Perry moaned and stooped down.
“Ought to see someone about that back, Doc,” the sheriff joked out of habit, but there was no humor in his voice.
Perry ignored him. He was digging through the mess. His fingers found an iron loop. “Root cellar.”
With Lauter’s help, he pulled it up and threw it aside. The root cellar was a five-foot hole with walls of earth that had been squared off. Lying on the frozen mud of the floor was what remained of Nate Segaris.
“Shit,” Lauters said quietly.
Segaris was a mess. His guts had been cleaved open, the organs torn free, the body cavity hollow as a drum. His arms were broken in several places. Smashed and bitten. The fingers of his left hand were missing, save for the grisly nub of a thumb. His right leg was hacked off beneath the knee, leaving a knob of white ligament to mourn its passing.
Lauters swore beneath his breath and lowered himself down there. He thanked God it was November. Had it been the warm months…well, he didn’t want to think about the stink and the flies.
“It must’ve killed him and threw him down there,” Perry suggested.
“No shit, Doc.”
The sheriff wasn’t in the mood for Perry’s bullshit speculation. He wasn’t in the mood for anything these days. He searched around and could find no sign of the man’s missing appendages.
Above him, Perry stared down at the ruin of Segaris’ face.
His left eye was gone, as was most of the flesh around it. But his other eye was wide and staring with an accusatory glare. His mouth was frozen in a scream. The top of his head bitten clean open-even from five feet above, Perry could see the teeth marks sunk into the skull. The brains had been scooped out and, it would seem, the gray splatter in the corner was what remained of them.
Lauters looked up at the doc with pleading eyes. “God help us,” he uttered.
“I hope God can help us, Sheriff, I really do,” Perry said stoically. “But if he can’t, then we’d better start thinking about helping ourselves.”
Grumbling, Lauters pulled himself up out of the root cellar, ignoring Perry’s outstretched hand. He stood and brushed himself off.
“It would be interesting to know the turn of events,” Perry mused. “In what order they occurred.”
Lauters glared at him with watery gray eyes. “What possible use would that be? A man’s dead. Murdered. Half-eaten for the love of Christ.”
Perry nodded patiently. He brushed a silky wisp of white hair from his brow. “What I mean, Bill, is that it would help us to understand our killer if we knew a few things.”
“Like what for instance?”
“Well, for starters, I’d like to know if Segaris was killed before or after this place was torn apart. If it was after…well, then we’re talking about an act of hateful, willful destruction here, an act of vengeance. Hardly an animal characteristic.”
Lauters shook his head. “You look too deep into things.”
“And you,” Perry said, “don’t look deep enough.”
Lauters ignored him. “Let’s get back to town. We’ve got to get Spence out here with his wagon to cart this body off.”
“‘His wagon?’” Perry said. “Hate to be the one to tell you, Bill, but Spence is a woman.”
“That’s your opinion.” Lauters sighed and sipped from a pocket flask of whiskey. “Sooner we get that body into the ground, sooner folks’ll stop speculating about it.”
Perry followed him and mounted.
“Yes,” the sheriff said, finishing off his flask and stuffing it in his saddlebag, “I see trouble on the horizon, Doc.”
Perry said nothing. His eyes, however, looked to the mountains for an answer. There was none. Only wind and cold.
17
Later, standing outside his office and listening to the relative calm of a Sunday evening, Lauters kept drinking. He didn’t even feel the cold that swept down from the mountains. In his mind he saw only blood, death, and a forecast of more dying.
Wolf Creek was almost peaceful this night.
The ranch hands had stayed home. The miners had stayed up at the silver camps. Few people ventured out of doors. Maybe it was the frigid temperatures or the blowing snow. But maybe it was something else. Something that killed people for sport as well as food. Maybe this is what kept people behind locked doors.
Lauters took another pull from his silver flask.
Even the old Blackfeet beggars were nowhere to be seen. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any injuns around for some time. Since the killings began, it seemed. This stopped the flask at his lips.
Was that worth considering? he wondered.
Could the Indians have something to do with the murders? Maybe. Maybe not. The local Blackfeet tended to steer clear of town for the most part, being that a lot of folks tended to harass them for no good reason. And when a major crime like a murder or robbery came down, they were nowhere to be found. Again, because if a scapegoat was needed, an injun was always a good bet.
Thinking of this, made the sheriff remember the time that Blackfoot was hanged.
He scowled and took another drink.
The Blackfoot’s name was Red Elk. He was being held in connection with the rape and murder of a local white girl, name of Carpenter. The girl had no family. She was new to Wolf Creek. Red Elk had supposedly surprised her one night as she left the dry goods store she worked at, forced himself on her and then cut her throat.
The second night the injun was in jail, the vigilantes came. They wore black hoods with eye and mouth slits. Nine of them pushed their way into the jailhouse.
“We want the injun,” the leader said. “And we plan to have him.”
“You boys better clear out of here,” Lauters had told them.
The vigilantes all carried guns and they were all on the sheriff.
“You don’t understand,” the leader said. “We want that murdering redskin and we’ll kill you if need be to get ’em.”
Lauters had gone for his gun, but the men were already on him. They knocked him senseless with the butts of their rifles and tied him to his chair. When he came to later, it was all done with. His deputy-Alden Bowes-had returned from delivering a prisoner to Virginia City and untied him.
Red Elk was hanged from an oak in the square across the street.
There were a few questions after that, but none Lauters couldn’t answer. The men had worn masks, he couldn’t identify them. They had overpowered him and he had the bruises to show for it. And why had he sent his deputy away to deliver a prisoner to Virginia City with a volatile situation brewing and anti-Indian sentiment running high? He’d thought no one would try such a thing.
The questions were answered to everyone’s satisfaction.
Besides, the man they’d strung up was just an Indian, a Blackfoot. And he’d killed a white. Case closed. The only ones really concerned were the Blackfeet people and they didn’t count.
Everyone else believed Lauters.
They never guessed he was lying about it all.
Knowing this, Lauters drank more. It was a year ago this week that the injun had been lynched and duly swung. In his mind, he could hear the creaking of that limb the noose was strung over.
It made him shiver.
18
The blizzard had been threatening for several days. On around midnight of the day Nate Segaris’ body was discovered and carted away in Wynona Spence’s funeral wagon to be plucked and polished in secret, it hit. It came down out of the Tobacco Root Mountains, urged forward by shrill, squealing winds that forced the mercury well below freezing. Several feet of heavy, blowing snow were dumped over Wolf Creek, the wind sculpting it into four and five foot drifts that looked like frozen waves crashing ashore on some alien beach.
Around four, the storm passed.
The world was white. Drifting, swirling, frozen. In the foothills of the mountains, Curly Del Vecchio waited in an old abandoned mine shaft wondering when death would come. His horse threw him the night before, a short distance away, breaking his leg in the process.