Lullaby for the Nameless (Nolan, Hart & Tain Thrillers)

by Ruttan, Sandra

  Too still.

  “Just…a feeling.”

  Mac stared at him for a moment, then cracked a grin. “Ah, you’re one of those. A modern man, in touch with his feelings.”

  “This is serious. You shouldn’t be shooting your mouth off. If he’s out there, he’ll hear you and know exactly where you are.”

  Mac held up his hands in mock surrender, but he was still grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Geez, I heard you had a bit of a short fuse, Nol—”

  Thhhwap. The crack cut through the calm, and the bullet tore into the bark on a nearby tree, sending bits of wood flying into Craig’s face. He spun around and dropped to the ground as he swore under his breath, which was coming hard and fast. He wiped his eyes with his left hand, then tightened his grip on his gun. He was ready; he just had to find the target. He scanned the trees. Nothing. No movement between the branches, no sign of color to hint at the location of the shooter.

  “Y’okay?” Mac’s voice, just a whisper.

  Craig glanced to his left. Mac had taken cover behind a large stump. The woods were so still the soft whisper could be heard effortlessly.

  “See anything?” Craig asked.

  Mac was scanning the woods behind them, where they’d come from, but after a moment he turned toward Craig. He wasn’t smiling as he shook his head. “Nah, man. I—”

  Thhhhhwap. Craig jumped at the crack of the bullet as it lodged into the stump in front of Mac. He barely registered that Mac was okay as he turned and looked over the area.

  Still nothing.

  Sssssthhhhwap. Bark flew off the side of a tree about ten feet in front of Craig. It sounded like it had been shot from farther away, and from what he could tell had come from a different angle.

  Two shooters? Or one shooter who was on the move?

  “This sonofabitch’s really startin’ to piss me off,” Mac muttered. In the distance they heard the flap of wings followed by another cry of protest from the branches above them.

  Whoever it was, they were running.

  As Craig’s breaths slowed, he pulled out his cell phone. Mac got up and moved to take cover behind a large pine close to the tree the last bullet had struck.

  Mac turned back just as Craig closed his phone, scanned the woods and made a quick move to a tree near Mac’s position. He stayed low just in case the shooter was circling around. Once he was at the tree, he turned and scanned the area to his left and behind him.

  Nothing.

  “They’re pulling in other teams from the east and west, hoping to cut him off.” Craig nodded in the direction the shots had been fired from. “We’re to go north.”

  Crouched low, taking slow, controlled breaths, Craig and Mac moved through the woods with shotguns in hand. In the seconds when Craig stopped and stood still, his visual surveys revealed no sign of the shooter.

  Craig pulled out his cell phone. One of the other things he hated about working in the woods in the mountains. Walk a few feet and you were suddenly cut off from the world.

  No signal.

  No sign of anything but trees and some rock.

  Nothing but stillness. The more ground they covered, the more uneasy Craig felt. Other officers should be out there, patrolling their assigned areas, but there was no evidence of anyone responding. He didn’t even hear another team approaching. Half of him cursed the decision to operate with radios on silent mode, despite the fact that he knew that decision had been made to ensure Jeffers couldn’t track their positions.

  All it would take was a half second for someone to call in on a radio and he’d know where you were if he was close by.

  You’d be distracted, and he’d have the advantage.

  It made sense to work without radios, but the unpredictability of cell-phone use in the area meant they were flying blind, and the risk of friendly fire was foremost in Craig’s mind. Moving forward on preset routes when they were given assignments was one thing; they shouldn’t be intersecting other teams.

  Now, they were doubling back and heading toward areas at least two other teams had been ordered to search.

  They would hesitate before firing, just to make sure it wasn’t one of their own. Jeffers wouldn’t.

  As Craig ran forward, he bent down low, swung the shotgun over his shoulder and pulled himself up over a rock ledge that was about ten feet tall. When he reached the top, he advanced slowly, ready to pull back in case someone took a shot at him right away, but the woods on the other side of the rock were as empty as the ones behind him. He turned back and signaled for Mac to follow.

  “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” Mac asked as he cleared the ledge and leaned up against the tree closest to Craig’s position, trying to control his quick and heavy breaths.

  In the distance to his right, he heard the rustle of branches and something thumping against the ground, moving fast.

  Followed by heavy footfalls. Two distinct sounds.

  Mac’s brow wrinkled. “Person or animal?”

  It took Craig a moment to place it. The sound was like a distant memory his mind was trying to bring into focus, from his training. “Both. Canine unit.”

  Said just as the dog came into sight, heading due north. Craig barely managed to signal the RCMP officer who jumped out of the bush onto the path in front of them. The man paused long enough to hold up his hand before turning and running again.

  Indicating they should hold back

  “What the hell? They don’t really expect us to let them take charge, do they?”

  Craig nodded. It had been a while since he’d worked with a canine team—a year and a half or so—but he still remembered the speed at which they covered ground. There was no way Craig and Mac could beat a trained police dog to the suspect, and if they got too close, they risked interfering with the dog and his handler.

  Craig scanned the area before he moved closer to Mac’s position. “While we do what, exactly?” Mac sputtered the words, flecks of saliva flying from his lips as he stared at Craig. “Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t say ‘to hell with it’ and go after this useless sack of shit?”

  “You mean, one good reason other than getting written up for insubordination and having that stuck in your record?”

  “Wouldn’t’a thought that would stop you,” Mac muttered.

  Craig didn’t even try to suppress the wry smile he felt tugging at his mouth. “Maybe not, but all we’d do is get in their way. He can’t be more than a mile from our position. If anyone’s going to catch him when he’s on the move and we’re closing in on him, it’s the dogs.”

  Mac breathed in and out rapidly, then drew a longer breath and slumped back against the tree, the breaths coming sharp and fast again. “Somethin’ ’bout this isn’t right.”

  Something? Nothing about this was right. A man who’d allegedly murdered his estranged wife and three children and was on the run had apparently shot at them. Assuming it was him, was he desperate or suicidal? He’d fired from behind them, which meant they’d either moved past his position without spotting him, or he was following them.

  Neither was a particularly comforting thought.

  If they’d missed him, why draw unnecessary attention to himself? Even if he’d killed both of them, Jeffers had to know there’d be more cops in the area. Why not just slip off silently while he had the chance?

  And if it wasn’t Jeffers, then who was it?

  What really bugged Craig was the quiet. Other than the moment the canine team had been in view and the sound from Mac’s ragged breaths, the air was unnaturally calm. It was like the hush over the earth in the middle of the night in winter, when the blanket of darkness brought with it a stillness that nothing dared to break. Not even the forest animals went about their business, Craig realized. Other than the sound of that one bird flapping its wings and crying out, there was no sign of life in the woods around them, and that wasn’t normal.

  He glanced at Mac as he felt his cell phone vibrate and reached for it. Out of the dead zone
. The voice on the other end was talking before he’d had a chance to finish answering the phone.

  Craig closed it again without saying a word.

  “Well?” Mac’s breaths had leveled out finally.

  He offered nothing more than a jerk of his head and started to run through the woods, not bothering to stop and take cover. It wasn’t long before there was a hum in the air, voices in the distance. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he knew it was the canine team. After another few minutes, his own quick breaths prickled his throat with a burning cold, and then a handful of men gathered in a small clearing came into view, two holding dogs back from whatever the others had gathered around.

  Déjà vu.

  He slowed his pace automatically. All they’d said was that they’d found something, to get there right away. All but one of the men had their backs to Craig, effectively blocking his view of whatever it was they were looking at on the ground.

  The man standing in profile met Craig’s gaze for a moment. Native, with a piercing gaze that made you feel he could see right through you.

  Just like Tain.

  He walked around the group to the end opposite the Native officer and knelt down, the blood rushing out of his face. Perhaps it was his way of avoiding what was lying in front of him, but for some reason all he could think of was that the RCMP wanted you to call them First Nations or Aboriginals now.

  Aboriginals. For some reason, that made him think of Australia, and as he tried to focus, he thought about the absurd way the mind formed connections, how in the most extreme situations you could find yourself thinking about being politically correct instead of thinking about the fact that you were kneeling in front of a body in the woods.

  Maybe it was a way of distancing yourself from the situation. The mind’s way of coping.

  It was a moment before one of the men standing above him spoke. “Is this what he’s hiding?”

  Craig shook his head even before he fully processed the question. “Death wasn’t recent, but the body hasn’t been here long.” He’d seen enough bodies in the woods to know that much. There was no evidence of animal activity from what he could see, which suggested she’d been moved recently.

  Not to mention the fact that they’d been patrolling the woods for a few days now, and teams had passed through the area without seeing a body.

  “How do we know he didn’t kill her, and that’s why he went off the deep end and murdered his family? Maybe they found out about it.” Another voice Craig didn’t recognize.

  “Came back out here to relive some past glory?” The first voice again.

  “With how cold it’s been, she could have been out here for weeks. Temperature throws off the process of decomposition.” One of the new members of the team. One who didn’t know what ground they’d already covered.

  “This area’s been searched. She wasn’t here before.” The second voice.

  Craig took a deep breath, one that he hoped would help settle his stomach and clear his head. “We don’t know anything. Right now, we don’t jump to any conclusions. We have a new investigation to deal with.”

  “You’re Nolan.”

  It wasn’t a question. Craig glanced at the man who’d spoken. He sounded like he’d swallowed broken glass, and he had a burly build topped off with a face that had more bumps and lines than a stucco ceiling. Whoever the man was, he’d put in a lot of years on the job, but he still looked like he could hold his own in a bar brawl.

  Craig nodded.

  “From what I hear, you’re no stranger to digging up bodies in the woods.”

  He felt his neck burn and his jaw clench as he lifted his gaze to look at the man who’d spoken. Instead, Craig found himself staring into the dark eyes of the Native officer, who remained silent but had a stare with the force of a magnetic pull.

  The RCMP could be as PC as they wanted, but you couldn’t undo the mental programming that came with years of using labels by suddenly changing the official terms. Craig pushed aside a fleeting thought about whether that was part of the reason it was so hard to eliminate racism and prejudice.

  “Hey, he’s my partner on this assignment, and in case you guys have forgotten, we were shot at. Some guy with a gun is still runnin’ around in the woods,” Mac said, “while we stand here talking about ancient history.”

  “Su-som-someone has to call this in and d-deal with the scene.” Another voice Craig didn’t recognize. Timid. Apologetically stating a fact.

  “So why not you?” Mac spat the words out.

  “I, uh, if-if I’m ordered to, I-I’ll d-do it.”

  “For Christ’s sake, did they let you out of training before your balls dropped?”

  The raspy voice returned. “Takes more balls to follow orders than it does to shoot off your mouth, MacDougall.”

  Craig forced a serious look as he stood and held up his hand to keep Mac from unleashing the retort forming on his lips.

  “We call it in, and the sergeant decides who stays.” He looked at the thickset man who’d spoken with authority. The one who’d seemed ready to drop the case in Craig’s lap. “Agreed?”

  For a moment, the small black eyes stared back, and then the man nodded and pulled out his phone.

  Craig looked down at the partially exposed grave where the body lay.

  Could it be…?

  Craig pushed the thought from that old case out of his mind. Based on what he could see of the body, the size, there was no way to know anything for certain. She could be much older than the girl he was thinking of, the one they’d never found. Craig shut his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he forced himself to focus on the body they’d recovered; she’d been partially wrapped in strips of what looked like canvas bags, so there was no way to know. One of the differences, but he knew the routine. Similarities to other cases in the area would raise flags, and although the murders were technically closed, the case had never been completely solved. If she was connected to it, she would have been kept somewhere else for a while and moved recently. Craig realized he didn’t even cover a mental checklist before forming conclusions, but then he’d seen bodies like this before.

  His…experience.

  Another part of his past he wished had stayed buried.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “It’s okay to admit when something’s bothering you.”

  “And you’d be the poster boy for the modern man who opens up about his feelings?”

  Tain ignored that. “So something is bothering you?”

  Ashlyn pushed the door open and didn’t slow her pace as she marched outside to the car. “Just your prying.”

  The zing in her words, color in her cheeks, the way she tossed her head defiantly as she spoke…They’d both just come off a week’s holiday, and the time away had done her good. She looked better than she had in months. Wherever she’d gone, whatever she’d done, it seemed to have worked for her.

  When he reached the car, he opened his door and was about to get in when he looked up and saw Ashlyn staring at him. Her eyes narrowed and a hand landed on her hip. “Don’t play innocent with me,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.” He sat down and pulled the door shut.

  “Tain…” Spoken with a bit of a growl in her voice as she got in the car and slid the key into the ignition. “Do you know something you aren’t telling me?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Ah.” Emphasized by the slam of her door. Ashlyn nodded as she put the car in reverse and began backing out of the spot.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Isn’t it typical for guys to avoid questions they don’t want to answer?”

  “I don’t know, Ash. I thought it was typical of anyone.”

  “Which tells me what I need to know.” She put the car in drive and pulled out onto the road.

  “No, it doesn’t. Maybe I feel I’m sending you mixed signals, and if I can figure out how I’ve given you the wrong impression, I
can make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  The sideways glance she gave him said it all, and he silently cursed her instincts.

  “You know, Ash, there was a time I could lie to you effortlessly.”

  “And you miss the good old days?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “So what aren’t you telling me?”

  “Look…” How could he tell her he had a bad feeling? “All we know is that we were asked to investigate something suspicious in a Dumpster. They weren’t more specific about what they found.”

  Although they had been specific in their request for Tain and Ashlyn to take the call, which was probably the reason he felt on edge.

  Ashlyn paused. “You’ve got a bad feeling about it.”

  Said matter-of-factly, without a hint of emotion. As though the weight of each word had been carefully measured so that he wouldn’t have any reason to think she was worried.

  “You know how it is, Ash. You never know what you’ll find on one of these calls.”

  For assaults or murders, they had some sense of the situation before they arrived. Carefully prepared masks were in place before they set foot out of the car at the scene.

  When they didn’t know what they were responding to, they had no idea the emotional toll the call might take on them. It wasn’t just the absence of information that gnawed at him, though. It was pure gut instinct telling him that something wasn’t right about this one.

  A feeling that only intensified when they pulled into the alley. The uniformed officers were standing where they’d taped off the scene near the Dumpster to keep anyone else from approaching, and both were an unhealthy green-tinged shade. Sergeant Steve Daly and Staff Sergeant Bill Gliddon stood outside the perimeter. Steve’s posture was rigid, a tightness in his shoulders that Tain was familiar with.

  “Well, it could be worse,” Ashlyn said as she parked the car. “We didn’t rank an inspector.” They got out of the car and closed the doors.

  She offered only the slightest nod at the two senior officers observing the scene and didn’t wait for Tain to take the lead.