“Looks that way,” Harry said. “Did you check the rest of the body?”
“No, sir, just the face.” Clearly that had been enough for Gary.
Ruick rocked back on his heels. In the spill of light from the flashlights, he studied first Gary then Anna and made a decision.
“Anna, hand Gary the lights and help me with this. Gary, keep us lit here. I don’t suppose anybody’s got a tape recorder? Pen and paper?” Anna did have that in the form of the small yellow pocket notebook with the ten standard firefighting orders printed on the inside cover. While Ruick rooted around in his pack, she and the seasonal waited, wishing they had more to do, some positive action to take. Having found what he sought, a 35-mm camera, Harry clicked off half a dozen pictures. The flash burned the photos into Anna’s brain as they did into the film. Scene recorded, Ruick began his work on the dead woman.
Gary held the lights as best he could while keeping his eyes off the ruin of the corpse’s face. Anna took notes. Ruick opened the army jacket. The dead woman was built along apple-on-a-stick lines. The bulk of her weight was carried between pubic bone and collar bone: big breasts, thick waist, meaty hips ending abruptly in skinny and shapely legs. There wasn’t much to write about. Except for the butchered face, she appeared unharmed. Internal injuries would be determined by the autopsy. Trauma to the face suggested enough force to snap the neck, but there was surprisingly little blood; none of the flowing spillage one might expect had the cuts occurred while the heart was still beating. The carving had been done after the woman was dead.
Harry’s check of the body was cursory. No defensive cuts on hands or arms. Nothing apparent under the nails. Given the lack of light it was impossible to ascertain much in the way of detail. The woman had no identification on her. The pockets of the army coat produced unused rolls of film, a three-by-five card, much battered, with measurements written on it, lip balm, three pennies and a topographical map of the park. The pockets of the victim’s shorts were empty.
Ruick finished the search, then lacking anything with which to cover her, he rolled the body back on its side and the ruination of her face was lost in shadow. He and Anna reclaimed their flashlights and the three of them did a perfunctory search of the tiny clearing, using only light and eyes for fear extraneous movement would further contaminate a crime scene that had already been severely compromised.
“No pack,” Anna said.
“No water bottle anywhere,” Gary added.
“Film suggests she was carrying a camera. Could be the pack was stolen. Could be it just got left off if she was chased or killed someplace else,” Ruick said.
He got on the radio and set the machinery in motion for the body recovery. With the weather clearing, a helicopter would be able to come at first light to airlift it out of the park.
While he talked, Anna was shutting down. Night, too much hiking, scrabbling and thinking, too little sleep, too little food: her brain was blanking. Though she moved the light around in a desultory fashion she knew she wasn’t seeing what was there. Gary and the chief ranger were in slightly better shape. Their sleep had not been ravaged by a psychotic bear. Still, she doubted any of the three of them would be good for much till morning.
Finally Ruick put his radio away. For a long minute no one said anything. Anna knew she had fallen into a dangerous state. She was abdicating, turning over not only the problem of the dead woman but her own well-being to the solid, reassuring Harry Ruick.
Snap out of it,
she ordered herself and scrubbed her skull with her knuckles to wake up the gray matter. Abdicating in the backcountry was commonplace. It was also a coward’s way and a fool’s. Nobody could guarantee another’s safety in the wilderness.
Brain nominally in gear, she said, “We carry her out?”
“Can’t see how to avoid it,” Ruick replied. “Can’t leave her here. We’re between a rock and a hard place. We carry her out and trash what might remain of the crime scene or we leave her here and the scavengers do the job for us. They may anyway. The smell of blood is bound to attract some.”
There was nothing in which to wrap the corpse. To facilitate carrying, they removed her arms from the sleeves of her jacket, zipped them inside and tied the sleeves over her chest. Anna secured her feet by the simple expedient of tying her bootlaces together.
Harry Ruick took the head, Gary Bradley the feet. Anna had the awkward but not difficult task of lighting their way back up the mountainside. The body had been located less than a hundred yards down from the trail and they traversed the distance in a grunting quarter of an hour.
During their absence Joan had not been idle. The other members of the team had convened on West Flattop Trail. It had been too late and too dark to return to Anna and Joan’s camp for their personal things, but three tents had been brought up from where the bear team cached their own gear. Camp was being set up a quarter of a mile off trail where park visitors would not see it and so have their wilderness experience infringed upon. Joan herself waited on the log where they’d left her with Vic to lead them to the new camp.
Though they’d known each other little more than five days, Anna was inordinately glad to see her. Leaving the men to struggle on with their burden across the flat and level meadow that presaged the burn, Anna walked ahead with Joan.
“So it was a woman,” Joan said.
Anna heard the threadbare weariness in her voice and knew she was probably running on nerve; muscle and bone were exhausted. Joan Rand was in fairly good shape, but she carried an extra twenty pounds. Most of that, Anna guessed, was heart. Joan was carrying the pain, Anna only the work and a few ounces of the horror. Either she’d been born heartless or over the years had grown inured to the tragedies of others.
“A woman,” she confirmed.
“Do we know who she was?”
“Not yet.”
As if admitting a failing on her part, Joan said, “You know, I was so glad it wasn’t Rory I didn’t even bother to ask Vic who she was.”
Rory Van Slyke. Anna hadn’t given him a moment’s consideration since the chief ranger had said of the corpse, “This is not our boy.” If Rory’s trail had been picked up by the backcountry ranger or the other members of the team, they would have heard. He was still out there lost or hurt or dead.
“At least we know our bear—presuming this was done by the same bear—has moved on,” Joan said. “If it had taken Rory, cached him, it would have made a nest nearby and stayed there to feed.” The logic of bear behavior was cheering her considerably. Anna was about to put an end to that. It wasn’t that she was in a foul mood herself and so wanted to spread the wretchedness around. It was that she respected Joan enough to know she’d want to know the facts and liked her enough to guess she’d rather be told under cover of darkness by another woman than back in camp under the glare of Coleman lanterns and men’s eyes.
“This lady wasn’t killed by our bear or any bear. She was hacked up by an edged weapon. A human being killed her. Or something with opposable thumbs masquerading as a human being.”
Ahead was the camp. Lanterns had been set up, and four men and one woman bustled purposefully about. Three tents had been pitched and Anna heard the familiar hiss of a gas stove. Environmentalist that she was, it would still have given her hope and courage had there been a great roaring fire to welcome them, warm their bones and keep the monsters of the dark away. In this group of conservationists, she wouldn’t dare to so much as voice her primitive longings.
“This is it,” Joan said, stopping. Ruick and Bradley carried the corpse past them into camp like hunters returning with the day’s kill.
“Did you hear me?” Anna asked when Joan didn’t fall into step behind them.
“I did,” Joan answered quietly. “I just couldn’t think of anything to say.”
They stayed a moment in silence on the edge of the circle of light carved out of the night.
“Hot drinks?” Anna said finally.
“Hot drinks,” Joan agreed.
Between Anna and
Harry they had thirty-one years of law enforcement in America’s national parks, yet the body of the murder victim created a dilemma neither of them had faced before. Because of Glacier’s active grizzly bear population the remains were not only evidence but meat, carrion. Trails in the park were routinely closed by the bear management team if a dead deer or elk was found on or near them. A carcass attracted bears. What they’d so laboriously carried out of the ravine might be a corpse tomorrow in a morgue. Tonight it was a carcass, just beginning to get ripe and alluring.
Faced with a problem pertaining to
Ursus horribilis,
Joan regained her equilibrium and took charge. The body was wrapped in plastic garbage bags—not because it would keep the smell from the keen noses of any bears in the neighborhood but to shield the delicate sensibilities of the humans—and hung up in a tree thirty yards from camp along with the other edibles.
That more than anything seemed to bring a bleakness of mood over everyone. Though several people made a weak joke or two and nobody stared at the ghoulish tree decoration outright, Anna was sure everyone was as acutely aware as she that it was hanging there, high in the branches, just beyond the reach of light, like a Windigo in the north woods.
They ate in silence and crawled into the tents. There were six bear-team members, plus Harry, Anna and Joan. Though as strays, Anna and Joan were invited to make a third in somebody’s tent, Anna opted to sleep in the open.
Better to face down the devil than blindly hear him circling.
6
Despite the fact
there seemed to be a bear in Glacier with Anna’s name on it and a lunatic who sliced off women’s faces, she slept very well. Harry Ruick woke her just after five by clanging around with stove and coffeepot.
Having only the truly vile clothes she’d worn the day before, Anna had slept in nothing but her shirt and had to spend an awkward minute struggling into underpants and shorts in the narrow confines of a sleeping bag. Trained in backcountry etiquette, Ruick did not deign to notice her until she was decent.
Joan had selected their camp with foresight. Two downed logs, fallen at right angles to one another, formed a natural seating area. Having stuffed the borrowed sleeping bag into its sack, Anna made herself a cup of coffee from a flow-through bag and joined the chief ranger where he sat on a log.
“Buck got to the Van Slyke boy’s dad up at Fifty Mountain yesterday afternoon, so the folks know the kid’s missing,” Ruick said in lieu of “good morning.”
Anna nodded. Buck was probably the backcountry ranger from down toward Waterton Lake.
“The helicopter will be able to land as soon as it’s light. If I remember right, there’s a good flat spot on the burn less than a mile from here. We’ll need to go check it and flag it.”
Harry wasn’t so much talking to Anna as planning his operation. She was content to serve the passive role of sounding board. Till Harry Ruick arrived on horseback the day before, she’d never met him. He struck her as the new breed of administrator—infused with a genuine love of the resource but a political animal for all that, with an eye to the next rung up the ladder. Old-school park rangers—or at least the lingering myth of them—would have it that they put the needs of the park before their own. Enlightened self-interest was the current trend.
“You’re here sort of apprenticing on Kate’s bear DNA project, that right?” he asked. Despite the time they’d spent together floundering around in the shrubbery, Anna had the feeling this was probably the first time he’d really seen her.
“Yes,” she said. “My home park’s the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi.”
“You know John Brown?”
“He’s chief ranger there.”
“John and I went to FLETC together,” Ruick named the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which NPS enforcement rangers filtered through at some point in their careers. “Tell him I said ‘hey’ when you see him.”
Anna promised she would. She wasn’t surprised the two men knew each other. The National Park Service was spread over a lot of real estate but there weren’t that many full-time employees. The game of “who do you know” was played successfully from Joshua Tree to Acadia.
Amenities observed, he returned to the issues at hand. “We’re going to do double duty today. Split our forces. You and I will go over the crime scene this morning. Two of my district rangers and about a third of my field rangers are in California on the Angeles National Forest. The damn annual pilgrimage to keep the movie stars from being burned out of house and home. Talk about a prime location for a ‘let burn’ policy. But be that as it may, I’m short-handed. So if you wouldn’t mind playing step-’n’-fetchit for me, I’d appreciate it.”
In one sentence he’d managed to give Anna the illusion of a gracious request and at the same time let her know her official status in the investigation was that of a gofer. A manager’s manager.
“Glad to help any way I can,” she said, and meant it.
“Good girl.”
The “girl” offended Anna not in the least. Being a woman of a certain age, she’d learned to pick her battles. That, and she’d been called a whole lot worse.
“Gary, Vic, the others’ll continue searching for the Van Slyke boy. As soon as the body”—he pushed his jaw at the plastic-wrapped lump of bear bait hanging in the tree at the far edge of their camp—“is taken to West Glacier, the helicopter will join the search. If the kid is up and around we ought to be able to find him today.”
He didn’t add the obvious, that if Rory wasn’t up and around it probably wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference whether he was found today or a month from today.
They sipped their coffee in companionable silence awaiting the sun. Anna was cold. Her green uniform shorts and short-sleeved gray shirt offered little in the way of warmth. In a minute, when she was more awake, she would get her raincoat from her day pack.