Chapter 37
Kipp
It had taken another day for the official red tape to come through from CID from Casper, but sometimes cold cases didn’t get the urgency they deserved. Hattie had been in a frenzy the previous day, looking through what I would assume was all the information available on Barry Galloway.
She’d taken Casper’s words to heart when he said he wanted her to keep her podcast going. She and her crew, or squad, had released an episode that immediately sparked intense internet speculation about the Galloways.
In the early morning, the vista area was filled with sweeping trees and berry brambles that sparkled in the sunshine. From the overlook, it had been full of drama and distance. Today, the space shrank to dirt, pine needles, and the steady rhythm of my own breath.
I adjusted the strap of my pack and checked the orange flagging tied to a low branch.
Grid C–7. My grid. Thirty yards wide, running downslope toward a bend in the creek.
There was a certain beauty to being on a SAR grid search that was enjoyable.
My specialty here wasn’t in leading or even organizing people for this kind of effort.
My expertise was in being part of a team.
It wasn’t in directing it. Here, I was only a trained pair of eyes walking a line someone else had drawn on the map.
It was nice to lose myself in that instead of focusing on nonessential things, like the fact that eager-Beaver Roger had shown up wanting to ‘bond’ or some shit.
Hattie had given me an admonishing look when I’d made Casper assign him the grid as far away from me as possible.
The ground here was dry from a good month without rain, packed hard where deer trails cut through, softer under the ferns.
Five months was a long time. Long enough for spring rains and animals to erase almost everything a person left behind.
There might be something to find, and I knew Casper hoped we would see signs of either a struggle or a burial site.
It was clear from the amount of blood in the car that Allison Finch was dead.
No amount of cleaning was going to keep that a secret.
Focusing on what was right in front of me, I kept my eyes fixed on my surroundings, searching for any disturbed earth.
But everything I observed was familiar: a broken branch at shoulder height that looked old enough to predate winter, and a scatter of rocks near the base of a fir.
Still, I crouched down, fingers brushing the dirt, looking for the unnatural—fabric, plastic, or anything that didn’t belong.
Nothing.
I stood and kept moving my boots, crunching softly in the dirt with each tiny step.
We were spaced out well, orange vests flickering through the trees at the edges of my peripheral vision.
Off to my left on the upslope, I caught a glimpse of blonde hair pulled back under a baseball cap.
Hattie’s head was angled down as she worked her own strip of ground.
Out here, attention wandered at your own risk.
People thought searching was about sweeping glances and big discoveries.
Grid searching wasn’t like that. There was a reason that it was called a grid.
It was refusing to let your brain fill in gaps, just because you wanted to finish your section.
You had to be methodical and careful, working in tandem so that every square was covered. So nothing was missed.
I moved more slowly near the creek, where the ground dipped and debris gathered at the bottom.
If someone had walked away from the car, if they’d stumbled or been dragged, this was the kind of place that might have hidden something longer.
Water changed things, especially when it was covered with leaves or run-off.
This environment could be insidious for rot, but it was all pretty far from the car for a body.
Kneeling again, I pushed aside the wet leaves with the tip of my glove. Beneath the moldering twigs and branches was nothing but mud, and a few faint tracks of small things with too many legs. Nothing that I needed to record.
I tried not to think about a woman bleeding out in the back seat of her own car while the world kept turning.
The radio made soft static crackles against the straps of my backpack, with the steady murmur of check-ins and coordinates.
All of it was professional and controlled.
There was no chatter from anyone that indicated what we were all thinking, which was that this place had already given up everything it was going to give.
It was a trap that you could fall into if you weren’t careful—that pit of doom. You needed to keep the faith.
I straightened, stretching my lower back, and scanned ahead.
The slope steepened here, with rocks peeking through the dirt along with occasional berry shoots.
The ground here was hard and uneven, with poor footing.
Making a mental note to angle my boots slightly, I kept within my boundaries and kept going.
This was where experience mattered, not as a cop, but as someone who knew how people moved when they were panicked, injured, or dying in the woods.
If they were running, they took the easiest path.
Often they went with gravity, which meant downhill.
They followed water. They clung to the easiest route, even when it led them to a worse place.
But there were no signs of that here.
No scuffed earth, no broken undergrowth in a line that suggested someone had been hauled or half-carried anywhere. If Allison Finch had left the car on her own, she would have vanished like smoke. Of course, it had been months. Time and weather were not our friends out here.
I wiped sweat from my temple with the back of my hand and took a drink from my water bottle.
It was already getting hot, and even though I’d prepared for it, the air was already stifling.
Still, I enjoyed being outside and being part of the process.
Every chance I got for SAR, I never hesitated to join.
Tracking was more my speed if we were doing an active search for a missing kid or something, but I liked this too.
It was rewarding. People could lie to themselves all they wanted about being selfless, but you needed to find meaning in the jobs you did and the ways you volunteered. Levi taught me that.
Making mental notes to myself about the terrain so I could log it later in my journal, I kept going until a flash of orange caught my eye to the right. One of the volunteers paused, bent briefly, then shook their head and moved on. Another non-discovery logged and forgotten.
My boot nudged something half-buried near a stump, and my pulse jumped before my brain caught up. I crouched, brushed dirt aside just to be sure, and let out a slow breath. Old beer can. Sun-bleached, crushed, probably tossed from the overlook years ago.
Somewhere downslope, Hattie laughed softly at something one of the search leaders said, the sound brief and instantly swallowed by the trees. It struck me then—the strange clash of her worlds.
Hattie and I had talked about the search for her sister and how it felt to be called back to another one.
She’d done other searches since then, and she said they’d always been a little hard, but they were important.
It made me realize how much I’d jumped the gun at the beginning.
I’d been an absolute dick to her. Hattie was strong as hell, working in a profession that still caused her so much pain.
I wanted to talk about her plans after this case.
She made a few comments that led me to believe that she’d be open to staying. I’d love that more than anything.
By the time we reached the end of the line, my calves burned, and sweat made my shirt cling damply to my back. Marking the boundary tree, I tied off the last bit of flagging and keyed my radio.
“C–7 clear,” I said.
Acknowledgments came back one by one. Clear. Clear. Nothing. Nothing. It was what I expected, but I was still disappointed.
When we regrouped at the edge of the vista, the sun was lower, casting gold light through the trees.
Faces were grim but unsurprised. Casper quietly talked with his team, already moving on to the next steps and locations.
Hattie’s team wasn’t the only one hot on the trail of figuring out Barry Galloway’s movements.
If Allison Finch’s body wasn’t here and this was just the dump site for the car, then it must be somewhere else.
The problem was that cameras weren’t exactly standard on small-town roads, which was going to make this tough to figure out who left it here.
Hattie stood a few yards away, hands on her hips, her gaze turned back toward the forest as if she might memorize it through sheer will. We were both thinking of the fact that five months had left us all with no clues, but that didn’t mean we were done. I knew that Hattie felt the same way.