Alaskan Showdown
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Sarah Varland
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HarlequinONE
They’d been searching for the missing twenty-something hiker for days and Adriana Steele had thought this time all was going to turn out well, that maybe they’d have that happy ending that search-and-rescue teams dreamed of.
Then she had climbed into the boat with her dog, Blue, and Blue had come to alert in the middle of Haven Lake.
Not the alert she used for people who were still alive. Blue did search and rescue—that was why she’d brought her along—but she was also the best cadaver dog she’d had the privilege of working with. One of the only ones she knew of who was able to sniff out the decay of a body, even when it was underwater. She’d done it before.
And that was her signal. Someone was dead.
Adriana had radioed the discovery in to the dive team, who had been waiting, and navigated her search boat back to the lakeshore.
She had done her best to push past the clench of pain in her chest. She knew what the family was going to go through now from personal experience. Saving people made facing her own personal demons worth it, but she paid a heavy price every time there was someone she couldn’t rescue.
Blue whined. Adriana reached down and petted her behind the ears. Finding people took a toll on the dog, too.
She waited with her at their truck, sat right there on the tailgate and watched the activity. The team had recovered the body from the lake, and law enforcement was over there with the search-and-rescue team members who had stayed in the immediate vicinity. The last thing Adriana had heard before she walked away, far enough away to give her some emotional distance, was that the body matched the description of Lara Jones, a hiker who had disappeared from nearby earlier in the week. A roommate had reported her missing, no foul play had been suspected before now and her car was parked at a trailhead not far from the lake.
It was tragic, but familiar. These cases happened too often, where hikers went missing and ended up dead, from some accident or another, enough times that Adriana knew how this worked. Someone was going to have to give a statement and since Adriana had found the body—well, her dog had—they’d want to talk to her specifically.
As long as it was a reasonable individual, she’d be fine. As long as it wasn’t... No, she pushed aside the thought.
It’s just there was one officer she’d rather not work with.
At this point, though, she’d talk to anyone if she could just get out of here. She could only hold it together for so many more minutes. She and Blue both needed to decompress. Maybe go for a run.
Adriana looked toward the group that had gathered around the body covered with a sheet.
She swallowed hard.
The landscape morphed. She no longer saw the fall leaves, changing on the trees from dull green to browns, golds and reds. Instead she saw winter in her mind. A lake like this, but frozen over. A recovered snow machine.
We’re sorry, but he went through the ice and didn’t make it...
Adriana stood so fast her head spun, dizziness making her weak.
She sat back down, reaching her hand out to steady herself.
“Whoa, are you okay?”
Levi Wicks grabbed her arm. He was the last person she wanted to see here. Well, maybe second to last. At least Levi gave some kind of credence to the idea of using dogs in search-and-rescue teams, even to assist law enforcement, whereas his brother thought they did no good at all. No, it wasn’t that part of Levi that bothered her. He was a laid-back “good old boy,” as they’d have called him where she was from, easygoing and unconcerned. Nothing flustered him. Nothing made him upset.
Adriana didn’t understand him. Being easily invested emotionally—wasn’t that part of what made her such a good search-and-rescue team member?
At the moment, though, he was all that was between her and passing out, maybe hitting her head on a rock on her way to the ground, so she should probably be a little more forgiving of his personality flaws.
“Adriana? Can you hear me?”
Yes, she could hear him. She was having a panic attack; she wasn’t deaf. But when she opened her mouth to answer, nothing came out. Anxiety choked her, cut off her airway, and she started to see spots again.
Not now.
But panic and the past never listened to her, never stayed where they belonged stuffed deep down inside, behind all the other thoughts and feelings she had. No, they had to intrude, unannounced and very much uninvited on days like today.
We can recover his body, but he’s gone, Adriana.
Her first love. Only love. Taken by a lake like this.
Adriana felt her eyes fill and for a horrible minute thought she might cry in front of this man. He was certainly the last person she’d want to cry in front of, not even second to last. How could someone like him possibly understand her feelings?
Besides, she’d never cried about Robert’s death. Not in the entire five years since it had happened.
She certainly wasn’t going to start now.
“Adriana.” She felt his weight settle beside her on the tailgate and blinked several times to clear her vision, to banish memories of the past and remind herself that she wasn’t back there, that today wasn’t that day. She needed to remind herself these feelings needed to stay buried at the bottom of her heart, where they belonged.
Her head spun and she squeezed her eyes shut, feeling herself start to give up on talking herself down from this attack. Maybe it was better to just let the emotions come, awful as it would be. She couldn’t fix it, couldn’t change the past.
She felt Levi’s arm brush against her back, then her shoulder, and come to rest on her upper arm.
“Hey.” He pulled her close to him. “You did your best. It’s an awful way to die and I’m sorry you had to see it.”
He was talking about today, and the body. Adriana knew that. But he didn’t know about Robert. Couldn’t know...
“It’s not that.” She heard her voice, watery though it was.
“Other...?” He trailed off. “Bad memories?”
Was that his voice breaking? Almost like he was fighting emotions of his own? Adriana took a breath, steadied somehow by his unsteadiness.
“My fiancé drowned. Five years ago.”
No. No. No. She heard her voice. Yes, that was her that had said that. She’d carried the secret with her from Wasilla, where she’d lived before “the accident,” as all their friends called it in hushed tones. Then she’d moved to Anchorage, taken some search-and-rescue classes, given up her work as a dog trainer and moved to Raven Pass to work with the team.
And she’d not told a soul why until now.
“You are the strongest woman I know.” His voice was still rough around the edges, heavy with something that made Adriana realize she wasn’t the only one with old hurts.
He might have only just found out. They might not be close at all.
But he understood. And somehow, right now, it felt like enough.
For the first time in five years, Adriana started to sob.
“I couldn’t save him.”
He pulled her closer.
“You can’t save them all.”
Officer Levi Wicks hated failure with every fiber of his being. Especially when he wasn’t ready to quit on something and giving up was forced on him, the decision taken out of his hands.
Sorry, Officer Wicks. There’s just not enough to keep the case open.
His chief’s words from the night before played again in his mind as he held Adriana while she cried. He’d finished his shift and kept his mind on patrol—the people of Raven Pass didn’t deserve a distracted law enforcement officer—but once his shift had ended he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the serial-killer case that had occupied all his spare moments for the last few years.
Probably it would have helped if he’d left the police department and gone home, but to do that would be to admit that the last few years of work were really over and had come to nothing.
Levi hadn’t worked exclusively on a single case for the last several years. It was a small department, so there was a lot of multitasking, but when he could he’d been looking into the most recent string of unexplained murders in the area. Two deaths had taken place in Raven Pass, with a third in nearby Girdwood. There’d been a fourth farther down on the Kenai Peninsula in the town of Hope, ironically enough.
This case hadn’t been his only. But it had occupied enough space in his mind over the last few years that it felt fully like his case.
Levi had been on this assignment since his second year in the department. He’d worked it with his partner, Jim Johnson, straight through until Jim’s retirement last spring.
He was letting Jim down. Letting the victims’ families down. They deserved closure.
The night before, he’d been heading for his truck, ready to head home, but turned around and walked instead to the cold-case room.
The door was cold and the handle opened easily after Levi had unlocked it. He’d signed in on the clipboard that hung by the door and stepped into the room, which felt cooler than the hallway had been. That made sense. The evidence related to these cases was stored here to avoid decomposition.
Pieces of peoples’ lives, those odd discordant details that reminded him that nothing about his job was natural. Levi and his brother Judah had both become police officers to deal with the darkness in the world. Their eldest brother, Ryan, had become a pastor.
He supposed everyone had their ways of coping with the broken world they lived in.
Every box in the room represented a cop who hadn’t been able to do his job, who’d walked away feeling like Levi was.
He hadn’t known why he was there exactly, but still he’d walked around the room, removing a box here and there, looking through the case files, setting them back down.
It was all he’d been able to think to do at the time.
The next box had been a missing-persons case. It had gone cold in 1977, not long after the Raven Pass PD had been established. A man, midthirties at the time, had gone hiking and never been seen again.
Heaviness had settled on him again, so he’d set the lid on top of that box and slid it back onto the shelf.
He’d needed to leave and do something to get his mind off his work. It wasn’t like him to wallow in a sense of melancholy.
As he had walked toward the door, Levi took one last look behind him, imagining his case on these shelves.
Then one more box had caught his eye. The label was faded, the edges peeling slightly.
Women in Their Twenties. Twenty Years Ago.
Serial Killer.
He’d slid the box off the shelf.
It stung, how many criminals were never found and brought to justice.
Levi had settled the box on the table. Opened it.
The first folder was about a girl named Jessica. Average height, he had noted, taking in the features on the photograph of her like this case wasn’t colder than ice itself. Blond hair, past her shoulders. She looked friendly. Pretty.
She’d been killed at twenty-two and found on a popular hiking trail near Anchorage. Investigation had revealed that she’d been killed near Raven Pass.
The folder had slid back into the box easily and Levi had grabbed the next one. Its details were similar to the first, except this one specifically mentioned that the victim had been abducted from a coffee shop. Just like the victims in his case over the past three years. All women in their twenties. Usually early twenties. Bodies found buried.
He’d swallowed hard. There were a lot of coffee shops in Alaska. Had anyone at the department worked there for more than two decades? Levi hadn’t thought so.
Still, he wouldn’t know if there was significance to what he’d found until he looked at the next folder.
Another woman. Annie. Disappeared from a coffee shop. Presumed dead.
Chills had run down his arms, down his spine.
And last night’s realizations hit him all over again.
The women in the case he’d been working had all disappeared from coffee shops...
Either someone knew of this case and was copycatting...
Or the killer had stopped for more than a decade and then started again.
And Levi thought this body might be another one of his victims.
Levi shook himself from his memories to the crying woman he still held in his arms. He was in way deeper here than he’d meant to be. He’d only meant to check in at the scene that had been causing chatter on the police scanners to go crazy. When a body was discovered, it wasn’t something that required multiple police officers. Levi could have let someone else handle it, but something had told him to go down there.
But when he’d gotten there and seen the state of the body, he’d known.
It was another death related to the serial killer.
The zip ties around the hands were the same. Levi was willing to bet the victim hadn’t died from drowning at all, but rather had been suffocated somewhere else, like the others, and then moved.
But if she’d been a missing hiker, then she didn’t fit the profile of his victims, since she hadn’t been taken from a coffee shop. Her age was right. Her general build was right—most of the women killed had been medium height and weight. Could a serial killer deviate that much from his preferred MO?
And if so, why?
More than anyone else on the team, aside from his buddy Jake—who was out of town on his honeymoon—Levi trusted Adriana Steele to shoot straight with him. The woman didn’t know what it was to step lightly around a subject. When you went to her, you got the truth. So he’d left the busy scene at the water’s edge, where other law enforcement agents had gathered, and trekked around the lake a bit to where he saw Adriana sitting by her truck with her dog.
Alone. With a look on her face that almost made her seem...
Human. Breakable.
Even so, he hadn’t expected to find her on the edge of falling apart, so needing her information for his case had taken a back seat.
Levi had never seen her like this and if someone had asked him if he could picture her anything other than in control and too bossy for her own good, he’d have said no.
But here they were.
Adriana let out one more shuddering cry and then took a deep breath.
“I didn’t want to save them all, I only want to be able to go back and save him.”
Her voice came out in sobs, but Levi knew better than to believe the words. She was more like him than he’d realized. It hurt—every person he couldn’t find justice for, every person he couldn’t save by preventing their death. Sometimes he wondered why he’d chosen this job, what made him face that kind of defeat over and over.
He didn’t always have answers for himself.
“You can’t.” Levi didn’t try to soften the words—she wasn’t the type who would appreciate that. Instead he held her higher, close enough that he could smell the berry-scented shampoo she used. Close enough to almost be able to feel her heart beating against his chest.
Levi swallowed hard. He hadn’t held anyone like this in years. Hadn’t wanted to.
Now...
He wished Adriana wasn’t upset and would give anything to fix her pain, but the idea of her in his arms... He didn’t hate it.
He should hate it. They were nothing alike.
Everything had been normal and now something in his mind, his heart, had shifted.
Please don’t let me mess up everything between us for work’s sake, God. Levi breathed out the prayer and inhaled again, begging for strength he wasn’t sure he had to act completely normal. The words felt funny, like rusted metal trying to work again. His relationship with God was...
Well, he had one. Some days that was all he could say about it.
Long minutes passed. She kept crying. And then she finally stopped and looked up at him with her brown eyes wide.
“I’m sorry. I’ve never... I don’t usually...” She cleared her throat, brushed at her tears, looked away. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize. Tears aren’t a crime, Adriana.”
She looked up at him and there he was, staring into those eyes again, uncomfortable awareness coursing through him.
Movement to the left caught his attention. He broke eye contact and looked that way.
Just as a bullet whizzed into the ground, a foot or two from their feet. Closer to Levi’s.
“Behind the truck!” he yelled at her, pulling her with him as he ran for cover. She pushed away.
“Blue!” she shouted. The dog followed and she sped up again, her speed matching Levi’s. They dove behind the truck and Levi pulled her and the dog close.
“You okay, buddy? It’s okay. Such a rough day, sweetheart.”
Her voice was thick and sweet, like fresh honey. Of course, she would talk to her dog that way, even after someone had shot at them.
Though he’d never heard her talk to people without a little more spice in her tone.
Another shot. Across the lake, he could see the incident team taking cover also, even though the shots weren’t near them. Good. They were following protocol.
Though if Levi had to guess based on the proximity to his shoes...
They were aimed at him.
“Why is someone shooting at you?”
Apparently it hadn’t escaped Adriana’s notice, either.
“I don’t know.”
But didn’t he?
Had the killer been watching the site where he’d dropped his latest victim? Or had Levi been followed from the police department?
Neither option was good.
Another shot. This one hit the ground, too, kicking up rocks and dust.
Levi’s radio crackled. “Unit thirty-four. I’ve found where the shooter is and I’m approaching.”
Unit thirty-four was his brother.
He pulled the radio from his waist. “Unit thirty-four, this is unit thirty-seven. Approach with caution. The suspect may be our serial killer.”
Radio silence for a solid ten seconds. Then a crackle. “Ten-four.”
The shots stopped. Coincidence? Or was the killer on their radio frequency?
Levi slowed his breathing, started taking deeper breaths in and out and waited.
“Is it safe to move?” Adriana’s voice was breathless, too.
“I wouldn’t yet.”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to, anyway,” she pointed out, some of the sassiness that had been missing earlier returning to her voice. “I can’t move with your arms around me, holding me like this.”
She had a point. He suddenly let her go like he’d been burned, and maybe he had been. Or could feel that he was about to be. Surely she hadn’t thought his proximity was about anything more than keeping her safe. It hadn’t been. He was just bothered by the fact that he felt more aware of her, was conscious of her presence, that she was an attractive, intriguing woman close to his age.
He watched her as he waited to be convinced everything was all right. She was collected now, the only traces of her earlier episode being some shadows of eye makeup around her eyes. It was faint, not too obvious, but it gave her a worn appearance.
How had she managed to be part of that recovery when she had something in her past similar enough that the memories gave her a panic attack? He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d told her she was the strongest woman he knew. He’d meant all of it.
Sometime he was going to tell her again, when he was sure she would believe him. Because it was true.
“So what now?” she asked after a minute.
“Well—” Levi began. Just then, the all clear came over the radio. “It’s probably safe to leave our cover. You don’t need to give any kind of statement about the shooting. I was here.” He smiled wryly. “I do need a statement from you about...today.”
“I’m assuming you don’t mean my hysterical crying.”
“The part right before that, I believe.”
Adriana nodded. “Okay. That’s fine. But actually I meant ‘what now,’ like what are you going to do about this? Someone is trying to kill you? Surely you’re not going to just ignore that.”
Well, when she put it that way.
“No. I’m not going to ignore it.”
“So who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
She stared at him.
He stared back. Then looked away. Sighed.
“It’s a case I’m on.” That was all he could say. While he still needed to talk to the chief, a new discovery of a body connected to that case surely warranted keeping it open.
Adriana nodded. “The serial-killer case.”
She shouldn’t know about that. He hadn’t been publicly mentioned in connection with the case in over a year, since the chief had fired the department’s press secretary for giving out his and Jim’s names. They’d done a good job since then in keeping coverage of the investigation from any of the press.
“I remember the article.” She shrugged. “I rarely forget anything. It’s a blessing.” She looked away. “Sometimes.”
“Yes, it’s that case.” Levi trusted her. Telling her wasn’t against any kind of department policy—it was just smart to be wise with who knew the information. His safety depended on it.
Although apparently it was a little late for that.
She nodded. “I thought so. If I remember, not all the bodies have been recovered, isn’t that correct? Like, weren’t there some women who were assumed to be victims but their bodies were never recovered?” Her mind was spinning. This might be a way to help Levi out, regain some of her dignity, help families get closure in another way.
“Also correct, yes.” Levi stood. “Okay, so I’ll get back in touch with you about a statement for today, but I think for now—”
“I want to help you.” Adriana blurted the words as they both stood, facing him straight on. “I want to help you find the bodies of those missing women in case it helps you solve the case.”
Levi blinked. “I can’t... The department isn’t doing well financially and I can’t afford to hire a consultant. I appreciate the thought, but—”
“I don’t need to be paid. I’ll work around my search-and-rescue schedule. I want to do this, Officer Wicks.”
Come to think of it, she’d never called him Levi. He thought of her by her first name because everyone called her that, but she called him by a title. It was a good reminder that any relationship they had was strictly professional, and any further thoughts of her berry-scented hair, shiny in the sunshine, were fully and completely inappropriate.
“It’s Levi,” he said, which made no sense when he considered all the thoughts he’d just had about keeping professional boundaries.
But she nodded, still looking up at him. How could someone have such big innocent eyes and be knowledgeable about the ways the world could break a heart all at once? Looking at her eyes was like looking at her heart. Levi didn’t want to look away. Didn’t know if he should keep looking.
He felt like he knew her better from five minutes of face-to-face conversation than he’d known Melissa in all the months they’d been married.
So strange.
But with Melissa, what went wrong there had been his fault. He needed to remember that and not rush into a similar situation.
“Okay,” Adriana said. “Levi. Please, let me help you.”
He considered her again, thought about his brother out there in the woods risking his life. Looked down at the dog that he knew would do anything to keep Adriana safe.
Then he nodded his head down, just slightly. “Okay, I’ll promise to think about it.”
Her eyes narrowed like she was ready for a fight.
He tried not to smile. “Thinking about it is the best I can do.”
That seemed to be enough. She nodded once. “Okay.”
Then she walked to the front of the truck, opened the door for her dog and climbed in. “I’ll be at my house when you’re ready to talk. It doesn’t matter how late—come by, okay?”
Levi nodded and then watched her drive away. When she was safely out of sight, he walked toward the other officers.
Could he do it, let her help him?
If he did, then he might be risking her safety, too.
But if he didn’t he was risking the lives of countless other people who might be the serial killer’s next targets.
Some days the weight of the job felt too heavy to carry. So for now, as he walked he worked on passing some of the weight back to Jesus, who’d promised to carry his burdens, and did his best to put Adriana Steele out of his mind.
Even while he wondered whether she’d somehow snuck past just his mind straight to his heart.
And whether or not she’d put herself in danger by doing so.
