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.
Given its half-melted then dried consistency, the scat had been left before the rain but not too long before. If it had been deposited much before the storm, it would have dried more completely. The downpour would have reduced it to its component parts, not merely smoothed it over.
An educated guess put the age of this sample at five or six days, seven at the outside. Around the time of Mrs. Van Slyke's death not twenty yards away, around the time the flesh cut from her face had been cached in the tree.
The killer had been here. Thebear-or a bear-had been here. It was conceivable the smell of the meat in the plastic bags overhead had attracted a passing animal. Their noses were exceptionally keen. But Anna could find no indication this bear made any effort to retrieve his prize: no claw marks on the trunk or lower branches, no disturbed leaf litter or soil around the tree as might be expected from a frustrated three-hundred-pound scavenger.
It appeared as if the bear had simply come to this minuscule clearing, quietly relieved himself and went on. No law against that. Anna thought of the old joke "Where does a bear shit in the woods?" and smiled in spite of herself.
Too much coincidence, though. Bears, grizzly and otherwise, were high-profile inhabitants of Glacier National Park, but given the park's forty-one hundred square kilometers, there weren't all that many of them. According to Resource Management statistics, less than three hundred. One of the things the DNA study would do was give a more accurate count. Wishing she'd thought to pack one of Joan's handy scat sample bottles, Anna made do with another evidence bag-plastic this time-and procured a spoonful for the bear researcher. Anna noted a few of the standard bear leavings: berry seeds, twigs, grasses, most in mint condition. The bulk of this scat sample was made up of a dull brown-gray grainy matter that looked to be closer to digested dirt than plant matter. Another mystery for Joan. As long as there weren't buttons or buckles or human fingerbones, Anna couldn't get too excited.
She was glad to leave the pine clearing, scared to reenter the thick of the brush. It was an act of will to move up the side of the mountain through the obscuring undergrowth at a sensible pace. The urge to claw her way frantically out of the shrubbery didn't abate till she was not only in the open sunny world of West Flattop Trail but upon Ponce's broad back. Cowboys were braver on horseback. It was a little known codicil to the code of the west.
For no reason more logical than a bad case of the willies, Anna put a couple of miles between her and the flesh-eating pine tree. At a bend in the trail, a hillside of broken stones created a thousand unique, earth-bearing planters displaying such a breathtaking show of yellows, blues and reds that Anna wondered how human gardeners could bear to enter the competition. She tethered Ponce to a downed tree deep in tasty grasses and emptied her pack: water, lunch, map, evidence packets. Lunch first, she decided. Scrambling up and down the tree had given her the insistent appetite of an active child.
A peanut butter and honey sandwich under her belt, she was better able to concentrate on her find. Donning a new pair of latex gloves, she examined the torn bags, all that was left of the macabre food cache. The blood, she had little doubt, would turn out to be that of Carolyn Van Slyke. As she'd discerned in the tree, other than these sinister smears, the plastic baggies had nothing to tell her. With its sophisticated equipment, the lab might do better.
The blue sack was slightly more forthcoming. Gray-green dust and a pale yellow residue of a delicate almost glittering nature, like pollen but more reflective, streaked the fabric. Whatever the substance was, it had been scuffed onto the sack recently. Perhaps the lab could use it to tell where in the park the bag had been before it was shanghaied into service as a ditty bag for the deceased. In a civilized environment, that information might lead to the killer. Here, time was a deciding factor. The days it would take to get the bag down to West Glacier, then to the lab and back, would be too long. The killer would no longer be "living" in the same place.
Having returned the evidence to storage and divested herself of the surgical gloves, she unwrapped her second sandwich. Her fingers smelled of the talc used in the gloves and tainted her enjoyment of the peanut butter. Ignoring that and the busy ticklings of flies, she leaned against the log where Ponce was tied and listened to the reassuring tearing sounds as he went on with his picnic.
The killer was still in the park. Either that or Anna's intuition had finally slipped over into paranoia. That was a distinct possibility. Sitting in the sun, in a world where she had felt comfortable and whole much of her adult life, she was unpleasantly aware that she gasped and started at every noise. Her eyes never ceased scanning the horizon, alert for danger.
Though the most obvious, the wilderness wasn't the only thing she was at odds with. With the possible exception of Joan Rand, Anna had not had anything even resembling a genuine connection with another human being since she'd come to Glacier.
She thought of Sheriff Paul Davidson, her-her what? Her boyfriend? Her sweetheart? Or merely her lover? Paul was a good man and once, a long, long time ago in mind, two weeks ago by the calendar, she'd fancied herself falling in love with him. Since her adventures began in Glacier he'd scarcely crossed her mind. She'd not even called Molly though she'd told herself she would. There was something about this case that was causing her to isolate.