Bet started up the bike. Schweitzer’s eyes gleamed with the thought of a race. Even though her dog could move faster than her across the rutted terrain, Bet still kept an eye on him. He loped along without flagging all the way to the tunnel. Dale came out of the woods as Bet pulled up.
“What’s up?” Dale asked.
Bet explained what Seeley told Clayton in the helicopter. “We need to go back down with Schweitzer to look for this other girl.”
Dale looked around in the woods. “It’s been quiet. Think it’s safe to leave this unguarded?”
“Let’s lock the bat gate behind us with the chain you brought so no one can follow us in.”
“Your call, Sheriff.” Dale went into the woods to where he’d stashed his belongings and came back with a length of chain and a padlock.
The two climbed the shale hillside and stepped into the tunnel before Bet gave Schweitzer a sniff of Seeley’s pack. Dale ran the chain around the squares of the metal gate and locked it behind them.
“Remember the combination?”
“I do,” Bet said. “Though the plan is for us to come out together.” With that, Bet pointed Schweitzer at the footsteps she believed Seeley Lander had left. Though they had crossed them returning with the boy on the backboard, the scent would remain. Schweitzer could help them backtrack Seeley’s route through the cave.
With Schweitzer in the lead, Bet and Dale followed as fast as they could in the dark, rough passage. Even with flashlights, they could see only a few feet in front of them and hear nothing except the drip, drip, drip of water seeping through the porous limestone rock. No surprise to Bet, Schweitzer led them directly to the stairs.
They reached the bottom, and Bet crawled through the low opening into the cavern beyond. She splashed her flashlight around the space, the structures glittering and shimmering, throwing starlight patterns of iridescence onto the cave walls.
“Wow,” Dale said.
Bet turned her attention to Schweitzer, who started to follow different scent trails. He’d move forward, then fall back, move forward and fall back again.
“What’s he doing?” Dale asked.
“He’s losing the scent.”
“What now?”
“I can take us back to where Collier and I found Seeley and see if we can work our way backward from there.”
Bet pulled out her compass and led the way. Arriving at the water, Bet turned her light onto the rocks. She made Schweitzer sit/stay while she navigated the stepping stones. Turning back to Dale she asked if he felt confident crossing.
Without saying a word, Dale made his way across. Once he was safe on the other side, she called to Schweitzer and he leapt across in three huge bounds.
Bet and Dale examined the spot where Seeley had fallen unconscious but found nothing useful. Schweitzer nosed around, then sat and whined low in his chest. He had found the scent again.
Bet sent Schweitzer ahead to follow the trail. The dog moved boldly forward, nose twitching. The trek he took wound around stalactite and stalagmite formations. An occasional bloody handprint showed where Seeley had paused to catch his breath or regain his balance. The sound of the river took on a different note, and Bet could see they’d reached the far side of the cavern. The water vanished into a wall.
“Seeley must have crossed here,” Bet said, shining her light on the other side of the water. Schweitzer sniffed around the face of the mountain where the river disappeared.
“Look,” Dale said, illuminating another bloody handprint above the hole where the river swept into the side of the mountain. A lip stuck out along the edge of the wall. Moving slowly, first Bet and then Dale arrived safely on the other side. Once more, Bet called to Schweitzer, who made the scramble and picked up the trail on the other side.
Schweitzer stopped at a dark spot on the ground, where he laid down and whined. Bet rewarded him with a biscuit, then flashed her light around in front of them. The spot on the ground looked like blood, and a second, even larger bloodstain darkened a patch of gray stone a few feet away.
“That’s far more blood than one body could lose and live,” Dale said with a gesture toward the larger stain.
“I’m guessing Jane Doe died here,” Bet said. “Unless this Katie person is dead too and we have another crime scene elsewhere.”
Before they searched further, Bet took a couple of blood samples from both patches to compare to Seeley Lander and Jane Doe. They found no other blood or evidence of a crime scene. Schweitzer picked up the trail heading back toward the original entrance.
“They must have come in this way from the tunnel,” Bet said. “Then Jane Doe was killed and Seeley was injured, but made it to the other side of the river.”
“And the mysterious Katie?”
“Here’s what’s bothering me,” Bet said. “What brought these kids down here to begin with? How did they even know this cave was here?”
Neither of them had an answer for that.
Nothing indicated that either the missing “Katie” or the shooter remained below. As much as Bet felt in her gut that whoever had targeted her at the mouth of the cave was involved in Jane Doe’s murder, she didn’t have proof of that either. It could have been someone hunting illegally on Rob’s land making a poor shot in bad light.
If there had been a Katie or a Carrie with Seeley in the cave, either she’d vanished, or she was the one with the gun.
“We have no way of knowing how many other tunnels or accesses to the outside might exist down here,” Bet said.
“What now?”
“Let’s go up and see if we can assess which direction I was shot from. I don’t want to be out of cell range too much longer. Alma might need to reach us.”
Back at the mouth of the tunnel, Dale removed the lock and chain, then asked if she wanted it locked behind them.
“Leave it unlocked for now. You stand guard again. I’ll go investigate the woods.”
It was starting to get light as Dale melted back into the trees and Bet headed in the direction she thought the shots had come from. After searching around in the forest for several minutes, she had almost given up finding anything useful when something caught her attention. Schweitzer started to move forward, but Bet caught his collar and asked him to sit.
The structure, built of materials from the surrounding woods, slender logs and branches, covered a space just large enough to park a dirt bike underneath. A set of tire tracks led in and out. She hadn’t heard a dirt bike start up after the shots were fired, but she’d left the area fairly quickly. Maybe the shooter had waited until she did.
Bet pulled out her camera to take a few shots of the lean-to, wondering why someone had shot at her in the first place. Perhaps the shooter hadn’t expected anyone coming out of the cave to exchange fire with them, so once it happened they’d slunk away in the dark. Maybe they’d thought she was Seeley and, once they heard her voice, slipped away. Or it was an unrelated incident, a poacher sneaking through the woods, not expecting to find anything tall moving around except elk and deer.
Bet decided to bring a crime scene tech out from Ellensburg to process the lean-to and the cave. She could do the basics—fingerprints, casts of tire tracks—but a cave and a lean-to were way beyond her abilities.
Rob Collier knew the geography and knew about the cave. He might know something about this lean-to. Or at least who might be using it. Though if he did, why keep it quiet? Maybe there was more than one person involved in all this and Rob knew exactly who’d shot at her and why. He could be involved in whatever had brought Seeley out to the cave in the first place, even if he wasn’t Jane Doe’s killer.