K-9 Recovery

by Danica Winters

  Even in the gray, she could see his cheeks were cherry red from the cold and exertion. She considered slowing down for him, allowing him time to recover, but there was no time for rest. Not when it came to Lily. They had to go.

  “Hasn’t Daisy been leading us, not you?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Yeah, but no. We’ve mostly been just following the tracks. The problem with snow and cold is that in this kind of weather, especially with the wind, the scents she uses to track can disappear pretty rapidly. The wind alone can really make the odors drift off course. That being said, I’ll put her on this, but if they got off this trail, it could really slow down our progress.”

  He gave a dip of the head, and though she thought he would have been secretly relieved to slow down, he looked as frustrated as she felt. “We won’t stop, Elle, I promise. I will do everything and put every resource I can behind finding Lily.” His handset crackled, and she could make out a woman’s voice but couldn’t hear what she was saying. A thin smile moved over his lips and he looked up at her. “Search and rescue is on the ground. They just arrived at the house.”

  She glanced down at her watch. They had been on the trail now for a little under an hour. At the pace they had been moving, that made them just less than three miles from where Lily had last been seen.

  “They are putting together their plan, but for now it sounds like they are going to bring up their four-wheelers, then send hikers out to catch up with us, maybe even get Two Bear helicopter to fly them in, but they are still working on that. I let them know we are still running tracks, but that the tracks may have given out.”

  A thin wave of relief washed over her. At the very least, they wouldn’t be the only two on the mountain searching.

  She gave Daisy her command, and the dog got on scent. Daisy pulled at the leather lead, glad to finally be back in control of the situation. The rocks under the slick pack of snow made travel slippery as they moved higher and deeper into the timber. The snow went from a few inches deep to now nearly touching her ankles over her hiking boots.

  Hopefully when the trio had made it to this point in the trail, Lily was no longer being forced to hike without her shoes. She could imagine Lily now; she’d never been one for long walks, and especially not any that involved her being scared and uncomfortable. Lily had to have been crying the moment she had left the house, and by this point she was probably exhausted and in an overwhelmed flurry of hiccups and sobs.

  Elle’s chest ached as she thought of Lily and how scared she must have been.

  Lily, baby girl, it’s going to be okay. She sent up a silent prayer to the universe. Hopefully Lily knew that she was going to come out here looking for her, that she would never let her get hurt... And yet, hadn’t she done just that?

  She tried to swallow back the guilt that welled in her throat. Guilt would do nothing to make things better; all it would do was obscure her focus on the goal of getting Lily back and into safety.

  Daisy pulled harder as they moved up a switchback.

  The world was almost pitch-black, and between the falling snow and the enveloping timber, she couldn’t even make out light from the stars. Luckily, the city lights from below were reflecting off the clouds and giving her just enough illumination to find her next step.

  Lily would have hated this. She hated the dark. On the rare occasions she had been there to put Lily to bed, Lily had always asked for a night-light and for Elle to promise to stand in her room until she had fallen asleep. The first night had taken two hours, three bedtime stories and nearly one million glasses of water and trips to the restroom.

  She smiled at the memory and how it brought with it the faint scent of baby powder and new dolls.

  Lily would be okay. She had to be okay. I’m coming for you, baby.

  She sped up.

  Maybe the trio had stopped for the night. If they were out here on their own volition, they would have likely called it a night and put down a place for a camp—along with a fire to keep them warm. If they were kidnapped, if the perpetrator wanted to keep them alive and relatively unscathed, he would have needed to let them rest soon.

  Which meant all they had to do to catch up with the trio was keep pushing forward.

  The wind pressed against her cheeks, blowing down hard from the top of the mountain. Elle pulled in a long breath, hoping to catch the tarry scent of burning pine and a campfire, but she couldn’t smell anything but the biting scent of ice.

  Without a fire it was unlikely that anyone could survive a night out here, not at the mercy of the elements. Without shoes and drained from miles of hiking, Lily would be especially at risk. She didn’t have the body mass or the gear to be out here like she was for any extended period of time, let alone the night hours when the temperature was expected to drop at least another twenty degrees.

  Daisy paused.

  “What is it, Daisy? Poshli.” She took a step, urging the dog forward.

  Instead, Daisy sat down and looked up the mountain, signaling.

  “What did you find, girl?” She walked to Daisy and searched the ground; she couldn’t see anything, and she was forced to flip on the light on her cell phone to illuminate the ground. There, barely poking up from the snow, was a purple mitten.

  Lily’s mitten.

  The lump returned to her throat. Not only did Lily not have shoes, but now she was missing a glove.

  Why hadn’t they stopped to pick up her glove?

  They must have been moving fast. Catherine wasn’t the best mother Elle had ever seen, but she was hardly the worst. She had seen terrorists use children in ways that she would have never thought of or expected, but Catherine wasn’t the type who would just let her daughter freeze. Catherine loved her.

  Elle had to assume she would fight for her daughter. Perhaps that was where the blood they had found had come from. Perhaps it was Catherine’s. If she had been in the mother’s shoes, she would have fought tooth and nail until they were safe.

  Then again, from the trail they had followed so far, there hadn’t been any more areas where it looked as though there had been an altercation—at least not when they could make out the tracks in the snow. Did that mean that Catherine had just gone along with the man? Had she allowed herself to be pliable? Or had the man been threatening them? Or was Catherine out here for some purpose that they didn’t yet understand?

  Grant stopped beside her, taking pictures with his cell phone and noting the mitten for the camera.

  The wind washed through the timber, making the branches rub against each other and creating an eerie melody from nature’s cello. The sound made chills run down her spine.

  It’s nothing. I can’t be afraid. There’s no time for fear. Not for myself.

  Clearly, she had watched too many horror flicks, but she couldn’t let them seep into this search.

  Grant slipped on a pair of nitrile gloves and took out a plastic bag from his pocket. Ever so meticulously, he leaned down and picked up the mitten and glided it into the bag, careful to keep it as pristine as he could, no doubt in an effort to protect any evidence they acquired should they need to take this to court or be judged for their actions later.

  They both stared at the glove for a long moment. There was a faint red stain on the seam near the fingertips of the mitten, almost as if Lily had touched a wound with the edge of her glove.

  “Does it seem odd to you that they would have remembered to bring her gloves but not boots?” Grant asked.

  “If I know anything from my experience with kids, it’s that they can never find their shoes when you’re in a hurry.” There was a wisp of a smile at the corners of her lips, but it was overtaken by the gravity of the moment.

  She pointed the light of her phone up the mountain. It was hard to tell how far they were from the peak, or how much farther they would go from here. How far could Lily have gone if she was
bloodied and cold?

  Not much farther.

  “I bet that blood isn’t from her. It’s probably Catherine’s,” she said, her voice sounding hollow and dampened by the snowy world around them.

  Grant frowned, shrugging. He turned on the light of his phone and illuminated the bagged glove as if doing so would give him the answers they were seeking. “It’s possible. But hell, anything is.” He clamped his mouth shut like he was refusing to say another damned word on the subject, always the cop. There was nothing they were better at than being unflappable.

  She both loved and hated that calm in the face of chaos. Why couldn’t he just say what he thought, what he feared? Then again, she had enough fears and imagined outcomes; if he laid his upon her, she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to bear the weight.

  Why couldn’t she be stronger?

  Hopefully Lily was proving to be far more formidable. Lily’s smiling face floated to the front of her mind, making tears well in her eyes.

  The wind rustled through the pines, hard and faster, and there was the drop of snow from branches, the sound reminiscent of footfalls. Just like the answers, even the forest was attempting to run away from them.

  There was a thud and a crack of a branch, and she shined her light in the direction of the sound. She wasn’t entirely sure whether or not it was more snow falling or something else, maybe an animal. This time of year, bears were in hibernation, but it could’ve been something large like an elk or even possibly a mountain lion.

  Wouldn’t that be crazy, them coming up the mountain looking for the missing Clarks and their possible kidnapper and then she and Grant falling victim to another kind of predator? The darkness in her heart made her laugh at the sick humor.

  She looked at Daisy, but the dog was sniffing the ground around where they’d found the mitten and seemed oblivious to the noise coming from the woods. Daisy was good, but just like her, the dog had a habit of being almost myopic when it came to the task at hand.

  She moved the beam of her light right to left, and as she was about to look away, she made out the unmistakable glow of two eyes from her peripheral vision. Instinctively, she stepped closer to Daisy and in front of Grant as though she was his shield. She moved the light in the direction of the eyes, but as she did, they disappeared into the thick stand of timber. Though she searched the area where she thought the animal had gone, she didn’t see it again.

  Daisy wasn’t the only animal who seemed to be drawn to Lily—or rather, the scent of blood.

  If the scavengers were starting to descend, she and Grant were likely walking into something far more sinister than simply two missing people.

  Her stomach roiled at the thought.

  She looked to the place where they had found the glove and then up at Grant. She thought about telling him of the eyes in the darkness, but she held back. There were plenty of things to be frightened of, but eyes staring out of the darkness seemed like the most innocuous of the dangers they faced. Whatever animal had been staring at them had been skittish. It was likely more curious than anything else.

  Like people, there were different kinds of predators—those who preyed upon weakness and were opportunistic killers, almost scavengers in their selection of their weak quarry, and then there were those predators who sought more challenging prey in order to test their killing abilities. The animal in the woods was likely more the scavenger type and less the stalker... Or perhaps it was situationally dependent. Perhaps the predator in the woods was seeking an easy meal because of the spent blood and wouldn’t waste its energy stalking them.

  “You okay?” Grant asked. He put his hand on the side of her waist, and the action was so unexpected that she allowed his hand to remain.

  She didn’t like to be touched.

  “Yeah, just thought I saw something, but it was nothing.” It was strange how she wanted to protect this man. Instead of stepping away, she wanted to reach out, to shield him.

  Or maybe it wasn’t about the man at all. Maybe she was just acting this way in an effort to protect herself from feeling more fear. But now wasn’t the time for some deep introspection; no, this was the time for Lily.

  He motioned up the hill. “Do you see that up there?”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. “What?”

  He pointed his finger more vehemently as if his simple action would clarify the entire situation for her. “Up there, see that line in the snow? There, under the tree.” He shined the beam of his flashlight near the base of a large fir tree.

  She finally spotted what appeared to be a drag mark in the snow. Though they were at least a dozen yards from the spot, it appeared to be the approximate width of a body.

  Carefully, they picked their way straight up the hillside, moving through deadfall. There was the snap of sticks and the crunch of the snow as they slowly struggled upward. It was steep, and as they neared the tree, Grant grunted. She glanced in his direction in time to watch him slip, then catch and right himself.

  If that mark in the snow was a drag mark, how could anyone move a body through this? They could barely walk through it on their own even without a three-year-old.

  When she was growing up, her father had taught her to hunt. When he wasn’t jetting around the world and taking down bad guys for the US government, he had taken her and her siblings out into the woods. They had spent time every fall and early winter in the woods, tracking and learning the patterns of animals. Her father had always told her it was so they could be more in touch with nature, but as she grew older, she realized it was just as much about human nature as it was about flora and fauna.

  One of the things that her father had drilled into her was that when animals and humans were injured, they would look for areas of cover. Most animals would run downhill toward water sources—creek beds and rivers. If water wasn’t close by or if they were significantly injured, they would seek shelter from trees.

  As she stopped to catch her breath, she realized that what they were looking at wasn’t likely to be a drag mark from someone being pulled up the hill, but it was more likely whoever had been hiding had slid down. They were, simply put, injured prey hiding from the predator. Little had they known, but predators and scavengers were everywhere around them.

  Daisy whined, pulling hard at the lead and nosing in the direction of the tree.

  “I know, Daisy.” She tried to control her heavy breathing; until now she hadn’t realized how much the hike had taken out of her. “Hello?” she called, hoping that if there was someone at the base of the tree, someone they couldn’t yet see, that they would call out an answer...anything, even a grunt that could act as a sign of life.

  Grant was a few steps ahead of her and stopped as she called out, but there was nothing, only the cascading sounds of the winter wind. Somehow, the world around them felt colder.

  Ascending the last few yards, in the thin light she could make out the edge of a bench beneath the tree, a flattened area that sometimes naturally occurred under large, aged trees thanks to years of deadfall accumulation, which then became alcoves.

  She silently prayed she was wrong, that her years of wilderness training were making her jump to the wrong conclusions. For all she knew, the animal they had run into below had made a kill and was actually watching them to make sure they didn’t find its quarry.

  Goose bumps rose on her skin.

  It was strange how a person’s sixth sense could pique and the mind could usher it away with a million different reasons to not pay it heed. Yet, when it came down to the critical moment, it was usually the sixth sense that would be proven right.

  Daisy leaped up and over the edge of the bench and immediately sat down, indicating something. Grant stood beside her, holding out his hand and helping Elle up the last step so she could be beside the dog.

  The bench under the tree was larger than she had thought it would have bee
n—it was approximately as wide as the widest point of the tree’s canopy, and as she stepped up, the dead limbs of the tree tore at her hair and scraped against her cheeks, forcing her to push the limbs away. It was really no wonder animals would have chosen this alcove to tuck in and away from the world.

  Grant grunted as he stepped up. She held back the branches so he could move beside her without being ripped to shreds by the gnarled fingers of the protective sentry. The dry twig in her hand snapped, the sound making her jump.

  “You’re okay,” Grant whispered, as though he was just as at odds with the fear in his gut as she was. His hand found its way to her waist again, and this time instead of merely allowing his touch, she moved into it ever so slightly.

  “I’m fine,” she lied.

  He moved the beam of his flashlight in the direction of the base of the tree, but there were so many branches that he was forced to crouch down. As he moved, he sucked in a breath.

  She dropped to her knees in the snow and dirt beside him. There, slumped against the gray bark, was a woman. Her hands were palm up in her lap. She listed to the right, and her face and shoulder were pressed into the brackish moss and bark. Her face was down, but thanks to the bottled, platinum-blond color of her hair, Elle knew she was staring at Catherine.

  She glanced at Catherine’s fingers. The tips were purple, but her skin was the gray-white that only came with death.

  Chapter Six

  The Two Bear helo touched down at the top of the mountain just short of midnight on one of the longest days of Grant’s life. He had thought he had been in good shape, but apparently a six-plus-mile hike straight up the face of a mountain wasn’t something his body was adequately prepared for. He waited as the coroner stepped out of the helicopter, followed by a few more members of the search and rescue team.

  The members of the team who had come up from the bottom of the mountain had finally caught up with them, and those volunteers were now in a holding pattern, sitting and resting while they waited for the helo team.