As we gear up for the release of the Tracking Jane series (pre-order episode 1!), I’ll share a preview of the first two chapters. Today I’m including Chapter 2 below, along with a brief synopsis.

If you didn’t get it the first time, click here for the Chapter 1 preview.

Synopsis for Shadow-7

Army canine trainer and handler Jane McMurtry served in Afghanistan with her dog Shadow until an IED blew her legs away. Now, after learning to walk again, alongside a new canine companion, Jane is tracking the scent of kidnapped children in the Colorado high country when her past, her inner turmoil, and her current case collide.

Though Jane thought she’d have to wait two more years, Shadow returns home when he himself suffers injuries. Now two dogs and one woman will struggle to redeem and get on with their lives. In this struggle, Jane partners with a police officer who will make her face the choice between self-loathing and accepting someone’s patient, unconditional love.

It takes us ten minutes to find an alternative, more gradual way down to the creek, and another twenty minutes to catch up with Shady. By then, walking as best we can along the meandering creek, we’ve reached the base of the hills. Shady is standing there, at attention, head and nose pointed toward the mountains.

“You really think they came this way?” Murphy asks. “I can see them going down to the creek back there, but considering how hard it’s been on us, I doubt they’d want to make a go of it this far up.”

I bend down to pet Shady. I could scold her for bolting on me, but right now I’m thinking we have more important things to consider. Besides, she did finally stand, on her own terms, sure, but here she is, standing.

Shady whimpers.

“What’s wrong girl?” I ask her.

She lets out another whimper, a longer one she exhales like a sharp whistle.

I straighten out and look up at the mountains in the distance. Up closer, I see the creek start to climb up. Around it, I don’t see much by the way of trails we or anyone else could use to get up there, to those sheer cliffs. Yet here we are, next to a dog with a nose pointing in that direction.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Murphy says, a hint of annoyed impatience coloring his voice.

“What’s that?”

“The kids wouldn’t come this far. Even if they did, at this point they would turn around wouldn’t they?”

I am scanning our surroundings for evidence of their passing when I see it. From my backpack I detach one of my telescoping walking sticks. I expand it and use it to point at a spot by the water.

“Here,” I tell him. “A footprint.”

“That’s not a kid’s shoe,” he points out.

“That it aint.” I look around some more.

This pebbled surface isn’t much for capturing footprints, except by the water where it’s muddy. I tell myself this is why I haven’t noticed anything up to now, but truth is, my one fourth American Indian tracker lineage notwithstanding, I’ve come to over-rely on my dog. Lately I’ve tried to up my game, but I still ain’t much of anything without a dog. Lucky me I have Shady.

Still, after thinking about it for a bit, I notice it. “Here,” I tell Murphy. “Not an outline of a print, because of the pebbles, but if you look at the ones that dig deeper into the dirt, you can estimate the size of a footprint. The more they dig in, the heavier the foot, too.”

Murphy nods. He catches on quick enough to say, “I’m noticing a couple of big ones over here.”

“Any small ones?” I ask, already knowing the answer for myself.

“Yeah, two sizes, I think.”

“More or less what I’m seeing on my end.” I look up at him and see his expression, his lips parted in mid breath. “I know I’m not law enforcement, and it’s not my place to say, but we ain’t just looking for two little ones.”

He takes that in for a moment and comes back at me with, “Yeah, well, three sets of footprints is one thing. But we don’t know they were set at the same time.”

“That’s an argument for a defense lawyer to make in a court of law. This ain’t no court of law. This is the great outdoors, and our job is to track what we see. Right now I’m seeing three, not two.”

He stares at me for a second before he pulls out his radio. “Murphy here,” he says. “We went up the creek.”

“You did what?”

“That’s where my tracker took me.”

They start hassling him about going off-trail, then crack him a couple of clever ones about being up a creek without a paddle. They have the good sense to exclude any comments about being there with a cripple passing herself for a world class tracker.

I turn my back to him and join Shady. Like her I look up the creek and sniff the air between us and the nearby cliffs. We gotta go up there, she’s thinking, and even while I’m not looking forward to it, I agree.

They’re up there.

I close my eyes and feel a cool breeze wafting in from that hard rock, and though I try not to go there, I find myself half a world away, feeling a cold wind coming from more brutal mountain ranges. I want to hear the squawking of the radio and the blabbering between Murphy and whoever’s on the other side of his radio link, but I only hear the bleating of goats and the strange words of Afghan shepherds. They’re up there, the missing, the wounded. I and my Shadow have to go find them.

“McMurtry,” I hear my CO say, but it’s not him. It’s Murphy, here, trying to get my attention.

“Call me Jane,” I tell him. “McMurtry’s too much of a mouthful.”

He smiles at that, barely. “The Chief and a deputy are headed this way. The rest of them will keep searching where they are.”

I nod, restraining the urge to say that’s fine by me, that the last thing I need is the whole posse descending on my track.

“They want us to wait until they get here.”

“That doesn’t sound terribly clever,” I reply.

I remove my backpack to release my other walking stick. I unfurl it, re-strap my backpack, and I click both sticks together. This is my little deflection. I smile at Murphy to conceal how I hate using them. They look cool, like beefed up skiing poles. Still, they are what they are, primarily, my admission – which I’ve put off up to this point as we clambered up the creek – that I can’t bank on a steady balance. I’ve told myself plenty it ain’t no such thing, that anyone trekking through rough country should be smart enough to use these. But the self-reproach of an amputee’s mind doesn’t surrender with ease.

“We really should wait here,” Murphy says. “If you’re right about the larger prints—”

“What? We need reinforcements?” I point at Shady. “She doesn’t just track, if you get my meaning.”

“But the Chief—”

“The Chief fills out your performance review, not mine. You can sit here if you’d like. I’m pushing ahead.”

He rubs his neck. “I’m not privy to all the details of your contract. But I thought you were always supposed to defer to local law enforcement direction.”

“I get the chain of command thing,” I reply. “But that last job I did, not far from here in Louisville? We near lost the track of those kids from all our sitting around to wait for this person to arrive or that other thing to happen.”

I leave it there, knowing I don’t have to reiterate any of the details. With all the TV coverage I got on that job, he should remember how the missing kids spent a night in the wilderness because we couldn’t get to tracking early enough, when we only had to go in two miles to get to them. Though I came out smelling like a rose out of that one, savior coronation and all, I secretly kicked myself for not being more forceful. Ain’t going to let that regret smack me again, and I stare Murphy down to let him know so.

He shakes his head, looking around at the bushes and the stream like he is going to find an answer there. I hear my mom’s voice again, counseling me to treat boys nice.

“Look,” I add. “Light’s getting short. It’s what now, 3 PM? We cool our heels here another thirty to forty minutes, and by the time your folks join the fun, it’s near time to pack it in.”

I say that knowing that in all likelihood I won’t go down to camp when evening comes. At least me and Shady will be spending the night on one of them cliffs. I eye Murphy’s flimsy backpack and his cute shorts, and I know he didn’t plan for that. At some point he’ll be wanting to head back to camp.

But they’re up there, my newest buddies. And I ain’t letting go of the scent this time. I aim to get them down these cliffs tonight, or the night after, if that’s what it takes.

Murphy is still vacillating. I don’t give him a chance to conjure any further objections.

“Sook,” I tell Shady. “Slow,” I add, and this time she heeds me, walking off more or less a few steps in front of me, nose up creek.

Up to now, I’ve contemplated the concern that along this creek, it would be far too easy to lose the scent. All anyone has to do is walk in the water, and the scent has nothing to latch onto. Maybe this won’t turn as negative as a set of adult prints might suggest. Whoever we’re tracking isn’t trying to lose us. Or maybe, my more cynical side rebuts, they don’t know enough to evade us. Maybe some creep followed these two kids and then…

I shake that off. It’s not my place. Sure, I’ve been reading some police investigation manuals so I can have more of a clue as I go around the country to offer my services. But I don’t know jack, and I ain’t going to play detective here. I’m the tracker. Best focus on one thing and do it well, a voice from my past tells me, and as I start up the steep side of the creek, that’s what I aim to do.

If you’ve ever hiked in the high country and disobeyed the advice to never go off trail, you know making your own way where there ain’t none is tough. Seeing where to go without the benefit of someone having drawn you some nice switchbacks that make easier work of a climb doesn’t come without struggle. You will also know that if you have an eye for it, you can find where the animals go. Deer in particular make their own trails, usually along water sources, in and out of them.

I look for that now. As I climb, watching Shady struggle with how to make her way, I soon realize following the creek won’t work for long. We turn around a bend in the rock, and confirmation comes when we see fingers of water flowing from up above, down the rock face, to feed the head of the creek at the foot of the cliffs.

“Hierr,” I say to Shady, asking her to come back to me.

She stops, in her own way realizing that she has nowhere to go. She sniffs the air, turns to me, sniffs it some more.

“Hierr,” I repeat.

She looks up at me and comes back toward me. When she reaches me, she doesn’t stop like she’s supposed to.

I turn to see where she’s going, nose low to the ground, and I see it: the deer trail. Murphy is standing at the head of it, oblivious to its existence, and I missed it too, so keen on looking forward and keeping eyes on Shady when I walked by it. He too watches her go past him.

“They came this way,” I explain to him. “Then they turned around and went up that trail.”

“I’m loving your dog,” he says.

“You can keep her when this is over,” I shoot back.

Shady stops, looks back at me and whimpers.

“Sook,” I tell her, followed by, “slow.”

She does the tracking part, but this time not so slow.

“She’s got something?” Murphy says as I go past him.

“Yeah, maybe.”

The trail rises at this point, but deer know their business, and it’s a gradual climb along a sheer rock face that rises to our right. Soon, though, the comfort of the forest to our left drops off. Now we’re walking along a narrow trail with a long throw down to the tree line on our left and nothing to hang onto on the rock wall to our right.

“Slow,” I shout after Shady, but by now she too has grown cautious, proceeding at a slower pace.

I catch up with her up trail, just as we’re about to go around a bend leading to a pile of boulders. She stops. I stop behind her. Together we sniff the air.

I smell it, probably long after Shady. Not the putrid scent that forces you to cover your nose, not the sharp iron edge of spilled blood, but the oppression of it, its despair. Death is here.

She whimpers. She lets out one howling bark.

“She found something?” Murphy asks.

I whisper, “Yeah, maybe.”

I step around Shady, and she follows me, whimpering as she goes. The sharp pitch of her voice drills through me. Yeah, that’s it, Shady. That’s how I feel all the time.

She leaps past me to climb one, then two of the boulders. There, as the western sky starts to dim, she stops. She’s never done this before, but she does it now. As if to tell me she could have done this, too, up in those forsaken Afghan mountains, she cranes her neck upward and lets go of one long mournful howl.

It pierces through me, and I fight back the urge to let out a howl of my own, though I think it would feel so good about now. Not that I could. I’ve stopped breathing.

Murphy lets out a growl of a curse. He smells it too now, in his own way.

He steps around me to climb up the boulders.

Shady lets out another howl, shorter this time. She turns to look at Murphy as he stands atop the third layer of boulders. He looks down, then up, then back down.

He stays there, waiting for me as I navigate the easiest way up the boulders. With an outstretched arm he pulls me up the last bit of the way.

There I see her. “The girl,” I say. Her body lies contorted. Little blood other than a thin, winding line seeps from her nostrils. “She fell,” I add, realizing why Murphy was looking up.

“From up there, I’d guess.” He points up the rock wall. “Hard slog to get up there.”

“The trail must keep going beyond these boulders.” To confirm my guess, I step onto another bolder to see where the trail continues, steeper now, still rising up along the rock wall. I point it out.

“Still, not easy going,” he says.

“But if someone’s chasing you. Or forcing you—” I stop myself there, once more telling myself I’m not here to solve or theorize about anything. With a glance at the dipping sun, I return to my tracking mindset.

“We gotta keep going,” I say. “Before sunset.”

“No, we have to stay here, with the body.”

“You have to stay here.” I take off my pack to dig out a head lamp. I put it on to show him the level of my readiness.

“No, you have to stay here, too.”

“We’ve been over this. I don’t—.”

“Look at her,” he says. “Her neck in particular. What do you see?”

A quick look confirms why I should stick to tracking. I see it now, and he spotted it at once.

“Her neck’s bruised,” I say.

“That’s right. Ligature marks. She was strangled before the fall. Someone wanted to make it look like she fell. But she was dead before she hit the rocks. Only God knows for how long.”

I sigh, knowing where he’s going with this.

“Whoever did that is still up there,” he says. “We’re not going up there alone, and you sure aren’t going up on your own.”

He doesn’t have to tell me the rest, namely that he can’t go on, this now being a crime scene and all. He needs to stay with the body to safeguard the scene, and also to keep away whatever critters might come to feast on it.

“I have her,” I said, pointing at Shady.

“Still, no go, Jane. That guy could be armed.”

I reach into my pack and take out the heaviest item in there. “So am I. License to carry and all.”