Wolfwraith Read Online Free PDF Page B

and watched as Barnett and Alex met near the vehicles and talked. Barnett waved toward the dock once, but there was no telling if he was talking about Shadow or the body.
    A parade of vehicles soon emerged from the woods, including a car marked Virginia Beach Medical Examiner. Along with a couple of cops, the coroner came out on the dock. He began examining the body while two teams of police search-and-rescue units backed their boat trailers down the launching ramp.
    Barnett drove away and Alex came back onto the now-crowded pier.
    “Have you had breakfast?” he asked.
    “No. I thought I’d grab something later, but never got a chance.”
    “Go over to my place. Lillian will make you something to eat. After that, get another johnboat and make sure both boats are ready to go. I need to get back to the contact station, but Jonesy is coming down to take the other boat. Call me on the radio once you’re on the water and I’ll assign you to your areas.”
    “Sure thing. Thanks.”
    “Oh, one more thing. The commissioner...aah...sometimes gets, uh, an idea about something and right now he’s worried you’re going to say something premature about what happened to this poor girl. Let’s keep a lid on it until we know a bit more, huh?”
    “Sure, Alex.”
    As Shadow walked toward his boss’s trailer home, he thought how difficult it would be to ‘keep a lid on it’ if something similar had happened to the other girl.
    Chapter Three
    He’s quite a little Napoleon, isn’t he?
    At the end of a fruitless day searching for the second girl, Shadow tied up his search vessel and returned to the False Cape dock in a boat piloted by Lester Jones, the head of volunteer services for the park. Jonesy wore a ranger’s uniform, but did not have a badge or carry a firearm. Because, as a youth, he’d spent many summers with relatives on False Cape and had learned to love the place, he assisted the park without pay. He helped the rangers and arranged for volunteers to perform odd jobs such as picking up litter, answering the contact station phones on weekends or clearing trails of underbrush.
    A Vietnam veteran, he had retired from a successful, self-owned business a few years back. His wife died shortly thereafter. Preferring to keep busy, Jonesy spent most of his days in the park and usually slept, despite his wealth, in an old trailer there rather than his large home in nearby Sandbridge. Now in his sixties with thinning hair, he looked overweight but Shadow knew the man’s bulk to be mostly muscle. Laugh crinkles surrounded his blue eyes and he was quick to flash a winning smile or tell a tall tale in his southern drawl. He and Shadow had readily become friends; they lived close together in the isolated park and shared a dislike for bullshit and a tendency to cheat at card games.
    Jonesy steadied the boat while Shadow pulled himself up on the dock. It had been an exhausting day, with the prospect of another like it tomorrow. He undid his lifejacket’s fastenings and tossed it into the boat.
    “Want to come over to the Taj Mahal later?” Jonesy asked, referring to the old trailer. “I’ve got a couple of six-packs in the fridge.”
    “Sure, sounds good. I’ll give you time to take the boat back and relax a bit, then I’ll be over.”
    They had been relieved for the night by other teams, who would search during the clear, moonlit night with spotlights. They had found the two kayaks and there was still a good chance the other girl was alive, since much of the bay was shallow enough to wade to safety.
    “Then ta-ta for now,” Jonesy said cheerfully. He gunned the outboard and spun the johnboat expertly away. Shadow heard the sound of the motor fading away as he walked up the pier toward his truck, still parked where he had left it. The nearly full moon was low in the sky behind him and he had no trouble seeing his way. A sudden, chill breeze hit him, though, and Shadow glanced up to see clouds rolling in from the