Page 31 of Wilderness Search
“I suppose you could make someone drink anything if you threatened them with a weapon,” she said. “Or threatened someone they loved.” The idea made her queasy. “Who is doing these horrible things?”
“I’m not sure anyone is doing anything. At this point, I’m just speculating.”
“Does this have anything to do with Olivia?” she asked.
“No. This is something else. And don’t tell anyone we had this conversation. It’s so far-fetched they’d probably laugh me off the force if they knew. I was just curious.” He moved a little closer, his tone confiding. “To tell the truth, it gave me an excuse to talk to you. I’ve missed that.”
She had missed it, too. But that didn’t mean it was a good idea to spend too much time talking with him. “I have to get back to work,” she said.
“Me, too.” But he lingered, his gaze like the brush of his fingers across her skin.
A knock on the door made them both jump. “Willa, is everything all right? You have a patient ready.”
She glanced up at him, a desperate look, and he stepped aside and opened the door. She rushed past him and hurried toward the examining room, fleeing her own worst impulses.
Jake radioed asAaron was leaving the clinic. “What’s your twenty?” Jake asked.
“I’m headed back to the sheriff’s department. I’m about a block away.”
“Do you have time to run back out to Mount Wilson Lodge with me? Dwight has something he wants to show us.”
“Sure. What’s he got?”
“He didn’t say. He wants us to take a look and arrive at our own conclusions.”
They met at Jake’s sheriff’s department SUV. He looked as exhausted as they all did, worn out but determined to keep going, desperately hoping for some sign of that missing little girl. Every day that passed made it less likely they would find her alive. Gradually the case was moving from a rescue mission to a search for a body to give the family closure and, they hoped, provide more clues to what had happened.
Aaron might have dozed on the drive out to the fishing and hunting lodge. He snapped to as they turned in at the gate. Dwight met them in front of the lodge with two quad-runners. “This is the best way to get to where we need to go,” he said.
Jake got behind the wheel of one vehicle, while Aaron rode with Dwight in the other. They headed down a trail, past a large lake where two men stood, fly-fishing.
“The wife of one of those guys went hiking this morning,” Dwight said. “When she came back she asked me about this place. I couldn’t really figure out what she was talking about, so after she went back to her cabin, I rode out here to take a look. That’s when I decided to call this in.”
“Call what in?” Aaron asked.
“It’s hard to describe. You’ll have to see and decide for yourself.” Past the lake, he turned off on another trail that led up an incline to the east. “We’re headed toward Mountain Kingdom Kids Camp now,” Dwight said.
“How far is the camp from here?” Aaron asked.
“About a mile as the crow flies. A little farther on foot. It’s pretty rough country—a lot of blow-down trees and big boulders scattered around. Some of the search and rescue people came through there the day Olivia was reported missing. They didn’t find anything, but it would have been easy to miss someone in that kind of terrain.”
They threaded their way through dense forest, then across a high meadow, until they reached a three-strand barbed wire fence. Dwight stopped and shut off the machine. Jake parked beside him.
“We have to walk from here,” Dwight said. “We’ll be on national forest property.”
“How did your hiker end up out here?” Jake asked as he ducked between the strands of barbed wire.
“She said she was following a trail that just stopped,” Dwight said. “I think she must have gotten off on a deer trail. Fortunately, she has a good sense of direction and was able to find her way back to the fence and the main trail from there.” He pulled out his phone. “I marked the GPS coordinates after I found what she was talking about.”
They walked for another hundred yards, Dwight frequently consulting the screen on his phone. They detoured around a thick stand of aspen, then came to a stop.
“What are we looking for?” Aaron asked.
“Over there.” Dwight pointed to what at first looked like a clump of brush. But as Aaron moved closer he could see it was actually branches that had been bent over, the ends weighted down with rocks to form a tunnel.
He crouched down and looked inside. “Did you go in?” he asked.
“No. Look there, just inside. Do you see it?”
