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.
When she’d finished, she wondered what the hell she was going to do with her neatly labeled packets. There was no place to lock up the stuff. In the Visitors Center-cum-ranger station there would be an evidence locker, but the NPS wouldn’t have given Ridley a key. Besides, Anna wasn’t sure she trusted Ridley. At this point, she hardly trusted herself.
There was the storeroom off the common room between her bedroom and Bob and Adam’s, a narrow, windowless room full of cobwebs and outdated backcountry gear. She dismissed it. Little used as it was, it was accessible to anyone who was interested. Besides, under normal circumstances, freezing organic matter would render it worthless. Since this had already been frozen, it would do more damage to thaw it and subject it to the possibility of refreezing.
A few minutes of rummaging about and in the rear of the shop, at floor level beneath a workbench, Anna found a partially rotted board; she could see the shallow crawl space beneath the shop. An old toolbox, rusted but still mouseproof, was pressed into duty as an evidence locker. She placed the box in the hole, then covered the opening with paint cans.
There was a bit of Nancy Drew about the entire episode that appealed to her. How serious could a situation be if the lead investigator was hiding metal boxes under the floorboards in old sheds?
Lunch was being consumed when she returned to the bunkhouse. Dinner was the only planned meal. Lunch was peanut butter and jelly on toast – or on biscuits, if there were any left from the night before. Adam wasn’t in attendance. Ridley was but wasn’t particularly chatty. The weather – or the threat of losing his vocation and avocation at the whim and will of Bob Menechinn – had left bruise-colored smudges under his eyes.
Anna pulled out a chair and sat down. Ridley nodded politely and passed the bread and peanut butter. She was hungry, but not with the insatiable, almost desperate hunger of the first days.
Katherine is butchered and you are sated. The thought jarred her. The ravenous nature of the island jarred her.
Bob sat in his usual place, looking larger than he had the day before.
A tick filling up.
Given to black humor and a certain dark turn of mind, Anna was accustomed to thoughts better not expressed in groups, but, what with eating and being eaten – the whole food chain thing spelled out in gobs of flesh and strawberry jam – the words, rising unbidden, had a sinister cast, as if she were going mad. Or the world was.
Not superstitious by nature, she considered taking it up, as she chewed, staring at the table. There was no harm in protecting oneself against things that didn’t exist. What could it hurt to carry a rabbit’s foot? Other than the rabbit.
“I’m going to practice my cross-country skiing,” she announced as she dusted the crumbs from the table.
“Take a radio,” Ridley said.
Bob smiled, a half smile that said: I saw you naked.
I Know What You Did Last Summer fluttered out of a box in Anna’s brain and she smiled back, not at Bob, at the silliness of the teen-scream B movie. A touch of the gory knife and the dripping hatchet must have shown. Bob stopped smiling and concentrated on eating.
TEN YEARS OR MORE had passed since Anna’d been on skis and she hadn’t been much good then. Over rough patches where Robin would fly and Ridley power through, she would have to take her skis off and carry them; still, it would still be quicker than hiking. The only boots she had with her were the Sorels. There was no way the fat toes would fit into the bindings. Having learned from Robin’s ingenuity at Malone, she grabbed a butter knife and popped off the bindings and affixed the toe of each boot firmly around the ski with duct tape, leaving her heels free. Not ideal, but it would suffice. The remainder of the roll of tape she shoved in her pack.
The gentle, curving slope where the road led down to the water gave her time to establish a relationship between feet and skis, hands and poles. By the time she passed the pier, she was moving with a modicum of confidence.
Following the Feldtmann Trail to where she’d cut cross-country was easy. Snowmobile tracks cut deep. The trail from the Feldtmann to where Katherine had fallen was harder, but the drag of the Sked and the holes left by Anna’s boots had yet to be completely eroded by wind or filled by new snow. Ski tracks were mostly gone. Occasionally she’d see the stripe in the snow or a pock where a pole was driven in, but she would have been hard-pressed to stay on course if they’d been her only map.
Adam had said it wasn’t too far to where she’d abandoned the Sked. It wasn’t. Unburdened, rested, on skis and in the light of day, the trip took less than an hour. The cheekiness of time irked, then disoriented, her. Déjà vu telescoped, collapsed into two dimensions, as if she’d walked out of the living room in her house in Rocky and into the bath, the connecting hall suddenly not there.
The nose hill, the nose-hair tree, the refrigerator rock: Anna shed her skis and waded into the cedar swamp.
The neon orange patches where animals had unearthed tasty bites of researcher were erased by snowfall, but the trees were still startling in their neon spatter. Anna pulled her balaclava off and stood quietly, sending her senses out to taste the forest. Wind blustered through the tops of the trees but without malice; a teasing shake of bare branches, a rattle of dead leaves that had refused to fall in autumn. The air smelled clean and new; there was no lingering odor of the windigo, to speak of unspeakable things. She felt only the amiable curiosity of red squirrels.
Following the trail blazed so conveniently in blood, she worked her way out from the clearing.
She’d learned to track in the desert. A land of snow was very like a desert, and she found she could read sign tolerably well. Working slowly, she followed the spatters and the now-almost-obliterated mark where Katherine had crawled – or been dragged – from the swamp. She found the hole she and Robin dug, excavating the backpack. The bottom had filled in till it was just a large dimple in the snow. Anna pulled a pasta server she’d lifted from a kitchen drawer out of her backpack and used it to rake around the area. Gloved hands packed snow rather than lifting it, and it was too cold to use bare fingers.
Sieving turned up bits of blue canvas, one soaked with what Anna presumed was either wolf blood from the broken vials or human blood from the researcher. On fabric, there was none of the cheery traffic-cone orange; the blood had gone dark and hard. Anna had no idea of the chemistry involved, but, no doubt, one day an enterprising researcher would get a hundred-thousand-dollar grant to study the phenomenon.
Near ground level, she found a blue canvas strap. One end was intact, the buckle still in place. The end that had originally attached to the backpack was ripped. Either it had been torn from Katherine’s back or been ripped in a game of tug-of-war between woman and wolf or wolf and wolf.
Or woman and scary noneating thing.
Anna rose to her feet and looked for the next spatter of orange. Snow humped over downed wood, and the swamp resembled a rumpled giant’s bed. Half the trees were alive, erect above the snow, and half in a deadly tangle beneath it. Contours and cave-ins could be the mark of human intervention or snow cover interacting with gravity, temperature and the various levels of piled trees.
Anna had been hoping for a bit more blood. She’d seen the wolves taking down a moose. There had been a lot of blood. Wolves and moose hearts pumping at top capacity, wolves slashing, moose fighting back with hooves and antlers. Blood had flown in every direction.
Here there was little for a tracker to go by. Maybe because Katherine hadn’t the physical strength to fight a predator that didn’t weigh much less than she did and her clothing soaked up fluids from her wounds.
Without its bizarre coloration, Anna might have missed the next spatter. Seven orange drops in a neat arc stood out at snow line against the pale bark of a downed cedar.
With careful steps and her pasta-serving spoon, Anna worked Katherine’s back trail. Fifty yards into the tangle of downed trees was a six-by-eight patch of snow that was sufficiently disturbed that the drifting had not completely concealed it. Digging was deepest in a crotch formed by two dead limbs. Around this patch was a wide area of lesser dimpling, the paw prints of wolves.
If they were paw prints. The windigo carried its victims so high and so fast, their feet burned away to stumps, and the prints they left in the snow were more like hoofprints than human tracks.
“Cut it out,” Anna said aloud. An “inner child” was all well and good, but the little buggers could be a real pain in the ass when it came to scary stories.
Starting at the outer perimeter of the circle, she began clearing snow away. Within a foot of where the branches came together in a natural snare, she found a patch of frozen urine. It was human; a fragment of wadded tissue paper lay next to it. Katherine had been trapped long enough to need to relieve herself, and her leg was not yet broken. The compound fracture would have rendered her too crippled and in too much pain to have squatted neatly.
On the same imaginary ring around ground zero – the foot trap – Anna found a flashlight, an unused emergency flare and a water bottle, half full and frozen solid as a brick, and a pack of Juicy Fruit. Katherine might have run madly into the woods, but she had returned to her room, or had this pack cached elsewhere, and come prepared.
Anna rocked back on her heels, wondering what a small, emotionally upset researcher from Washington, D.C., would rush out in the dark with a flare and a pack of gum to do. Did she plan to get lost to punish Bob but wanted to hedge her bets? Did she stage the fight with Bob to establish a reason to run off that wouldn’t incriminate her?
In what? And why didn’t she use the flare? Any late-night-movie viewer would know to strike the flare to keep wolves away. Whatever Katherine’s reasons, it was here that the rucksack was wrested from her.
Not having evidence bags large enough to accommodate flashlight and flare, Anna stowed them in her backpack. A little more digging turned up the cell phone Bob worried about. Anna knew pretty close to nothing about cell phones. For much of her career, no one had such a thing, except for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. In the years since they’d become commonplace, she’d worked in places too isolated to get service. Paul bought her one, and, because she’d promised she would, she kept it in the car when she traveled between Colorado and Mississippi. A couple of times she’d gone so far as to turn it on. Once she’d even needed it, but the battery had gone dead and it had been demoted from glove compartment to trunk.
This phone appeared to be a fancy machine, many buttons and symbols, all in Lilliputian scale. The viewing screen was black. Because her phone worked this way, Anna took off a glove, then pushed END to begin.
Nothing.
She pushed TALK.
Nothing.
When her fingers got cold enough to cause pain, she gave up and slipped the phone in her pocket. The batteries could be dead or frozen. Probably both. Menechinn wanted the phone to save the cost of replacing it. Whether he was being petty or not, Anna knew she would put it down the outhouse rather than give him a moment’s satisfaction. Since he’d saved her life, Bob had that effect on her.
Sitting on one of the limbs that had captured and held Katherine till death came on night’s paws, Anna considered what she had found. Not much. And she didn’t have a lot more time. She’d gotten a late start and had no intention of reprising her long day’s journey into night, dragging a corpse and a zombie, not even with two flashlights and an emergency flare.
Putting all of the “not much” together, she fleshed out a story. Katherine had run from the housing area for reasons of her own. Maybe to conduct an activity she wanted kept secret or to make Bob sorry for whatever he had done. The flare in the pack suggested the activity might have something to do with signaling. Homeland Security had sent Bob to ISRO presumably because it was a hole in the border through which anything could leak, especially in winter when it was deserted.
Signaling offshore smugglers? Terrorists?
Anna laughed, surprising herself with the noise. Evildoers deciding to do evil in Lake Superior in January were a self-culling gene pool. Based out of a city, Homeland Security personnel might not know that. Provincialism wasn’t just for the provinces anymore.
The facts were: Katherine had left Windigo, then intentionally or accidentally gotten lost. She’d gotten caught in the cedar swamp. Wolves found her. Contrary to natural behavior patterns, they decided to devour her. At some point, she remembered her cell phone and tried to call out. She fought to free her foot and her ankle snapped. That might also have been when the vials were broken. Blood from the compound fracture, blood from a dead wolf, frenetic noise and preylike thrashings: hard for any self-respecting wolf to resist. The foot comes free. Katherine drags herself or is dragged by wolves to the killing ground.
Then her ghost flits to Windigo and writes “HELP ME” on the window glass.
“I guess we solved this one,” Anna said to a red squirrel, who, thinking her a bump on a log, had settled nearby to munch on a ration of fall’s harvest. The little rodent squawked, scurried up the nearest tree and disappeared around the bole. Two seconds later, it reappeared on the other side and scolded Anna for her impertinence.
“I’m sorry I scared you. I thought you knew it was me. Hey, thanks.” Looking at the squirrel, she noticed a set of tracks coming in at an angle on the far side of the tree. They looked like boot prints. Had she not been half expecting them, Anna would have written them off to the vagaries of tracking and weather. Overlapping moose prints often resembled a human track. Wolf tracks scoured out with the wind fooled the eye in the same way.
Most of the tracks had been obliterated. All she could tell was, they came from the west, the direction of the bunkhouse, which meant nothing. In rough country, only the crows fly as the crow flies. Creeping and climbing and scooting on her butt, she worked her way through the swamp in concentric circles out from the existing prints.
Nearer where the body was found, at the foot of an evergreen tree, branches full of needles and keeping out much of the snow, the tracks ended. The owner of the boots had stood, back to the tree, and watched the slaying or the body or both.
It was the watcher who had frightened the wolves from their kill.