Page 63 of Backtrack

“I think so,” Barr said. “She achieved a good amount of notoriety after she tried to shoot down that floatplane. This is Forest Service jurisdiction, but it’s common knowledge I went to school with her. They came to me after they took the hikers’ report. Forest Service LEOs set up cameras out by Ward Lake. They’ve got eyes on the road leading in from Ward Cove, as well as the trails that go back to the illegal cabin. Her beat-up Mitsubishi came out this way around noon today with a white male in the passenger seat. She’ll be back at some point. I’d say we head out there. Good chance your guy is still with her.”

Lola put both hands flat on the conference table. “Sounds like a plan. I’m assuming y’all have less-lethal. Cutter and I have Tasers,but I don’t fancy getting that close to anyone with a ten-millimeter pistol.”

The troopers nodded in unison.

“I have a forty-millimeter and Trooper Murphy has an ARWEN,” Heath said. “Either one could break her arm, but they’re not lethal as long as we don’t hit her in the noggin.”

Pepper spray and impact batons had once been referred to as nonlethal, but enough people had died from breathing issues or getting a flying plastic missile to the head that the powers that be had decided to call them less-lethal.

“She’s legit scared if you ask me,” Barr said. “It’s like she sold her soul to the devil and now she’s afraid he’s coming to collect.”

Cutter stopped whittling and looked up. “That’s an awfully interesting analogy.”

Barr’s eyes glazed over in a thousand-yard stare. “Something she said to me when I arrested her.They’ll kill me, they’ll kill you. They’ll kill my family. They’ll kill your family …” Barr took a shaky breath, returning to the present. “Spookiest shit I ever heard in my life. She said it like it was a foregone conclusion. A done deal.”

Lola sat with her mouth agape.

“Does she have a brand, by chance?”

“How’d you know that?” Barr said. “On the nape of her neck.”

Lola and Cutter exchanged glances.

“A wolf, I think,” Barr said. “I took a photo of it when we booked her after the floatplane thing.”

The detective spun around in his chair. Seated, he duckwalked to a computer in the corner without getting up. A few taps of the keys later and a printer spat out five copies of Jessica Stone’s booking photos. Cutter was closer. He studied it a moment and then slid a copy to Lola.

“Holy hell,” she gasped.

Trooper Murphy held up her copy of the paper. “Barr’s right. It looks like a wolf and a … I don’t know, a tree or a torch, maybe. You’ve seen this before?”

“We have,” Cutter said.

“And they’re all dead.” Lola pushed away from the table. “Church is our fugitive, but our primary objective is now Jessica Stone.”

CHAPTER 23

Unlike the movies, the vast majority of felony arrests went down without a hitch, either by proper execution or dumb luck. There was little reason to think the arrest of Darrell Church would go otherwise—unless a curious moose or brown bear wandered onto the scene.

The troopers led the way out of Ketchikan. Marked patrol units were in the area daily as AST offices were located at that end of town near Ward Cove. Green US Forest Service pickups were ubiquitous and wouldn’t likely raise an eyebrow even with a wanted felon unless they followed too closely.

Cutter and Lola hashed over this new information about Jessica Stone while they drove to the pinch point. Homicide investigations were well outside Marshals Service swim lanes, but after one of their prisoners and two informants with the same wolf-head brand were murdered in recent months, the chief gave them the go ahead to poke around as long as they didn’t get in the way of other agencies. The body of a young female that had washed up in Kodiak had seemed to hold promising leads, but five months later, it remained unidentified.

Lola tended to turn up the heat on her usual banter when she was flummoxed about something.

“What do you think’s up with that creepy-ass mantra?” she mused. “It’s always exactly the same.They’ll kill me, they’ll kill you …What does that even mean?”

“Seems straightforward enough,” Cutter said. “Means exactly what it says if we go by past events.”

“But who are thetheythat’ll do the killing, and what gives them the juice to scare the shit outta everyone from Anchorage to Ketchikan?”

Cutter and Lola had this same conversation at least every other week. She talked it out until they turned away from the ocean and into the National Forest.

Stone and Church would have to pass by Ward Lake Park on their way to the fire access road that led to their squatter cabin. Forest Service LEOs, troopers, and Detective Barr set up on either side of the main road, with Cutter and Lola in a shadowed picnic area under massive spruce trees along the shore of the lake itself. The tree nearest Cutter was well over a hundred feet tall and at least three feet in diameter. It forked at the base in a wide arch like a bowlegged cowboy.

“That’s one of those ghost trees,” Lola said, flitting from conversations about the strange wolf brand to whatever happened to cross her path. Cutter had grown accustomed to her pinball thought process. He’d come to think of her as a wicked smart but goofy kid sister.

“Yep,” he said, eyes constantly moving. He’d learned about nurse trees and ghost trees on his first trip to Southeast Alaska, but Lola explained anyway, bleeding off nervous energy.