by Jen Blood
She lay on her back, eyes closed, a pool of crimson bleeding to pink in the snow beside her. Her face was deathly pale.
“Who is it?” Jack called to me, radio already up to his mouth.
The woman opened her eyes at my approach, plainly terrified. I knelt beside her. “It’s all right,” I said. “We’re getting help.”
“He shot Megan—” she began.
“Jamie?” Jack called, closer now.
“Tell Hogan we found Heather,” I instructed him, then returned my focus to the woman before me. “Who shot her, Heather?” I asked. “What happened? Where are the others?”
She shook her head, tears coursing down her cheeks. “I don’t know. It happened so fast. It came from the woods. I never saw anybody. And then we were running away, and I…” She stopped, forcing herself to slow down. “Then, he shot me. Everything just happened so damned fast.”
I took a few seconds to assess her condition and realized that the bleeding seemed to be minimal, confined to what looked like a graze in her right leg.
I turned back to Jack, already on the horn with Hogan. “Give him our coordinates and get somebody out here. We need a Medevac. Fast.”
Phantom lay down beside the woman, and Heather tipped her head to the side so she could touch the soft fur. I remained beside her, trying to keep her calm, as the minutes passed.
Buckle up, baby girl, Brock whispered in my ear. I’m just getting started. My stomach turned. With the radio call made, Jack stood beside us, silent, as we waited for help to come.
Chapter 6
WITHIN TEN MINUTES, Hogan reached the site where we’d found Heather. He was accompanied by two other wardens and Heather’s husband, Abe. As soon as we were in sight, Abe broke into a run. He half-slid to a spot beside his wife, eyes frantic.
“Heather. Oh my God, baby.” When he got no response, he looked at me. “Why isn’t she saying anything? Has she woken up since you found her?”
“She was conscious when we got here,” I said, directing the words to both Abe and Hogan. “But she passed out a few minutes later, and I haven’t been able to get her back.”
“Is she hurt? What the hell happened to her?”
“We’re not sure,” I said. “We’ll need to wait and have the paramedics check her out.”
Abe had another dozen questions for us that we couldn’t answer, while Hogan alternately sent updates to the IC and stared at the sky, waiting for help to come. Mercifully, that help arrived twenty minutes later, noise like a firestorm sounding over the horizon. Seconds later, the Medevac helicopter came into view. It landed in a clearing fifty yards away, blowing snow and debris in every direction. I snapped Phantom’s leash onto her collar and kept her out of the way as paramedics rushed toward us, crouched low to avoid the chopper’s rotors.
“Vitals?” a short, stout woman demanded as she knelt beside Heather. I rattled them off and the woman nodded. Meanwhile, Hogan and Jack worked together to strong-arm Abe out of the way.
Satisfied that we had done what we could, Hogan, Jack, and I stood by as they lifted Heather onto a stretcher and carried her back to the chopper. Once she was loaded in, the medics made room for Abe, since there was no way in hell he would have been left behind. We remained silent as they lifted off. I reached down and scratched Phantom behind her ears as the helicopter flew away, and tried not to think about what would have happened if she hadn’t caught that scent and pushed on.
“The IC is pulling us in to regroup,” Hogan said, once the chopper was up and away. “The fact that there’s a gunman changes everything. State police are on their way out to analyze the scene, and the sergeant needs to figure out how he wants to play things if we have an active shooter out there somewhere. My hunch is that he’ll pull the ground pounders out of the field now.”
The fact that I worked with the trained K-9 units meant I was slightly more valuable than the civilian searchers Hogan was referring to, but I still technically qualified as a civilian volunteer.
“He doesn’t need to do that,” I said. I thought of the search in Glastenbury and the deadly standoff that resulted because I hadn’t pulled my searchers off, and reconsidered. “At least, not with me. I’ll keep Bear and Ren out of it from here on out. Issue Kevlar if you need to, but I’m not stopping as long as those women are still out there. Especially not now.”
Jack frowned. I glanced at him, noting the worry in his dark eyes. “You don’t have to come,” I said. “I’ll understand. There’s no shame in playing it safe.”
“I’m not worried about myself,” he said quietly.
“We’ll need to report back to the IC regardless,” Hogan said. “He was clear on that. We’ve got a new PLS to work from, and with the hasty search of the area already done, we’re moving into a type 2 search. That means I’ll need more teams on the ground, including K-9s. Whatever way you slice it, this is gonna be a shit show.”
In search and rescue, there are several categories of searches, the most basic being the ‘hasty search,’ which is exactly what it sounds like: searchers divide segments of a large search area into a grid and do a quick scan of the area, often using planes or helicopters to cover open spaces like roads and waterways. In this case, the hasty search had employed both air teams and snowmobiles, but had yielded nothing.
Type 2 searches are more organized than hasty searches, but are still considered a rapid, basic search. In type 2, an area is divided into grids and searchers are sent out to cover each section in a focused, consistent pattern. In the vast majority of search operations, the missing person is found during either the hasty search or the subsequent type 2 phase. I was hoping that would be the case this time, but the discovery of Heather and the story she told made me doubt we’d be so lucky.
“Based on what we saw here,” Hogan continued, “Heather couldn’t have been in the snow more than a few hours. Did she say when she got separated from the others?”
“She was fuzzy on the details. She was with another group, but she broke away so she could go back to the camp for Megan, who was the first one hit. Heather spent some time looking, and that was when she was shot.”
Hogan looked at me sharply. “Megan was hit, too? So where the hell is she? We’ve searched the camp. There’s no way she’s there.”
“We don’t have any more answers than you do,” Jack said. “But according to Heather, they were at the campsite when the first shot was fired.”
“So our radius has to be right,” Hogan said, half to himself. “This is three and a half miles from the campsite. They must have run like hell once the shooter came on the scene.”
The image ran through my mind: the group, panicked, running for their lives, Heather aware that her sister was hurt, that the dogs had been left behind, desperate to get back to them. I could imagine her begging the others to let her go, and then insisting. Only to find herself a target, just like Megan.
“The fact is, we don’t know what happened,” Hogan continued, his frustration clear. “We can finish speculating at base. We need to head in.” I frowned, catching Jack’s eye. He looked equally unhappy. Hogan caught the exchange, and paused. “What?”
“What if the others aren’t that far from here?” I asked. “They could be close, in which case us leaving the scene to go talk about what we should do rather than just doing it, especially if we already know what that something is… It’s a waste of time. And it could be time that Megan and the others don’t have.”
To my surprise, he nodded rather than arguing. “I know. But my orders are to bring you back in. We’ll get someone out here as soon as we can.”
“But you already have someone out here,” I insisted. “I could swap Phantom out for Casper so Phantom can rest up – Casper has more energy than he knows what to do with. That dog can do a ten-hour shift and still be ready to play when we get home. I want us to keep looking as long as we can.”
Hogan ran a hand through his hair. I’m not usually one to argue with my superiors on a search
, but I will if I know they’re making the wrong call. In this case, everything in me was saying we were wasting valuable time. We were looking at an active shooter and nine women still missing; time was the enemy right now. We couldn’t afford to waste a minute.
“Let me give the sergeant a call, see what he says,” Hogan finally said. “I want to check in with Michelle, though. See how long she thinks the K-9s on her team can handle the terrain out here.”
“Whatever you need to do,” I said, then added, “Thank you.”
He shrugged. “I just want to get everybody home safe. And if Megan’s still out there, and she’s hurt…” He fell silent for a moment, seemingly at war with himself. When he spoke again, there was an intimacy there that he hadn’t allowed in before. I saw Jack shift, and knew he must be wondering about our past. “I need you to be smart about this, Jamie. Because to be honest, I’m not sure I can be.”
The truth was clear in his eyes, whether or not he chose to acknowledge it: he knew Megan. Maybe they were just friends, but that wasn’t what I was seeing. Right now, I saw a man being torn up by a ticking clock and the knowledge that everything he was doing, everything he could do, might not be enough.
“Just let me get Casper out here,” I said to him. “Send us back out. In the end, I’ll do what’s best for my dog. If I think he’s in danger, I’ll pull out.”
“Good.” He paused, looking out toward the horizon. His jaw was hard, pain clear in his eyes. “Thank you, Jamie. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “Wait till we see how this thing ends.”
#
My next call was to Bear. I expected a fight about making him sit the search out while I took his dog with me. Instead, I was more than slightly uneasy about the underlying note of joy I detected in my son’s voice when he learned that he and Ren would be alone and unsupervised in a romantic lodge on a cold winter’s night, instead of trekking through the wilderness until the wee hours.
“You have separate rooms for a reason,” I reminded him, a tinny echo over the radio repeating the words back to me. It felt like I was being mocked by the danged thing, though I knew that wasn’t true. My son might not be taking me seriously, but the radio probably didn’t care one way or the other.
“I know that, Mom,” Bear said. “Relax. Geez. We’ll hang out, watch something on TV, and get some sleep. Hopefully once everything gets figured out, we’ll be able to get back out on the trail tomorrow to look for Megan and the others.”
I didn’t tell him that I doubted that, since that was my one and only bargaining chip at the moment. “Good. There’s a little bit of food in the fridge, but if you can’t find anything you like you can always order in.”
“We’re seventeen, Mom – I hope at this point we can figure out how to feed ourselves.”
“Funny how I never hear you say that back home when you’re wandering around complaining that there’s nothing to eat.” He didn’t dignify that with a response, which I could understand. I hesitated a second, that voice from our shared past echoing in my mind once more. Had he heard anything? Seen Brock?
“We’ll be fine, Mom,” he said, when a second of silence had passed between us.
“I know you will,” I said. Unless he said something to me about Brock, I decided, I would keep the echo of Bear’s father to myself. “Look after Phantom, and I’ll check in later. Love you, bud.”
We’d already gone through the phase where those three little words inspired embarrassment or overt horror. Particularly since the events in Glastenbury, that seemed to be a thing of the past.
“Love you too,” he said. “Now go on out there and find Megan, would you?”
I smiled. “You got it.”
I ended the call, and got my head back in the game.
Three hours later, we were still going strong. Any precipitation had long since ended by this time and the moon was out, the night unnaturally bright thanks to the light given off by the world of white around us. Casper kept going without complaint, his body insulated with his thermal jacket and his paws protected in specially designed thermal booties. We’d been joined by Michelle and Whippet and another half-dozen dog teams, each of them focused on an area within the grid we’d established based on the discovery of Heather Wright.
Jack remained by my side, while Hogan returned periodically to check on us but, clearly, had too many other things going on to hold my hand. Which was just fine, as far as I was concerned.
I hadn’t heard Brock’s voice again for hours, but I couldn’t shake the memory. More than once, I felt the cold, hard eyes of some malevolent force following me, but when I turned around there was no one. I kept going back over the words I’d heard, both back at the hotel and then later in the woods. There was no question that it was Brock’s voice. He may have been dead for eight years, but I would never forget what he sounded like whispering his threats in my ear.
There was one key difference here, though: Baby girl. In our entire troubled history, Brock had never once called me ‘baby girl.’ ‘Sweetheart’ was his preferred term of endearment, said typically with an underlying bite that made it feel as pointed as a knife’s edge by the time we were through. So was it actually Brock I was hearing, or could it be someone else? And could that someone actually be Heather’s shooter?
My thoughts were interrupted by the rustle of branches and the sound of footsteps behind us. It was just past ten p.m. Hogan pushed through the undergrowth, his breath a cloud of white preceding him.
“All right,” he said. “Time’s up. I want you back at base.”
“But—” I began. He held up a hand to stop me.
“No buts – I’m serious. You’ve been over the same area three times now, and so has everyone else out tonight. We’ve got a fresh group coming on. They’ll work through the night, expanding the grid another five miles. But you’re dead on your feet, and I know that dog could stand a break.”
Reluctantly, I nodded. I hadn’t worked Casper any harder than I should have; the dog’s eyes were still bright and his tail up, but extending the day any longer would definitely push the line. Jack looked ready to drop, and I was anxious to get back to the lodge to check on Phantom, who had gone back with Bear and Ren.
“All right, fine,” I said. Hogan looked pleasantly surprised that invoking the needs of the dog had worked on me.
“Really? We’re going back now? I was just getting warmed up,” Jack said, up ahead on the trail. Jack usually wasn’t one for sarcasm, but there was no missing it in his tone this time.
“You could have gone back sooner, you know,” I said.
“And leave you alone out here? Not a chance,” he said. At my look in his direction, he added quickly, “Not that I was here because I thought you needed protection. It’s just…” He faded out, his eyes still caught on mine.
“We’re partners,” I said. “I wouldn’t have left you, either. That’s how this thing works.”
It felt strangely intimate saying the words aloud. Another beat of silence passed before Hogan cleared his throat. “Well, nobody has to leave anyone out here alone now. Let’s get back to town.”
I called Casper back to me and snapped his leash on at his return. He looked discouraged at the unsatisfying end. Just like humans, working dogs thrive on knowing they’ve completed the day with a job well done. But while Phantom had found Heather, Casper had been chasing dead ends for hours. I hesitated, then turned to Jack.
“You up for one last job?”
He narrowed his eyes at me, his fatigue apparent even in the darkness.
“Jamie—” Hogan interrupted.
“It will only take a few minutes,” I said, barely glancing in Hogan’s direction before I refocused on Jack. “You mind playing the vic in a quick game?”
He caught my meaning immediately and nodded. “Casper needs a win for the day? Sure, I can do that. Just give me five minutes.”
Jack took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to m
e. “Here. Use this as a scent article. It should smell like me, but I swear I haven’t actually used it.”
I shoved it into a plastic baggie I took from my own pocket, holding it by one corner between thumb and forefinger. “Sure you haven’t.”
Seconds later, he vanished into the darkness. I turned to Hogan, who stood beside me with weary acceptance.
“The dogs need to feel like they’ve done something. This has been a frustrating day for everyone.”
“Tell me about it,” Hogan said darkly. “Do what your dog needs – I’m not about to stand in the way of that.”
After five minutes had passed, I knelt and unsnapped Casper’s leash one more time, then stuck the baggie with Jack’s handkerchief under the dog’s nose.
“Smell familiar, boy?” I asked him. He wriggled from head to toe, sensing that things were finally about to get good again. “All right, Casper. Ready? Find him!”
Instantly, Casper was on the move. His head was up for only a second while he searched for the scent. Then, three seconds in, his body snapped to attention. His nose hit the ground. Trotting easily across the frozen ground, he weaved in and out of the trees with Hogan and me close behind. Less than a minute later, I heard his alerting bark, then the pound of his paws on the frozen snow as he returned to me, barked, and ran off again.
“Where is he, Casper?” I called, pouring my last shred of energy into the words. “Come on, boy! Show me!”
He came back around to get me one more time, and I followed him through the woods until he stopped and sat down, barking pointedly into a den of branches. I shone my flashlight in, and Jack grinned back at me.
“Good boy, Casper!” I said. “That’s my boy!” I pulled out his tug toy, continuing to praise him like a nut while Jack and Hogan looked on and Casper latched onto the tug, teeth bared, tail waving. When you’re a dog handler, you can’t have too much stock in your own dignity – part of the job is acting like a complete idiot to keep your dog motivated and enthusiastic about the job.
After a two-minute celebration, I snapped Casper’s leash on again, stuffed his slobbery tug toy into my pocket, and looked to Hogan and Jack.
