The smell hit them first. It was strong enough to stop Johnny in his tracks, and behind him Van actually backed up a step. Ruthe froze in place for one long second, and then with a set face climbed the two steps into the room.
There was a brief pause, and then they heard her say, "For crissake! What the hell were you doing out here?"
Johnny steeled himself and followed her inside, Van at his shoulder.
The door opened into the office area of the trailer. There was a desk, a four-drawer filing cabinet, a whiteboard, and a map of the Park on a scale so large it covered one wall floor to ceiling and corner to corner, including the two windows in that wall that showed up as light rectangles through the map. Flyers, brochures, and statistical handouts, all sporting the GHRI cheery sunrise logo, were piled all over the room.
The desk was large and metal and gray. Across it lay the body of Mac Devlin, his chest a torn mass of flesh and blood and bone, his square, red face gaping at the ceiling in astonishment. He was starting to bloat.
Behind Johnny, Van made a sound and the warm of her at his shoulder vanished, followed by quick footsteps going down the stairs and the crunch of her knees on the snow. He heard her retch. He wasn't far off it himself.
Ruthe surveyed the scene, her face grim. "How long ago, do you reckon?"
Johnny swallowed hard and steeled himself to step forward and grasp Mac's hand. It was cold. He tried to move it. It wouldn't. "Rigor has set in," he said.
"What does that mean?"
Oddly, he seemed to have adapted to the smell, and was able to speak more easily. "Rigor mortis starts setting in about three hours after death. It takes about twelve hours to reach maximum stiffness, depending on conditions." He looked around and saw a small Monitor stove, probably fueled by the tank outside. "It's warm in here." He tried to move Mac's hand again, and succeeded in shifting it just a little. "I'd say he's been here longer than three hours but less than twelve." He looked at Ruthe. "It'll go off again in about seventy-two hours. If someone trained is there to observe it, they can get a good idea of time of death." He took a deep, shaky breath. "For now, we need to get out of here."
"What? Why?"
"It's a crime scene, Ruthe. We shouldn't be in here, and we need to leave now and go get Jim." He walked out of the trailer. Van was on her feet, washing her face with a handful of snow. "Are you okay?"
She nodded and tried to smile with stiff lips. "I'm okay. Was that… was that Mac Devlin? The MacMiner guy?"
"Yeah, it was."
"What happened? What are you doing?"
He had bent over to look in the snow around the stairs. There was hardly any light left to the day and he couldn't see anything. "It looks like he was shot from a long way away, in the back, with a rifle, but a lot of times a killer can't resist taking a closer look. It's how we catch them."
"'We'?"
"It's how my dad used to, anyway." He straightened. "You learned a lot from him."
"Yeah." He shrugged, trying to be casual. It wasn't easy, with the memory of Mac's gruesome remains fifteen feet away. "It was interesting." He swallowed. "Well, you know. When it wasn't gross."
"He's dressed like he just walked in the door," Ruthe said from the doorway. Something clicked and a light came on over the doorway. "Parka, snow pants, boots, and all."
"I think maybe he was shot in the act of stepping inside," Johnny said, standing straight and looking up at Ruthe. He pointed two fingers at her. "He'd probably already opened the door, and was standing on the threshold." She turned around, standing in the open doorway and looking at Johnny over her shoulder. "The bullet hit him and the impact spun him around-" Ruthe's hands flew up and she staggered two steps forward, turning to face him. "-and then he fell on the desk."
Ruthe looked over her shoulder again, at Mac's corpse this time, and came back to the door and frowned at him. "But the door was closed when we got here."
Johnny frowned, too. "The killer could have closed it if he came up to take a look. Or maybe Mac could have pulled it shut when he fell." Johnny gestured at his feet. "I can't see anything other than our tracks, Ruthe, but that doesn't mean Jim won't be able to. You should close the door. And lock it, if you can."
She reached behind the knob, felt around, and nodded her head. Pulling the door to, she tried the knob and nodded again when it held. "Okay. Time to go for help. Like you said, Jim needs to know about this, pronto."
"Wait." Johnny fumbled with one of his pockets. "Here. We can trigger this."
It was an orange electronic device the size of a pack of cigarettes. Ruthe took it. "What's that?"
"A PLB, a personal locator beacon. Kate insisted on getting one for me to carry in case I got into trouble in the Park. If I trigger it, it'll send our coordinates and a 911 call via satellite to the local police. That's Jim."
"Clever. And smart of Kate." She shook her head and handed it back to Johnny. "No can do."
"But he could fly out here, and land. There's a wind sock, I saw it on our way in."
"So did I," Ruthe said, "but he's not flying out here in the dark and landing in a place he's never landed before, also in the dark. If you trigger that thing, they'll think we're in trouble. We aren't. No. We go get him."
Johnny hesitated. "One of us should stay here. Make sure no one contaminates the crime scene."
"No," Ruthe said definitely. "I'm not leaving either one of you around here with some nut on the loose with a gun." Impossibly, she grinned, and jerked a thumb at the trailer.
"Besides, I just locked the door to the only warm place to wait."
TEN
The journey back down the side of the hill to the valley seemed a lot shorter, but it was well past dark by the time they got to the river. They stopped to gas up the snow machines and wolf down steaming bowls of ramen that Ruthe insisted they take the time to cook on her single-burner Coleman stove. "It's been a long day and we're all tired. We need fuel to get us home. Drink lots of water, too, and keep a bottle handy, tucked in somewhere it won't freeze."
She had them stuff peppermints into their outer pockets. "A sugar hit for the road," she said, "when we start to run out of steam."
"We could stop at one of the villages," Johnny said. "We could," Ruthe said. "I don't think we should. Once the word gets out, there's going to be a stream of rubberneckers up there, and some of them won't stop with looking."
She looked at Johnny. He nodded. "You're right. Best to get the word to Jim as fast as we can. He can fly in tomorrow at first light." He looked at Van. "You want to drive awhile?"
A smile broke through the strained look on her face. "Sure!"
Ruthe. The Gruening River caribou herd. The Suulutaq trailer. Mac. The rush to tell Jim. The attack.
Van.
Vanessa.
He pulled himself inch by painful inch to his knees and looked around.
His snow machine sat twenty feet away. The sled was gone. The sled with all their supplies in it. Memory returned in a terrifying rush.
"Van," he tried to say. "Ruthe." He staggered to his feet. "Van! Ruthe!"
He thought he heard a low moan from one direction and staggered toward it, almost falling over a dark, huddled lump. It was Ruthe. "Ruthe!" he said. He shook her, possibly a little less gently than he should have. "Ruthe!"
She groaned again. In the steadily increasing light of the rising moon her face looked bleached of all color, like a death mask. "Johnny?"
"Yes," he said, almost sobbing. "It's me. Are you okay? Here, squeeze my hands. Good, now push your feet. Good. Good."
"Where's the girl?" she said, raising her head.
He staggered to his feet. "Van! Vanessa! Where are you, Van?"
He found her beneath the lip of the riverbank. She didn't answer his call, she didn't move, and he was shaking so badly from fright and the cold that he could barely pull down her collar to check the pulse in her throat. It beat strongly against his fingers, warming it. "Oh, Van," he said, his head drooping. "Oh, Van."