Part 2
“I gave Dana Whitcomb the number at seven seventeen,” Maren said. “I didn’t tell her you’d be alone.”
“You told her you were meeting me at the east gate.”
“Three days ago, I told Voss a reporter had my photographs,” Eli added. “I didn’t give him your name or the gate. Your call gave him the rest.”
Before Maren could answer, Ranger lifted his head. A vibration traveled through the shack floor, followed by the low mechanical grind of a tracked engine climbing from the road. The dispatcher had said the rescue unit would come from below, but Eli’s whole body tightened as if the sound had entered through the cut at his temple.
“Turn off the lantern,” he said.
Maren did. Gray daylight remained around the window frame.
“Help is coming,” she told him.
“Voss has equipment on this ridge, too.”
Eli closed his eyes as another shiver pulled through his shoulders.
Ranger rose and crowded against the door, lips lifting without a bark. Kodiak tried to follow but could not get his injured foreleg under him. Maren took the iron stove tool in one hand and checked the messenger with the other.
The rescue unit had reached the east gate. “That’s them,” she said, though she kept the stove tool.
The engine grew louder, then stopped. Voices carried through the trees. Someone called Eli’s name, then Maren’s, identifying the county search-and-rescue team. She lifted the wooden bar from its brackets but waited until she saw a red county jacket through the window.
Three people entered: Deputy Tom Calder; a paramedic named Lila Cho; and a young man in insulated work bibs beneath a county search-and-rescue vest. He could not have been more than twenty-four. Snow clung to a short red beard and to the shoulders of his jacket.
Ranger backed away from him so abruptly that his hindquarters struck the wall. The dog made no move to attack. He lowered his body, bared his teeth, and began to shake.
The young man stopped, his face emptying of color. “I won’t come closer,” he said.
Calder noticed. So did Maren. She wrote the detail into memory and did not turn it into an answer.
For the next twenty minutes, Lila fitted Eli with a collar, checked his temperature and pupils, and wrapped him in warmed blankets before the team transferred him to a rescue litter. Calder photographed the ropes and orange cords where Maren had left them, took the original pieces into separate paper evidence bags, and recovered Eli’s phone from the clearing. The young volunteer helped rig Kodiak’s sled without going near the dog’s head.
“What’s his name?” Maren asked Calder quietly.
“Noah Reed. Three years with search and rescue. Runs heavy equipment for Voss.”
Noah looked up at the sound of his employer’s name. His hands paused on the buckle, then continued.
The tracked carrier had room for Eli, Maren, the dogs, and Lila. Calder followed on a county snowmobile. Noah drove with his shoulders rigid and his eyes fixed on the narrow corridor of road ahead.
At the east gate they passed Eli’s truck. The driver’s door still stood open. Orange stakes now ran in a straight line beyond it, bright against the snow, marking a road wider than the track beneath them. Maren counted eleven before the storm took them from view.
The county hospital and the veterinary clinic shared a plowed service lane on the north edge of town. Eli was taken through one set of doors with suspected concussion and hypothermia. Kodiak and Ranger went through the other with Dr. Sofia Alvarez, who spoke to the dogs before she spoke to any person.
“The irritant needs to come out of their eyes and coats,” she told Maren. “The larger one has a shoulder injury and both have cold stress. I won’t know the rest until they’re warm enough to examine properly.”
“Will they live?”
Dr. Alvarez looked at the wet tracks Ranger had left across the tile. “That’s what we’re working on.”
Maren stood in a restroom and held her hands beneath lukewarm water until the blood and rope fibers loosened. Two fingertips showed mild frostnip. The nurse who dressed her palms made her promise not to drive until the weather cleared, then wrote the promise into Maren’s discharge notes as if mistrust were part of the treatment.
Grace Lin answered on the first ring. “I got your SOS alert and two calls from county dispatch,” her editor said. “Tell me you are inside.”
“I’m inside.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Hands. Nothing serious.” Maren sat on the closed toilet lid because her legs had started to shake. “Eli Mercer is in the hospital. His dogs are at the clinic. He says two men from the project contractor attacked him.”
Grace was silent for half a breath. “Says?”
“He identified Cal Voss. There was another man. I didn’t see the assault.”
“Good. Keep those sentences separate.”
Grace did not confuse alarm with certainty, even when she was frightened.
“There’s more,” Maren said. “I called Whitcomb before the meeting. I gave her the parcel and said I was going to the east gate. Eli had asked me not to contact the company until noon.”
This silence lasted longer. “Why did you call?”
“We needed comment.”
“That explains the call. It doesn’t explain the location.”
Maren looked at the bandages across her palms. She could still feel the towrope moving beneath them.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
Grace told her not to file. The newsroom would preserve her notes, consult counsel, and assign another reporter to any criminal story. Maren had become a witness, and perhaps part of the chronology. She could keep reporting public records for the moment, but she could not write around her own conduct as though she were invisible.
“Send me the wide frame—original file, no edits,” Grace said. “Preserve the card. If Calder wants the rest, make a documented copy for him.”
“The knot photographs I took after cutting the ropes could establish the restraints.”
“For the sheriff, yes. Not for publication.”
The wide frame was the only image that showed Eli’s face; the later photographs showed rope, cord, and the cuts she had made. Maren was glad she had no close portrait of him in the snow and no image built around Kodiak’s frightened eyes.
When she left the restroom, Calder was waiting outside with a legal pad. He took her statement in an empty examination room, beginning with the planned meeting and ending with the name of every person who knew her route. Maren told him about the call to Whitcomb before he asked.
Eli gave his statement separately from a hospital bed. Through the narrow window in his door, Maren saw him lying flat beneath heated blankets, eyes closed between questions. When Calder emerged, he did not tell her what Eli had said.
“Your camera card,” he said instead. “Keep the original. If you’re willing, I need a documented copy of the photographs you took at the scene. I’m asking for your consent, not telling you to surrender your reporting.”
Maren copied the photographs to an evidence drive he provided, watched him seal it in an envelope, and signed the date and time across the flap.
By late afternoon, somebody had posted a scanner report claiming a former Navy SEAL and two police dogs had been ambushed over a secret resort. None of that description was accurate except Eli’s former service. Kodiak and Ranger were family dogs. The resort proposal had been debated in public meetings for eighteen months. The men responsible were not yet established by evidence. By dinner, the post had been shared thousands of times and copied onto three sites that had not called the sheriff.
Dr. Alvarez let her see the dogs after six. Kodiak lay under warming blankets with an IV line taped to one foreleg. Ranger sat beside the kennel door, eyes red from irrigation, refusing to lie down while his brother was out of reach.
“He can stay there,” the veterinarian said. “For tonight, being able to see Kodiak may do more good than a separate bed.”
Maren sat on the floor outside the kennel. Ranger watched her but did not come closer. Her coat still smelled of smoke, irritant, and the shack; that was reason enough for a frightened dog to keep his distance.
The clinic’s outer door opened. Noah Reed stepped inside carrying Maren’s black field notebook.
“You dropped this beside Kodiak’s sled when we unloaded him,” he said.
Ranger was on his feet before Maren moved. He did not bark. His body went low in the same posture he had taken at the shack, and a tremor passed from his shoulders to his tail.
Noah placed the notebook on the floor rather than approaching her. “Calder asked for my equipment log. It puts me on the ridge.” Maren did not reach for the notebook. “Then tell Deputy Calder.” “I will. I just—” He looked through the kennel glass at Kodiak. “I was there before you found them…”
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