Page 16 of So Dark

“Considering the effort it would take to lay different traps for different people, I’m pretty confident in that,” Faith confirmed. “I also think that the killer was close with them at one point. He might still be close.”

“I agree,” Michael said. “He knew where their cabins were, and Wyatt made it clear that wasn’t likely.”

Faith leaned back in her chair and sipped her coffee. “What’s your impression of Wyatt?”

Michael thought a moment. “He’s not happy to have outsiders here.”

"I got that impression, too," Faith replied. "He's been perfectly polite and helpful on the surface, but he's been a little vague with his details."

“Yeah,” Michael agreed. “I don’t buy that bit about friendships living off of handshakes and conversations. I know people from Alaska, and they have internet and cell phones just like everyone else. Hell, we have internet here in a town of what, fifty? And each time we point out an opportunity in the investigation, we get some corny response about how ‘things are different ‘round these parts.’ Seems like a nice guy, but I don’t think he’s going to be helpful to us.”

“Do you think he’ll interfere with us? If we expose skeletons in the town’s history?”

Michael thought for another moment, then shook his head. “He’s an Anchorage native. They’re a decent-sized city. He might feel loyalty to the state, but I don’t think he would feel a need to protect the reputation of a little mountain town a hundred fifty miles away. I think he just wants to do things his way and doesn’t like that he’s not the shot-caller.”

“He wasn’t wrong about moving slowly to find details, though,” Faith replied, playing devil’s advocate. We did find more evidence when we slowed down.”

“I’m not saying he’s going to make things harder for us,” Michael replied. “I just think we’re going to need to do the legwork ourselves. If we use the locals, it’ll need to be for mundane tasks like go talk to this person or go find out where this ATV spring came from. Basically, what we’re already doing but without the expectation that he’ll take initiative with that information or that he’ll get us those results without extensive follow up. In short, we’re on our own.”

She scoffed. “What else is new?”

“Exactly.”

She sipped more of her coffee and sighed. "Okay. So we have a survivalist hunter who was once close with our victims and used that to his advantage to set up traps to kill them. I'm leaning toward coward since he used traps instead of direct attacks, but the hunter outsmarting the prey angle can work too. If we want to learn more, we need to find out who Ethan Holloway and Valerie North are associated with. We should start by looking at social media. Wyatt says they weren't active, but I'll bet we can find something helpful there."

“Agreed. I’m going to make more coffee first, though.”

“Already? You just had a cup.”

“Do you anticipate sleeping before we find a new lead?”

“Good point.”

“Yep.”

Michael made the coffee while Faith looked up Ethan’s and Valerie’s social media accounts. It wasn’t encouraging at first. Wyatt might harbor some resentment at the arrival of two outsiders to take over his investigation, but he wasn’t lying when he said the two of them weren’t active. Valerie North had social media accounts, but she didn’t appear to have ever used them.

Ethan had once been very active on social media, but that ended abruptly two years ago. His last post read, “No point in connecting with people anymore. Those who say they love you only lie to you.” This accompanied a notification that his status had changed from married to divorced. He’d never actually deleted his social media accounts, but he hadn’t been active since then.

Still, it was something to follow up on. “Michael, can you look up Carol Holloway please? Ethan’s wife of ten years. They split two years ago, and Ethan stopped being active on social media after that.”

“Got it. Any connection to Valerie?”

“Valerie doesn’t seem to have ever posted on social media,” Faith said. “Looks like Wyatt wasn’t pulling our chain there.”

“Jeez. I guess I was wrong to assume.”

Faith rested her hand on her chin and looked pensively at the screen. Nearly all of their previous cases had been in proximity to cities. Even the few exceptions had city-like amenities. This area did too since they were fairly close to Anchorage, but Anchorage was an island in a very extensive stretch of very sparsely populated land. To add to that, the culture of Alaska so far seemed very much to be one of self-reliance, as Wyatt had said. They had caught most of their killers so far by looking at how the killers’ actions impacted the friends and family of his victims. Without that visible impact, it would be difficult to find this killer.

“Stop biting your nails,” Michael scolded.

Faith pulled her hand away from her face and reddened slightly. “Sorry.”

“Have you been doing that again?”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Well, you never noticed.”

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