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Judging by the matching gold wedding bands they wore, Gage guessed the woman was Greg’s wife. The couple hadn’t been killed for money. The man’s wallet still had cash and credit cards in it, and in addition to the wedding rings, they both wore expensive-looking watches. They had been left lying on the forested floor between their tent and the cold remains of a campfire, eight miles from the nearest paved road, about a hundred yards from the late-model SUV registered in their name.

“Creepy.” Gage’s fellow deputy, Dwight Prentice, came to stand next to Gage, staring down at the bodies. Dwight looked around them, at the still forest, lodgepole pine and aspen so thick in places a man could scarcely walk between the trunks, the evergreen-scented air now tainted with the stench of death.

“Yeah, it’s creepy,” Gage said. “If someone had it in for these two, why not kill them in Denver?” To his way of thinking, murder belonged in the city, not in the peaceful mountains where he had been born and raised and made his home.

Though he had been a member of the Rayford County Sheriff’s Department for four years now, Gage hadn’t seen death like this before. People in Eagle Mountain—the county’s only town—died peacefully of old age, of diseases or a heart attack, or maybe after a fall while climbing or hiking in the surrounding mountains. A little over three years ago, a young lawyer in town had been murdered. People still talked about that case; it had been so unusual for the quiet community that primarily made its living from tourists.

This case was going to give everyone something more to talk about. “I’ll drive down in a few minutes and call this in,” Gage said. No company had thought it worthwhile to build cell towers on Dakota Ridge, so this corner of the sheriff’s department jurisdiction had no coverage, and the radio wasn’t much more reliable. Besides, talking about something like this over the radio pretty much guaranteed that half the town would know about it, since so many of them made a hobby out of listening to police scanners. They would be out here to sightsee before the crime scene techs had even finished pulling on their Tyvek suits.