Alaskan Showdown

by Sarah Varland

  Levi shook his head. “No.”

  “No?” She waited.

  “Did you hear what the barista didn’t say?” Levi asked as he opened the car door.

  She opened hers while she thought and let Blue climb in first.

  Adriana had just started to shake her head when he continued.

  “The barista didn’t mention their meeting being strange. If this is the same killer who began committing crimes more than twenty years ago, he couldn’t meet with a woman that young without sticking out. See what I mean? The killer has to be years older. The cashier at the coffee shop would have been more specific, about her meeting an older man. And unless it was Harrison Ford’s doppelgänger, she wouldn’t have made the comment about him being handsome.”

  * * *

  All of which made sense. SAR puzzles just made so much more sense to her than the law-enforcement kind. Not for the first time, she couldn’t help but think how eager she was for this case to be over, to get back to her normal job.

  Although she wouldn’t see Levi as often. Although their paths crossed on occasion, it would be a rare occurrence. Not every day.

  She would miss him, she realized. Which made her aware of another truth. Even if they were only friends, it would still hurt her if he disappeared from her life.

  Was there no way to protect herself from all possible pain?

  Please don’t let me get hurt, she prayed, while trying to focus on the task at hand.

  “So who is the guy?” she asked.

  “No idea,” Levi admitted as he put the car in Reverse. “But hopefully that’s what we’re going to find out. Let’s go to the police department, get his address and then go talk to him.”

  At Adriana’s request, they dropped off Blue at her place on their way to the police department. While they were there, Adriana offered to fix some lunch for them. Her stomach had started growling earlier and she was sure he must be hungry, too.

  “No, it’s fine. You don’t need to do that.”

  “I’m happy to.” She was already halfway through the assembly of two roast-beef sandwiches. Each of her dogs had also had a tiny piece of roast beef, even though they couldn’t have much since the sodium wasn’t good for them. A little for a treat was okay, though.

  “I just feel bad. It’s not your job to feed me.”

  And yet, packing two lunches felt so good to her. It was nice to consider someone besides herself and to feel like she was helping to take care of him.

  Had he had a previous girlfriend make him feel bad for requesting that she make him food? Or something similar? Even as she thought it, Adriana was surprised at how much she disliked the concept of him ever having had a significant other. Of course, he would have, though. Men as handsome as Levi didn’t stay single their entire lives.

  “Why are you being so weird about this?” She finally couldn’t hold back the words, even knowing it wasn’t really her business.

  He seemed comfortable around her. Comfortable in her house, sitting at her table with coffee. He was personable, at least on a professional level.

  But there was some kind of line he’d drawn in invisible sand that he wouldn’t let himself cross.

  Of all things, that should make her back off. Leave him alone.

  But some flash of insecurity in his kind, light eyes had her feeling like whatever the line was about, it wasn’t what he really wanted.

  He was looking at her now, hesitation in his gaze.

  She stepped closer. Handed him the bag with his lunch in it. “Here.”

  He nodded and took it from her. “Thank you.”

  She made herself step back. The last thing she wanted to do was jeopardize their working relationship.

  “Ready?” he asked. She nodded and followed him outside onto her front deck.

  Maybe she’d been right. Maybe making lunch was too personal a thing.

  She turned to lock her door, then opened her mouth to apologize as Levi, who was standing beside her, held his remote up to unlock his patrol car.

  The car exploded in a concussive blast, the fireball sending out a wall of force that punched and pushed them backward.

  Adriana stumbled back, or flew, she couldn’t tell. Or had Levi shoved her? They landed hard on the wooden deck, and Adriana could feel a bruise forming on her hip where she’d taken most of the impact. Her ears were still ringing from the blast and a thrumming headache had started pounding.

  For a second she was lying there, her mind trying to grapple with what had happened and make it make sense. But there wasn’t much chance of that. Nothing about this made sense.

  “Book inside, now. The house.” Levi’s breathless voice beside her left no room to argue.

  She scrambled behind her for the doorknob, scooting back toward the house for safety.

  Her keys. Where were her keys?

  The car in the driveway was still burning, a creaking, crackling heap of useless metal.

  She had been in that vehicle half an hour ago. So had her dog.

  Keys. She had to focus on getting inside. She blinked away a fresh wave of dizziness and fumbled across the front deck on her hands and knees.

  There they were.

  She reached for them and unlocked the door. “Come with me,” she said to Levi and surprisingly, he didn’t argue.

  They both stepped into the house. Both dogs were barking, dancing in a frenzy of excitement. Adriana almost couldn’t breathe. They’d almost been killed.

  Incinerated.

  No.

  “What happened?” she finally asked, her heartbeat still in a tangle in her chest.

  His face didn’t reassure her. For once, his expression said nothing about having this under control, and only hinted at confusion.

  Even fear...

  “Someone is taking this awfully far.” At least that’s what she thought he mumbled. It was hard to hear, from the way he clenched his teeth.

  “Should I call 911?” The words felt silly. A cop was standing here with her and he hadn’t been able to stop the attack.

  “Yes,” he said, again surprising her. He held up his phone, which was vibrating. “I’m sorry, I have to take this.”

  * * *

  If he could ignore the look on Adriana’s face and just do his job, Levi knew he’d have a much better chance at solving this case.

  “Hello?” he said into the phone as he walked away from her, despite the look of sheer, unmasked fear in her wide eyes.

  There was no answering voice at the other end. But the “unknown number” on his caller ID had made him ready for anything. Expecting anything.

  “Officer Wicks.”

  Prepared or not, it was still spine-chilling to hear his name uttered by a genderless, heavily computerized voice.

  “This isn’t your fight. You don’t have all the information. It is necessary to do this. Stop getting in the way. Next time, the bomb goes off with you in the car.”

  He fumbled in his pocket for a piece of paper, to write down the caller’s words. But, of course, he had none when he needed it.

  The phone clicked. No more voice. No more words.

  “I called it in.” Adriana walked toward him, her voice shaking. “Who was that?”

  “I need paper.” He ignored her question for now, trying to focus on what had been said to him. “Do you have some?”

  Her eyes widened even more at his short tone. He would apologize later, but not right now. Right now he needed to write down the message as best he could remember it.

  “What on earth?” Adriana muttered under her breath as she handed him the paper. Levi scrawled down the message, knowing he was forgetting some of the word choices and hoping he was close enough.

  The part that had stuck with him most was the fact that the caller—theoretically, the serial killer he was after—
felt justified in his or her actions. Not that it surprised him. Serial killers often felt they were righting some kind of perceived wrong, or helping the world in some way, according to their warped perspectives. But this person’s words hadn’t sounded crazy, which was perhaps the creepiest thing about the call.

  He’d been on the phone with a person who had killed over five people. That person was now after him.

  It was more than he wanted to grapple with right now. Especially with his shell of a patrol car burning in the driveway.

  “The caller said next time I’d be inside,” he mumbled. That implied that his unlocking the door hadn’t set off the mechanism of the bomb, as he’d assumed. Instead, someone had chosen when to remotely trigger it.

  The killer apparently had triggered it right when they were close enough to be in real danger, to have almost died.

  “Why does this person appear to keep halfheartedly attempting to kill me?”

  “Because they don’t have the same kind of compulsion to kill you as they do the other victims.” He heard Judah’s voice as his brother stepped inside the front door, which Adriana had apparently left open. “You really should shut that. The fire department is outside putting the fire out, but that doesn’t mean leaving the door unlocked is a good plan with a serial killer.”

  Levi hadn’t meant to ask the question aloud, but nodded at his brother anyway. “Thanks for letting me know. Didn’t mean to leave it unlocked. So tell me what you think of this—the killer keeps doing things that might kill me, but doesn’t try too hard because he’d rather I just back off?”

  Judah nodded. “Exactly. You are in the way of whatever his plan is. But you aren’t one of the ones who is ‘supposed’ to die, according to him.”

  It was a sick train of thought to consider. But it made sense.

  The problem for him was that he wasn’t going to quit. Which meant he would stay in the way and still be in danger.

  And the more Adriana pitched in on the case, the more she would be in danger, too. Because the killer didn’t have anything against him personally. He was just a liability. And she was, too, now that she was helping. Serial killers, while they murdered people who fit their profile, also were known to kill people who didn’t fit the profile but who got in their way. Like law enforcement.

  And, he feared in this case, like search-and-rescue workers who had volunteered to help with the case and had the skills to blow it wide open.

  “I came as soon as we got the call.” Judah was speaking to him again. Then he turned to Adriana. “Thanks for calling it in. You did a good job giving details and staying calm. The dispatch worker was impressed with that.”

  Adriana offered a small smile and Levi felt proud of her. That was weird, wasn’t it, like they were something more than friends?

  “Thanks. I didn’t feel that calm, but I’ve learned in SAR work that panic doesn’t get you anywhere,” Adriana said from where she stood petting her dogs. Blue had barked when they’d come inside, but almost seemed to sense that Adriana needed her to be calm now. Both Blue and Babe stood by her like sentries, letting her pet them.

  “The killer called me,” Levi said, wondering if he should have waited until Adriana had left the room to tell his brother.

  “And said?” Judah asked.

  Adriana asked nothing. She just stared, eyes wide.

  “Essentially warned me that next time I’d be in the car.” Levi showed Judah and Adriana the words he’d jotted down.

  “Give me the phone number it came from?”

  “Blocked.” Levi shook his head.

  “Not that hard to do these days,” Judah said.

  “So he’s trying to give you a chance to live by stopping the investigation,” Adriana chimed in. “And you can’t take it because it would mean other people dying.”

  Well, when she put it that way, he sounded like some kind of hero, and if he was honest with himself, he saw a spark of something in her eye that seemed to imply she almost thought of him that way, too.

  But she couldn’t, surely. She must see the way that he worked too much, like his wife had said. And the way he tended to be a bit of a lone wolf. He’d worked well with Jim in the past, but he got tired of waiting for other people sometimes and preferred to just charge ahead alone when he had an idea. All of those things made him imperfect and she was still looking at him that way.

  He didn’t deserve it. And somehow never wanted it to stop.

  When this case was solved, what was he going to do? Adriana would still be a coworker, so not anyone he could afford to casually date, lest they break each other’s heart and make their jobs awkward.

  But he’d gotten so used to having her at his side during the course of these last few days that he would miss her.

  Maybe more than as just a listening ear. If he let himself, he could admit that he enjoyed spending time with her just as a person, as a woman, which was something he hadn’t let himself feel in years.

  “You must be getting uncomfortably close,” Judah offered, “for the killer to be willing to escalate things this way.”

  “Or they are just getting unhinged.” Adriana didn’t look pleased with that idea.

  Levi couldn’t say he was, either. And Judah’s tightened jaw spoke for itself.

  “I’ve got guys outside ready to look at the car when it’s cool enough,” Judah said finally. “To see what type of bomb it was and if there is any kind of forensic evidence that could help us out.”

  “Are you expecting to find any?” Adriana asked.

  “Not really,” Judah admitted. “Not easily, anyway. Whoever this is has been killing for years. They could get sloppy. But only if they’re desperate.”

  “I like the idea of someone getting desperate enough to leave evidence, but not enough to actually want them after me like that,” Levi said, attempting a joke.

  His brother, as he should have known would be the case, was not amused.

  “Is this some kind of joke to you?” Judah’s voice lowered and his tone darkened. “That your car got blown up, the first Raven Pass cruiser ever to be destroyed—by the way, I heard that tidbit from Officer Clark on the way here—and that someone is after you? That’s just funny?”

  “I’m going to go make sure Blue got enough food earlier.” Adriana cleared her throat.

  Great. They’d made her feel awkward in her own house. That was another level of being a bad guest. Bad enough that she’d made him lunch today, like it was her job to take care of him.

  No one had taken care of him since the day he’d moved out of his house after high-school graduation. No one. Not like that.

  It still stung that the marriage he’d thought might have that kind of love hadn’t. No, instead it had only left him with betrayal from the discovery of her unfaithfulness and a deep sense of cynicism that he couldn’t shake no matter how lighthearted he tried to be about life.

  And rather than thank Adriana for the sandwich, for thinking of him, and actually find the guts to tell her why he’d acted so weird, he’d gotten his car blown up in her driveway and interrupted her safe world with this entire case.

  Yeah, he might miss her when this was all over, but she would undoubtedly be glad to be rid of him.

  “Of course I don’t think it’s funny,” he said now to his brother, doing the best he could to keep some of the pure anger from his tone. Judah was still his brother, no matter what kind of stupid things he might say sometimes. “I think it’s awful and I want it to end—that’s why I’m barely sleeping and I’m working this case every single second I’m awake.”

  “So don’t make jokes.”

  “It’s what I do, okay? Some people drink too much, some people find a hobby, some people make jokes to handle it. Let me do things my way.”

  Judah stared at him in that way only older brothers could, and then Levi really heard hi
mself.

  “Yeah, okay, I could make jokes and also handle it better, too. Pray about it? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Sometimes Judah was a lot like their eldest brother, Ryan, that way. Levi followed Jesus, too—at least he sure tried his best—but it had never been quite the same for him as it was for his two older brothers. For all his gruff attitude, Judah loved Jesus in a big way, the same with Ryan.

  Levi...followed Him. Knew a lot about Him. And had trusted Him to save him.

  He loved Him. Sure. Just not, you know, in a squishy, overly emotional kind of way.

  Something that was hardly Judah’s business. He didn’t care what his brother thought, or that he might disagree.

  “Let me handle my life, Judah,” he said, and pain flashed in Judah’s eyes.

  “Fine,” his brother said and walked away.

  ELEVEN

  She wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, truly she wasn’t, but Adriana could hear every word from the kitchen. Neither of the brothers were trying particularly hard to be quiet.

  It made her uncomfortable beyond belief that the killer had probably called Levi. It was even worse knowing that the person had insinuated that the bomb had been triggered remotely, which meant someone had to have been watching them.

  She looked around the house, where she’d always felt so comfortable, and ran her eyes over the ceilings, down the walls. Looked at the room full of furniture.

  Were they listening, too? Surely her house hadn’t been compromised. No one could have gotten inside without the dogs alerting her to it.

  Right?

  “Sorry you had to hear that,” Levi said as he walked into the kitchen and sighed. The sound came from deep within, less frustration and more heaviness. “I assume you did, based on the fact that you’re just standing here, looking alarmed.”

  She was literally caught in the act. Adriana felt her face color, but she shrugged, refusing to feel bad for overhearing a conversation that had taken place in her own house.