Chapter 67

“How you doing now, bud?” Cst. Keith said, battling to push his walrus-sized body through a cluster of pine trees and bushes. He could have gone around the mess, but the idea was to keep the grid lines as rigidly straight as possible, to be sure no area big enough to contain a human body got missed.
Rawle climbed over an enormous deadfall pine tree with pointy branches. “I’m having trouble,” he admitted. “Jack and Tee aren’t stupid. They know this bush, man, as bad as it is. Real well. Jack was raised here. And if they went out walking the dog, how far did they go? Not far enough. And there’s two of them. If one fell down and hurt themselves, what happened to the other? And where the hell’s the Jimmy? I just can’t understand it.”
Cst. Keith walked right next to Rawle for a while, using his leather cop gloves to break the branches off in front of their faces.
“It is weird,” he said. “You’re right. It’s weird. But, you’ve got to remember, the Membership is working this outside these woods too, dude. They’re probably nowhere’s near here. They’re probably somewhere none of us has thought of yet. That’s all. Where’s the Jimmy? Exactly. The vehicle is the key. They’re bound to be with the vehicle. Yes, we called the search, that’s just what we do. You know that. This is just their last known location. We don’t know where they went after they were last seen here. It’s the end of the trail from our point of view, not necessarily their’s.”
Rawle nodded, appreciating his friend’s efforts to calm his fears. Inside, though, he wanted to scream.
It didn’t make sense. If Jack and Tee weren’t in these woods or drowned in the lake, where were they? Why did they stand up Tamara’s little sister? Nothing else Rawle could think of sounded any better.
He kept going. Carefully checking the snowy ground and gray tree trunks for the off-colour of human clothing.
“Search Command. Team two. Over,” Someone from the other seasrch team, Team Two, said over the radio that was clipped to Cst. Keith’s belt.
“Team two. Search Command. Go ahead,” Terry Killacky responded from Big Orange.
“Command, we found a clue. We have… A clue. Over.”
Rawle stopped dead in his tracks and yelled: “Woah!” into the air.
Cst. Keith struggled to unclip the UHF/VHF hand-set from his coat lapel.
“Uh… David? IC, IC here. What’s your 20, Team Two? Over.”
“Uhh, roger, IC. This is Team Two,” came the slow, drawling answer. “Our GPS location? We went 180 degrees southeasterly from Big Orange. Uhh, basically we are a kilometre and a half, no, maybe half a click east of you guys. There’s a little creek here on my right. Hey, I said what’s our Jesus GPS?” The voice trailed off.
“What did you find!” Rawle shouted into the air in frustration, “Jesus!”
“Team Two. This is Incident Commander. What did you find? Over,” Cst. Keith spoke patiently into his handset.
Search protocol prohibited identifying evidence, especially corpses over the airwaves. Family members of the missing people, reporters and lonely town scanner-rats were always within earshot of a walkie-talkie.
Valley Search and Rescue and Kings RCMP used an agreed upon radio code to indicate a dead body had been found, ‘10-7,’ which was a police radio code that meant “off the air.”
Rawle kept his ear peeled, in terror, for the sound of those magic numbers.
“IC. Team Two,” the member of Team Two responded. “We found the dog. Deceased.”