Chapter 20
Slade got a tug on his line right after Hans did, then concentrated on pulling in his fish. He loved how Sheri showed her brother how to catch the fish in jest, and then handed the pole to him when she had a bite so her brother could reel it in. He loved to see the interaction between them—good-natured fun. Even though he loved being here alone with Sheri, he enjoyed being with the others too.
He wanted to ask Sheri about the Gerard case, but he figured she wanted to tell everyone about it at the same time over dinner. Hans pulled his pike, and Slade managed to catch one too.
“Yes!” Hans said. “We can have a fish fry tonight and then take the rest home for a fish fry with the pack if we have enough left.”
“Or we could have hot dogs and save the fish for home,” Slade said.
“Woo-hoo!” Candice said in the tent nearby.
He smiled. “It appears Candice got one.”
Sheri was fishing but wasn’t catching anything. Slade was afraid Owen wouldn’t either.
It took another hour before Owen caught a fish, and the others were cold, so they broke down their tents and packed everything up on the sleds and hauled them back across the snow-covered ice to the cabin.
“We’ve seen the prettiest northern lights at night. Maybe we can see them after our wolf run, while we’re making s’mores. Do you want to save the fish and have hot dogs over the campfire?” Sheri asked.
“Oh, hot dogs sound good,” Hans said.
“Yeah, we can save the fish for home,” Candice said. “A fish fry with the whole pack for all those who couldn’t make it to the cabin?”
“Yeah, that would be really nice,” Sheri said.
After they unloaded their stuff and cleaned the fish, then put them in the freezer, they grabbed the hot dogs and headed out to start the firepit to cook them. Owen brought out the bottles of champagne to help celebrate their mating and filled glasses for everyone.
Then they sat all bundled up, roasting the hot dogs over the fire, talking about Sheri’s case.
“If this case gets too dangerous, we’re all on it,” Owen warned Sheri.
“Yeah, sure. I’m all for the help if I need it. I’m not too proud to accept it.” Sheri took a sip of her champagne.
Slade was glad about it. He loved being a pilot in his family’s business, but he realized how much he wanted to help Sheri with her cases now that they were mated!
Sheri got a call and said, “Oh, no. All right. I’ll tell everyone else. Thanks, Cameron.” She set the satellite phone down on the table. “Okay, not so good news. Fitz and Otis both got bail. They had never been up on any other charges before, so the judge let them go with low bails.”
“It’s a financial crime, and no one has been murdered yet ,” Slade said.
“Unless Fitz gets ahold of Gerard, if Betty’s worries are founded.” Owen drank some more of his champagne.
“Yeah. Fitz wasn’t too happy with me either for helping the police to bring him in,” Slade said.
“They deputized you again, didn’t they?” Owen asked.
“Ohmigod, they actually deputized you?” Sheri asked. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“Yeah, to help bring the perps in. The other deputies were trying to take down Danbury, the shooter. Conway only had me to help him take in the other two men.” Slade swore Sheri looked impressed that he’d been deputized.
“Wow.” Sheri put her hot dog on a bun and squirted on ketchup. Then she took a bite. “Hmm, good.”
The others finished roasting their hot dogs and began adding condiments.
“Oh, these are good,” Candice said. “I haven’t had roasted hot dogs like this in a long time.”
“Yeah, we thought they would be tasty over the fire,” Sheri said. “The champagne goes well with them too.”
They all ended up getting seconds on the hot dogs and after they ate those and finished another bottle of champagne, Sheri said, “Save room for s’mores after our wolf run!”
“About the wolf run,” Owen said, “you’re taking us to the crash site, right?”
Sheri smiled. “Sure. It’s taped off, but we found other merchandise beyond that area.”
“Which is probably taped off too now, but as wolves exploring the site? It won’t matter,” Slade said.
“True,” Sheri agreed.
Candice said, “Everyone take mental notes about everything. I’ll use it in one of my stories.”
They all laughed, but they knew Candice was serious. If she didn’t have a camera, a recorder, or a pad of paper with her, she asked everyone to help her remember details.
They stripped out of their clothes and shifted, all but Slade, who had to open the door and close it afterward, then he shifted.
Slade and Sheri led the way, the other wolves following them along the trail. Now, Slade thought, Candice could really envision the downed trees and the difficulty for humans to travel this way after the bad snowstorm for her story.
First, they took them to the crash site and the wolves went under the crime-scene tape and smelled around the whole area. They didn’t smell any more merchandise though. Then Slade and Sheri headed for the next area where they’d found packages before, but this time they heard digging. Slade was afraid that Fitz and his friends had returned once again.
They moved silently in that direction, but if it was Fitz and the others, they were quiet this time, no one talking, just digging in the snow. And they only heard one person digging. It didn’t make any sense. Unless someone had seen the news about the plane crash and stolen goods on board and was looking for a free laptop or other brand-new electronic devices to grab.
As soon as he reached a tree that was close enough, Slade saw Dulcie digging in the snow with lanterns around and a headlamp on. She’d already found a laser printer. She wouldn’t have needed the lighting, unless she was taking pictures to document the finds. Sure, then she’d need them. He listened for any sign of any other officers in the area before he let her know they were there. In the meantime, the other wolves joined him and watched Dulcie.
Then Slade figured she was by herself and woofed at her.
Dulcie startled and turned to look in Slade’s direction. He smiled at her and woofed again.
“Slade?”
He nodded.
Sheri came out of the woods and woofed at her and then trotted over to her and started helping Dulcie dig out the package.
“Sheri,” Dulcie said, smelling her scent. She smiled. “Wow, imagine me seeing you guys out here.” She saw the other wolves then and smiled again.
Slade joined Sheri and Dulcie and began digging. But Hans, Candice, and Owen were wandering around, sniffing for any other scents. And then Hans woofed and started to dig at the snow. So did Candice and Owen.
Before long Dulcie, Slade, and Sheri uncovered two more boxes, but they didn’t know what they were. Dulcie lifted them out and set them with the printer.
Then Dulcie began smelling for any more scents. Slade watched Hans and the others digging deeper in the snow. Then he and Sheri began looking for any more items out here. He was surprised Dulcie was out here on her own. Then again, in a way, it was easier for her to locate the items on her own without witnesses than try to explain how she had found them.
With all the wolves digging, Dulcie concentrated on pulling out the merchandise from the snow. She left markers everywhere that they had found the buried merchandise. Then they found the last of the packages in the area. They moved off to another area to do more searches and found a few more items. Once they were done, Dulcie called it in to the sheriff’s office.
“Yes, I know. I couldn’t sleep, okay? I kept seeing in my mind’s eye where all the packages were buried. In any event, I used a metal detector in a few new areas and have recovered another fifteen packages. Anyway, I’m done for the night if anyone wants to come out here and pick these up to secure as evidence.” Dulcie laughed. “Sorry about your show… Yeah, I really, really am. Okay, see you in an hour.” She secured her satellite phone and said to Slade and the others, “Thanks so much to you for helping me. I couldn’t have gotten half of this work done without you.”
They woofed at her.
“Tanner and Conway are on their way. They’ll be here within the hour. There’s no need for you to stay here any longer.”
But they didn’t budge. Slade knew the others wanted to stay here with Dulcie too, to make sure Fitz and Otis didn’t return and steal all this from Dulcie and hurt her. At least Danbury was still in the hospital from the gunshot wound, and since he was the one who had been shooting at everyone, maybe the others wouldn’t resort to those kinds of tactics, but Slade and his pack members couldn’t take that chance.
Besides, they were nice and warm in their fur coats. He imagined poor Dulcie was cold for however long she’d been out here before they had even arrived. They figured they would have quite a wait for the officers to show up, but half an hour later, they heard a siren in the distance and knew Tanner and Conway were parking at the cabin. Slade smiled. They had rushed to come to Dulcie’s aid.
When they heard Tanner and Conway finally approaching on foot, the wolves moved off into the trees. They could have gone back to the cabin, but Slade wanted to make sure Dulcie didn’t get into trouble for coming out here on her own to do this. Though he totally understood why she had.
“Hey,” Tanner said. “We knew you were a workaholic, but really, this is beyond what I could have envisioned.”
Conway shook his head. “She’s just trying to show us up at the office because she’s new at the job. She’s doing a damn good job of it too.”
They all seemed to have a good working relationship with each other, which Slade was glad to see.
“She is. But I’m glad she did it so we didn’t have to be out here all this time. It must have taken hours to uncover all this stuff,” Tanner said.
It would have if she hadn’t had the wolves’ help.
Tanner and Conway helped document all the finds and locations of the merchandise, and then they packed the items up on two sleds and hauled them back.
The wolves followed them, giving them safe passage all the way to their vehicle at the cabin. He wondered where Dulcie had trekked in from.
When the officers drew close enough to the cabin, Slade and the other wolves dashed through the woods ahead of them. Once they arrived at the cabin, Slade shifted, unlocked the door and everyone went inside, and he locked the door. Then they all shifted and dressed.
“Wow,” Candice said. “At least the bad guys didn’t show up, but the rest was great for a story.”
Owen laughed. “I’m glad we could help Dulcie uncover a bunch of the stolen merchandise.”
“Is she single?” Hans asked.
“Yes,” Sheri said, “and she asked if there were any bachelor males in the pack. I mentioned you, but I didn’t want to push you two together if you weren’t interested in each other. She’ll be coming to the pizza party at the office after we move Slade’s things to my apartment.”
“Great. I can talk to her then. I guess she didn’t know I was the bachelor male there helping her out.”
“She’ll smell your scent when you’re at the party and know you were there,” Sheri said.
Slade was amused, but he was glad he already had his mate. Sheri was just perfect for him.
“I was going to say we could go out and have some s’mores, but maybe we should wait for the officers to all leave in their cars first,” Sheri said.
“No. I mean, we could invite them to join us. I mean, since the three officers had to give up part of their night to come out here and—” Hans said.
“You want to meet Dulcie,” Sheri said.
Slade would have done the same thing if he were Hans.
“Let’s do it,” Candice said. She was already heading to the kitchen to grab the graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows and smiled at the container of green frosting. “I remember you adding red and blue frosting to the s’mores for the Fourth of July party. This will be so much fun.” Then she took all of it outside while everyone grabbed some water bottles and blankets and headed out after her.
Hans got the fire started. Sheri passed around the roasting forks, and then everyone began to roast their marshmallows when they heard Tanner talking to the other officers as they moved in the direction of the cabin from the trail. “Yeah, at least my show is on a streaming service, and I can watch it anytime.”
“That’s good to know,” Dulcie said. “I knew I could count on the two of you to come out and help me with this.”
“You should have called us sooner,” Conway said.
They saw Slade and the others roasting marshmallows and Slade called out to them, “Come join us! We didn’t know you would be out doing some more digging for buried treasure tonight.”
“We didn’t either,” Tanner said. “It was all Dulcie’s idea.”
“Yeah, we’ll join you,” Conway said. “I haven’t had s’mores since I was a Boy Scout.”
“I haven’t had them since I was a little girl,” Dulcie said.
“I have them every Fourth of July.” Tanner frowned. “What’s that on them?”
“A little Christmas color,” Candice said.
“Well, that works for me.” Dulcie motioned to the cars. “We’ll just get these loaded in the cars and then be right back.”
A few minutes later, the three officers joined them. Slade was glad Candice and Owen had brought more fixings for s’mores. Then introductions were made all around, though Tanner and Conway had met Owen before on a case he had been looking into.
Dulcie seemed interested in Hans, once she realized he was Sheri’s brother and the bachelor male wolf in the group.
When Candice said she was the novelist, Dulcie smiled. “I read your novels. I’ll have to have you autograph them.”
“Oh sure, I would love to.”
Then the officers were making up their s’mores, adding green icing to them, Tanner saying, “This is like Grinch s’mores.” Everyone chuckled.
“So we heard that Otis and Fitz were bailed out of jail,” Slade said.
“Yeah. We hoped they wouldn’t be because they had been resisting arrest and carrying illegal weapons in the BCWA, but the judge thought otherwise. No past criminal charges, no threat of flight risk—so the judge believed. It won’t be the same for Danbury though,” Tanner said. “Not only because he’ll be hospitalized for a few more days, but because he was shooting at our officers.”
“Good. Do you believe these guys had never pulled off a job before?” Sheri asked.
“It’s possible, but unlikely,” Conway said. “I mean, there are cases where someone or a team of people pull off a heist and they had never done any crimes before that. But most of the time it’s a case of they never got caught on any other crimes they’ve been involved in so there’s no record of it.”
“Okay, well, Betty Connolly came to me today at the cabin and asked if I would find her husband, Gerard, and clear him of being a suspect in the case,” Sheri said.
“Yeah, she was in today to speak with me.” Tanner made another s’more. “I swear she’s like the boy who cried wolf. When she first said her husband had gone missing, we figured he was a grown man, he was having an affair, and that’s all there was to it. Now, that’s not to say we didn’t look into it. We did. We checked all the usual places to make sure he hadn’t died or been injured—accident reports, all of it. But there was no sign of him. Then she calls the office and says, ‘He’s home. He’s all right.’ Then you call in the airplane crash, we verify it was his plane, you tell us about the stolen merchandise, and this is now a whole different story.”
“Did Gerard’s wife tell you who was really flying the plane?” Sheri asked.
“Nope,” Conway said. “She said Gerard didn’t know who had and now he has gone missing again. We have no way of knowing who the pilot was or whether he survived the crash or was injured and whether he even knew what he was transporting. Of course, Gerard might very well have been flying the plane. We did have cadaver dogs out there searching the area to see if we could find a body. But we didn’t find any sign of one.”
Slade was thinking they would have smelled an injured or dead man while they were looking for the packages, and they hadn’t. Which he was glad for. Maybe the pilot had made it out alive just fine.
“Well, while I’m conducting my new investigation into Gerard’s disappearance, I’ll let you know if I locate him or learn anything about the case. Did Betty tell you he was being blackmailed by his brother, Fitz?” Sheri asked.
“Yeah.” Tanner wiped his hands on one of the Christmas napkins Sheri had set out for everyone to use. “She said it had been because he’d been unfaithful. With whom? I had asked. She didn’t know. She sure doesn’t know a lot. Supposedly, Gerard wouldn’t tell her. But Mrs. Connolly did say she had all the money in the family—inherited wealth. And if Gerard had been unfaithful, she would divorce him and there would go his chance of getting any of that money. She had him sign a prenuptial agreement. He was, or still could be, a real ladies’ man and Mrs. Connolly knew that when she had married him.”
“So then the blackmail could have triggered a divorce and him losing the money he was accustomed to having.” Slade thought that might make more sense. And the Jaguar Betty had been driving? It wasn’t from Gerard’s income as a pilot, but her own wealth.
“Exactly,” Conway said.
Hans looked like he wanted to add something to the conversation, opening his mouth to speak, and then clamping it closed as if he thought better of it.
“We tried to call you, by the way, to let you know we were parking at the cabin since it’s the closest location to the plane’s crash site, but we didn’t get any answer,” Tanner said, sounding apologetic.
“Oh, we were taking a walk and none of us had a satellite phone on us,” Hans said. “We were lucky we didn’t run into any trouble.”
Of course, in reality, they’d been running as wolves and didn’t have their satellite phones with them. Dulcie smiled at Hans.
The officers finally finished their s’mores and thanked them for the treats. Then they left and Owen said to Sheri, “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You’re no longer in training as a PI. I don’t think any of us has done as much work on a case when we were on vacation as you have,” Owen said.
“Yeah, but that’s because it all kind of fell into my lap. Though we might have to make Slade an honorary PI for all the help he has been to me on the case,” Sheri said, giving Slade a hug.
“Believe me, I’ve been happy to do it.”
Then they all went inside to have some more champagne to celebrate the happy union between Slade and Sheri.