seems fine."
"Your coat. It's all torn." His green-flecked brown eyes were full of worry.
"Yeah, I hit a gate. Rooster threw me."
By then the Boss had gotten to us. "We'd have been here sooner but I forgot they had fenced that big federal training facility. Had to go around it." He took Rooster by the reins and examined his fetlock. "How in hell did you end up all the way out here?" Roy said from under the horse.
"I was tracking a cougar," I said. "Another attack on the pueblo flocks."
He raised up. "Well, why didn't you let someone know?"
"I didn't think I would end up so far out, but when I knew we were closing in on her—"
"Her? It's a female?"
"Yes. With two young cubs. She's wounded, and she looks half-starved."
"You must've got a good look at her, then."
I nodded. "She visited last night."
Kerry brought water for Mountain from the ATV, and a thermos of hot coffee. He poured some in a cup and handed it to me. I held it between my palms for a moment and watched the steam curl from the surface.
The sound of an engine whined from the east as another ATV approached, rocking and dipping over the rough terrain, disappearing into arroyos and then surfacing seconds later. Soon FBI Agent Diane Langstrom unfolded her long-legged form as she climbed out of the seat and gave me a dutiful smile. "We have got to quit meeting like this," she said.

???

In the chapel, Diane circled the corpse with a camera, the flash shooting sparklike rays of white light into the dimly lit space. She snapped a lens cap over the camera's eye. "With the body frozen, it will be hard to determine the time of death."
Roy, Kerry and I watched as she got down on all fours and sniffed the victim's open mouth, then drew back. She lifted the hem of the dusty black dress and peeked underneath. The men turned away, pretending to examine the chapel's architecture.
Diane looked up at me. "The body's been moved since the victim died. There's signs on the tops of her legs that the blood pooled there, as if she'd spent the first hour or so after death facedown. I don't see any indication of sexual assault, but we'll let the medical examiner decide; she's on the way. These marks on the neck are from a rope. See the crosshatch pattern of the fiber? Nylon rope."
"Hanged?" the Boss said, looking up at the vigas that spanned the roof.
"No, strangled. If she were hanged, there'd be a sort of upside-down V pattern where the rope pulled up on either side. This is straight around. She was strangled, and from the side, because it's worse here, on the left—the rope cut right through the flesh of the neck. Somebody made sure it took. I'm going to use my sat phone and make a call," she said, springing to her feet and dusting off her hands. "This is a hate crime. We got a special unit for that."
While we waited for the medical examiner to arrive, we split up to look for tire tread marks, footprints or tracks in the surrounding ground surface, but it proved fruitless since the previous night’s high winds had disturbed the topsoil, and patches of snow still covered some of the recesses. Plus, before I had been aware that it was a crime scene, I'd explored much of the area both on foot and horseback with the wolf alongside. I didn't mention that Mountain had trounced the corpse in his encounter with the cougar.
I approached Kerry as he crouched on the ground outside the compound wall, examining a pot shard. He looked up the slope to the ruin. "This must have washed down from up there," he said, rising to his feet. Mountain came over to see what he held in his hand, sniffed the shard with disinterest, and then trotted away. Kerry looked at me. "Babe. What were you doing all the way out here by yourself?"
I shook my head. "I was doing my job."
"You need to buddy up when you're this far out of range."
"Buddy up? We don't even have enough staff in the winter to man the phones!"
"Well, you can call me if—"
"And you'll stop working at your job and come help me do mine?"
He turned his head to the side and looked at me, a furrow across his brow that nearly joined his brown eyebrows in the center. "It's just common sense. You shouldn't be out this far alone. Even an amateur hiker knows not to venture out by himself into the wilderness."
I held up my hand. "That's enough."
He stepped toward me and tipped my hat brim back. "You have a bad bump there on your forehead."
"Yeah, the stirrup."
He chuckled and gave my shoulder a squeeze. "I don't even want to know."
Roy strode toward us, pumping his arms. "Jamaica, how long since you fed Mountain?"
"He wouldn't take any jerky last night, so . . . yesterday morning."
"Well I had a big old deer sausage one of the guys gave me and a breakfast burrito I had picked up on the way to work, and that wolf got in the ATV and ate every bite. The whole sausage. Enough for four or five meals. And the burrito, too."
Mountain slunk up beside me, noting the tone of Roy's voice.
"I'm sorry, Boss. I should have kept him with me."
"Damn right you should have. That was enough sausage for a big party! I was looking forward to having some of that."
"I'll buy you some sausage when we get back to town."
Roy huffed out a breath and waved me off. He started to go back to the ATV, but turned and looked at me. "What ever happened to that cell phone I issued you?"
"I've got it."
He nodded his head, then gave a little snort. "Ever turned it on?"
"Yeah . . . I, yeah."
"What's that number again?" He cocked his head slightly.
"The cell phone? I . . . I don't know it."
"You turn it on and use it. Today."
"It won't work out here, Boss. There's no cell phone coverage half of the places I go."
"So turn it on and use it the other half. I'd just like to be able to keep track of you at least some of the time."
"Actually, half's probably an exaggeration. I bet I don't have cell phone coverage more than ten percent of the time when I'm on the job."
Roy reached a hand up and toggled his cowboy hat slightly to reposition it on his head. “Use the cell phone. That’s an order.” As he walked away, he muttered, "Damn, it's cold out here! I didn't get any breakfast. I'm hungry."