Page 13 of So Dark

"He'd have to know where the cabins were, too," Faith replied. "There's too much land out here for him to accidentally stroll up to multiple cabins and rig traps."

“Are there a lot of people who come out here and do survival stuff like this?” Michael asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Wyatt said. “Alaska’s one of the most popular destinations for that sort of thing. We have—as Miss Bold pointed out—a lot of unspoiled land. We also have a very robust first responder network, so if you do get lost or hurt out here, we’re more likely to find you.”

“Or find a body,” Michael added.

Faith frowned at the rude comment, but Wyatt didn’t seem offended. He replied with dead seriousness. “Or find a body.”

“How did you find Valerie North’s body?” Faith asked.

“Her friend called us about a week ago saying she hadn’t checked in for the day. She was supposed to call us if that happened. She gave us some GPS coordinates that Valerie had given her. That led to this cabin, and… well, we found her.”

Faith looked around the cabin. There were multiple red pins throughout the large single room. The police apparently had better luck finding the traps here. “Walk me through what you saw.”

Wyatt pointed to a large dark stain in the middle of the room. “That’s where her body was. As you can tell, it was completely exsanguinated by the time we found it. The head rolled all the way here to the stove and came to rest against the left side right here. We think there was a fire going at the time of death because the head was burnt severely on the side that came to rest.”

Michael groaned and turned away. Faith didn’t feel nauseous, but she could understand it. The image of an innocent woman’s head searing against a hot stone while her body bled out was a rough one. She’d spent her entire career confronting such images, but it never got easier.

“How did the snare work?”

“So that’s the part that we’re trying to figure out. I mean… we know what happened, but we don’t know how the killer got it to work the way it did.”

“Let’s start with what happened,” Faith said.

“Well, what happened is she stepped on a tripwire here.” He pointed at a red pin stuck in the ground behind the dark stain in the floor. “When she stepped on that tripwire, somehow a loop of chicken wire descended from the ceiling suspended by two hinged rods here and here.” He pointed at two red pins about eight feet apart on the ceiling. “Once the rods reached full extension, springs released that caused them to snap back up toward the ceiling, stretching the rope taut instantly. The wire went through her neck like a cheese slicer.”

Michael groaned again. “Christ. And this happened fast enough that there was no time to react?”

“We can only assume so. We weren’t able to replicate the weapon’s action. It was, pardon me for using the term, very sophisticated.”

“How tall was Valerie North?” Faith asked.

“Five-foot-nine,” Wyatt replied.

Faith thought a moment. That was relatively average height for a man, tall for a woman. It was possible that the trap could have been meant for anyone, but it seemed like an awful lot of work for no guarantee of success. “I think he targeted them. I think he designed his traps specifically to work on these particular victims.”

“Have you talked to their families?” Michael asked. “Their friends?”

Wyatt chuckled. "This is a small town country. Most of the people that live out here fall into two camps: people with family in Anchorage or people with family out of state. Ethan and Valerie were the latter."

“What about friends?”

“We’re working on that,” Wyatt replied. “We don’t have anything just yet.”

“You haven’t checked social media?”

"Neither of them were active." Faith and Michael looked at each other, and Wyatt explained, "This is a different country out here. People live differently. We're so far away from everything else that social relationships out here are a lot more like things were back in the old days. You talk to people. You see them face to face. You help your neighbors out, help your community out. You don't have friends from a distance. Maybe a little bit in the cities: Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, but in the country, you have to rely on the people who are right there in front of you. Or you have to rely on yourself. Ethan and Valerie were the kind of people who relied on themselves."

“In other words, they were the perfect target,” Faith summarized.

“Yeah. Looks that way. We’re talking to people. Nelchina’s a small town. Everyone knows each other. Someone will have something for us. We just have to be patient.”

“In my experience, Wyatt, killers like this count on patience. The slower we move, the faster they move.”

Wyatt met Faith’s eyes. “We have a saying up here. The worm eats what the eagle misses. Believe me, Special Agent, I have as great of a sense of urgency to solve this case as you do, but trying to find information as fast as possible only means that we don’tnotice the crucial details. In a haystack as big as Alaska, we can’t afford to miss details.”

Faith frowned. Wyatt was right, but it frustrated her to be stuck, even if it was only the beginning of the case. Killers moved so quickly these days. The worm might eat what the eagle misses, but while the worm gorged itself, the sparrow could swoop in out of nowhere and tear the worm from the Earth.

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