Page 67 of Radar

It had to be local. It was the only thing that made any sense.

Xander needed to get on the road. He planned to catch up with Elyssa’s car and shadow it, make sure she was safe to fly. He was worried about her heart.

Hell, he was a little worried about his own heart.

Seeing Elyssa in danger turned him into pure power. He was glad that Radar had managed the guy because if he had put his hands on him, Xander wasn’t sure he could maintain his control. Xander couldn’t save mankind from the Zorics machine if he were in a jail cell locked away for murder. And jail would be a hell of a bad way to ride out the Apocalypse.

With a quick scan of his room, Xander shoved everything into his pack and was reaching for the door handle when a woman’s screams splintered the frozen air.

Primed by the attempted kidnapping, the entire lodge heaved out of their doors along with Xander and Radar.

The lodge staffer ran out of Eddie’s room and stood on the walkway, looking around wide-eyed. Blood was all over the sheet she held in her hand.

Xander edged up until he could see into the room. It was Eddie’s room. The sweater he’d worn the night before in the lodge lay on the floor.

Something violent had gone down. The blood on the sheet in the woman’s hand was dry. Xander would say the event happened minimally an hour before.

“Put the sheet down. Step out of the room.” Xander said with calm authority that he wasn’t feeling. “This is a crime scene.”

Xander remembered the drunk at Elyssa’s room at 4:30. He stepped past Orest’s room to Paca’s. There, he saw the door wasn’t pulled all the way shut. Tapping the door open with his elbow, the scene here, too, looked like there had been a fight. A spurt of blood on the wall had trickled down and had dried to a deep brown. Xander thought it looked like someone got punchedin the nose. On the ground at Xander’s feet, blood droplets rounded the corner.

“Here too. Blood in the snow. Everyone, back away. Stay away. This is a crime scene.” Xander pulled out his phone and recorded a video with footage of the room and the bloody trail, then stepped away to avoid contaminating the scene. He sent the footage to Finley, then dialed his number.

Finley answered with a groggy, “What?”

“Hey, man, sorry to wake you.” He looked at his watch; it was after ten on the East Coast. Finley must have been burning the midnight oil. “We need an FBI team here in Lumberjack, Alaska, to investigate. And we need it now.” Running through the sequence of events from the guy at Elyssa’s door in the middle of the night up until that moment, Xander walked to the lodge, placed the key card on the desk, then headed toward his rental car.

“It snowed last night,” Xander said. “In the fresh snow, you can see in the film that someone was dragged from Paca’s room. I’m assuming Paca.”

“Wait. Who’s Paca?”

“Nickname for the squirrel researcher, Claude Burns.” Xander spread his fingers across the screen to enlarge the image. Running the video through, he paused at the end. “Yup. In the video, I can see two sets of footprints, one on either side of the dragged feet. When that trail stops, there are snowmobile tracks over the berm and into the woods.” He stopped and looked back at the room, then up to the sky. “Heading northwest. I didn’t follow it out. I don’t want to mess up the crime scene. And I’m not credentialed to interfere in a crime investigation.”

With this new information, the chance that the attack on Elyssa was a local crime was down to zero.

But the why of it was beyond Xander.

Beeping the fob, Xander looked down at Radar, who had been pressed to his thigh, ready for the command the whole time. “Time to get going, buddy.” They needed to leave before anyone with a badge detained him as a witness.

He needed to be with Elyssa.

If Xander thwarted the guy last night, and Elyssa saved herself again this morning, could they have someone going after her a third time?

Xander jumped Radar into the car, then climbed in behind him, sliding under the wheel.

While the engine was warming, he sent a text to Elyssa.

Xander:It’s Xander. Checking on you. The luggage tracker I threw into the car tells me the car is heading in the right direction. Is that right? Are you physically safe? Are you emotionally okay? That was a hell of a departure. I’m in the car heading back to the city. I’d appreciate a call.

He expected her to take the time to read it, then she’d reach out to him with an update immediately.

But she didn’t.

Did she even give him the correct contact?

Xander called Finley to run a check on the number.

While he waited for the information, Xander had the pedal down. But everything that had happened at the Lumberjack lodge had taken too much time. He’d never catch her.

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