“Have you ever had a murder at Glacier before?” she asked.
“You mean since it’s been a national park?” Harry thought about that for a bit. “Glacier was made a park in 1910. We joined up with Canada in 1932. There’s bound to have been some foul play but nothing in recent history,” he said finally. “They used to be rare as hen’s teeth.”
Used to be. Anna was thinking of the beheading in Yosemite a few years back, the death of the child in her own park only months before.
Population was at an all-time high. Park visitation was up. Anna remembered reading
Future Shock
in college, the experiments crowding too many rats in too small a space. Now, nearly thirty years later, it was happening in the parks. The rats were starting to kill each other.
Twenty minutes after
first light, before the sun had scraped over the jagged cliffs rising from the eastern edge of the mountain, camp was broken, gear was stowed. Joan and the rest of the bear team headed southeast to mark the helicopter landing area, their sad cargo belly down across a saddle like a gunslinger’s trophy. Needing the full light of the sun to properly examine the shrub-choked crime scene, Anna and Harry decided to first walk West Flattop Trail.
The woman had been butchered after death. The kind of precision knife or hatchet job that had been done on her face was the work of ten or fifteen minutes, maybe more considering the flesh cut away had been removed from the site. Butchering was a job requiring privacy. Consequently the body had been carried off the trail, as the drag marks attested. Corroborating this theory was the fact that the body had none of the scratches or scrapes that might be expected on the arms of a healthy live woman forced through a thick alder copse.
Had the murder occurred any distance off trail, most likely the killer would have had all the privacy needed to mutilate in peace and would have had no need to move the victim after death. Logic dictated that the murder had been committed on or near West Flattop, and fairly near where the body had been dumped. In August, with visitation at its peak, the killer would have wished to get the body out of sight as quickly as possible.
The burn covered both sides of West Flattop but for the small patch of green bordering the trail above where the body was found. It was an educated guess that the kill had occurred in the burn zone, where the perpetrator had little or no cover. He’d carried the victim till he found enough undergrowth he could hide in.
Anna and Harry walked, one to each side, three to five yards off the trail in search of the place the original violence had taken place. Just under half a mile from where they started, they found what was probably the victim’s backpack. It was forty feet into the burn, stuffed under a downed tree. Char and ash had been hastily pushed over it. The scorched soil would have proved an ideal surface for tracking if it hadn’t been for the rain the day before. What prints there might have been were melted into amorphous depressions that would keep their secrets.
Anna stood by, notebook in hand, while Harry photographed the pack and log with a different 35-mm camera than he’d used the night before. This one had been brought in by the helicopter. The other was his own. He’d come to the high country for a search and rescue, not to investigate a murder.
That done, he and Anna made a series of measurements so the exact location and lie of the pack could be reconstructed later on paper, should that prove necessary. Then Ruick pulled on latex gloves, carefully swept the debris off the pack and pulled it from where it had been stashed. He handled it as if protecting possible fingerprints, but it was just good form and training. The stained gray canvas, soaked with rain and grimed with soot, wouldn’t hold any latent prints.
From the way the pack moved, Anna could tell it contained something heavy. Harry emptied the zippered front pouch. “Mosquito repellent, tissues, topo—careful woman, carried two topographical maps.”
“Not careful enough,” Anna remarked as she wrote down the items he’d removed.
“No. I guess not. Let’s see what we got here.” He unzipped the main pocket of the day pack and lifted out three cameras and four lenses. “A photographer. From what little I know about camera equipment, my guess is this is pretty expensive stuff.”
“Rules out robbery,” Anna said. Robbery had never been a motive she’d considered seriously. Robbers took things and ran away. They didn’t drag corpses around and slice their faces off. Why would anyone slice off a face? “Maybe he didn’t want her recognized,” she said, seeing again the single eye staring out of the mess.
“If that’s the case he didn’t do a thorough job of it. I don’t know about you, but I’d recognize those near and dear to me if half their face was still there. It doesn’t take that much.”
That was true. With dental work, fingerprints, medical records and DNA it was nearly impossible to hide the identity of a corpse for any length of time. Unless it was a corpse nobody cared about, and hadn’t for a long time. Judging by the cameras, this woman was too well-to-do to be completely unloved.
“No film in any of the cameras,” Harry said after a brief inspection. He handed Anna the stuff to hold. Arms full, she abandoned the role of secretary. Ruick reached into the pack and took out four boxes of unopened film and three empties. “No exposed film,” he said. “These boxes must have been in here awhile. I guess she hadn’t gotten to wherever she was going to shoot before she was killed.”
“Or she was taking pictures of something the killer didn’t want recorded for posterity,” Anna said.
The chief ranger shot her a look of surprise. “Good point,” he said, and again she had the odd sensation that he was seeing her. It was as if underlings only existed as nameless cogs in a green and gray machine. Because Ruick was good at his job, he kept that machine clean, fueled and maintained, but scarcely expected the moving parts to show signs of initiative above their station in life.
Item by item he retrieved the cameras and lenses from Anna and restowed them in the pack. Another ten minutes were spent circling out from the log, studying the ground before he said, “This vein’s mined out,” and they moved on.
For the next couple of hours they continued to comb both sides of the trail east and west, but found no other trace of the woman or anything to indicate who killed her or why. With the sun high and bright, they returned to where the body had been and searched the path down and the area around where it had lain, but again found nothing. If the meat cut from the face had been tossed into the brush, something had dragged it away and eaten it. Gruesome as that image was, Anna preferred it to the idea that the killer was hiking around with human flesh packed along with his peanut butter and pork and beans. More measurements were taken, notes made. Anna sketched the crime scene. So tangled was it with branches and leaf litter that, as good as the sketch was, it still looked like the doodlings of an idiot.
Having done what they could, they hiked east toward Fifty Mountain Camp. Given the sinister goings-on since Van Slyke’s disappearance, Harry felt it behooved him to speak to the lost boy’s parents personally.
Three miles shy of Fifty Mountain they received news of Rory. Returned from hearse duty to search, the helicopter had flown over several times but it wasn’t from that source that they finally had word. The call came from dispatch in the valley town of West Glacier. Hikers north-bound on Flattop Trail, two miles south of where it intersected with West Flattop near Fifty Mountain Camp, had called park headquarters on their cell phone. They’d met a young man, naked from the waist up and wearing slippers. They said he was distraught. He knew his name, Rory Van Slyke, but otherwise seemed disoriented and claimed to be seeking help for two women who had been savaged by a giant bear. Except for a bad sunburn on his chest and shoulders, he appeared unhurt. The hikers would stay with him till a ranger arrived.
On receiving the news, Harry radioed the rest of the search party to stand down. After a night of bears, a day of rain, and a defiled corpse, Anna’d not realized how starved she was—everybody was—for good news. The searchers fairly chortled and glowed over the airwaves. Everyone needed to quip, joke, to say some clever thing. Understanding this phenomenon, Ruick let the good times effervesce at the cost of radio discipline for exactly two minutes. Anna saw him look at his watch timing it. Then he cut it off with orders.
Since he and Anna were closest to where Rory waited with the hikers, they would cut cross-country from West Flattop to Flattop Trail, bypassing Fifty Mountain Camp, and collect their truant Earthwatcher. Joan and Gary were to hike to Fifty Mountain and tell Mr. and Mrs. Van Slyke that Rory had been found unhurt. Buck, the backcountry ranger Anna had yet to meet, was to join them at the camp to assist Ruick in the murder investigation.
Two law enforcement men in two million acres seemed to be giving the murderer a definite edge, but there was little else to be done. A massive manhunt could be mounted if they had any idea who they were looking for. Till then it would only breed panic and ill will.
One of the great enduring joys of wilderness travel was that, in America at least, it did not require that one have one’s papers in order. Campers were supposed to have backcountry permits, but hikers didn’t need even that. When in the backcountry one could go to bed when tired, rise when rested and wander where the heart led, unidentified and untracked. Even had they pulled every backcountry permit issued, there was no way of knowing where the permittees might be at any given moment. No one wanted to admit it, but in a killing such as this, the murderer was likely to get away with it. If he or she—a woman could just as easily bone a chicken or filet a person as a man—was apprehended, it would have as much to do with dumb luck as good police work.
Their cross-country trek was short-lived, scarcely more than half a mile, but all of it uphill. They rejoined Flattop where it ran parallel to West Flattop. Back again on an improved surface, they made good time and reached the waiting threesome just after two o’clock, hardly more than an hour after dispatch radioed that Rory was found.
In the day Anna’d spent with the young Earthwatcher, he’d not seemed a particularly demonstrative lad; but when he saw her rounding a clump of trees behind the chief ranger his face actually appeared to light up, as the cliché would have it. His eyes, dull and downcast, crinkled and came to life. His face, slack to the point of idiocy, firmed into a boyish smile that ripened quickly into laughter. For a second Anna thought he was going to rush over and hug her. She braced herself but his inner light flickered and began to fail. Like a robot suffering a power interruption, his movements faltered. Anna realized that, though he had been glad to see her, the major wattage was reserved for the person he thought was going to round the trees in her footsteps.
The instant it came together in her mind, she jumped in to put the boy out of his misery. “Joan’s fine,” she said quickly, speaking overloud to penetrate the fog of trauma hovering around him. “Neither of us was hurt. Joan’s gone to Fifty Mountain to tell your folks you’re okay. Joan’s fine,” she repeated, making sure the salient fact soaked in.
“Hooray,” he said. “Hooray, hooray, hooray.” And he hugged himself, sunburned arms around a chest that was just beginning to show the breadth of manhood. He rocked slightly and Anna was put in mind of a cartoon dog she’d delighted in as a kid, Precious. Precious would hug himself and levitate whenever given a dog biscuit. Rory looked like he’d just been treated to Purina’s finest.
When he settled back to earth he began to chatter. “I thought you were dead. You and Joan. I heard that growling and I came back—honest to God I came back. But the bear was huge. I mean huge. Like a polar bear. So I—I knew I had to get help—”
“Easy, son, time for that later. You’ve had the whole park looking for you for nearly two days. A lot of people are going to be real glad to see you.” Harry didn’t sound like one of those glad individuals. He came across as brusque and crabby. Anna noticed the hikers, not yet properly thanked for their heroic role in the saga, exchange a glance of disapproval.
Maybe Harry was a heartless s.o.b., but Anna didn’t think so. At least not entirely. She recognized the unpleasant task of leadership: Harry’s work wasn’t done yet. Happy as he might be that Van Slyke was alive and well, there were new plans to be laid now.
The less altruistic side of the NPS leadership mantle was the deep-down belief that virtually every ranger harbored—only idiots and green-horns got themselves lost. Purists even espoused the idea that the money and man-hours used to find them could be better spent. Anna would have been in favor of that radical view of no-rescue wilderness had she not found search and rescue work so satisfying. Enlightened self-interest; if the corporations and bureaucracies could get away with calling selfishness that, surely a private citizen could try it on for size.
“Anna,” Harry called her out of her thoughts. “Are you an EMT?”
“Yes.”
“Do your thing.” He nodded in Rory’s direction. As she led the boy a little way away from the others, she heard Ruick click into politician mode and begin to say the right things to the hikers. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when she would have quietly rolled her eyes and indulged in a small sniff of superiority. No more. Since she’d become a manager, she’d been made acutely aware of how important a part of the job being a good politician was. And what a joy it was to be a lowly flunky again for a few days.
She sat Rory on a stump, dug out the first-aid kit and, while he told his story, ran through a standard field check.
“I’d got out of my tent and gone into the woods just a little way behind that big rock. Something must’ve kind of upset my system or something and it wouldn’t wait till morning . . . you know?”
He looked to Anna to validate that diarrhea was an acceptable reason to leave one’s tent in the dead of night.