Prey

and credentials to the visibly nervous woman. 'Is your, uh, husband home?'

'No, my boyfriend and his friends, they are not here,' Mueller said as she unlatched the chain and then stepped far enough outside for Scoby to see the large, purplish bruise on the side of her cheek. 'But I was afraid you might be one of their friends, checking up on me. Please, come in.'

Responding to well-ingrained habits, Scoby entered the cabin cautiously, but it was immediately apparent that they were alone in the small two-room structure.

'Would you like some coffee?'

'No, thank you.' Scoby smiled.

'Then let me take you there right now to show you the bears,' she said as she strapped a small pack around her slim waist. She grabbed up a jacket and led Scoby out the back door to a narrow trail.

'This is one of my favorite places,' Carine Mueller said as she carefully moved branches aside so they could pass. 'I'm going to hate to leave it.'

'Have you been here long?' Scoby asked, trying to concentrate more on the forest and less on the woman's tight jeans.

'You mean at this house?'

'No, I mean in the United States.'

'Oh, not so long,' Mueller shrugged.

'You speak English very well, but I couldn't help noticing your accent,' Scoby said.

'Oh, yes. You like the way I speak?'

'Yes, I do,' Scoby smiled. 'It's very, uh, flavorful,' he said, searching for the word.

Carine Mueller laughed, looking back at the agent. 'I have never heard anyone say that before.'

'Well…'

'My boyfriend thinks I am very sexy when I talk English, but then he is not so shy as most of you Americans,' Mueller said. Scoby thought she had a great deal of composure for a supposedly nervous and abused woman.

'You think Americans are shy?' he asked.

Mueller nodded. 'You Americans know the big talk, but not so much the gentle words. I think it is because you are too shy, and that is no way to impress a Fraulein.'

'You're German, then?' Scoby asked.

'No, not German, but you are very close,' Mueller said as she continued to push forward through the narrow trail. 'I was born in Germany, but my father is Swiss and my mother is French, so I am what you Americans would call a hybrid. Is that the right word?'

'I think we would call you someone who shouldn't allow her boyfriend to give her black eyes,' Scoby said seriously.

'Yes, you are right. It was stupid of me to let him do that,' Carine Mueller nodded, glancing back at Scoby again. 'Sometimes we hybrids are foolish about our men. But did I not convince you to come here to take my boyfriend and his friends away so that I can have the cabin all to myself? So maybe I am not so stupid after all, yes?' With that, she turned her attention back to the trail.

After about five minutes of hiking through the dense woods, they came to a small clearing alongside the riverbank.

'Over there,' Mueller said, pointing to the opposite side of the clearing. 'See those shacks? The one on the right is where he stores the paws and the gallbladders until they're dried. The one in the middle is their processing shed. And the larger one on the left, the one with the chimney, is where they drink and have their poker parties.'

'How many people usually work here?'

'Usually it is my boyfriend and his three partners. But sometimes there are one or two others when they decide to play cards.'

'But you're sure none of them are here now?' Scoby asked as he scanned the wooden structures with his binoculars.

'I am very sure they are not here. If they were, we would have seen one of their cars back at the cabin, or one of their boats tied up at the riverbank.'

'Is that how they come here, by boat?'

'The buyers always arrive by boat, but then they go away somewhere else to make the exchange,' Carine Mueller told him. 'Do you think you can follow them to the place where they do that?'

'I'm sure we can come up with something,' Carl Scoby smiled. 'Shall we take a look at the galls and the burial site?'

'Oh, yes, of course,' she nodded. 'But first I wanted to ask you something. How will you prove that they are doing something illegal if you don't actually see them killing the animals?'

'When we make arrangements to buy wildlife parts or products from a suspect, sometimes we can get them to brag about how they're outsmarting all the law-enforcement people,' Scoby explained as they walked to the storage shed. 'If there happens to be a hidden tape recorder nearby, we can always play the tape back to a judge or a jury.'

'Would you do something like that?'

'It depends on the situation,' Scoby said as he surveyed the three shacks.

'I think it is so strange that a person like you could do something like that.'

'Oh, really? Why's that?' Scoby asked as he moved cautiously up to the side of a door, slipping his left hand inside his vest and releasing the safety strap on his shoulder holster.

'Because you look so much like a policeman.'

'Yeah, I know,' Scoby nodded as he reached for the door with his right hand. 'A lot of people tell me that.'

'Which I find fascinating, because I hate policemen so much,' Carine Mueller said softly as she stepped forward into a semicrouched position with a. 357 Magnum revolver she had withdrawn from her jacket extended out in two steady hands.

'What?' Scoby said, starting to come around when the first of six semijacketed hollow-points caught him square in the center of his chest.

As Scoby crumpled backward, Mueller continued to follow him with her sight pattern, smoothly triggering off five more high-velocity rounds into the rib-cage area of the agent's falling body.

None of the six bullets had actually penetrated Carl Scoby's Kevlar vest, but the sledgehammer-like impacts of the mushrooming. 357 Magnum projectiles had cracked or broken at least half of his ribs, and the agonizing pain made it almost impossible for him to draw the heavy SIG-Sauer automatic from his shoulder holster.

Stunned and nearly unconscious, Carl Scoby might have given up then. But the sight of Carine Mueller calmly dumping the expended brass out of. 357 Magnum, then reaching into her pack for one of her speed-loaders, gave him all the incentive he needed.

Functioning on instinct and training alone, Scoby had just brought his heavy automatic to bear on the blurry figure and was starting to squeeze the trigger when Kiro Nakamura stepped out of the shack and fired a single. 357 round right into the side of his exposed head.

'I can't believe it,' Marie Pascalaura whispered as she slid her head up against Henry Lightstone's shoulder and closed her eyes.

'What don't you believe?' Lightstone mumbled, nearly asleep because they'd been up half the night before, packing and chasing each other around the bedroom.

'That you and I are actually flying to Alaska to see if we want to live there,' she whispered against his ear. 'And that you're willing to give up undercover work so that we can live almost like normal people.'

'And we're going to get married?' Lightstone mumbled drowsily.

'Nope. After you get those transfer papers signed, and after you've worked for McNulty as a senior resident agent for a few months, then we can get married,' Marie Pascalaura said firmly. 'Until then, you're just going to have to get used to being shacked up.'

'Nice trusting attitude,' Lightstone said as he moved his head around to give her a gentle kiss.

'Attitude nothing,' Marie Pascalaura smiled. 'I just want to be sure you can do it.'

'Do what, leave undercover work?'

'Uh-huh.'