The escape of Veronica Kildare's vindictive, long-time nemesis from prison overshadows what should be a festive holiday season for her and her team. Law enforcement is convinced that Tommy Arnett perished in a fiery car accident, but Veronica can't shake the sinking feeling that she hasn't escaped that easily from his relentless pursuit of revenge against her.
Other unsettling factors are swirling through Colorado along with the encroaching harsh winter weather as Veronica and her Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Leda, search for several missing young women who've been abducted and pitilessly left to face the elements, and the daughters of her search and rescue partner, Sgt. Tim Donovan, are targeted by a mysterious man with an unknown agenda. All is not as it seems with regard to the kidnappings, however, as one case ties back to a local thoroughbred racetrack where a nefarious scheme has been enacted by a villain willing to eliminate anyone who stands in their way.
As malign forces gather around them, will Veronica and Leda be able to outrun a terrible fate when their brutal past and their present day life collide?
The escape of Veronica Kildare's vindictive, long-time nemesis from prison overshadows what should be a festive holiday season for her and her team. Law enforcement is convinced that Tommy Arnett perished in a fiery car accident, but Veronica can't shake the sinking feeling that she hasn't escaped that easily from his relentless pursuit of revenge against her.
Other unsettling factors are swirling through Colorado along with the encroaching harsh winter weather as Veronica and her Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Leda, search for several missing young women who've been abducted and pitilessly left to face the elements, and the daughters of her search and rescue partner, Sgt. Tim Donovan, are targeted by a mysterious man with an unknown agenda. All is not as it seems with regard to the kidnappings, however, as one case ties back to a local thoroughbred racetrack where a nefarious scheme has been enacted by a villain willing to eliminate anyone who stands in their way.
As malign forces gather around them, will Veronica and Leda be able to outrun a terrible fate when their brutal past and their present day life collide?
This search and rescue effort hasn’t even properly begun yet, but it already feels a bit like the search from hell. Or for hell. It’s not good. Gravel scatters like buckshot from beneath my speeding tires and brisk December air rushes through the slightly open back windows of my SUV as I make a sharp right turn from Boulder Canyon Drive onto Sweetbread Road, just a mile away from the parking area of a conserved property composing part of the more than one hundred thousand acres managed by the Boulder County Parks and Open Space division. However, it’s difficult for me to absorb the beauty of this natural area right now with dusk falling and the knowledge, weighing on me like Sisyphus’s boulder, that time is slipping away like quicksilver.
Taking a deep breath, I consciously loosen my hands from their death grip on the steering wheel. Leda, my six-year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever and standout search and rescue and drug detection dog, whines restlessly in the SUV’s cargo area just behind my ear as my anxiety radiates throughout the vehicle. She knows we’re going on a search, and her canine telepathy is telling her loud and clear that the circumstances are extreme and decidedly stressful to her owner. The past few months of my life have been very trying for reasons I’m resolutely avoiding thinking about at this critical moment, and Leda has been glued to my side in loyal canine solidarity. Right now, duty calls and we must be calm and simpatico for the search mission at hand.
“That’s my girl,” I tell Leda soothingly, trying to settle my nerves and project a sense of composure to my dedicated dog. My insides may be churning with the same pent-up anxiety that comes right before the roller coaster car plunges from its lofty peak to the bottom of the sickeningly steep hill (including a couple of 360-degree loops for good measure), but my exterior needs to look quite a bit more unruffled.
“We’ll find her, Veronica,” Michael reassures me from his position in the passenger seat with a comforting pat on my right arm. At age eighteen, Michael came into the lives of my father and me over a year ago when he helped me save the life of a dog being attacked in the back streets of Denver. That sweet dog, Cocoa, and Michael live with us now at my dog training facility, Dogged Pursuit K-9, on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado. He serves as my assistant dog trainer and attends criminal justice classes, working toward his goal of becoming a K-9 handler for the police department. Michael is an engaging young Black man with the stature of a linebacker and the disposition of a Golden Retriever, who’s rapidly become my surrogate younger brother.
“I’m trying to keep a positive outlook,” I tell him hesitantly while closely following the vehicle in front of me—which belongs to Sergeant Tim Donovan, Boulder County sheriff’s deputy and my skilled search and rescue partner—into the trailhead parking lot of the four-hundred-acre Candillo Preserve.
“It’s worrying for sure, and I know you’re thinking about her condition when Leda does find her, but we just have to do what we do as a team and then let the medical professionals take over. Sheriff Dawson never shies away from using every resource at his disposal. That’s why Tim brought the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) with him.” Michael talks evenly to me as we bail out of the vehicle and then collect our backpacks and vivid orange fleece jackets. I stuff an ultrabright flashlight into the side pocket of my cargo pants, knowing that we’re losing light quickly in this first crisp month of winter. Frost hangs delicately on the remnants of dried summer grasses rimming the parking lot, and my breath puffs visibly into the chilly air. The falling temperature adds yet another layer of concern to an already fraught situation. Although we are only three weeks from the Christmas holiday, no snow has yet graced us with its blanketing presence.
“Very true, and thanks for the pep talk,” I reply stoutly. Then I give Leda the command releasing her from the back of my SUV and pour water into her collapsible bowl. She gets a hearty drink, which washes around her nostrils prior to the search. I pull back my wavy auburn hair, which falls below my shoulders, and swiftly corral it with a ponytail holder. I finish off my preparation with a wool headband I slide on to protect my ears against the cold. Michael quickly assists me in snapping on Leda’s harness and Working Dog vest and adjusts my backpack on my shoulders. My dog leans against my leg, and I ruffle her ears absently as a grim-faced Tim exits his vehicle trailed by a wiry fifty-year-old woman enveloped in a voluminous red puffy jacket and tasseled winter hat barely containing her riot of steel-gray curls. Nita is the esteemed nurse from the nearby hospital who handles exams and victim support in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault—and the reason for her accompanying us on this search is frankly horrific.
This morning, a student at a local university was abducted while walking down a sidewalk on the outskirts of Boulder and hasn’t been seen since. Her roommate indicated that Olivia enjoys a peaceful, exceedingly early morning stroll each day before class, but she always sticks to the same route and is gone for less than an hour. When Olivia didn’t return for more than ninety minutes, her roommate took action and drove the walking route in reverse. She found Olivia’s abandoned blinged-out cell phone smashed on the sidewalk, but Olivia had vanished without a trace.
The police were called in immediately and began canvassing the area for clues. The plethora of home security cameras in the neighborhood’s surrounding streets gave the officers their first vital clue, as they were eventually able to rouse homeowners in the pertinent areas and view the footage collected by their cameras. A beat-up maroon Chevy sedan was identified as a vehicle of interest, and photos were obtained showing Olivia being dragged against her will into the car by a late-twenties, dark-haired White male in coveralls.
The footage is difficult to watch, Tim told me, as Olivia fought like a tiger against her attacker despite his hand being viciously clamped over her mouth so she couldn’t scream and the assailant outweighing her by nearly a hundred pounds. Tim and his wife, Sylvia, my best friend and a victim/witness advocate for the City and County of Denver, have two sets of twin teenage daughters in high school (Jane & Elizabeth and Marianne & Elinor), and incidents like this one are particularly alarming to all of us. One of the rookie officers at the sheriff’s department was able to spot the car in question and cleverly piece together nearly a complete license plate number after reviewing multiple cameras at a nearby gas station—which happened to catch the cross-traffic on Arapahoe Avenue. He ran the partial plate through the DMV computers with the parameters known about the car and got a solid hit. By this afternoon, officers swarmed the house of Drake Finnley, warrants in hand, and located the suspect, his car, and Olivia’s distinctive purple Stay Pawsitive sweatshirt—but Olivia was nowhere to be found.
The police department’s cadaver dog ruled out her presence at Finnley’s property, and he was taken into the station for interrogation by our friend Detective Charlie Hall. Tim is about to fill us in on the salient details of what Charlie has gleaned from the man in custody.
“Okay, everybody, listen up,” Tim says with authority, drawing us and the pair of EMTs who met us in the parking lot into a tight circle around him. The two EMTs are so bundled up against the frigid air that it’s hard to ascertain a single distinguishing feature about either of them. “Here’s the latest from the detective, as of our drive over here. Finnley is trying to play mind games, speaking in riddles, and being evasive. But he’s admitted to abducting Olivia and bragged about repeatedly sexually assaulting her in his car before dumping her off on the ‘Candy Cane Mountain’ by the ‘Popsicle Woods.’ He said she was probably still alive but wouldn’t be for long. Then he started taunting Charlie about how we’d never find Olivia in time.
“What an absolute piece of filth this guy is,” Tim continues heatedly. “Charlie Hall and the rookie officer who figured out his license plate tracked him on CCTV videos across the city and out into this general area. Once they looked at a map, they realized that Finnley could be talking about the Candillo Preserve—Candy Cane Mountain. He thinks he’s incredibly clever with his sickening puzzles, but he apparently never considered that we might have an eagle-eyed officer who could spot the smallest glimpse of his car on the surveillance cameras at businesses he drove past!
“They’re continuing to interview him in an effort to confirm that supposition about the Candillo Preserve, but we wanted to get this search started. Luckily, Finnley doesn’t know about our secret weapon, and Leda will let us know soon enough if Olivia has ever been here. It’s remote, steep, and peppered with ravines and enormous groves of pines. The inclement weather earlier this afternoon probably limited the number of visitors today, and since it’s Wednesday, this is one of the two days a week that mountain bikers aren’t allowed on the trails. Those factors help keep any scent fresh and less complicated for Leda. We figure Finnley had plenty of privacy to hide her at this spot; I just hope we get to her in time. Cell service and emergency services radios are rather spotty here according to the Open Space staff, due to the topography, so fingers crossed that Charlie can reach me if he learns anything new. Alright, Leda and Veronica go first and everybody else can follow and keep their eyes peeled.”
Great, no pressure then, Tim; just find Olivia before she dies, I think as I pull on warm gloves and snap my sixteen-foot long line to Leda’s harness, patting her shoulder sturdily while trying not to dwell on the brutality Olivia has undoubtedly endured today. Our job is to find her as rapidly as possible. After giving Leda a thorough sniff of Olivia’s sweatshirt, which Tim hands me in a plastic bag, I wait until she looks up at me calmly and tell her to Find. Leda walks briskly out of the parking lot and up the main trail, thus confirming that Olivia was here at some point. In a surprise move, Leda begins immediately cutting due west across an area of scrub foliage leading up to a gigantic grove of lodgepole pines. This variety of pine covers more than 1.5 million acres in Colorado, and this is the densest stand I’ve ever seen, perhaps as many as hundreds an acre. Their long-lived cones can wait around for years for the extreme heat of a forest fire to release their seeds, and that definitely seems to be what happened here at one point.
Leda wends nimbly through the phalanxes of closely standing trees, which block out the sky and simply add to the gathering gloom of the late afternoon. But I can see how the thin, towering pines with blobs of foliage at their tops could’ve translated to the “Popsicle Woods” for Olivia’s clearly disturbed abductor. What a pathetic joke. I look away from the treetops quickly and push myself to stay close to my chocolate-colored Chessie, not wanting the long line to get tangled or have us end up on the opposite side of too many tree trunks. Three skittish mule deer, with their trademark exaggerated ears and stiff-legged gait, erupt from alongside the trail, work agilely through the trees, and jog off into the distance as Leda disregards them altogether. Just enough light remains of this tense day for us to search without having to resort to flashlights yet, but a sense of malevolence pervades the environment, giving me a foreboding feeling. Leda found a deceased woman in a different woods not too many months ago, and neither of us has completely moved on from the dejection tied to that find. Please, I reflect, I want to find her, but I’m not sure I want to see what’s been done to her. Finding my co-workers and fiancé slain back in Ohio undoubtedly took a toll on my heart and mind, which affects me to this day.
“This makes sense,” Tim speculates behind me in a deep rumble as we pass an official sign indicating a boundary that demarcates the locale we’re entering from the other portion of the property. “This section of the preserve is Critical Wildlife Habitat, and there isn’t supposed to be public access. Drake Finnley must have used that to his advantage.”
Michael walks quietly next to Tim, periodically handing me a water bottle from my backpack as I closely watch Leda’s behavior whenever she halts and stands sniffing the breezes to confirm her course before resuming trailing Olivia’s scent. Trailing is basically a dog following a specific person’s scent pattern wherever it has wafted, as opposed to following a particular set of tracks (tracking). A human body contains approximately sixty trillion cells, and every day, about fifty million dead cells drop off that body. Leda concentrates on zeroing in on the skin rafts sloughed off by Olivia and settling on the surroundings as she passed through this forest with her captor. The skin cell detritus every person sheds as they traverse their daily lives includes minuscule bits of sweat, hormones, enzymes, and bacteria—which float on air currents before gradually settling to the ground or ending up on foliage. This is the scent that Leda is following primarily in the air and occasionally on the ground. Leda has a phenomenal nose and, if we’ve figured out Finnley’s cryptic statements correctly—and Olivia is still in the Candillo Preserve—my dog should have a very fresh scent in front of her this evening. I just pray that Olivia is still alive somewhere in the depths of this never-ending pine forest.
Can’t Run With the Big Dogs is the fourth book in author Tracy Carter’s dog-loving Veronica Kildare K-9 Mystery series, which features the savvy dog trainer and her amazing dog, Leda, and her wonderful circle of family and friends, who have their own working dogs and passion for helping others. In this latest adventure, Veronica and Leda, are called upon to track the paths of several missing, lost, and abducted persons, and readers are given a front row seat to how a couple of service-dogs-in-training learn their new crafts.
Veronica, a lifelong dog lover, has established a new life as the owner of her own dog training facility and the human half of the premier search and rescue team in the area with her Chesapeake Bay retriever, Leda. But before settling in Boulder, she had been the victim of an horrific ambush when her district attorney boss and sheriff’s deputy fiancé had been gunned down by a violent criminal who then eluded capture. While the gunman’s burned out vehicle with an unidentified body inside had eventually been discovered, there had been no positive proof that his reign of terror and threats to Veronica were over. Throughout the series, the lingering threat that Tommy Arnett was still out there, watching and waiting, has really enhanced the foreboding and suspense of the stories, and this book provides the same brooding background menace. There is a note of hope as everyone waits for the results of some new DNA testing, though.
Veronica‘s relationship with her delightful professional baseball player beau, Ricardo, has gone a long way in healing, her emotional wounds from her past, and their time together is warm and comfortable. Veronica is supported by her loving and talented father, Bob, who tests and rights reviews for outdoor outdoors equipment and has a clear genius for manipulating and processing out information via the Internet, besides being a dab hand in the kitchen, and by Michael, the young product of the state foster system, now living on site while attending college and learning to become a K-9 handler and dog trainer himself. Veronica‘s best friend Sylvia, and her husband, Boulder PD Sergeant Tim Donovan and their brood of two sets of twin, teenage daughters, round out her close knit circle of friends. As a group, they are focused on service and making an impact making a positive impact on their environment and community. While facing some difficult situations, they always strive for excellence and maintain a positive attitude, which becomes very important when partnered with a working dog on assignment.
Yet, the highlights of the book are those featuring Veronica‘s work with the dogs. Besides Leda’s and her exciting rescue operations in the surrounding Colorado wilderness areas, this book features her additional adventures with two fledgling service dogs. Sky, an 18-month-old Australian cattle dog mix and shelter rescue, is undergoing training to sniff out and alert nursing home staff to the presence of C. diff, an insidious bacteria that can be deadly to the elderly. Decla, a two-year-old, Irish Red and White Setter, who lost her human family in a car accident, is finding a new home and purpose as a drug detection dog at the local horse, racing track. Decla’s storyline intersects with the main plot of strange goings-on at the track, where already two grooms with important information have gone missing.
Finally, the author has chosen an exceptionally versatile setting in placing the action in the Boulder/Denver, Colorado, area. The descriptions of the locations are vivid and so critical to the action that readers can almost feel the bitter cold and damp, smell the crisp, fir-scented air, and feel the loose, rocky trails beneath their feet as Veronica and Leda trail the scent of someone who is having the worst day of their life.
With its engaging cast of characters, vibrant settings, and compelling plot, I recommend CAN’T RUN WITH THE BIG DOGS to readers of mysteries, thrillers, and suspense.