Only His (A Sadie Price FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 3)

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

If there was one feeling Sadie hated more than any other, it was feeling helpless. As she hovered next to her father’s bedside in the ICU, watching the doctor and nurse take his vitals once again, a heavy sense of powerlessness settled over her.

Her father had been unconscious by the time the air ambulance arrived. Although his cabin wasn’t as deep in the hinterlands as some, recent snowstorms meant that driving over land would have wasted precious time. She had watched them lift up his body as she had climbed into her snow truck, and the sight of him, so small and frail, had brought tears to her eyes.

When she had heard about the cancer, there had been no real emotion. There was no love lost between them. Sadie knew that if he died now, she wouldn’t grieve the way she had for her mother and Jessica. What, after all, would she have really lost? Yet for one long moment as she watched him being airlifted to the hospital, she had felt a sharp ache in her heart. Perhaps not so much for what she might lose as for what she had never had.

The sound of machines beeping filled the room. The machines that were currently keeping him alive. The doctor looked at Sadie with sympathy in his eyes, which made her almost flinch away from his gaze. She didn’t need pity.

She needed answers.

“What’s going to happen to him?”

The doctor smiled sadly. A tall, thin man in his fifties, he looked tired, as though he hadn’t slept for days. His name tag read Dr. Bailey.

“His condition is stable, but at the moment that is really all that we can tell you. It’s a waiting game at this stage, I’m afraid. Thankfully, the CPR you performed on him managed to restart his heart quite quickly. You saved your father’s life, Ms. Price.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that. Her training had taken over, and it had barely registered that it was her own father she was trying to help. She wondered how he would feel when he came around, knowing that she had saved him. She strongly suspected he would resent any notion that he owed anything to her.

If he came around, she reminded herself as the doctor went on.

“At this stage he could be comatose for days—even weeks. There could be brain damage due to the lack of oxygen reaching the brain while his heart was stopped. We won’t be able to tell the extent of that until he wakes up.”

“So, he will wake up?” Sadie pounced on his last words, but the doctor shook his head.

“As I said, at this stage it’s a waiting game. He is stable, so I would hope so, but what we have to remember here is how fragile your father already was. His cancer is very advanced, and he was refusing treatment. We can only hope that his body holds up. There are no guarantees,” he finished softly.

Sadie didn’t reply but stared down at her father. He looked dead already, his lips blue and his cheeks sunken in and hollowed. Only the steady beeping of the machine indicated the fact that he was still alive.

“If you want to go home, Ms. Price,” the doctor said, “we will call you at once if anything changes.”

Sadie nodded dully, picking up her bag and moving past the nurse with no more than a quick nod of her head. She felt drained of energy and walked down the corridor of the ICU almost as though she was in a trance.

She was in shock. Not just at the sudden arrest of her father’s heart, but at the fact that he had actually agreed to talk to her.

She had been so close.

Not quite ready to leave, she took herself to the small cafeteria and ordered a strong, sugary coffee, taking a seat in a corner booth where she could be alone with her thoughts. Sipping at her coffee and feeling some semblance of life return to her limbs, she stared down at the folder that now lay on the table in front of her.

Her father had been about to tell her what he knew, she was certain of it. She had finally been on the edge solving the mystery of her sister’s death, only to have it snatched away at the last minute.

She could almost be angry at him, if it wasn’t for the fact that Sadie knew she must have contributed to the cardiac arrest. She had pushed him too far and too fast, making him angry and distressed. His system clearly hadn’t been able to cope with it.

But at the same time, Sadie knew that no other approach would have gotten anywhere with him. Appealing to empathy or a finer sensibility that he didn’t have would have been worse than useless.

There was nothing she could do now but wait and hope her father would come around, and that when he did, he would still be willing to talk to her.

Or even be capable of it. If he died or had severe brain damage, then whatever he had been about to say would be lost forever.

Sadie put her head in her hands as a sense of despair threatened to overwhelm her. To get so close to the truth only to have it vanish in front of her eyes felt like more than she could bear.

Her phone rang, the loud noise making her jolt in her seat.

It was the sheriff.

“Hey,” Sadie answered weakly.

“Everything okay, Price?” Cooper had known she had planned to visit her father today. Over the past few weeks, their relationship had changed from one of wary suspicion to…something else? Mutual respect, certainly, and maybe even friendship. There were also those times she was sure she had caught the sheriff looking at her in a way that signified something more.

She quashed that thought. Sheriff Cooper was a colleague. Work and personal life didn’t mix. Not that Sadie had any personal life to speak of.

“I… don’t know,” she said, not yet ready to talk about the morning’s events. When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to elaborate, the sheriff cleared his throat, changing the subject rather than pushing her.

“I was calling to see if you wanted to accompany me on a call-out. It’s not your usual scene though; sounds like a straightforward bear attack. But I thought you might want to look it over and check that nothing is being missed.”

Sadie couldn’t help but smile to herself. Mutual respect or not, Cooper was the local sheriff and no happier about having an FBI agent accompany him anywhere than any local cop would be. She knew he was doing this in case she needed an “out” from whatever was going on with her dad.

“Give me the coordinates,” she told him. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Great,” he said. “Just to warn you, though, Price; it ain’t pretty.”

*

The victim’s cabin was nestled among the pine trees at the bottom of the mountain. A pretty lodge rather than the ramshackle affair of her father’s, it was the winter home of a local writer, Marie DuVale, who had made a name for herself writing bonkbusters full of sand and sea and s*x, a far cry from her native home of Alaska.

Sadie had never met her, but she instantly recognized the name. The woman stayed alone up here in the winter, writing. Now it seemed she had fallen victim to a rogue bear attack.

As Sadie jumped out of her truck and trudged toward the cabin, she thought about that. Bear attacks, even deaths, did occasionally happen up here, but it was usually hunters or trappers who were intruding on their turf. It wasn’t unheard of for bears to sniff around the cabins, but Sadie couldn’t remember having heard of anyone being killed in their own home before, although something similar had happened in Canada a few years ago.

Before she entered the cabin, she wrapped her scarf around her mouth and nose and braced herself for what she might be about to see. She was used to dead bodies, even horrifically mutilated ones, but she had never seen the aftermath of a wild animal attack before, and she wasn’t sure what to expect.

The smell of blood hit her before she was even through the doorway.

It was everywhere. Up the walls, splattered on the counters of the small breakfast bar, all over the expensive pine furniture and all over the body itself.

Although, she thought as she steadied herself against a wave of nausea, it wasn’t so much a body as pieces of one.

Sheriff Cooper and Pete, the medical examiner, were already there. Pete was cataloging and bagging body parts and for a moment Sadie was surprised. Why wasn’t he waiting for Forensics? But then she reminded herself that this wasn’t a murder.

“I did warn you it wasn’t pretty,” Cooper said by way of greeting, sounding apologetic. If this was his way of trying to rescue her from her father, she thought, then it left a lot to be desired.

“Who found her?” she asked.

“A local trapper, Bobby Carson. He’s around the back having a smoke. He’s pretty shook up, as you can imagine.”

Sadie nodded as she looked around the cabin, trying not to make it obvious that she was avoiding looking at the arm that lay a foot to her side in a mass of blood and guts. The bear sure was a messy eater.

There were pictures of Marie and various guys on the shelf, and an award for Best Novelist from some romance authors guild.

“My wife read her books, you know,” Pete said sadly. “She will be devastated by this.”

“Such a waste of a life,” Sadie agreed, although she didn’t personally know the author. Although what had happened to the woman was clearly terrible, Sadie didn’t feel the outrage and drive for justice that she did when it was a murder victim. Bears were animals, after all, and this one had just done what she guessed hungry bears did, even if it did seem like a particularly savage attack.

She heard a small cough behind her and turned to see a man come in. He was tanned and lean and seemed little affected by the scene of c*****e all around them.

“You’re Bobby Carson,” she said. He saw her badge and his eyes went wide, which was the reaction she was used to when a local realized that she was FBI and not just another state trooper.

Those who didn’t know her, anyway. The locals who remembered her as a kid were usually just shocked to see her back.

“You’ve been on TV,” Carson said to her, sounding a little starstruck. “You caught that serial killer.”

Sadie still had to get used to her growing reputation as something of a local celebrity. She wondered how Marie DuVale had dealt with that.

“What do you make of this, Bobby?” she asked, ignoring his comment. Bobby looked around and shrugged in distaste.

“Nasty attack, but it does happen. The problem is, now that this bear has gotten a taste for sniffing around cabins and making a meal out of the inhabitants, it’s likely to strike again. Once they get a taste for human flesh, they will seek it out.”

Sadie winced at the thought of a rogue bear lumbering around the hinterlands. Maybe even making its way down into town, lured by the promise of rich pickings.

“I guess a bear hunt is needed?” she asked. Cooper nodded.

“I’ve got a fair bit of experience hunting,” he said. “Bobby is going to lead me into the woods after the tracks to see if we can get a sight of him and see what we’re dealing with.”

“It’s definitely a bear?”

Bobby nodded. “It’s a bit churned up out front,” he said, “but you can see all of the tracks out back, clear as day. I was doing my rounds when I spotted them and knew they were heading toward the cabins. So I followed them and… found her.”

“Did you know Marie DuVale?” she asked him, hearing a note of suspicion in her own voice. She saw Cooper glance at her sharply and she shrugged in response. Old habits die hard.

“I used to see her about,” Bobby said. “She was friendly enough, but she was quiet too and never had much to say. She was always busy with her writing.”

“Do you want to come with us, Price?” Cooper cut in, perhaps before Sadie could start interrogating Bobby as a potential “suspect.”

Sadie hesitated. “Don’t we need a proper team?”

“We’re not going to try and take him out,” Bobby said. “Just see if we can locate it and hopefully its lair. We’ll hang back, stay downwind.”

“I’ve called Game and Wildlife,” Cooper said. “So we can get a proper hunt coordinated. But they can’t get straight out here. The more information I’ve got, the better. As soon as this gets out, there’s going to be a panic, or macho types taking the matter into their own hands. There are a lot of tourists and vacationers in these forest cabins. We don’t want any more casualties.”

“I could use some space to get all this catalogued,” Pete cut in, obviously relishing the idea of getting them out of the way for a while. Sadie shrugged. Why not? I don’t have anything better to do, she thought. She wasn’t currently needed at the FBI field office in Anchorage. In fact, she wasn’t due to return to work for a few more days, after her last case had seen her end up in the hospital.

Sadie would have happily gone straight back to work but Paul Golightly, her ASAC, had insisted she take some time out to recover.

Her plan had been to use it working on Jessica’s cold case, but that had hit a dead end with her father lying in the hospital. The last thing she needed was to sit around worrying.

Even if she could think of more pleasant things to do than trek through freezing woods after a man-eating grizzly.

“Looks like we’re going on a bear hunt, then,” she said.

Before they left the cabin, she took a look back at the blood-spattered mess and realized that although the killer wasn’t human this time, it was just as dangerous.

She hoped they weren’t about to walk straight into its lair.