He might have been searching the body as he’d said. If he’d had a flashlight with him, it hadn’t been on when Anna arrived in all her naked glory, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t used it earlier.
Staring at the dead woman’s face but without seeing it, Anna put herself back in the sauna and retraced her steps to the carpenter’s shop. Memories of the night before weren’t sharp. There’d been too many things dulling her brain.
She left the sauna. She flew with the wind. She heard a clanking sound – probably the Sked banging into the metal legs of the workbench under the window. She opened the door and turned on the overhead light.
Without the wind raking her back and Bob’s eyes her front, Anna was able to see more clearly in memory than she had at the time. Bob Menechinn had been on his knees. His butt had been in the air and his head down, hiding that of the corpse. That’s why Anna had the sudden thought he was eating it.
The time for rescue breathing was long past. Had he been kissing Katherine? Love lost and good-bye and rest in peace with Baby Jesus, like Bob claimed?
Or did he like making love to dead women?
That was a gruesome thought. Though, should Anna ever have to have sex with the likes of Menechinn, it would be preferable to be dead at the time.
Shuddering out of that mental place, Anna turned her attention to cause of death. Wolf, certainly, but wolves weren’t what had taken Katherine to the cedar swamp in the first place, nor, did Anna believe, had they taken the researcher down. The tracks at the scene, those that hadn’t been totally obscured by snow, told the tale of a meal, not a hunt.
Anna got a pair of latex gloves from the box Ridley had left on the counter from the wolf necropsy and turned back the stiffened edge of the shredded trouser leg. A splintered femur thrust through the tattered flesh – broken, snapped, not gnawed through. A considerate beast of some sort had licked the bone clean.
Katherine had probably stepped in one of the swamp’s natural traps and broken her ankle. Maybe the pack was hounding her, but it seemed more likely she’d broken her ankle and the pack had come upon her. Wolves could have smelled the blood from the compound fracture. There were vials of the dead wolf’s blood in her pocket. She might have smashed them against a stone or the bole of a downed tree.
If they were in the area, the wolves would have smelled it. But wolves smelled blood all the time: crippled moose, injured pack members. Every meal was served up with the smell of blood. All summer long, they smelled the blood of tourists, scraping and blistering and cutting themselves with cooking utensils. It wasn’t like chumming in shark-infested waters; at the scent of blood, wolves didn’t go into a feeding frenzy. The odor of humans was enough to send them running.
The only thing that made much sense was a confluence of events: Katherine breaks her leg, wolves come upon her, she reeks of fresh blood – hers and theirs – and they kill her.
Reeks.
The breath of the windigo.
Smell, the most primitive of the senses, flooded Anna but brought with it no memory, only the knowledge that something was unutterably wrong.
21
Anna returned to the bunkhouse, let herself in the unused kitchen door, took Katherine’s sample-gathering paraphernalia and carried it back to the carpenter’s shop. There she began the painstaking process of collecting and preserving trace evidence.
She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A smoking gun maybe, though the murder weapon was clearly tooth and claw. Could be she was bored or paranoid or suffering from the madness of the Far North, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Katherine’s death was not accidental, not entirely. Nor could she shake the feeling that Bob had something to do with it. But, then, she seemed pretty anxious to pin something on the Homeland Security guy and couldn’t be trusted to be objective.
She swabbed and preserved and noted. What struck her most forcibly was how little trauma there was. Researchers hypothesized the size of a wolf pack was determined by how many animals could fit around a kill. When wolves brought down an animal, they surrounded it and ate it warm, often alive – for a while. Canis lupus were designed to eat en famile and efficiently; an adult wolf’s jaws exerted fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, about twice that of a German shepherd and five times that of a human being. A mature wolf could gnaw through a femur in six or seven bites. Speed was also in their nature. They might be the most ferocious of predators, but they weren’t nearly as focused as ravens when it came to scavenging. A single raven could carry away as much as four pounds in a day, meat cached in the branches of a nearby tree for later consumption.
Soft, small-boned, Katherine would have been torn to pieces in minutes. Yet the corpse was relatively undamaged: a foot torn off, throat slashed, arm severed and hands eaten. The rest was superficial damage. In a starvation winter, when moose were scarce, the wolves would not have left fresh meat of their own volition. They had to have been frightened off the kill.
Something had scared the wolves away, then didn’t eat the body itself. The noneating, scary thing vanished before the snow stopped falling. Either that or it traveled in such a manner it left no tracks.
Anna rose to her feet and stomped to get the circulation moving. The stiff-soled Sorels were not made for kneeling. Or walking. Or fashion. They were simply designed to keep feet dry and toes from turning black. Dead wolf parts to one side, dead woman to the other, clapping and stomping in true zombie-jamboree fashion, Anna cast back to the night Katherine had been killed.
She couldn’t even be sure Katherine left the shop intending to confront Bob. Nature might have called; Anna did come upon her near the outhouse. Bob might have waylaid her for some reason and they’d gotten into a fight. She might have run into Bob accidentally and taken the rare moment of privacy to unload on him about something that had been on her mind for a while.
Again Anna knelt and began searching Katherine’s clothing. In the right front trouser pocket was a tube of Chap Stick. In the pocket of her parka was a handkerchief; not the great square of cotton of the present day but a smaller square of linen edged with crocheted silk. Anna had carried one very like it down the aisle when she’d married Paul, the “something borrowed.” Her sister, Molly, inherited a box of them when her husband’s mother died. They weren’t the sort of thing one carried into the wilds to mop the frozen mucus from one’s nose and eyes.
Hoping the delicate handkerchief had given Katherine comfort, Anna tucked it into a paper evidence bag. If there was organic matter on it, paper would preserve it better than plastic. That done, she did a thorough frisk of the body. A lump in the lining of the parka brought on the familiar rush any cop – green or blue – got when they were onto something.
Excitement dwindled as she discovered it hadn’t been covertly sewn into the lining like smuggled jewels but fallen through a rip in the pocket. She worked it up the fabric to the light of day. Blood; one vial of wolf’s blood had not been smashed.
Had Bob been looking for the cell phone like he’d said or was this what he was after? That made little sense when there was enough wolf meat in bags on the tool bench to glean any number of samples. Anna slipped the tube into an envelope, dated and sealed and initialed it. In every case, the chain of evidence had to be preserved: who collected it and anyone else who accessed it had to be recorded. One link in the chain broken, one unauthorized moment out of the chain, and an attorney would say the evidence could have been tampered with and was inadmissible.
Anna wasn’t sure there’d been a crime. She wasn’t even acting under color of law. Her jurisdiction was in Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It did not extend to a park in Michigan. Still, she worked with precision and strict adherence to the rules.