Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds

by Michael McBride

  Seaver glanced over at her. He could tell by her expression that she didn’t entirely believe what she was saying. If anyone knew these woods and the animals that inhabited it as well as him, it was Crowell.

  “Have you seen any claw marks or signs of rubbing on any other trees? Or how about spoor? You and I both know that bears mark the hell out of their territory.”

  “It doesn’t matter what did it,” Dayton said. “I’m sorry you lost a sheep, ranger, but right now our main concern’s what might have happened to five people. Surely you can appreciate how that takes priority.”

  Seaver nodded. The sheriff was right and he knew it. The dead ram was his problem and there was nothing he could do about it now. On the positive side, the sheriff had officially established that this had nothing to do with him, so no one would have any reason to criticize him for heading back to his truck the moment he showed them where he found the video camera. He had his work cut out for him if he was going to figure out which species of animal had scavenged the ram. While he still leaned toward the idea that it had been poachers who were ultimately responsible for its death, the fact that there was an animal or some unknown number of animals capable of causing such damage to its remains meant he needed to implement measures to protect the remainder of his diminishing herd. He had access to an enormous computer database that catalogued not only every species native to a given region, but everything from its tracks in various substrates to its bite and claw marks in everything from fruit to flesh.

  He thought about the macerated wound where he assumed the bullet had struck the ram. Had he interrupted whatever animal was scavenging the remains? Had it been mere feet away in the forest while he examined the carcass and then searched this very hollow?

  The mere thought elicited a shiver.

  He took pictures from every conceivable angle, including the best close-ups he could get of the branches where the animal had crouched and dislodged the bark. Even when he zoomed in as far as he could go, he couldn’t tell if there were any claw marks, only that it was definitely blood on the broad branch.

  The wind screamed through the valley, tossing the upper canopy.

  Zeke growled.

  Seaver turned to see the dog staring deeper into the forest with his teeth bared.

  “The video camera?” Dayton said.

  “Yeah.” Seaver put his camera into his backpack as he walked and slung it over his shoulders. “That’s one of the arrows I told you about over there.”

  The man who’d arrived in the old Bronco scurried up the hill to the trunk and traced the design with his fingertips. It had been carved long enough ago that the pulp had faded to gray and the sap had become brittle.

  Seaver didn’t know who the man was, but if his expression was any indication, he had a pretty good idea. All the more reason to just get this over with and get back to solving his own problems. He pitied the poor guy, but he wasn’t looking to carry any of his baggage for him.

  He slid sideways down the cut where the snow was already several inches deep and bounded out into an open stretch where he was buffeted by flakes the size of moths. The wind felt like it propelled slivers of ice, which pierced him clear to the bone. Another dozen strides and he was again surrounded by forest so dense the storm barely reached the ground.

  “Right over there,” he said, and pointed to the hole inside the network of roots where he’d found the camera.

  The man from the Bronco pushed past him and fell to his knees on the bare earth. He craned his neck to better see into the shadows, then attacked the bank with his bare hands.

  “You need to back off,” Dayton said. “This is a potential crime scene.”

  “How much evidence do you think could have possibly survived seven years out here?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  The man stopped digging and raised his hands in mock surrender.

  “Was there anything else in there?” Dayton said.

  “I didn’t see anything, and I didn’t think to keep looking,” Seaver said. “There was just enough charge left on the battery for me to see what I showed you. After seeing that, I figured I was way out of my depth.”

  The man turned to face him.

  “What did you see?”

  Seaver glanced over at Dayton, who quickly shook his head.

  The man stared down the sheriff. The air became electric with tension. Seaver could think of nowhere he wanted to be less, so he set about extricating himself from the situation.

  “I got you guys here. Just like I said I would. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get back to the station so I can figure out what took apart that ram.”

  “Why don’t you just track it?” Crowell said.

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s not a single print out here. Even if there is, the trail will be buried under the snow by the time we find it.”

  If they could get Zeke on the scent, he could probably follow it, regardless of the storm. He looked at the dog, which stood at the top of the gulley, still staring off into the woods. His haunches quivered and he tucked his tail between his legs. With a high-pitched whine, he scampered down into the ravine and sat beside Crowell’s legs. He cowered and shook like he’d just been beaten.

  Seaver glanced back up at the dark forest and realized that he didn’t need a dog, or even a single paw print, to track the animal responsible for the carnage.

  Assuming it still had the rest of the ram’s carcass, anyway.

  * * *

  Avery had known the sheriff was holding out on him since their first conversation, but he hadn’t realized the gravity of that information until the ranger mentioned what he’d seen and the sheriff had silenced him with a look. He’d have to find a way to isolate the ranger and get the details without the sheriff finding out. Right now, though, he was closer to Michelle than he’d been in seven years and he wasn’t about to let anything stand in his way. He started digging again with everything he had.

  “Get your hands out of there!”

  “What would you do in my place, Sheriff?”

  Dayton looked him up and down, nodded, and turned away.

  Avery’s fingertips hurt from scratching the hard earth. He saw black streaks on the soil and pulled his hands out into the light. His fingers were coated with a layer of earth and mud that congealed on the lacerations he couldn’t see, but from which a steady layer of crimson seeped to the surface. He couldn’t help but imagine Michelle kneeling in this very spot, clawing at the hole to widen it enough to hide the video camera.

  He wasn’t so naïve that he didn’t understand why she would have felt compelled to conceal the camera. She had known there was a good chance she was going to die and had left some sort of message on the tape. And presumably it was that message the sheriff was withholding from him, although to what end he could only speculate. Until he knew for sure that she wasn’t still out here somewhere, though, he would continue to throw himself into the search with everything he had.

  Maybe she’d hidden something else, something that only he would recognize. He clenched his trembling hands in an effort to stop them from shaking, then reached back into the hole. The dirt was as hard as asphalt and came away in chunks. He brushed them out onto the ground in front of him and was just about to resume digging when something caught his eye. It was roughly ovular in shape and reminded him of a Pringle, only much smaller. The convex surface was a brownish color with flecks of red enamel. There was a black crust on the underside.

  It was a fingernail.

  “Jesus,” the younger guy with the camera said. He took a picture of it and quickly turned away.

  Avery closed his eyes and pictured Michelle lying on the couch with her bare feet propped on his lap while she painted her fingernails with long, glossy strokes.

  “I’m going to need to collect that, son.”

  The sheriff leaned over him and scooped the nail into a plastic bag.

  The thought of how frightened she must have bee
n to continue digging after her entire fingernail was torn from the cuticle made him sick to his stomach. He scrambled away from the hole and heaved several times before regaining his composure. He spat the vile taste from his mouth and wiped his lips with the back of his dirty hand, which was shaking so badly he could barely control it.

  He turned to find Dayton again crouching over the dirt with the bag open. In his hurry to crawl away, Avery had scattered it, and in doing so revealed another, much shorter fingernail with a vertical tear down the center, and a tangle of hair, which Dayton teased from the soil with the tip of his pen. There were maybe six strands in a clump, almost like you’d pull from the drain after a shower, only they were brittle and dirty and looked almost gray.

  “Any of them have hair this color?”

  Dayton stared him down when he spoke. His expression was meant to look casual, but Avery had been dealing with law enforcement officers long enough to know better.

  “No.” Avery leaned closer and appraised the hair from several different angles. “At least not that I remember. Amy’s hair was about that long, but it was much darker.”

  “Your girlfriend was blond, right?”

  “It was much brighter. And longer, too.”

  “Hair color fades over time,” Crowell said. “You’ll find black bear fur snagged on branches that’s bleached almost white by the sun.”

  Dayton just nodded and resumed bagging his collection.

  “Now how do you figure a clump of hair got in there?” he said. “Or better yet, why would someone bury it with the camera? I mean, what are the odds it just fell out like that and the wind blew it in there?”

  Avery assumed the questions were rhetorical, so he didn’t answer. Instead, he stood and looked up toward what little sky he could see through the canopy. The clouds had descended into the snow-blanketed treetops. He knew the hair wasn’t Michelle’s. Not only was it too short, it was too thin. How many times had he run his fingers through her long locks when drawing her face to his? But why would she hide someone else’s hair with the video camera? And why would she have a clump of hair in the first place? Had she yanked it out of her attacker’s head?

  There was a crackling sound behind him. He whirled to find the ranger standing uphill with what looked like an old TV antenna raised above his head. A cord connected it to a handheld device, which appeared to be the source of the noise.

  The ranger turned in a complete circle before settling upon a point deeper into the valley. He looked up from his monitor with an expression of confusion.

  “The radio beacon’s just over half a mile that way.”

  “What does that mean?” Dayton asked.

  “The ram was collared. It wore a radio frequency-emitting beacon around its neck.”

  “You’re saying that whatever animal got to your bighorn dragged the carcass half a mile in a matter of hours?”

  The ranger slapped the unit and fiddled with the dials on top. The static squelched and he turned slightly to his right.

  “Yeah, and it’s still moving at a decent click.”

  * * *

  Dayton was at a loss. He didn’t know what he thought he’d find, but he’d definitely expected to find something more useful than a couple of fingernails and a collection of hairs, at least in a more immediate sense. His expectations had been abstract, and yet a part of him had figured he’d be calling in the discovery of evidence the ranger had simply missed. Or maybe Avery would recognize the house from the video. Then again, maybe he hoped Avery was guilty and bringing him back to the scene of the crime would cause him to crack. As it stood now, all he could think to do was have Thom help him string a cordon of crime scene tape around the tree while he tried in vain to raise the station on his two-way transceiver.

  Once he got a signal, he’d have them call in the crime scene response team out of Denver, but considering the demand for their services and the fact that his evidence was seven years old, his case wasn’t likely to receive priority treatment. The best he could hope to do was document absolutely everything and hope to catch a break.

  If the girl’s death was imminent when she hid the camera, then it was a distinct possibility that she’d been killed shortly thereafter, which meant that her body had to be out here somewhere. In an area this remote, it would make more sense to just throw some dirt over the remains and be done with it, instead of trying to haul it out to the nearest road. And if that were the case, then surely Crowell’s dog could sniff it out.

  “What do you think, Denise? Can that dog of yours pick up a scent trail for me?”

  Crowell looked at him for several seconds before replying.

  “We’re not bringing this girl back with us, are we?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Wayne. You know exactly what I mean. Those fingernails have been out here for a long time and I’m starting to think that story about it just being an old camera is something you made up to get Zeke and me out here. If you want my help, you’d damn well better tell me everything you know.”

  Dayton realized she’d just officially made her choice between the two jobs. His deputy would have backed his play without question. This person was a stranger to him.

  “The camera belonged to a girl who went missing seven years ago,” Thom said.

  Crowell never took her eyes off Dayton.

  “You told him, but you didn’t feel as though you could tell me?”

  “I needed his help to make the tape play. That’s all. Besides, this isn’t about us. The way I see it, that little girl and her friends have been out here for far too long already and it’s about time someone figured out what happened to them.”

  “What you’re saying is you want Zeke to find where she’d buried—”

  “Wait a minute,” Avery said. “We don’t know she’s dead.”

  “And so this must be her brother?”

  “Boyfriend.”

  “Tell me you didn’t bring him along to sweat him.”

  Dayton shrugged. “He was cleared by the original investigators.”

  “You’re so full of crap. You willfully endangered all of our lives—”

  “I had nothing to do with their disappearance,” Avery interrupted. “And I don’t give a rat’s ass what any of you think. I’ve been searching for Michelle for seven years and this is the closest I’ve come. I’m not leaving here until I find out what happened to her.”

  He glared at Dayton, then Crowell, and climbed up to the top of the ravine to survey the surrounding area.

  Dayton sighed.

  “Can he find the body or not?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never trained him on anything other than animals and living human scents.”

  “Give it your best, okay?”

  Dayton turned and headed down to the bottom of the gully.

  “What was on the tape?” Crowell said to his back.

  “A girl resigned to the fact that she was about to die.”

  “I’ve known you for a lot of years, Wayne. You wouldn’t have dragged us all the way up here if you didn’t have something more concrete than that to go on.”

  He stopped, shook his head, and turned to face her. He held his hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the blowing snow while he appraised her. Without another word, he removed the folded images from his pocket, placed them in her hand, and walked away.

  It would make things a whole lot quicker and easier if she decided to help, but he didn’t need to justify his actions to her. He was the sheriff and didn’t answer to her or anyone else.

  Even this many years later, a shallow grave would still be easy enough to spot by the growth pattern of the plant species. Humans were by nature a lazy breed. They didn’t dig graves any larger than absolutely necessary, which meant he was looking for a patch of earth roughly rectangular in shape and maybe two feet wide and five-and-a-half feet long. The physical action of excavating and refilling an area of the ground not only destroyed the existing veget
ation, but turned the soil, creating a seed bed for the establishment of new plants. These new plants went through a natural progression from pioneer weeds to perennials, and finally to shrubs and trees whose growth patterns would be different from the surrounding forest. The process of decomposition led to more fertile soil, which, in turn, accommodated more individual trees in a smaller space. At least until their food source was depleted and the body was reduced to bones. In a region like this, he would expect to find a conglomeration of junipers surrounding a tight cluster of aspens or scrub—

  “I know this place,” Crowell said. She held up the printout of the ranch house. “I’ve seen it, anyway.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Somewhere near Devil’s Creek? At least I think this is the same place.”

  Dayton climbed up to the crest of the hill to gather his bearings. It was hard to tell exactly where he was, but if he had to wager a guess he’d have to say Devil’s Creek was somewhere in—he turned in a half-circle—that direction.

  He found himself staring directly at Seaver’s back as he crunched through the underbrush with his antenna held high.

  * * *

  There was something wrong with the signal, as though it were being attenuated by a physical barrier of some kind. One minute it was there, the next it was gone. Seaver had seen this before with tagged bears, which often lost signal when they entered their dens. There weren’t any caves around here, at least not that he’d seen. That was the least of his concerns, though.

  The beacon was still moving. Not continuously, but in spurts. It remained static for long stretches of time before abruptly moving a considerable distance very quickly. Considering the ram’s horns alone weighed more than thirty pounds, any amount of the animal still attached to them would make it both prohibitively heavy and unwieldy. It was possible someone had removed the collar, but what could they possibly hope to accomplish by doing so?