the cousin who’d grown up surrounded by a large and loving family on a southwest Colorado ranch. He’d been nurtured by a stay-at-home mom during the same years that Adam had passed through a grim series of foster homes, skipping school to run with the toughest street gang in the city.
Adam’s luck had turned around when his mother’s brother—Gabe’s father—had discovered his whereabouts and his situation. From age fifteen to eighteen, he’d lived with Gabe’s family, learned to cowboy, and relearned what it was to be loved by good, caring people. Another year and it would’ve been too late. He’d seen enough lost kids in his job to know how close he himself had come to the edge. So, yes, he supposed he did have his share of luck. “At least at poker,” he admitted wryly.
“And women.”
Short-term scoring, sure, he did all right, but the long-term win? His one time at bat—with Alice—he’d struck out big time. Swung for the bleachers and fallen flat on his face.
He started to shrug, then caught himself. “What can I say? Women are crazy for badges. And uniforms. Can’t tell you how I hated giving mine up when I moved into Homicide. Was a real heartbreaker trade-off.”
“Yeah, I can see you’re hurting.” The cousins grinned at each other till embarrassment set in, and Gabe glanced down. He plucked at the sheet hem. “So…when do they let you out of here?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“That’s not what the nurse—”
“Tomorrow, or I start tossing TVs.” He hooked a thumb toward the racket beyond the curtain.
“Ah.” Gabe nodded understanding. “Okay, but after that? I suppose they’ll be giving you some recuperation time?”
“More than I’ll want.” Being a homicide detective wasn’t simply a job, it was a calling. Maybe if he’d had a woman or a family to distract him—but then, how could a good cop allow himself to be distracted?
The cases were endless and they were fascinating, and they tended to eat a man up. You might stagger home wired yet exhausted, night after night, but your job counted for something. You felt it made a difference.
Feeling like that, you didn’t tend to set it aside at the end of your shift, or switch your focus to the things that mattered to civilians. Because what hobby could be half as meaningful? What sport could give a man the same rush as going eyeball-to-eyeball with a gunman? What woman could compete with the adrenaline high of a righteous arrest?
Which was why so many detectives lived wistfully single in spite of themselves.
“That’s what I figured. So I was wondering…” Gabe still fingered the sheet. “Maybe once you’re back on your feet, you’d consider helping me out?”
Adam cocked his head. Gabe, the golden boy, needed his help? Gabe, who’d always had his ducks in a row, be they feminine, academic or professional. “Sure, but with what?”
“You know I’ve been working on the lynx reintroduction project? For four years now.”
“Big spotted cats, with goofy clown feet and Mr. Spock ears,” Adam remembered. “Bringing ’em back to Colorado.” Gabe had explained his mission with enthusiasm several Christmases back, when the project was just getting off the ground. He was a conservation biologist for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, DOW for short. A few years ago, the DOW had concluded that lynx had become an exceedingly endangered species in Colorado—there were maybe two left in the state, as far as anyone knew—and it was time to save the critters from extinction.
In spite of the howls of protest from the cattlemen and sheepmen and skiers, they’d imported a hundred or more of the big cats from Canada and Alaska. Then they’d freed them in the San Juan Mountains, the wildest, roughest region of the southern Rockies, hoping they’d go forth and multiply. “You brought in the fleabags at a thousand a pop, I think you told me. So?”
Gabe turned up his hands and showed them empty. “So then…where are they?”
CHAPTER TWO
“WILL SHE LIVE?” Standing across the exam table from the veterinarian, Tess cupped one of Zelda’s outsize paws between both her hands.
Dr. Liza Waltz glanced up from the sedated lynx, then down again at the thermometer she held. Her sandy brows drew together. “I don’t know yet. Three degrees above normal.” She set the thermometer briskly aside and returned with a stethoscope.
Tess stroked silky gray, black and buff-brindled fur and watched anxiously as the examination proceeded. Waltz was supposed to be the best vet for exotic cats in Santa Fe. After each of four phone calls to local vets had brought up the woman’s name, Tess had driven straight to her office. The vet had interrupted a scheduled appointment to walk out to Tess’s pickup. She’d peered into the cage in the truck bed, which Tess had covered with a tarp against the wind, sworn under her breath, then run back for sedatives and a noose pole to control the cat.
Zelda had been too weak to fight the injection. Within minutes Waltz had her on the table, and now Tess bit her bottom lip as she waited for a verdict.
The vet muttered something to herself and removed the stethoscope from her ears. “Not good,” she allowed, fixing Tess with accusing gray eyes. “How long has she been this way?”
“I don’t know.” Tess explained how she’d acquired the lynx, and from whom. “Hazeltine mentioned there’d been a second lynx, a male, who shared Zelda’s cage.”
“Two in a cage that size!”
“Exactly. He bought them from the same fur farm last year. I asked him what had happened to the male, and he hemmed and hawed, then told me he’d sold him a few days ago to somebody who needed a barn cat. But frankly, I think he was lying. My guess is the male died, and it suddenly occurred to Hazeltine that I might back out on the deal if I thought Zelda was that sick. So he spun me a feel-good story instead.”
Waltz growled something under her breath as she switched her attention to the cat’s belly. Her gaze grew distant while her fingers gently kneaded and squeezed.
“Checking for pregnancy?”
“Right, although she’d have to be four or five weeks along for me to feel kittens. Or for an ultrasound to show them. Is there any chance she could have been bred in the past week or two?”
Tess turned up her palms. “I suppose anything’s possible. But given the size of their cage, and that the male was removed recently, and that he may have been ill—”
“Seems unlikely,” the vet agreed. “Malnourished as she is, it’d be a miracle if she could conceive, even if she were bred. So…” She patted the lynx’s shoulder, then turned to a refrigerator in the corner. She stood, considering vials for a moment, then chose one and reached for a syringe. “I’ll have to culture her saliva to be sure, but we’re going to assume it’s not simply viral pneumonia—that by now she’s got bacterial complications. We’ll see if a bolus of antibiotics can knock it back while I’m waiting for the results.
“Meanwhile she’s dehydrated and underfed, so I’ll run an IV line. Give her saline and glucose for now. Tubal feeding by tomorrow if she isn’t eating.” Her left hand probed delicately across a gaunt gray haunch, then she set
