Chapter 70

After lunch, Hasty Team gathered around Big Orange in the parking lot again. Back to work.
Search Director Terry Killacky was giving a brief update.
The outlines of the search area had been recalibrated slighty, based on where the dog was found.
Kyle Verryn was still on the line as Rawle listened.
“I gotta go.”
“I’ll wrap up,” Verryn said. “So Jack and Tee are determined to be missing, they were supposed to visit a sick relative but never showed. Friday. And now the dead dog.”
Rawle paced on the frozen gravel at the back of the crowd. “Kyle. You need to tell Mittelstaedt that this is a real bad scene, based on everything I know as a searcher.”
He said he undertsood. Rawle was about to add the only piece of good news he had: The fact that Jack’s Jimmy had not been located yet, but before he could even begin his sentence, Cst. Keith came up behind him and pounded on his shoulder with the fat tips of his fingers.
“We got the vehicle.”
Rawle went stiff all over. He turned and started bolting, barking to Kyle over the cell phone: “We found his truck!”
“Something, something… 10-7, 10-7,” a voice squawked over the radio receiver on Cst. Keith’s belt. It was the search and rescue code for dead body. 10-7. Off the air.
Rawle stopped dead in his tracks, the strength vanishing from him.
Somewhere in the network of radios, scattered across the search effort, someone had found a body.
Or more likely two.
Rawle felt his balls shrivel up inside his underwear.