Sarah Varland - Alaskan Christmas Cold Case

“You okay, Trooper Cooper?” Clay asked.

Erynn barely nodded. “Fine.”

Noah spoke at the same time. “She knew the deceased.”

Erynn’s eyes snapped to him and he saw what she’d tried to hide. She was close to broken by this, looked more fragile than he’d ever seen her. But what really surprised him was the expression of betrayal in her eyes. Because Noah had said she knew the victim? He wanted her on this case, but he couldn’t hide anything, couldn’t conceal the facts from his own officers.

Still, the way Erynn looked at him, silently begging for more time...

“How?” Clay asked Erynn, but Noah spoke up again.

“High school.”

Clay looked like he might ask something else, but the ME interrupted. “There’s something underneath her.”

All three of them turned as he slid a piece of paper out from beneath her.

“Same color. Same weight. Probably the same pen,” Erynn muttered under her breath.

Noah hadn’t been expecting the note, but now he remembered Erynn had said that one was always left.

“What does it say? Can you read it?” he asked the ME.

The man read it silently. Frowned. Looked up at them. “It says, ‘One more to go.’ ”

Erynn’s eyes widened and Noah couldn’t stop himself this time—he reached for her hand. Held it tight.

The man was driven and his goal was Erynn’s death. Something Noah refused to let happen.

Erynn did not remember walking from the crime scene to Noah’s office, but there she was. Sitting in a chair across from his desk, blinking.

She had precious little time to get her head back into the game if she was going to make a difference before she was taken off the case. Because as sure as she knew anything else, she knew her days working it were numbered. She had personal connections everywhere, and while she disagreed with protocol suggesting it would make her less effective on the case, it wasn’t worth arguing over.

Instead she just needed to work fast, find as many leads as possible to turn over to whomever was put on the case after she was relieved.

And then work the case on her own time, quietly. Because she owed her dad that.

“You’ve got to stop staring. Blink or something.”

She did, almost without thinking; her eyes were drier than she’d noticed and needed the moisture. She blinked again.

“Erynn...”

The way Noah’s voice trailed off was almost too much for her. Years, she had tried to stay on the edges of the tight-knit community of people who made up Moose Haven. Years, he’d fought her on it, pulled her not just into the town, but into the inner circle his family and friends occupied. She’d told herself it couldn’t hurt and yet here, at this moment, it seemed it could hurt a lot.

“Don’t, Noah.” It was enough to get her to look up, focus. “You can’t talk to me like that, okay?” Like she was a victim. Which she was, or might be at any moment, but right now she was still a law enforcement officer, wasn’t going to give up the responsibility that came with that until someone forcefully benched her.

“You’ve been through a lot.”

Yeah, the story of her life. She’d tired of the pity early on in her “career” as a foster kid, especially because that didn’t give her a home of her own, didn’t give her the stability that so many kids her age had and took for granted. Though she knew Noah didn’t mean it that way, he didn’t know what the words made her think of.

“We’re both about to go through a lot more and people in Moose Haven could suffer if we don’t get this case under control.”

“This case meaning the Ice Maiden case?”

Erynn shivered. She’d always hated that name, too, as much as she’d hated the “Foster Kid Killer” nickname for the serial killer who had terrorized and marked her teen years. Why did departments, the media, whoever did it, name killers, name cases? Criminals didn’t deserve the notoriety, and she disliked the way it glamorized them.

Still, she understood; how else were they going to refer to cases? So she just nodded, fought to get her emotions under control. “Yes, the Ice Maiden case. We need to go back and rework it. Because Janie coming out of hiding, telling us about that...”

“There was nothing there.”

“Clearly there was. Because the woman we thought had died hadn’t, but now has, and we don’t know who is up in that glacier crevasse. That could present another lead.”

He didn’t say anything, to his credit. But she heard the things he wasn’t saying. They’d had a team of people working with them when the case had been hot initially, and they still hadn’t been able to find many leads on who it could be.

Was it someone who was now local to Moose Haven? Someone who had tracked her here and decided to terrorize her more? Erynn knew from her profiling classes the way a serial killer’s mind worked. It wasn’t impossible to suggest that the killer had become fixated on her years ago.

Still, it was all just conjecture. She was tired of that. She needed facts.

“Okay. So you’re telling me you’re convinced that the Ice Maiden death wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a disappearance, but is instead connected to...” Noah trailed off, his voice fading away and giving Erynn the opportunity to explain out loud the suspicions she’d always had.

“The Foster Kid Killer.”

“And you believe this because Janie was in the foster system?”

“Yes, and so was Michelle.”

“Michelle is the woman who warned Janie to be careful, right before Janie disappeared and we discovered the body in the glacier.”

Erynn nodded. Waited a minute. “We have to get to her, Noah. We have to know for sure if it’s Michelle or if chasing leads on the body in the glacier will just be pulling our attention away from an active serial killer.”

Noah’s brow furrowed, his face serious in consideration. “It’s December, Erynn. Accessing the body we left on the glacier is going to be even more impossible now. It’s buried under who knows how many layers of snow and the wind on the glacier at this time of year...”

“We have to try, Noah. Every single angle.”

She was right. She knew it and he did, too, but that didn’t make this any easier. That case had almost cost them so much, years ago. He hadn’t been sure either one of them would make it through, and now it was back, had never gone away.

If he was a runner, he’d leave town, build a career somewhere else, do something else. He had hated the Ice Maiden case with every fiber of his being because it was a nightmare come true—a woman went into the Alaskan wilderness and turned up dead. The news had overpublicized it, used it as a cautionary tale against backcountry hiking alone even once law enforcement had declared the death accidental, but doubts had niggled at Noah’s mind even then, and an oppressive heaviness had been present during the entire time they worked the case. Now that he knew it involved Erynn personally, he hated it more.

He glanced over at her again. What he should do was call her superiors at the trooper post, get her moved out of town and off this case. Protocol probably dictated it. But to what end? She’d be farther from him, where he had no choice but to let someone else try to keep her safe. And the idea of someone else failing...

Besides, much as he’d sparred with her over case-working strategies the last few years, as many times as they’d ribbed each other, they’d worked well as a team, and he needed her. Did not want to tackle this case again at all, much less without Erynn.