Dangerous Refuge by Elizabeth Lowell

gloaming time,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Those clean, beautiful moments before the sun clears the mountains across Carson Valley, when the stars are mostly gone and light seems to bloom from an invisible source. There aren’t many details, just darkness at your feet and the day coming up with the sun. You get the same feeling at twilight, after the sun has set and light drains away, leaving the stars behind.”
    He watched her, listening to her describe the beauty of the times when night and day passed each other. “Are you a dawn person?”
    “I won’t get up to see one, but if there’s another reason to be out, I like that hushed, waiting-for-something feeling.”
    “Lorne’s message must have really upset you,” Tanner said quietly, understanding what she hadn’t said—she really hadn’t slept well after hearing his uncle’s anger.
    She nodded and closed her eyes. It made no difference. She still saw Lorne’s body condensing from the shroud of night, the marks of scavengers getting clearer and clearer on his corpse with the rising sun.
    She opened her eyes. It was too easy to remember how he had looked lying slackly on his back, his ruined face lifted to the merciless sky and his thin silver hair lifting in the occasional wind.
    “What are you seeing?” Tanner asked in a low, undemanding voice.
    “Lorne. The marks of scavengers. Vultures sliding out of the brightening sky to get their share of the free protein.”
    He waited, hating that he had to put her through this. And knowing that the only other choice was to walk away and pretend that everything was as neat as the first deputy’s report, all gaps filled in, certainty crisp in every line, no dangling ends or unanswered questions.
    “This kind of ground doesn’t hold footprints well,” she said, “unless the person stays in place for a long time or paces back and forth or drags himself around. I didn’t see that kind of disturbance in the vegetation until they lifted Lorne’s body. Everything beneath him was crushed. His boot heels . . .” She waved her hand. “You can still see the marks. His arms were out from his sides.”
    “Sounds like he fell hard.”
    So hard his heels bounced.
    “Like a puppet without strings.” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, I—”
    “Don’t apologize. I asked for what you saw. You’re telling me.” He took her hand and rubbed his thumb across her fingertips.
    “Do you console every grieving civilian?” she asked softly.
    “No.”
    His thumb stroked her palm.
    She let out a breath. “He wasn’t wearing a hat. I guess it blew away in the wind.”
    Tanner waited, caressing her, saying nothing, silently encouraging her to remember each painful detail.
    “I’m not sure I ever saw him without his hat,” she said.
    “He only went bareheaded in bed or in the shower.”
    She almost smiled. “He wasn’t wearing one of his work shirts or his work pants. It was his go-to-town clothes. And . . .” She frowned, remembering. “The little pouch of chewing tobacco had spilled out over his shirt.”
    “The one he kept in his left shirt pocket?”
    She nodded. “I could tell he had died well before the scavengers came, because they didn’t draw blood. There were . . .” She drew a deep, careful breath. “Marks, gouges, but no bleeding. No rigor mortis. No bruises on his hands, no grass or dirt under his nails that I could see from ten feet away. Except for the scavengers, I didn’t see any sign of facial injury. Nothing to make me think he’d struggled or fought or anything like that.”
    “Like I said, you see better than an overworked deputy. Sheriff wrote it off as a heart attack before he ever looked at the body. If he looked at all.”
    Shaye watched Tanner with shadowed, beautiful eyes. “You don’t think that’s what happened?”
    “A heart attack is always possible, but in this case it leaves a lot of dangling ends.”
    “Such as?”
    Tanner started naming the facts that he was