William McCaskil’s camp looked uninhabited she noted as she lugged her tent and gear down toward the food preparation area and Ponce’s makeshift paddock, a tying rail between the food area and the outhouse. A powerful temptation to search his tent coursed through her. The previous night she’d struck out with the slippery fellow. Or missed the basket or fumbled the ball—it was hard to know just what game McCaskil was playing. Had she been a private citizen, she might have given in to the urge. As a federal law enforcement officer she could not. Even in a tent in the wilderness, an American citizen had a reasonable expectation of privacy. If she found anything during an unauthorized search the evidence would be tainted and she would have done the investigation more harm than good.
After a night’s sleep and a feed, Ponce was of a cheerier disposition than the day before and Anna’s weight was somewhat less than he was accustomed to carrying. In easy companionship they started west, Ponce looking for anything tasty he might snag in passing and Anna looking for nothing in particular. Since there were no clues in the form of tracks or paper trails, and her meager list of suspects had already been interviewed within an inch of their tawdry little lives, she decided to return to the scene of the crime.
Third time’s the charm,
she told herself, wondering who’d coined the idiotic aphorism. The true charm was being on horseback under a fathomless sky with nobody to answer to for the entirety of a splendid day.
Riding on flat improved trails was a luxury and a joy. But as she dismounted and tied Ponce to the log where Joan and the excitable ranger had waited while she and Ruick bushwhacked to the body, Anna was reminded that it had been a long time since she’d been in the saddle. What little padding she once had on her posterior had since lost its stuffing. Her sit-bones complained of miles of insult.
A strip of orange surveyor’s tape indicated where the body had been taken from the brush. Anna entered the scrub and began the steep alder-choked journey down the side of the ravine. Alone, rested, the sun shining, she was able to give the now-battered path her undivided attention. She discovered nothing but a discarded Good & Plenty box. It had not been there prior to the murder. The cardboard paper had not been rained on. Anna knew she hadn’t dropped it and she was sure Harry hadn’t. No ranger had. Park rangers were subject to the ailments of the general populace: prejudice, stupidity, small-mindedness, malice; but she had never known a single one she suspected of littering. In the days since the body had been recovered the crime scene had been visited by an ill-mannered civilian.
With the exception of arsonists, who liked to see the fruits of their labors, most criminals did not return to the scene of the crime. Could be a curious visitor who had learned of the location by some means. Could be a hiker coincidentally chose that spot to take a leak and clean his pockets. Still, Anna bagged the candy box, marked the day, time and place she’d found it, and tucked it away. One never knew.
The Good & Plenty was the sum total of excitement. In the irregular opening in the alders where Gary had found Mrs. Van Slyke, Anna sifted through leaf litter, crawled into the neighboring tangle of bushes, examined weedy trunks and found nothing.
At length, enjoying a childish morbidity, she lay down in the place where Carolyn had been dumped and, folding her hands behind her head, contemplated being among the quick, and the sure knowledge that one day she would join the dead. Molly said thoughts of mortality came with one’s fiftieth birthday. Anna still had a few years to go. But then she’d always been precocious.
Free from what she expected to see, Anna finally saw what was actually there.
In law enforcement classes, teachers were always admonishing students not to forget to look up. In real life, officers, rangers, forgot. Unless it was obvious, evidence in treetops went largely unnoticed. Both times that Anna’d crawled into this ravine, she’d seen little above eye-level.
High in the scrub, hard to assess from a supine position but probably six or seven feet up, a handful of the dusty-looking leaves were striated. Had the marked leaves not been so far from the ground Anna would have thought they’d been brushed with mud, painted by a passing boot after the rains and, so, after the body recovery. High as they were, above where tracks could be found, they held less interest.
Plants, like other life forms, were subject to disease and death, molds and rusts and parasites. Anna wasn’t well enough versed in the pathologies of Montana’s flora to speculate what this augured and her mind drifted. Drifted far enough to notice no other leaves, no other bushes were affected.
The world of the shrubbery pressed around her, began to feel claustrophobic. Sticks poked in her side. Leaves stuck in her hair. Skinny bark-clad fingers scratched at her arms. Light was deceitful, playing tricks with leaf shadows stirred by a wind that scarcely ever penetrated down to ground level. Heat, held close and dusty, itched on her skin.
Time to abandon her macabre resting spot. She rose and pushed into the branches to pluck one of the marred specimens. The rust-colored markings were smeared from the rain, but protected by the leaves above, enough remained for study. Dried blood—in her chosen profession Anna had had the opportunity to see plenty of the stuff—was slathered on various surfaces. A spit test reconstituted the brown to red. She took a small paper bag from her pack and collected several of the leaves. Blood in trees was not as rare as it might seem. Predators roamed the skies. These twiggy boughs were insufficient to support a dining hawk or eagle but occasionally they dropped wounded prey. If this was the case the tiny critter’s corpse had been whisked away by a lucky groundling.
Her gory find stowed in an inside pocket, Anna stood in the alder and waited. Flies found her. Deerflies with jaws like airborne Chihuahuas flew kamikaze missions at the backs of her knees. Absently, she slapped them into the next world.
At length the information she waited for came into view: another patch of the rusty leaves a couple yards deeper in the brush. Shifting her attention down she moved toward it carefully, seeking any further sign underfoot or lower on the bushes. Runoff from the rain had erased any trail that might have been left and the sturdy alders retained no sign of anyone’s passing.
Having reached the second cluster of streaked foliage she repeated the process. It took a sweaty, fly-bitten two hours to travel the rest of the trail but before noon she reached its end. Had she been a crow she could have flown from the place Carolyn’s body was dumped to the pine tree where the blood trail ended in a matter of seconds. The two places were no more than seventy feet apart.
A pine, a lodgepole, rose gracefully out of the thicket. Its shade and the acidity of the fallen needles had opened a small needle-lined space beneath the boughs into which Anna moved gratefully. Her assumption that this was the blood trail’s terminus was based not on what she found but on what she’d ceased to find. Three quarters of an hour’s careful search around the tree led her to no new manifestations of rust-streaked leaves. Since the trail had been laid overhead, Anna crouched on her heels and studied the interlocking green of the pine above her.
This time the search was short. Twelve or fifteen feet up, partially secured to a branch with string of some sort was a navy-blue stuff bag vomiting pieces of clear—or once clear—plastic. All had been ripped to ribbons, by talons probably, though a bobcat or cougar or even a very talented fox was a possibility. Other than that, Anna could think of no pawed and clawed carnivores who frequented the avian stomping grounds.
The bark ringing the tree’s trunk was unscarred. Whoever had put the package there had not done so by climbing. Having shed her day pack, Anna shinnied up for a closer look. Straddling a comfortable branch she tried to put together the pieces.
It didn’t take long. With understanding came fear’s cold touch, sickening in the warmth of noon. The torn plastic was blood-smeared as the leaves had been and comprised several different sources, two sandwich bags cut open, and part of what would undoubtedly turn out to be the tail end of a cheap poncho, the kind one can buy at the check-out counter in gas stations and carry in purse or trunk for soggy emergencies. The navy cloth was from a simple stuff sack, the sort hikers used to stow extraneous things. This one was eight or ten inches wide and twice that long. Bag and baggies had been drawn into the tree on a rope pull. A line of torn threads fuzzed the bark where the makeshift rope had been thrown over the limb and dragged. The line was secured with a slipknot. The dangling remainder had been cut, the frayed end tossed up into the lower branches. The rope was as cobbled together as the packaging: strips of torn fabric, white with narrow blue striping, tied end to end.
Carolyn Van Slyke’s face had been cut off. The bloody slabs of meat had been carried high like a trophy or a team pennant over the butcher’s head, leaving traces of blood on the cloaking leaves as he passed through. Away from the body, the murderer had packaged up the steaks in what he had at hand—sandwich bags and a raincoat—stuffed them in a sack that had been used maybe to carry his lunch, and cached this new treat up high where bears and other animals couldn’t make away with it.
He’d been saving Carolyn Van Slyke’s face for later.
15
Anna seriously wanted
to get the hell out of there. Each and every idyllic day in this most beautiful of places had shown an underside that suggested God’s Country was under siege from His traditional nemesis. To Anna’s mind the most hellish of weapons had been unloosed: fear. Fear was the root of all evil. The others could be tracked to it. Greed was fear of want in pathological form. Lies, fear of being discovered for who one was, punished for what one had done.
The unnatural actions of the bear, Rory’s bizarre disappearance, needless murder, now this abomination; fear poured into Anna’s mind. In the midst of the very things that brought her comfort, she was being drowned in it. For a moment she clung to the branch fighting a desperate need to run from the wilderness, from sunlight, from solitude and hide in a closed, dark room full of familiar faces.
“Goddamn it,” she muttered. Over her forty-odd years the fates had robbed her of her husband and taken a good shot at her only sister. She would not be robbed of that which made all else endurable, the peace and perfection of the natural world.
Anger helped but did not heal. Her rage was manufactured from two parts self-pity and one part need. It lacked the self-propelling white-hot burn of righteously earned ire. She kept it alive long enough to scorch away at least the core of her panic. She could trust herself to function, not to topple from the tree or dash madly down the trails shrieking.
When her breathing evened out, she knew she could stay and do her work, but peace of mind, joy, freedom, those gifts of the wild country had been stolen away. “Fuck,” she whispered, then she prayed a jolly little prayer: “Dear Lord, please let me find a gun in my pack when I climb down. Love, Anna.”
Backup was hours away, but she radioed Ruick to tell him of her find. Mostly, she admitted to herself, to report her location. Should she go missing, Ponce would alert them to where she’d gone off trail but who would think to seek as far as the bush-locked pine?
Harry was in a meeting. Maryanne wrote down the message and Anna was left with no choice but to break contact.
Flinching at every sound, freezing at every change in the shadow pattern, she made several trips up and down the desecrated pine taking photographs of and collecting the shredded bags. The meat they’d held was long gone. Whatever bird or beast had worried it out of its packaging had carried it away and undoubtedly eaten it.
Too bad,
Anna thought. Unless the killer was of the Hannibal Lecter School of Fine Cuisine, he may have removed the flesh not to eat it but to take away a clue to his identity.
But why string the stuff up if he’d merely been covering his tracks? Surely one would want the telltale flesh eaten or buried or at least exposed so that it might decay more quickly. If something is cached it’s because someone means to return for it.
No birds stirred the leaves, no shadows moved with the wind, still Anna stopped breathing, listened, cursed the gods for ignoring her prayer for firearms. Moving as quickly as she could, she labeled each item as she packed it in a paper evidence bag to better preserve the blood samples. The navy stuff sack was old, several years at least, made by REI and common as cotton underpants. The same went for the baggies and the torn scrap of poncho: generic, easily obtained, ubiquitous in the backcountry. The strips that had been tied together to form the line used to swing the cache into the branches were what appeared to be shirting. The cloth was equally unremarkable, probably J. C. Penney or Sears, cotton-polyester sold in bulk. However, if the shirt they had been torn from had once covered the back of the killer, they could prove important.
Regardless of value or lack thereof Anna spent no time studying the evidence. With ingrained care she packaged and stowed. Mind, ears and eyes were occupied patrolling the perimeter around the tree for cannibals, bears, axe murderers and other manifestations of impending violence.
At last the job was completed, everything tucked in her pack. With the possibility of flight nearer, Anna found her unease growing. “Get a grip,” she ordered herself unsympathetically. Before she could make her escape, she needed to canvass the clearing one more time in case she had missed anything.
Out from the tree at a north-northwesterly heading, five-feet-four-and-a-half-inches as measured by the carpenter’s tape she carried for just such a purpose, she found a pile of what could only be bear scat. Whether grizzly or black, she couldn’t tell. This time of year, both had about the same diet. The sheer size of the sample would suggest a male grizzly but black bears grew nearly as large at the upper end of their scale. For unscientific reasons, Anna felt certain it was not only grizzly scat but that of her own personal grizzly.