In the Dark

by Loreth Anne White

  It was a sense more than anything—death lay near. Perhaps, thought Callie, some vestigial part of themselves could smell it on a primal level.

  They saw it. Two shapes lying prone near a circle of stones around blackened embers. She tensed. Scanned the surrounding forest.

  Trudy growled, hackles rising, lips peeling back from her incisors, gums and teeth shiny with saliva.

  “I’m going to hold back and wait here,” said the K9 cop. “She knows the wolves are there.” His hand was near his sidearm.

  Callie nodded. The rest of them proceeded forward in single file behind Oskar. Mist tendrils snaked like specters through the trunks.

  “Helvete,” Oskar said as his body went rigid in front of Callie. She knew Oskar well, had been on enough searches with him to be aware that hearing him swear softly in his home tongue was a really bad sign. The word meant hell, which carried a much darker weight in his language than hers. Definitely not good.

  Mason came up beside Oskar. His body also stiffened. He shot his gloved hand out, halting the rest of them. Callie scanned the mist, trees, again, watching for the yellow eyes of a timber wolf, her heart beating hard.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Mason said, switching his gloves out for crime scene nitrile.

  She came forward, slowly. Hesitant. Not wanting to see, but needing to.

  Her heart kicked. Two corpses. Male. Wildlife had been at one. Not the other.

  Only two men had left the Forest Shadow Lodge. So they had to be Professor Nathan McNeill and Dr. Steven Bodine.

  She turned to the body lying closest.

  Mason shot images with his RCMP cell phone.

  This male lay on his back, arms and legs splayed. One of his legs at a strange angle. His face had been scavenged, half pulled off. No lips. But hair and scalp remained. Brown hair. Thinning.

  “Nathan McNeill,” she whispered.

  Mason nodded. He reached into the decedent’s bloody pockets, looking for ID.

  She moved to the other corpse. This male lay on his side. A gaping wound in his cheek writhed with freshly hatched maggots. Bile rushed to her throat. She stifled a gag with her gloved hand.

  Skin was jaundiced. Eyes wide open, the whites a dark-yellow color. Eerie, almost inhuman-looking. Signs of liver failure and organ collapse. This had to be Steven Bodine. And by the evidence of an advanced stage of liver failure, he’d ingested a significant amount of the lethal death cap fungus.

  “Where are the women?” she asked, turning in a circle.

  “Over here!” Oskar called. He’d been checking the periphery of the clearing. “Just inside the trees here.”

  Callie moved to join him.

  He pointed down at the body of a woman sprawled in the loam. Callie gagged.

  Brunette. Shoulder-length hair. But the rest of her body had been ripped and mutilated beyond recognition.

  “Fy faen.” He swore quietly in his native tongue again. What the fuck. “Looks like the pack dragged this one out of the clearing and into the trees.”

  Callie crouched down and studied the sole of the woman’s boot. She held her hand over her nose and mouth, repulsed by the smell. Putrid. Metallic. Small maggots wriggled in the loam beneath the corpse. A hunk of flesh lay nearby.

  “Deborah or Monica. From the boot,” she said, coming to her feet and stepping back, her stomach churning. “But we still don’t know which one of them wore which boot. I can’t tell just looking at the rest of her, can you?”

  “Both Deborah and Monica were brunettes,” Oskar said. “Both had similar-length hair.”

  “Maybe it’s not past tense for both. Unless the other two are dead as well, and the animals just dragged them farther off.” Callie returned to the clearing to inform Mason, while Oskar scouted in an outward spiral from the clearing, shotgun ready, looking for signs of the other two women.

  Mason was bent over Nathan’s body.

  “We found—” She froze.

  He’d rolled Nathan over onto his stomach.

  “He was shot,” Mason said. “Through the neck.” He pointed to a ragged and bloody area between the base of Nathan’s skull and his shoulders. “Exit wound here.” He glanced at the other body. “Steven Bodine, too. In the face. And chest. But the animals haven’t touched him. It’s like they sense the toxin in him, the foulness in his flesh.”

  Callie felt an urge mount within her to get out of this place. Away from this violence. And whatever it meant.

  “No sign of the rifle from the lodge,” Mason said as he visually scanned the clearing.

  He saw something that glinted among the pine needles a short distance away from the bodies. He went to it, squatted down, photographed it. Then, using gloved hands, he reached for it. “Shell casing,” he said. He picked it up, bagged it, then found another nearby in some pale-green lichen. He took more photos, then bagged and recorded that one, too.

  Callie’s mind raced as she watched Mason. One shot had been fired into Nathan McNeill’s neck. And two shots into the ailing Dr. Steven Bodine. One in the chest. One right in the face. The men had seen it coming. They’d looked into the eyes of their executioner.

  Mason came to his feet. “Where are the others?”

  The question sounded rhetorical, but Callie said, “We just found one more, so far.” She led the way back into the trees.

  “Shit,” he said quietly. He photographed the female decedent, then turned her onto her back. Her face was unrecognizable. As with Nathan’s body, the wolves had savaged this one so badly it was impossible to guess whether she was Monica or Deborah, or even the age. All they could tell was that she was not Stella.

  “Looks like it could be an exit wound there,” Mason said, pointing to a dark and saturated bloom of blood on the woman’s chest.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. But it’s possible.”

  “She was shot in the back?” Callie asked quietly as she glanced back toward the firepit where the men’s bodies lay. “Running away? From who? From one of the men? Someone else?”

  “Perhaps whoever still has the rifle,” he said.

  Oskar appeared out of the misty trees, carrying his shotgun. He shook his head. “Can’t see any sign of the other two heading in that direction. Only signs of the wolves.”

  “Ask the pilot if he can do another sweep, see if the chopper can pick up any infrared trace from the other two women,” Mason said. “They must have left this area of their own volition. There’s only one backpack left behind in the clearing. I imagine the five would have brought more than one bag from the lodge to carry water and other supplies.”

  Callie reached for her radio and made the request.

  “Roger that, SAR one. The pack is closing in toward your location again. Becoming more resistant to our attempts to scare them.”

  “Roger. Thank you. Over and out.”

  Mason had moved back into the clearing, trying to find better reception for his sat phone. She went to join him.

  “I’m calling this in,” he said. “Going to need a forensic ident team in. Body removal. Coroner.”

  “Wolves are closing back in. Might not be much left by the time they get here.”

  He got through as a yell came from Gregson. “Got trace back here! Trudy’s picked up scent again. Looks like two sets of tracks heading west, along some kind of game trail.”

  Mason made his request and killed his call. He and Callie hurried over to join the K9 team. Trudy was champing at the bit, lunging on her tracking line.

  “Did you say two sets?” Mason asked.

  “Affirmative,” Gregson said. “Size seven, and another set, slightly bigger.”

  “Stella and either Deborah or Monica,” Callie said.

  “Signs of blood, too.” Gregson pointed to some small dark dots on leaves.

  Urgency bit. Conflict chased through Callie. She was programmed to go after possible survivors. Triage. But these bodies in the grove would be finished off by the wolves as soon as they left.
r />   “We can’t leave these remains here,” she said. “The wolves will destroy what evidence there is.”

  “We’ve got an RCMP team coming in stat,” Mason said. “They’re coming via helo. We can ask this military chopper to hang in and keep trying to buzz off the wolves while we go after the other two,” Mason said. “They could still be alive. And they’re witnesses.”

  Callie’s gaze held his. And she heard the unspoken words.

  Or worse. One is the killer.

  THE SEARCH

  CALLIE

  Callie jogged with the team single file behind Gregson and Trudy. His dog lunged and muscled into her harness, hot on the scent of something fresh that had fueled her. Possibly the blood.

  As they ran, Callie felt dogged by a cold breath of malevolence that seemed to exhale from the forest grove behind them, as if reaching out and grasping to pull them back to the murder site with the mutilated bodies. Her pack bounced on her back, growing heavy. Her thighs burned, and air rasped in her lungs. She heard the steady thump, thump of Mason’s boots behind her. It was growing dark already. Clouds thickening and rain turning to soft blowing flakes that bit into their sense of urgency.

  “More blood,” Oskar called over his shoulder, pointing to leaves that had been stained with dark red. But they didn’t stop. Time was critical. Someone was not too far ahead of them, injured, but still alive, judging by the trace.

  Callie clicked her headlight on. So did the others. They labored like this for almost two hours, moving at a much higher elevation from the lake, but parallel with it. She knew it was out there, down there, but the water lay hidden from view by the clouds and softly blowing snowflakes.

  They came upon a wide river, and they all stopped along the bank, breathing hard. Gregson allowed Trudy to cast about with her nose, up and down the edge of the swiftly flowing water.

  Callie used the break to open her canteen and swallow cold water. She handed her bottle to Mason. He nodded thanks and took a sip.

  She watched him. He looked good. Color in his cheeks. His eyes bright. Energy high.

  He caught her looking and she glanced away quickly, her heart beating faster.

  “Doesn’t look too deep,” he said as he handed back her canteen.

  She recapped the bottle. “Maybe thigh deep at the deepest point, near those rocks there, I reckon.” She tilted her chin toward the crystal clear waters.

  But to their left they could hear the rushing water of rapids and what sounded like a waterfall as the terrain dropped toward Taheese Lake.

  “Over here!” Gregson called. “Looks like they went in here. Waded across.”

  “We go over,” said Mason. “We keep going.”

  Gregson put Trudy into a sling, and they waded into the icy water. It stole Callie’s breath. It went into her boots. They wouldn’t last long wet like this. The rapids tugged hard at them, but the river was shallower than she’d guessed. They made it through to the other side.

  Trudy picked up scent again immediately.

  They began to jog again, water squelching uncomfortably in boots, wet fabric chafing against legs.

  Oskar stopped suddenly and crouched to study the ground. Callie drew up alongside him.

  “What is it?”

  He frowned, looked up, moved a few paces forward, and crouched once more. He studied the ground again. Snow was beginning to settle.

  Oskar said, “Hard to be sure with the weather we’ve had, and the conditions, but . . . I think we’ve lost a set of tracks.”

  “What do you mean?” Mason asked as he joined them. Trudy and Gregson were still moving ahead. Fast.

  “I’m seeing only one set of tracks. I think. Since the river.” He pointed to a vague bit of an indentation in the mud, then another, both of which Callie would have missed had Oskar not drawn her attention to them.

  “Which set are you still seeing, what size boot?” Callie asked.

  “Can’t tell. Not in these conditions. Prints have been compromised.”

  Trudy suddenly started to bark wildly up ahead. Gregson yelled, “Got an alert. She’s alerting! Over here!”

  Callie and the rest of the group caught up to the dog and handler. Trudy was leaping and yanking against her tracking harness and line.

  “Down there!” Gregson yelled. “Someone down the cliff.”

  Shit. They had a find!

  Callie hurriedly shrugged off her pack. She got down on her belly to peer over the rocky precipice.

  “Hello! Anyone hear me? Anyone down there?”

  Mist as thick as pea soup swirled. She couldn’t see what was at the bottom. Her headlight beam danced off the mist.

  “Hello!” yelled Oskar.

  They all fell silent, listening. Gregson tried to quiet Trudy by taking a tug toy out of his pack and offering it to his K9 partner as a reward game. Trudy’s snuffling and tugging made it hard to hear any response. In the distance they could still hear the chopper, and another one coming in.

  “Hello!” Oskar cried again in his big foghorn of a voice. It echoed and bounced off the mountains around them.

  Silence. Just Trudy panting.

  “Someone is definitely down there,” Oskar said, examining the bushes and tracks. “More blood. And prints. And the broken twigs here. If it was dark, or foggy like now, they might not have seen this drop at all, and gone straight over.”

  “We need to get someone down there.” Callie took a coil of rope from her pack. “I’ll do it. See how far I can get. You help lower me from the top.”

  Gregson gave Trudy water, and Mason called in their status, asking for air rescue to stand by as Callie and Oskar and the other techs set up their ropes.

  Callie secured her harness and climbing helmet and started down the cliff into the mist. Working carefully, she felt her way along the rock face while Oskar directed the rope handling above.

  She got about ten meters down before her feet hit a rock shelf. The wind started to gust, clearing visibility. She got a better look at her surroundings. She was on a ledge about three meters wide and several meters long. A woman lay still a few feet away.

  She keyed her radio. “SAR one, come in Oskar, come in SAR two.”

  “SAR two, go ahead, Callie, I can see you.”

  She looked up. Oskar’s headlamp glowed at the top of the rock face among the snowflakes. She could see the others in the gloom, too. The wind was picking up, which was good, as it would help clear visibility and assist with the rescue.

  She keyed her radio. “One female. On a rock plateau about ten meters down. Can’t see anyone else. She’s not moving. Going to check.”

  Callie moved carefully along the ledge. It felt solid. She reached the woman. A brunette—definitely not Stella, then. Stella had short-cropped silver-blonde hair. She lay on her side. A small amount of blood trickled down the side of her face. Callie felt for a pulse. Her heart kicked. Hurriedly she keyed her radio.

  “SAR one to SAR two. We’ve got a live one. Repeat, we’ve got a live one. We’re going to need a backboard, litter basket, air extraction. Over.”

  She moved the woman’s hair off her face to better assess the extent of her head injury. “Hey, hon, hey, can you hear me? My name is Callie Sutton. Kluhane Search and Rescue. We’re going to look after you. We’re going to get you help, okay?”

  The woman’s eyelids fluttered, and she moaned.

  Callie keyed her radio. “It’s Deborah Strong. Repeat, we’ve found Deborah Strong. No sign of Stella Daguerre.”

  She returned her attention to the subject. “Hang in. We’re going to get you home, Deborah. Help is coming.” As she spoke, she heard the second chopper. It grew louder. It must have diverted from the crime scene.

  “Help is coming, Deborah. Hang in.”

  She groaned. Moved her legs, then her arm. Relief whammed through Callie. Not paralyzed. The sound of the chopper grew louder.

  “Deborah, can you—”

  “M . . . mm . . . my bay . . . baby. Is m . . . my ba
by okay? Pregnant.”

  Shit!

  She glanced at the woman’s legs. No blood. No overt rounding of the belly, either. Callie leaned closer, holding her hand. “Paramedics are coming. Just hold on.”

  White light from the helicopter washed over them. Callie signaled.

  “Baby?”

  “Looks like no bleeding, Deborah. How pregnant are you?”

  “Twelve weeks. I . . . haven’t . . .” She moaned. “Told . . . Ewan.” She faded out. Her eyelids fluttered. Pulse was going thready.

  She radioed in. “Deborah Blunt is pregnant. Twelve weeks.”

  “Roger that. Medical personnel standing by in Kluhane.”

  A SAR tech was being lowered on a long line from the helicopter above. Callie squinted against the downdraft pummeling her as she protected Deborah’s face and eyes from the whirling sand and debris coming off the cliff face.

  “He’s almost here, Deborah.” Callie was using her name repeatedly to keep the subject present. “Paramedics are almost here. They’ll stabilize you. Get you onto a backboard and covered with a survival blanket. They’ll make you warm and strap you into the litter basket and lift you into the helicopter. You’ll be in the Kluhane clinic in no time. They’ll check your baby.”

  Another moan.

  “Can you tell me where Stella is? Did she go farther on the path? Is she still out there? Is she hurt?”

  Deborah moved her head, winced.

  “Don’t move. Just talk, if you can. She might need our help, Deborah.”

  “She . . . Sst . . . Stella . . . Gone.”

  Callie leaned in closer, the noise deafening. The tech was coming lower, swinging on a line from the hovering bird.

  “Gone? Where is she gone?”

  “Fell into river . . . slipped. Ste . . . Stella . . . washed down. D . . . drowned. Dead.” The woman was chattering with cold. The tech’s boots hit the ledge. He made a sign to the chopper.

  Callie stepped back. She pressed her back against the rock face, giving room to the paramedic on the small ledge and making way for the litter basket being lowered from the chopper. She began to shake, coming off her adrenaline rush. The news that Stella had drowned—the blow to her gut felt physical. Callie hadn’t realized just how high her hopes had soared after she’d seen Deborah alive that they would still find Stella alive, too.