Alaskan Showdown

by Sarah Varland

  Levi glanced at Adriana. If it came down to it, she’d have the presence of mind to run. But that didn’t matter if they got so deep into the woods that there was nowhere to run.

  He looked around. Again, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Still, a sense of foreboding pressed on his chest. The darker the woods got, the worse the feeling grew.

  “What did she find?”

  The dog whined again, then lay down.

  Adriana looked at her, then back up at him. “She found exactly what we came to look for.”

  Levi raised his eyebrows. An hour of hiking and they’d found the body the killer must have been burying when the hiker stumbled across them? It seemed too good to be true. His eyes narrowed.

  “Unless...”

  Surely there was no way to confuse a search dog, right?

  Also, shouldn’t the ground be messed up? Obviously dug up and then recovered? If the hiker who had disappeared had walked up on a body being buried, it should be freshly buried enough that the ground wouldn’t have settled.

  If this was a body, it had been here much longer than a week.

  Was there more than one body in these woods?

  What had he walked Adriana into?

  “Get down,” he ordered her, not stopping to think about anything aside from what was happening right now and the uncomfortable feeling he had that something was wrong.

  Adriana frowned and kept standing. “Levi...”

  “Down,” he said again, this time more firmly, just short of raising his voice, but in a way that was clear he meant what he said.

  She called Blue to her, rubbed her ears and crouched beside her. Levi moved toward them, ready to shield her with his body if necessary, but...

  Nothing happened.

  No gunshots. No crashes through the trees.

  Nothing.

  “What’s wrong?” Her voice didn’t waver, so she must have trusted him; that much was clear in the steady tone of her voice.

  And Levi didn’t know how to answer her.

  Was it just him? He’d never reacted like this before.

  “I...” Nope, he still had no good explanation.

  “Am I okay to stand back up? Because kneeling beside a buried body really makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Yes, sorry, go ahead.”

  “What’s wrong, Levi?” Adriana stood back up carefully, looking around like she was keeping her eyes open for anything strange.

  He had overreacted.

  Yesterday’s conversation with Judah was haunting him now. His brother had told him he had no business letting a civilian help him. Maybe it wasn’t just because Judah was concerned that doing so would be dangerous for Adriana. Maybe he’d also been able to tell that Levi wouldn’t be able to avoid making this personal.

  He’d just started to get to know her yesterday and today. At the very least, as a friend, a coworker, she intrigued him. And also kept him on his toes. He didn’t have anyone to do that for him very often.

  It made sense he’d been extra jumpy.

  “Levi?”

  “Sorry.” He shook his head. “I thought I saw something, but I didn’t.”

  She studied him for a moment. For signs that he was falling apart? After a short time, she nodded, then continued. “So,” she began, “what now?”

  “This is supposed to be a body? Buried right here?”

  Adriana nodded.

  “But it’s not fresh.”

  “Right. So you have two choices.” She was keeping her voice quiet, but it still echoed in the chilly autumn woods, without summer’s full leaves on all the trees to insulate their words. The echo gave him chills and made him wish he could whisk her away somewhere safer.

  He wasn’t sure what she meant. “Okay...”

  “Either our guess was wrong, and the killer didn’t get caught burying a body and then murder the hiker, or he or she did get caught, but not burying this body. Or—I guess this is three choices—the hiker got too close to this spot and it made the killer nervous, though why he would be here essentially guarding a burial site I don’t know. So that option is my least favorite.”

  She had a head for this, he realized. How much of that was because there were commonalities between working a search-and-rescue mission and solving a crime? Levi wasn’t sure, but she impressed him.

  He nodded, testing out the theories for size in his mind. “All right, I can see those, though I agree you’re right—the last is the least likely.”

  “For now, though.” Now it was her turn to seem uncomfortable. She looked around nervously. “Could we handle this and get back somewhere inside and well lit? This whole place is frankly kind of creepy, knowing what we are standing on or near.”

  Levi raised his eyebrows. Huh... He wouldn’t have thought she would be bothered.

  She shrugged. “I can help Blue find them, but I don’t really love the whole thought of what we are doing if I think too hard about it.”

  “That’s fair.” Levi pulled his phone from his pocket. “Let me call this in and get a team out here to excavate the body.”

  “Should we mark it or something?” Adriana asked. He was already pulling out his GPS device, which he’d used many times in the backcountry just exploring, but it would also come in handy now.

  “I’ll mark the coordinates. A team will come out as soon as they can. I’m messaging them and the police department now.”

  “What kind of team?” she asked.

  He did his best to answer while getting the coordinates marked. “It’s really just someone I know...” He trailed off and finished what he was doing, then looked back up at her. “In Anchorage. She’s a forensic pathologist and she’s qualified for this kind of work.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Levi put the device back in his pocket. “Ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “In case our suspicion earlier was correct, that the hiker was killed because she stumbled on a recent burial, we should keep searching. We should hike around some more. If there is a body here—”

  “What do you mean, if?” She sounded annoyed, he noted. “If Blue alerts, there is a body.”

  “I just don’t want to jump to conclusions.”

  “She’s a cadaver dog, Levi. She knows what she found. Give her the benefit of the doubt here.”

  Levi considered it for a minute and then nodded. “Okay, even though there’s a body here, it’s not the one we are looking for. If the hiker was killed because of a recent murder or burial, the ground would be more disturbed. The scene would be fresh.”

  Adriana nodded.

  “Is there a way to, like, clear the dog?” Levi asked, looking down at the husky, who had set down her head on her paws, brown eyes looking mournful.

  Did the dogs know what they found? He found himself wondering. That would be tough on them, he imagined.

  “Clear the dog?” Adriana’s eyebrows were raised and if he wasn’t mistaken, she was trying to suppress a smile.

  And failing. Quite spectacularly.

  Levi shrugged. “Reset her? I don’t know, tell her to try again? Is there a way to say ‘Yes, good dog, that was a body, can you find another?’ Or is it like a once-per-day kind of thing?”

  He had expected her to look at him while he talked, but she was gazing at the dog and he found he didn’t mind. Actually it fascinated him, her partnership with the dog and the way she had a working dog whose needs she was so in tune with.

  “I think another today would be fine. We can’t do too many at once because it can depress them, but she could probably look for one more and see what we turn up. Hopefully that will be enough for today.”

  She looked so hopeful that Levi didn’t want to point out all the things that could go wrong. Like, for example, this body might not belong to a serial
killer’s victim at all. It could be much older. He knew from the Google search he’d done on search-and-rescue dogs last night that they could recover even much older remains. This may not be one of the sites they were looking for at all.

  But it might be. And he hoped it was. Especially because Adriana looked like she needed a win.

  So did her dog.

  “Come on, Blue,” she said gently, moving the K9 away from her place on the ground. Once she was twenty feet away or so, back on the trail—Levi had followed her—she stopped and petted the dog, then reached into her pocket and showed Blue a toy.

  Blue wagged her tail and her eyes looked slightly less sad.

  “Yeah, you get a new toy, don’t you, good girl? You did such a good job today.”

  “Does the baby voice help?” He did nothing to keep the amusement from his voice.

  Adriana wrapped her arms around the huge white animal. “Listen, if it makes my baby happy and my baby keeps doing this job for you, I don’t think you should mind.”

  She had a point. But it was still cute. Levi laughed.

  “All right, ready?” she asked the dog, then bent down toward it. Had she said something? Given some kind of command?

  Levi wasn’t sure, but the dog moved down the trail farther, ignoring the site they had left behind.

  “Can we walk toward the lake on purpose? Will that throw off her search?” He was keeping in mind the fact that he really didn’t know what kinds of remains were in these woods to discover. If the serial killer had dumped the hiker in the lake rather than bury her, it would make sense for the lake to have been extraordinarily convenient.

  “If that’s the area where we want her to search that’s fine. We can move that way.”

  Adriana moved to her dog and called her that direction, then headed toward the lake, on the right-hand side of the woods.

  The dog’s pace picked up slightly, but not enough that Levi was sure if she’d smelled something.

  Of all the things he’d seen during the years he’d been doing police work, this was unquestionably one of the most interesting. While he had worked on cases with the SAR team before, and even seen Adriana and her dogs at work, he’d never paid this much attention. It was almost unbelievable, except he was seeing it, and did believe it.

  He followed behind silently and they hiked for about another ten minutes. The dog’s pace seemed to vary. She would slow, then speed up.

  Finally her speed increased dramatically, just like the last time, and she let out a bark as she hurried for some unseen spot ahead. She turned back around, ran to Adriana, then ran back up ahead.

  “Legit, that’s just like Lassie,” he said, remembering old reruns he’d watched as a kid at his grandma’s house.

  “Good girl, Blue.” Adriana ignored Levi for now and followed her dog.

  Levi followed both of them.

  Please, let this be near the lake. Really, really near, Levi prayed.

  They twisted through trees, fallen leaves crunching underneath their feet, toward what he had to hope was a body because they needed to solve this case and it would be another lead. According to what Adriana said earlier, it had to be. She believed if her dog alerted, it was surely a body.

  Still, he hated to know it was another body because even as he thought it, his chest stabbed with hurt for some family out there that was already missing a relative. And whose hopes for a living person were about to be crushed.

  * * *

  Adriana couldn’t possibly be more proud of her dog.

  As a general rule, Blue didn’t find more than one body a day. There just wasn’t a need for it as they were usually searching for one missing person, and so she just didn’t have the opportunity. She’d heard about the working dogs of 9/11 and the way some of them burned out and were depressed after the carnage they saw; she’d always been thankful she didn’t have to worry about that with hers.

  But two in one day seemed like it would be okay and so she’d taken a calculated risk in letting the dog continue on.

  Blue dropped to her stomach and whined at the ground—it was a patch of earth that sat on a slight rise, overlooking the lake.

  It was a spot that would be perfect for someone to bury one body, then dump another into the lake if discovered.

  She was so, so proud.

  “Good girl, Blue.” She kneeled next to her K9, rubbed her ears. And looked back at Levi.

  He looked as happy as she felt. Their theory had just gotten more plausible.

  “Is it fresh, though?” Adriana looked at it.

  Levi walked over, gently nudged some of the leaves with his foot.

  The spot did seem to have more leaves over it than the rest of the area. In fact, some of the trees had less foliage underneath them than she would have expected.

  He scraped the leaves away from the spot next to Blue.

  The ground underneath was freshly patted down. Like someone had dug it up with a shovel and then smoothed it back out.

  Then covered it with leaves.

  The wind whistled through the trees, rustling a few fallen leaves up from the ground, and Adriana shivered.

  “Good girl,” she told the dog again.

  It was easier in some ways for animals to find a missing person. When a person was rescued by a search dog they tended to be thankful, excited, and that passed onto the dog. When a cadaver was found, the energy was completely different. And the dogs noticed.

  Levi was marking the coordinates on his GPS tracker again.

  “When is your friend coming? Did you say where she’s from?” Adriana couldn’t remember.

  “Anchorage. But she headed down earlier today when I told her I thought we might find something. So she’s staying in Raven Pass and should be here soon.”

  Like talking about it had made it happen faster, Levi’s phone rang then. He gave someone directions to where they were, then hung up.

  “That was her?”

  “Yes.”

  Adriana nodded. Should it bother her that him having a female friend he talked about made her feel almost...? Not, like, jealous, but...

  “So tell me about your friend,” she finally said, hoping her voice stayed normal.

  “Wren is actually my cousin,” he said as he lowered himself down to sit against the base of a tree.

  Oh. Cousin.

  There was no reason for Adriana to feel relieved, but...

  Okay, sure, yes. She felt relieved.

  He was a handsome, outdoorsy man who had a desire to bring justice to the world. And she wasn’t completely immune to that. Especially now that she had spent enough time with him to realize that some of her assumptions about him had been off.

  Levi was on the phone now with the police department, judging by his end of the conversation that she was overhearing. When he hung up, he turned back to her.

  “She always wanted to be a forensic anthropologist, and when she got her degree, she found a job up here.” He shrugged.

  “Are you from Alaska? I can’t remember,” she admitted.

  Levi nodded. “From Anchorage, originally. Judah moved here first, then me.”

  “It didn’t bother you to follow your brother?”

  He raised his eyebrows and she wished for a minute she hadn’t asked. “Sorry—”

  “No, it’s okay.” He looked away from her, then back again. “I know what you’re asking. And in some ways, yes. But it’s also worth it to be around family. However much of a hard time they can give me.”

  Not something she understood at all, but she didn’t know him nearly well enough to open up that can of worms. Talking about her loss of Robert was one thing. Her family was definitely like a twentieth-date kind of topic.

  Or twentieth year of marriage. She would be okay just not talking about them for that long.

  Sudden
noises in the forest drew both of their attention. A crackling branch? A rustling leaf? The noises were just small enough Adriana couldn’t identify what they were, and they might not be out of place, but in a situation like this it was still enough to make her jumpy. Adriana looked up, back toward the direction from where they’d come.

  Levi had stood up, had his hand on his side. Over a weapon? She couldn’t see but guessed so. Even though it was likely it was Wren, she appreciated that he was being careful and not taking any chances.

  Even if it did lead to some odd situations, like earlier when he’d told her to get down and nothing had happened.

  A small woman with blond hair tangled around her shoulders looked up and smiled. “You must be Adriana. Levi, good to see you.”

  “Thanks for coming.” He walked over in her direction.

  “Is this the scene?” She gestured in front of them to the forest floor.

  Levi answered. “Yes. Adriana’s dog found it.”

  “How does that work?” Wren seemed genuinely curious.

  “She alerts to the spot by barking and lying down.” Adriana motioned to Blue, who was still lying down. “Come here, girl,” Adriana called her to her and Blue looked back at the spot but then ran to her.

  Carefully, Wren started to work. She cleared the area first, after suggesting that Levi check it for evidence that might have been left, which he already had. As she meticulously removed the leaves and then started to measure the approximate area, Adriana watched her. Seeing her work was fascinating, but Blue looked like she needed a break. Her ears drooped a little more than usual and her eyes looked sad.

  “I need to take Blue somewhere else.” They didn’t usually stick around for this long and she wasn’t comfortable with the dog’s mood. If they stayed too long, she could get depressed.

  “I can come with you in a few minutes. I’m still waiting for another officer.” He glanced at Wren. “I don’t want either of you alone right now.”