Alaskan Showdown

by Sarah Varland

  Which made sense to Adriana. While neither of them was at a coffee shop, they did fit the profile of the victims. It would be wise to be extra careful, rather than getting into trouble.

  But her dog couldn’t wait much longer.

  Thankfully, another officer walked up after only a few minutes.

  “This is Officer Quinn Koser.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Adriana and Wren said at the same time.

  “I’ve really got to go.” Adriana glanced at Levi. “Sorry.”

  She put a leash on Blue and headed into the thick woods, back onto the trail. She could hear Levi behind her, could feel him watching her, but never glanced back.

  “You okay?” he finally asked.

  Was she? Blue’s mood seemed to have affected her. Or maybe it was the other way around. All she knew was that this wasn’t the type of work she wanted to do all the time.

  “I don’t know,” she finally answered honestly, then shrugged as she inhaled a deep breath. The air was crisp and cool.

  “You did good today.” He said it and then walked along quietly, maybe sensing she needed the space.

  No matter how many deep breaths she took, though, her head didn’t clear. It felt fuzzy. Like there was too much pressure in it.

  She kept walking. Kept breathing. She felt him behind her.

  One thing Adriana appreciated was the fact that he seemed to understand that she couldn’t put her feelings into words if she tried. She liked that he didn’t try to keep talking until it made sense, or until she could say what was wrong.

  Maybe that was the reason she liked hanging out with her dogs so much. Most people pressed for answers. Levi didn’t seem to be like that.

  Interesting.

  She kept walking in silence until the clearing at the end of the trail, where the parking lot was, came in sight. Then, finally, she exhaled, feeling her spirit lighten as the sunshine found its way through the trees more.

  “I think it’s just that... I don’t know. It affected me more than I thought.”

  “Finding murder victims?”

  When he did talk, he didn’t mince words. He got right to the point, to the center of the issue at hand.

  And yet she somehow didn’t wish that she was alone with her dogs. It was right that he was here.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Someone did this.”

  “Someone did.”

  And as she inhaled, she felt herself become even more determined to solve it.

  She looked up at Levi, admiration building in her. She’d thought he was laid-back, didn’t take things seriously enough.

  How much of that was self-protection? Was he just trying to keep his work from weighing him down?

  After spending today doing this work with him, it seemed like that.

  It was possible, very possible, that she’d misjudged him.

  And that thought was dangerous to her in an entirely different way than a killer who might be after them both.

  EIGHT

  Levi had wanted, with almost everything in him, to stay at the crime scene. This was his case, and he was finally getting somewhere. He felt like they were closer now than they’d ever been to ending this.

  The idea that the killer had been targeting victims years before, when Levi himself was still a kid, was still mind-blowing, even though the idea’d had a couple of days to sink in. The initial cases he’d found in the cold case file had been women whose bodies had been found, whom investigators had linked to a common serial killer. And now there seemed to be a link to the four bodies he’d been investigating for the last few years. Were there more buried somewhere? Had the killer committed any other murders in all those intermittent years? Or had there truly been a pause?

  And if the latter was true, then why?

  Much as he’d wanted to stay, he knew he could count on Officer Koser to handle it and he needed to get Adriana home. She wasn’t a responsibility he could delegate, not with the possible threat against her. He was still fairly certain the attacks had been against him, but she was working with him now. He couldn’t afford to take chances, not where her safety was concerned.

  “Thanks for driving me home.” She’d finally spoken as he pulled into her driveway.

  Levi nodded, half of his mind in the present, half back there in the woods wondering what Wren was finding right now and how it would change how they worked this case.

  If they got a break now, it wasn’t because he’d earned it, but he’d take it anyway. He’d thought that morning that he would come up with a solid plan for how to approach this, but Adriana had offered different ideas—good ones—and then he’d had some of his own realizations, and at the end of the day, nothing had gone as he could have predicted.

  Was that good or bad?

  That was something he’d have to think about more. Right now, his mind couldn’t handle a single other thought than all the ones he’d stuffed into it throughout the day.

  “Thanks for all your help today,” he finally said.

  “Do you want to come in? I could make coffee,” she offered.

  It was the first solid olive branch she’d proffered since he’d done or said something to offend her in the woods hours earlier, before Blue had alerted to the first body. What had they been talking about? He’d asked how she’d chosen her career and become a search-and-rescue dog handler.

  Nope, he still couldn’t figure out what he’d said wrong there. Unless it had something to do with the loss of her fiancé? But it had seemed like more than that. Either way she’d pulled back, for sure. Now she was asking him to come inside for coffee.

  Did he say yes?

  He glanced in her direction, trying to figure out if this was an obligatory kind of invite, or if maybe she was scared to be alone. But, no, he saw no fear in her dark brown eyes, just a tiny spark of friendship, or what could be friendship if he didn’t mess it up.

  “I can’t stay long, but I’d love to for a little while if that’s okay.” The words were out of his mouth before he’d finished deciding that’s what he was going to do.

  Adriana nodded. “Okay.”

  She led the way to the front door and let them both in with a key. “So coffee?” she offered.

  This time, he shook his head. “No, but water would be great. You don’t have to get it, I saw where the cups were last night.”

  She looked like she wanted to argue for half a second, and that’s when he remembered she’d said she was from down south somewhere. Maybe down there people served guests, but up here in Alaska, at least among Levi and his friends, it was a sign of real friendship to know where things were and serve yourself.

  He watched her let Blue off her leash. The dog happily bounded into the house and was quickly joined by Adriana’s other dog. Adriana pulled another toy out of her vest pocket, one he hadn’t seen earlier.

  “You’re such a good girl. The best girl.” She handed the dog the toy and Blue ran off with it, looking half the age she had earlier.

  “And you’re the best boy,” Adriana told the second dog—Babe, he thought his name was—and that one ran off also.

  “Blue seemed different earlier,” he commented aloud.

  “Bodies depress her.”

  And her owner, too, unless he’d missed his guess about Adriana’s reaction earlier. She’d seemed shaken, especially after the discovery of the second body.

  “Is she still okay to search tomorrow or does she need a day off?”

  She looked at him with surprise. He tried to read what was behind her eyes, but couldn’t.

  “I don’t want to make this take any longer than it has to.”

  Levi opened his mouth to reply, but his phone rang before he could. He made an apologetic face. “I’m sorry, just one second, okay?” He didn’t like to answer calls when he was in midconversation, but they wer
e in the middle of a case. It was necessary.

  “Wicks, it’s Koser.”

  “Thanks for calling, what did you find?”

  “It was a woman. Midtwenties, probably. Blond hair. Her prints are in the system—Raina Marston.”

  If he was mentioning hair, it must not have been an old body. The chances had just gone up that this had been the site and victim they assumed might be there—the one that presumably Lara Jones had stumbled on, maybe even seen the killer burying, that had led to the hiker’s death.

  “Why do we have her prints, do we know?”

  “Looks like she was printed for a substitute job with a school district.”

  “Okay.” Levi took a deep breath. “What else?” He waited, wondering what else they had learned.

  “Zip tie around her hands. Orange. Same brand as the others.”

  Levi knew most of the officers at Raven Pass PD were familiar with the case, even though he’d been the one primarily working on it. Quinn knew the orange zip ties were part of their serial killer’s MO.

  “Can we establish any kind of time of death yet?” Levi asked, thinking that the ME probably hadn’t gotten there yet. Only the medical examiner could establish an approximation with any kind of certainty. That was one of their specialties.

  “The ME just got here. He won’t say for sure yet, but these aren’t old bones, Wicks.”

  So very, very likely their theory about the hiker interrupting a burial was correct.

  Which would mean adding a fifth body to the serial killer’s recent tally.

  And there was still the body that Blue had found first today to consider. Was it coincidence the two were buried in the woods? Or had the killer buried them together in the same general location?

  And if he had...

  Were there more? Were all the burial sites by twos and they only had half the victims accounted for? Even though Raina’s body and the other hadn’t been in close proximity, they’d been located within half a mile of each other.

  It was a terrifying thought.

  Levi felt Adriana watching him and wondered how many of his thoughts she could read on his face. He held up one finger in a one-sec kind of sign and walked toward her front door, back into the entryway, where he’d have a little privacy.

  “Has anyone been able to work on the scene we found first?” He’d called that in, too, along with the coordinates he’d marked, but it had been necessary to start with the most recent burial. Vital evidence was more likely to be found in the most recently killed body.

  “Not yet, but I’ll keep you posted. I just wanted you to know this part. The ME is taking her to Anchorage.”

  “Thanks, man, I appreciate it.”

  “All right. Bye.”

  Levi hung up the phone and stood for a minute, thinking.

  The serial killer had killed again. A blonde woman, midtwenties. They’d know more soon, hopefully.

  But the thought of the killer burying bodies in twos still lingered. Was there a possibility that more bodies were buried in twos? Maybe one older corpse and one more recent? That was just a guess as he didn’t know anything about one of the two they’d found that day, but it was possible. Worth investigating further.

  Tomorrow, they’d give the dog a break and spend the day finding out all they could about Raina Marston. But the next day, they’d go check the four sites where he’d found bodies before, and see if they’d been the only ones buried there.

  * * *

  Adriana had been running through the day in her mind, over and over, while she drank her coffee, but she still couldn’t truly make sense of it or reconcile her mind to it.

  She hated the fact that people killed other people. Yet she knew it was true. She’d seen enough violence during her time in Oklahoma to know that and had lost one of her favorite cousins to senseless violence.

  That was when she decided she’d follow Robert to Alaska and never look back. She’d needed to distance herself from everything back home and Alaska had seemed like a pretty good place to do it.

  Then, when she’d lost Robert, becoming a search-dog handler and reinventing herself had seemed like a good idea, too.

  This—helping out Levi—was a little too close to reminding her of everything she’d tried to escape.

  Pasts, she knew better than most in her line of work, did not stay buried well.

  “Sorry about that,” Levi said when he walked back in. “That was Officer Koser, the guy we left there.”

  “What did he say?” Because news, she could handle more of. Anything that told her this would be over soon.

  “We know the woman’s identity, and if it is okay with you I think we should spend tomorrow talking to her family and trying to establish what we know about her.”

  “Is that a step backward in the case, though?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure.” Adriana couldn’t deny that a day with less adventure sounded good to her. It would still be emotionally exhausting, she knew from experience with the SAR team, to talk to the bereaved family. But it was still easier than going out and looking for more bodies.

  She could use something a little easier after today.

  * * *

  From her place in the passenger seat of Levi’s car the next morning, Adriana’s eyes widened and she gripped her coffee tighter. The earth on the other side of Levi’s car dropped off into a ravine, the road itself literally crumbling at the edges into...

  Well, air.

  No guardrails. That would provide an illusion of some kind of safety. Adriana swallowed hard and tried to ignore the pressure in her chest. She was not having a panic attack today, definitely not in front of Levi, where he sat at the wheel calmly driving the road to Raina Marston’s parents’ house like it was a normal subdivision road.

  She guessed the sign at the entrance that said Wilderness Heights should have been her first clue. It was definitely wilderness. And they were very, very high up.

  This was not what she’d been expecting.

  Adriana set down her coffee in a cup holder, not taking her eyes from the road. Now she gripped the top of her to-go coffee cup with her left hand and the handhold grip of the car door with the other.

  “It’s really fine.” Levi glanced in her direction.

  “Do not look at me, look at the road!”

  So, yes, she was scared of heights. She may have left that tidbit out of her about-me section because really, who hired a search-and-rescue team member who was scared of heights? It didn’t affect how good a job she did as she was always able to push through the fear when a search required it, but she still hated it, like her own personal thorn in her flesh.

  “Hey.” His voice was quieter now. She felt his hand settle on top of hers. Warm. Strong. “It is going to be okay.”

  Simple words like that shouldn’t have the power to release the tension from her shoulders, to ease the grip she had on the handhold. No, instead she should be embarrassed that much as she may have tried to keep her acrophobia a secret, Levi had just uncovered it.

  But she wasn’t. She felt...similar to yesterday. Known.

  Adriana swallowed hard as something awfully similar to butterflies danced in her stomach and not from the height. It had been so many years since she’d felt more than a passing bond with someone. This felt...like more than passing.

  The second she’d decided she liked his hand there, that maybe she was ready to take the risk to open her heart just a tiny bit, he yanked it away. Like somehow he hadn’t been conscious of what he had done until that very second and now he was, and regretted it.

  “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t... Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “This is their house, on the right.”

  Better than on the left. Because even though it meant they had a steep driveway to drive u
p, they weren’t driving essentially off a cliff, so she was thankful for that.

  “So what’s the plan when we go in there?” Mainly she asked to try to keep her mind focused on what they were doing, instead of imagining the possibility of something developing with Levi.

  She still wasn’t sure why she’d come today. She appreciated his understanding about Blue needing a day off. They’d pick up looking for burial grounds tomorrow. But why did she need to be here? She wasn’t a regular partner, not in any sense of the word.

  Unless it informed the search somehow? Adriana guessed she could see how that would be a possibility. And it was always better to have a second set of ears hearing people talk, in case someone missed something.

  “I just want to talk to them and see what insights they can offer. Sometimes the tiniest details end up being useful to a case. Besides, don’t you think they deserve to know that someone is looking for their daughter’s killer?”

  Yes, of course she thought so. She wanted them to have closure.

  Did that mean she was ready to go look people facing loss in the eyes?

  No, not at all.

  Yet he was reaching for the door handle, clearly expecting her to follow. “Ready?”

  No. Yes? She would try to be. Rather than say any of it, Adriana nodded. She was as ready as she was going to be.

  Levi opened his door and stepped out and Adriana did the same. The air was a little warmer today, almost like a Lower-48 fall day, and the sun was shining, clear and bright in a vibrant blue sky.

  She loved Alaska. Had since the first day she’d stepped out of the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. She might be from Oklahoma, but she was pretty sure somehow that she was Alaskan at heart.

  They walked to the front door, rang the bell.

  A woman, probably in her midsixties, answered. She looked like someone who had been crying, but who had tried to pull herself together. Adriana knew Levi had called yesterday to set up this appointment, so at least they weren’t showing up unannounced, but she still felt uncomfortable stepping into someone else’s grief when she always wanted to be left alone with hers.