Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds (5 page)

Avery stared at it for a long moment before a tear trickled down his cheek.

“Where did you get this?”

“Can you identify her?”

Avery ran his fingertips over the image.

“That’s the day she left. I remember exactly what she was wearing. I see her dressed like that every time I close my eyes and I think about how different everything would have been if I’d just told her not to go. Never let go. She’d have stayed if I asked her to. You know that? Three words and she’d still be here with me…Please don’t go.”

“Her name, son.”

“Michelle Louise Jenkins.” He smiled to himself when he said her name. The expression abruptly vanished when the implications hit him. He looked Dayton dead in the eyes. “You found my camera.”

“Your camera?”

“Yeah. Michelle thought that if I couldn’t be with her in the flesh, then I could at least be there in spirit. You found it out here?”

“Why do you think we called you?”

“How did you know to call me at all?”

Dayton sighed.

“We have a long walk ahead of us and there’ll be plenty of time for your questions, but for now I need you to answer mine, okay?”

“Of course.”

The sheriff handed the second screen-capture to Avery. It was a shot facing uphill toward the road from the vantage point of the wrecked car. The blowing snow nearly obscured the sliding tracks and the distant forest.

“Do you recognize this place?”

Avery stared at the picture for a full minute before speaking.

“No. Did you find Dylan’s car? Is this where they slid—?”

“How about this place?”

Dayton held out a picture of the old wooden ranch house. It was the best image they’d been able to produce as the blizzard blurred the structure.

“No. What is this—?”

“One more.”

He offered a picture of the ravine where the ranger found the video camera. Seaver had taken it with his cell phone after recognizing that the camera had been hidden, not lost.

Avery shook his head. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath.

“Is this where you found…where you found her body?”

“No, son. This is where we found your camera, which, as of now, it’s the only lead we’ve got.”

“What are those other pictures?”

“More of the same,” Dayton said. He folded the stack in half and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a lie, but it was too soon to spring them on Avery. He needed to watch this guy a while longer to see how he approached the search. The way Dayton saw it, there were two different ways Avery could act: like a man searching for something he hoped he might find or like a man who already knew exactly what he would find. The pictures of the corpse suspended by its ankles, the indistinct silhouette through the trees, and the expression on the girl’s face—Michelle’s face—at the very end would take that away from him because they left little doubt as to her ultimate fate. “These are the only possible landmarks we could isolate from the recording. We were hoping you might be able to help us identify them. That’s all.”

“So you think that since you don’t recognize these places they might have been filmed someplace else and someone might have just…dumped the camera here?”

“We have to consider that scenario.”

Avery nodded. His expression showed he understood what that scenario implied.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Avery said, but Dayton had already turned to face Seaver and Crowell, who waited at the trailhead, watching the dark clouds roll in over the peaks to the north. “How did you know to call me?”

“We’re burning daylight,” Dayton said.

He nodded to Crowell, who opened the plastic bag containing the video camera and allowed Zeke to sniff it. After how long it had been exposed to the elements, it was little more than a formality. Any trace of Michelle’s scent had likely faded years ago. Crowell handed the bag back to Thom, who zipped it up inside his backpack and looked at the sheriff expectantly.

Avery spoke to his back, so Dayton pretended not to hear.

“How did you know to contact
me
?”

* * *

Avery walked as though in a trance. In his mind, he relived the memories of his time with Michelle and all of the horrible visions of the misfortunes that might have befallen her that had haunted him through the years. The rational part of him knew she was dead, but there was a small part of him that understood that once he allowed himself to accept it, he would be, too. It was that sliver of hope that kept him going, that gave him the strength to put one foot in front of the other and follow the sheriff up the steep and increasingly treacherous trail, all the while knowing that, like the original investigating officers, he wasn’t convinced Avery hadn’t played a role in Michelle’s disappearance.

He was used to it, though. The detectives had made no secret of their dislike for him and what they thought of his alibi. While he’d never accepted their open hostility toward him, he’d known that his only option was to tolerate it if he ever hoped to see Michelle again. They were only playing the odds, after all. Avery wasn’t so blind to the situation that he couldn’t see how he looked on paper. They hadn’t found a single lead. Not one. And the percentages showed that the significant other was responsible more often than not. In the absence of evidence, they had no one to look at except for him, despite the fact that he’d been at work, as witnessed by eight other employees and countless patrons, all of whom were interviewed multiple times by the investigating officers.

He’d never been this close, though, so he could deal with the sideways glances, the overt suspicion, and the way the sheriff kept his hand in his jacket pocket, right by his holster, if this was his chance to finally learn what happened to Michelle.

Time lost all meaning in the forest and his sense of direction was replaced by a progressive reliance upon the game trail that guided them ever higher. He had no idea how long they’d been walking when they ascended above the treetops and to the base of a towering granite escarpment. Until that moment, Avery had genuinely believed that he’d searched nearly every square inch of the Rocky Mountains. From the top of the butte, he stared down upon thousands of acres of wilderness he’d never seen before, let alone explored, and realized just how wrong he’d been.

“Down there,” the ranger said, and pointed straight down over the edge.

Avery leaned over the precipice and saw a steep hillside covered with snow. The wind kicked up with a howl. He stepped back from the edge and wrapped his arms around his chest. The clouds to the north had grown even darker and rose higher into the sky even as they expanded outward.

“What’s down there?” Dayton asked.

“The ram. It was right there.”

The ranger looked from one of them to the next as though seeking confirmation, and then headed for the bottom without another word. The dog bounded past him and appeared far below before his trainer even commenced her descent. The sheriff and the skinny guy picked their way down much more slowly. Avery glanced down at the bare earth one last time before hurrying to catch up with them.

“I’m telling you. It was right here.” The ranger took off his backpack and rummaged around inside until he found a digital camera. He raised it in triumph, then scrolled through the images on the tiny screen. “See? Look.”

The picture was of a dead bighorn sheep, lying on ground that looked a whole lot like that beneath their feet.

“How much does an animal like that weigh?” Dayton said.

“I know what you’re thinking, but I swear to God, it was right here this morning.”

“What’re we talking? Three hundred? Three-fifty?”

“Somewhere in there.”

The sheriff turned and inspected the snow leading downhill. There were obvious tracks and pinkish blotches of discoloration, although it was hard to tell what had left them or how long ago.

“A lot of these hills tend to look alike…”

“You think I don’t know where I was? This is the spot. I’ll prove it.”

The ranger dropped to his knees and brushed aside a crust of windswept ice. The flattened grasses were brittle and made a crackling sound when he parted them.

“What do you figure is capable of hauling off a three hundred-pound animal without leaving tracks all over the place?”

The dog ran circles around the ranger, stopping every few feet to sniff at the ground or the air before racing around again. It darted left, then right, then back left again, its nose to the ground.

“See? There!”

The ranger leaned back and gestured at rocks and soil blackened by blood.

The dog sniffed the ground and froze, its tail straight and still. It abruptly looked downhill toward the trees. It lowered its head and the fur rose along its haunches. It bared its teeth and growled from deep inside its chest.

“What do you smell, boy?” its handler said. “That’s his ‘alert’ posture. It’s his cue that he has a scent.”

“I’m sure he does. There’s blood all over—”

“No. Not just any scent. An unfamiliar scent. I trained him in this forest. He knows the scent of those bighorns. We have to teach our dogs to find any unfamiliar scent because so many times we’re dispatched without anything to go on. No clothes or personal effects whatsoever. So he has to be able to isolate anything out of the ordinary and alert me to it.”

“So what did he find?”

“We’ll know soon enough, but not if we don’t get moving. People shed their dead skin at a rate of forty thousand cells per minute. These dead cells form what we call a ‘skin raft,’ which floats on the air before settling to the ground, but they don’t last long, even under ideal conditions, let alone in this wind. What he’s telling us is that someone was here recently, presumably whoever took your carcass. I trained him to give an ‘alert bark’ for human scents, too, but apparently he—”

The dog shot off down the hill, charging through the snow. Its handler took off after it, leaving the four of them to watch the orange-clad shapes slipping and sliding down the hill.

The ranger stood and brushed the dirt and congealed blood from his hands onto his pants.

“Damn poachers,” he said, and started down through the snow after them.

Avery watched the dog bound into the dark forest and suppressed a shiver. The body of the woman he loved was potentially somewhere down there and every step brought him closer to the moment when hope was stolen from him. When it was gone, what would be left of him?

The snow began to fall as the leading edge of the storm eclipsed the sun, which was already well into its descent.

Avery tugged up his collar, ducked his head against the storm, and followed the trail of the dead animal’s blood through the accumulation.

* * *

Dayton had hoped to be back in his truck before sundown, or at least shortly thereafter, but he realized that was a pipedream. The best he could hope for now was to find where the ranger had discovered the video camera with enough light left to cordon off the scene before the snow started falling in earnest. He figured the girl’s remains—if they were out here—couldn’t be far from where she’d hidden the camera, which was the final act of a desperate woman who knew her end was at hand. And while Zeke was no cadaver dog, he’d been trained to sniff out skiers buried under avalanches; surely a body in a shallow grave would at least catch his attention.

He’d been cautious with what he shared with Crowell. She was his deputy—and an excellent one at that—but more and more since she’d started training that dog he’d felt her allegiances shifting toward her other career and he had no doubt that he’d lose her soon enough. She’d already trained as an EMT and had privately talked to him about taking an extended leave of absence to go to paramedic school at some point, which meant her heart just wasn’t in law enforcement anymore. He understood how these things worked; there were days when the last thing he wanted was to crawl out of his warm bed and pin on that star. The difference was whatever misgivings he had were his own. Once you opened your mouth and started sharing them, you already had one foot out the door and were simply looking for someone to give you a shove.

She was better off thinking there was still hope of finding the girl alive, without which it was really no longer a search and rescue issue and he’d have to wait days to get the cadaver dogs out here from Grand Junction and by then the entire area would be under several feet of snow. Besides, maybe there still was a chance that the girl and her friends were still alive. And maybe if he told himself as much enough times he’d eventually believe it.

Thom was the only one who shared the full extent of Dayton’s knowledge, and only because the sheriff’s technological skills were in dire need of an upgrade. The station had been renovated and wrenched into the twenty-first century in the wake of the ordeal with the hunter in the diner. You didn’t just walk out of the storm with a severed head under your jacket without making the national news, and you certainly didn’t shoot that man dead without finding yourself under the microscope. The news had portrayed him as the bumbling Barney Fife-type and the town as a kind of Mayberry-in-the-mountains. The state’s first response was to issue him a blank check to modernize the department, which he promptly handed right back and told them to do whatever they needed to do, largely because he didn’t have the slightest clue where to start. And, privately, he was dealing with his own demons.