“What happened?”
The two men exchanged unreadable looks before turning back to me.
“As you know, I’ve been out on the trail, scouring every inch to find anything that could link back to the woman we found a few weeks ago,” Ethan said.
I nodded, having known this already.
“Well, yesterday I took my search farther off the trail. I hadn’t gone far, and I swear I’d searched that area before, but….” He trailed off with a sigh.
“What?” I demanded. “What the fuck did you find?”
“A body?” He said it more like a question, as if he was unsure.
“How are you not sure what you found?” I huffed. “Are you saying it wasn’t human?”
Ethan looked to Oliver for help, which made my impatience rise.
Oliver was the one who responded. “What Ethan is trying to get at, in a strange way, is that yes, it was human, but it was badly decayed.”
Ethan grimaced. “It looked like a damn mummy. Something out of those history shows Oliver likes so much.”
The man in question shoved Ethan hard. “The hell, man. Stay on topic.”
“Just saying, you have a strange fascination with the History Channel.”
My brows pulled in tight as I listened to the two go back and forth, trying to piece together the information. “That means the body had been in the elements a while, so it could be one of the missing female hikers and they really did go off the path?”
They exchanged another look, pissing me off. There was something going on between those two, but I wasn’t in the mood to figure it out. Later, when I wasn’t about to bash their heads together, hoping that would speed up the conversation so I could finish chopping wood and get inside to finish what we’d started earlier.
“Get the fuck on with it,” I snapped, instantly stopping their strange silent conversation.
“It was near the base of a large rock formation, a place where Caroline would go on her own sometimes.”
Hearing our missing friend’s name froze me in place. “You don’t think….”
Oliver’s responding nod had me sucking in a breath. “Even though the skin was wrinkled and dried out, we made out a few tattoos along the body’s forearms.” He took a deep breath, blowing it out roughly through his nose. “The body Ethan found yesterday evening, which is on its way to the Anchorage coroner now, is Caroline.”
I stumbled back as if someone had landed a blow right to my stomach. “But how…?” I rasped, my mind running through a thousand thoughts a second. I shook my head. “There’s no way. We searched all her normal places and found nothing, not a scrap of evidence saying she’d been there recently, much less a fucking body. And that’s not even counting the hours Miles and Aiden put in searching. There’s no way we or they missed her.”
My heart raced with the unanswered questions, big fucking red flags waving wildly, telling me this was wrong. Somethingwasn’t adding up. Just like the entirety of the missing women cases, nothing made sense.
Ethan shook his head, running a hand through his thick hair. “I don’t know, Langston. I don’t fucking know. It’s like it appeared out of nowhere, but the condition of the body says it was there the whole damn time.”
I scoffed, dropping my head forward with a slow shake. “So, either we’re all idiots and are terrible at the rescue and recovery part of our jobs, or….” I looked at the two men, hoping they had something to offer.
“Someone moved her body,” Oliver stated, his tone solemn. “That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. And I can only think of one reason someone would do that.”
Dipping my chin in agreement, I released a slow breath. “To throw us off.”
Ethan stepped closer. “Because we’re getting too close.”
Fucking hell.Too close to what? All I knew was that the danger that had felt far away, removed from our community, was circling, putting us all in the crosshairs.
Our friend was dead.
Her body had been moved.
What the hell was going on in Anchor Bay… and how the fuck could we stop it?
