Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds (6 page)

It took considerable time to recover from shooting William Coburn, and while he was going stir crazy inside his own head, the last place he wanted to be was training in the station with everyone else. He might have only been in his late forties, but he was every bit the relic his predecessors had been. Up here in the mountains you were essentially cut off from the rest of the world. The job of being sheriff wasn’t as much about the act of policing as it was about maintaining relationships, both his own and those between everyone else. Crime didn’t happen up here without a half-dozen people knowing who did it. That’s what turned his entire world upside down about that night in the diner. Things of that nature weren’t supposed to happen here. And while the violence of the crime had been shocking, it was what he’d seen in the aftermath that disturbed him even worse.

The victim’s head…there’d been obvious teeth marks in the flesh. He didn’t need some forensic odontologist to tell him that. He’d seen the markings with his own eyes. On the neck. On the cheeks. Something had taken bites from that man and he didn’t buy the logic the dentist they’d brought in from Denver had said about the elasticity of the superficial tissues and the process of repeated freezing and thawing of the tissue distorting the shape and size of the dentition. There was no way in hell they could have been made by the man he shot, but it was far easier to believe that version of the story than the one in which he murdered an innocent man because he’d been scared. Or maybe he just chose to believe it.

Whatever the reason, this had the potential to be another high-profile case and he needed everything to be properly documented. He certainly lacked the skills to do so. Besides, Thom had been eager to do it and considering he wasn’t on the payroll, it would spare the county the overtime for one of his deputies and force him to recall another to man the station while they were out here in this godforsaken forest for Lord only knew how long. Whether Thom was here out of boredom or some twisted fascination would be easier to justify to the county commissioner—or, God forbid, the state and feds—than why he essentially abandoned his county to search for a missing group of kids whose bodies would surely keep until the spring thaw, if the scavengers had left anything behind.

The image of the teeth marks on the dead man’s cheek rose to the forefront of his mind. He shook his head to clear his thoughts as he ducked under the lower canopy of the lodgepole pines. It had to be a good fifteen degrees colder in the perpetual shade, although he was at least spared from the gusting wind, which bowed the upper reaches with enough force to elicit cracking sounds from the trunks. Snow had already begun to filter through the branches and collect on the ground.

Crowell stood out like a beacon in her orange jacket, while that dog of hers only occasionally flashed his colors through the dense underbrush. The ranger followed right behind her clear up to the edge of the steep gully. They stood motionless at the edge while Dayton crunched toward them on the carpet of dead pine needles. He was about to step past them when he saw what held them enrapt.

Zeke was maybe fifteen feet down the cut on top of a rock formation from which a single crooked pine grew. His entire back bristled and he pointed toward the opposite slope with one front leg.

Dayton looked in that direction and saw tatters of a bloody pelt hanging from the branches and decorating the far bank, from which a trail of blood led down to a heap of flesh and bones.

A flash of light from his right caused Dayton to flinch. He whirled to see Thom taking pictures of the carnage with a fancy digital camera.

“That wasn’t there earlier,” Seaver said.

Dayton looked back at Avery, but couldn’t decipher the expression on his face. His eyes were concealed by the shadows and he’d gone deathly pale. As little as he wanted to, Dayton turned his attention on the task at hand and scrambled down to the bottom of the ravine, where the snow accumulated on the remains. Zeke didn’t so much as look in his direction when he passed.

The first thing he noticed was that the bones definitely weren’t human. It wasn’t until he was much closer that he recognized the hooves and the fringes of fur surrounding their juncture with the broken bones of the animal’s lower legs. There were still knots of tendons at the joints and just enough white fur on the haunches to confirm what he already knew. This was what was left of Seaver’s ram. Or at least part of it. It appeared as though the back half had been torn off.

There was no sign of the front half or the viscera.

* * *

Seaver couldn’t take his eyes off the remains. This wasn’t the work of poachers. This kind of damage could only have been inflicted by an animal, likely several of them for the physical devastation to be this complete. The problem was there were no larger species of predator in this area that hunted as packs. He’d done the majority of the surveys himself and triple-checked what little he’d delegated to other rangers and graduate students.

There were brown bears to the northwest and black bears to the northeast. While the former was large enough and possessed the requisite ferocity, the population had evolved a dependence upon man and lived on the fringes of civilization. The black bears were considerably smaller and more timid. While they could probably bring down a wounded animal, they would have had no interest whatsoever in a dead one. The same logic applied to the mountain lions that roamed into the national forest from the south during the summer months, but he hadn’t seen so much as a single paw print since the middle of July, which, now that he truly thought about it, was an anomaly in their traditional behavior patterns. And none of those species hunted in packs. So what did that leave? Wolves? The nearest established population was hundreds of miles to the north in Yellowstone.

He watched the ground as he crept down the hill. He’d spent enough time in these mountains that he could identify the tracks of nearly every species of mammal and bird. In fact, cataloguing prints had been one of his main projects during the countless hours spent scouting this region. Other than the sheriff’s tracks, however, there wasn’t a single identifiable print. The detritus was undisturbed clear down to the bottom, where he found the impressions of his own tread from that morning nearly concealed by the snow. The ram’s trail was less apparent than it had been earlier and would only last so much longer, but still it stood out to him as though lined with running lights.

The sheriff nudged the carcass with the toe of his boot and looked back at him.

“What do you think? Bears?”

Seaver shrugged. If there were a better answer, he certainly didn’t know it.

He crouched over the remains and waved away a handful of flies. His breath formed a cloud that drifted back over his shoulder as he brushed off the snow and evaluated the bones. The tibia and fibula were both broken bilaterally, but remained articulated. The blood had congealed to a crust on the bones, giving them an almost rusted appearance. The femora and pelvis were similarly discolored. There were distinct gouges in the cortex where either claws or teeth had met with the bone.

Seaver used a handful of snow to scrub off the dried blood and studied the shape and depth of the markings. They could have been inflicted by any sharp object for all he could tell. There were no distinct teeth impressions or claw patterns and the grooves were too shallow to estimate the kind of force it would have required to deliver them through an unknown quantity of muscle and connective tissue.

He was just about to stand again when he looked at the surrounding ground. There wasn’t a single track. The bones had left a sloppy trail coming down the hillside that disappeared beneath the snow before his very eyes. He stood and followed it up toward the bank. The carcass was heavy and had churned up the earth where it impacted. He imagined it cartwheeling down the slope, legs akimbo, and recognized the momentum it would have needed to fall in such a manner.

Zeke was already waiting for him when he climbed up onto the bank. The shepherd had his back to him and his head lowered toward the forest, the fur along his neck bristled into a Mohawk.

Seaver inspected the ground at his feet. There was only a dusting of snow on the pine needles, which were matted with blood, not spattered, as though it had been applied by a stamp. In fact, the way the detritus was indented, that’s exactly what it looked like had happened. There was one large, misshapen divot without a single print around it. It was almost as though the carcass had simply fallen from the sky.

Seaver furrowed his brow and glanced at the tufts of fur and desiccated skin decorating the branches around him. He plucked off a swatch of coarse golden-brown fur, turned it over and over between his fingers, and then looked slowly up into the canopy.

There was more fur up there, and smudges of blood on the bare wood where the bark had broken off. A glance at his feet confirmed that the bark chips predated the snow, but not by very much, judging by the sap on the undersides, which had yet to completely harden.

“It had to have been bears,” Crowell said. “Can you think of another animal that can climb all the way up there, let alone with a carcass that large?”

Seaver glanced over at her. He could tell by her expression that she didn’t entirely believe what she was saying. If anyone knew these woods and the animals that inhabited it as well as him, it was Crowell.

“Have you seen any claw marks or signs of rubbing on any other trees? Or how about spoor? You and I both know that bears mark the hell out of their territory.”

“It doesn’t matter what did it,” Dayton said. “I’m sorry you lost a sheep, ranger, but right now our main concern’s what might have happened to five people. Surely you can appreciate how that takes priority.”

Seaver nodded. The sheriff was right and he knew it. The dead ram was his problem and there was nothing he could do about it now. On the positive side, the sheriff had officially established that this had nothing to do with him, so no one would have any reason to criticize him for heading back to his truck the moment he showed them where he found the video camera. He had his work cut out for him if he was going to figure out which species of animal had scavenged the ram. While he still leaned toward the idea that it had been poachers who were ultimately responsible for its death, the fact that there was an animal or some unknown number of animals capable of causing such damage to its remains meant he needed to implement measures to protect the remainder of his diminishing herd. He had access to an enormous computer database that catalogued not only every species native to a given region, but everything from its tracks in various substrates to its bite and claw marks in everything from fruit to flesh.

He thought about the macerated wound where he assumed the bullet had struck the ram. Had he interrupted whatever animal was scavenging the remains? Had it been mere feet away in the forest while he examined the carcass and then searched this very hollow?

The mere thought elicited a shiver.

He took pictures from every conceivable angle, including the best close-ups he could get of the branches where the animal had crouched and dislodged the bark. Even when he zoomed in as far as he could go, he couldn’t tell if there were any claw marks, only that it was definitely blood on the broad branch.

The wind screamed through the valley, tossing the upper canopy.

Zeke growled.

Seaver turned to see the dog staring deeper into the forest with his teeth bared.

“The video camera?” Dayton said.

“Yeah.” Seaver put his camera into his backpack as he walked and slung it over his shoulders. “That’s one of the arrows I told you about over there.”

The man who’d arrived in the old Bronco scurried up the hill to the trunk and traced the design with his fingertips. It had been carved long enough ago that the pulp had faded to gray and the sap had become brittle.

Seaver didn’t know who the man was, but if his expression was any indication, he had a pretty good idea. All the more reason to just get this over with and get back to solving his own problems. He pitied the poor guy, but he wasn’t looking to carry any of his baggage for him.

He slid sideways down the cut where the snow was already several inches deep and bounded out into an open stretch where he was buffeted by flakes the size of moths. The wind felt like it propelled slivers of ice, which pierced him clear to the bone. Another dozen strides and he was again surrounded by forest so dense the storm barely reached the ground.

“Right over there,” he said, and pointed to the hole inside the network of roots where he’d found the camera.

The man from the Bronco pushed past him and fell to his knees on the bare earth. He craned his neck to better see into the shadows, then attacked the bank with his bare hands.

“You need to back off,” Dayton said. “This is a potential crime scene.”

“How much evidence do you think could have possibly survived seven years out here?”

“That’s not the point.”

The man stopped digging and raised his hands in mock surrender.

“Was there anything else in there?” Dayton said.

“I didn’t see anything, and I didn’t think to keep looking,” Seaver said. “There was just enough charge left on the battery for me to see what I showed you. After seeing that, I figured I was way out of my depth.”

The man turned to face him.

“What did you see?”

Seaver glanced over at Dayton, who quickly shook his head.