2 Blood Trail

by Tanya Huff

  “Uh, Ms. Nelson, you don’t have much experience in woods, do you?” Rose asked tentatively.

  “No. Not especially,” Vicki admitted, “but . . . Rose, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “It’s just that, you’re from the city and. . . .”

  “That’s not what I meant!” She positioned herself between the woods and the girl. “You know someone is watching your family from those trees. Why are you changing? Why take such a stupid risk?”

  Rose rubbed at the dirt on her face. “But there’s no one there now.”

  “You can’t know that!” Why the whole damned county wasn’t in on the family secret, Vicki had no idea.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “How?”

  “It’s upwind.”

  “Upwind? The woods are upwind? You can smell that there’s no one there?”

  “That’s right.”

  Vicki reminded herself once again not to judge by human standards and decided to drop it. “I think you two should get home.”

  “Maybe we should stay with you.”

  “No.” Vicki shook her head. “If you’re with me, you’ll influence what I see.” She raised a hand to cut off Peter’s protest and added, “Even if you don’t intend to. Besides, it’s too dangerous.”

  Peter shrugged. “It’s been safe enough since Ebon died.”

  It took her a moment to understand. “You mean that two members of your family were shot out here and you’re still coming in range of the woods? At night?”

  “We’ve been in pairs like Henry said,” he protested. “And we’ve had the wind.”

  I don’t believe this. . . . “From now on, until we know what’s going on, no one comes out to these fields.”

  “But we have to keep on eye on the sheep.”

  “Why?” Vicki snapped, waving a hand toward the flock. “Do they do something?”

  “Besides eat and sleep? No, not really. But the reason there’s so few commercial sheep operations in Canada is a problem with predators.” Peter’s lips drew back off his teeth and under his hair, his ears went back. “We don’t have problems with predators.”

  “But you’ve gotta keep a pretty constant eye out,” Rose continued, “so someone’s got to come out here.”

  “Can’t you move the sheep closer to the house?”

  “We rotate the pastures,” Peter explained. “It doesn’t quite work like that.”

  “Bugger the pastures and bugger the sheep,” Vicki said, her tone, in direct contrast to her words, reminiscent of a lecture on basic street safety to a kindergarten class. “Your lives are more important. Either leave these sheep alone for a while or move them closer to the house.”

  Rose and Peter exchanged worried glances.

  “It’s not just the sheep . . .” Rose began.

  “Then what?”

  “Well, this is the border of our family’s territory. It has to be marked.”

  “What do you mean, marked?” Vicki asked even though she had a pretty good idea.

  Rose waved her hands, her palms were filthy. “You know, marked. Scent marked.”

  “I would have thought that had been done already.”

  “Well, yeah, but you’ve got to keep doing it.”

  Vicki sighed. “So you’re willing to risk your life in order to pee on a post?”

  “It’s not quite that simple.” Rose sighed as well. “But I guess not.”

  “I guess we could talk to Uncle Stuart . . .” Peter offered.

  “You do that,” Vicki told him agreeably. “But you do that back at the house. Now.”

  “But. . . .”

  “No.” Things had been a little strange for Vicki lately—her eyes, Henry, werewolves—but she was working now and, regardless of the circumstances, that put her back on firm ground. Two shots had been fired from those trees and somewhere in the woods would be the tiny bits of flotsam that even the most meticulous of criminals left behind, evidence that would lead her out of the woods and right down the bastard’s throat.

  The twins heard the change in her voice, saw the change in her manner, and responded. Cloud stood and shook, surrounding herself for a moment in a nimbus of fine white hairs. Peter heaved himself to his feet, his hand on Cloud’s shoulder. He tucked his thumbs behind the waist band of his shorts, then paused. “Would you mind?” he asked, gesturing at her shoulder bag with his chin.

  Vicki sighed, suddenly feeling old. The distance between thirty-one and seventeen stretched far wider than the distance between thirty-one and four hundred and fifty. “I assume your nose tells you it’s still safe?”

  “Cross my heart and bite my tail.”

  “Then give them here,” she said, holding out her hand.

  He grinned, stripped them off, and tossed them to her. Peter stretched, then Storm stretched, then he and Cloud bounded back toward the house.

  Vicki watched until they leapt the closer of the two fences, stuffed Peter’s shorts in her bag, and turned toward the woods. The underbrush appeared to reach up to meet the treetops reaching down, every leaf hanging still and sullen in the August heat. Who knew what was in there? She sure as hell didn’t.

  At the edge of the field she stopped, squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and pushed forward into the wilderness. Somehow, she doubted this was going to be fun.

  Barry Wu blinked a drop of sweat from his eye, squinted through his front sights, and brought the barrel of his .30-06 Springfield down a millimeter.

  Normally, he preferred to shoot at good old-fashioned targets set at the greatest distance accuracy would allow but he’d just finished loading a number of low velocity rounds—the kind that reacted ballistically at one hundred yards the way a normal round would react at five—and he wanted to try them out. He’d been reloading his own cartridges since he was about fourteen, but lately he’d been getting into more exotic varieties and these were the first of this type he’d attempted.

  A hundred yards away, the lead silhouette of the grizzly waited, scaled in the same five to one ratio as the rounds he planned to put into it.

  The bullet slammed into the target with a satisfyingly solid sound and Barry felt a little of the tension drain from his neck and shoulders as the grizzly went down. He worked the bolt, expelling the spent cartridge and moving the next round into the chamber. Shooting had always calmed him. When it was good, and lately it always was, he and the rifle became part of a single unit, one the extension of the other. All the petty grievances of his life could be shot away with a simple pull of the trigger.

  All right, not all, he conceded as the moose and the mountain sheep fell in quick succession. I’m going to have to do something about Colin Heerkens. The trust necessary for them to do their job was in definite danger. Rising anger caused him to wing the elk, but the white-tailed deer he hit just behind the shoulder.

  We clear this up tonight.

  He centered the last target and squeezed the trigger.

  One way or another.

  A hundred yards away, the lead silhouette of the timber wolf slammed flat under the impact of the slug.

  Vicki rubbed at a welt on her cheek and waved her other hand about in an ineffectual effort to discourage the swarms of mosquitoes that rose around her with every step. Fortunately, most of them appeared to be males. Or dieting females, she amended, trying not to inhale any significant number. Barely a hundred yards into the trees, the field and the sheep had disappeared and looking back the way she’d come, all she could see were more trees. It hadn’t been as hard a slog as she’d feared it would be but neither was it a stroll through the park. Fortunately, the sunlight blazed through to the forest floor in sufficient strength to be useful. The world was tinted green, but it was visible.

  “Somebody should tidy this place up,” she muttered, unhooking her hair from a bit of dead branch. “Preferably with a flamethrower.”

  She kept to as straight a path as she could, picking out a tree or a bush along the assumed line of fire
and then struggling toward it. Somewhere in these woods, she knew she’d find a fixed place where their marksman had a clear line of sight. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that this place could only exist up off the forest floor. Which explained why the wer had found nothing; if they hunted like wolves, it was nose to the ground.

  Trouble was, every tree she passed had so far been unclimbable. Trees large enough to bear an adult’s weight stretched relatively smooth and straight up toward the sun, not branching until there was a chance of some return for the effort.

  “So, unless he brought in a ladder . . .” Vicki sighed and scrubbed a drop of sweat off her chin with the shoulder of her T-shirt. She could see what might be higher ground a little to the right of where she thought she should be heading and decided to make for it. Stepping over a fallen branch, she tripped as the smaller branches, hidden under a rotting layer of last year’s leaves, gave way under her foot.

  “Parking lots.” Shoving her glasses back up her nose, she stood and scowled around her at Mother Nature in the height of her summer beauty. “I’m all in favor of parking lots. A couple of layers of asphalt would do wonders for this place.” Off to one side a cicada started to buzz. “Shut up,” she told it, trudging on.

  The higher ground turned out to be the end of a low ridge of rock on which a massive pine had managed to gain, and maintain, a roothold. Brushing aside years of accumulated needles, Vicki sat down just outside the perimeter of its skirts and contemplated her scratched and bitten legs.

  This was all Henry’s fault. She could have been at home, comfortably settled in front of her eighteen inch, three speed, oscillating fan, watching Saturday morning cartoons, and . . .

  “. . . and the wer would continue to die.” She sighed and began building the fallen pine needles into little piles. This was what she’d chosen to do with her life—to try to make a difference in the sewer the world was becoming—no point in complaining just because it wasn’t always an easy job. And she had to admit, it was a job that had gotten a hell of a lot more interesting since Henry had come into her life. The jury was still out on whether or not that was a good thing given that the last time they’d worked together she’d come closer to getting killed than she ever had in nine years on the Metro Police.

  “And this time, I’m being eaten alive.” She rubbed at a bite on the back of her leg with the rough front of her sneaker. “Maybe I’m going at this the wrong way. Maybe I should have started with the people. What the hell am I going to recognize out here?” Then her hand froze over a patch of needles and slowly moved back until the needles were in full sunlight again.

  The scorch mark was so faint she had to hold her head at just the right angle to see it. About two inches long and half an inch wide, it was a marginally darker line across the pale brown carpet of dead pine—the mark a spent cartridge might make against a tinder dry resting place.

  Oh, all right, honesty forced her to admit, it could’ve been caused by any number of other things-like acid rain or bunny piss. But it sure looked like a cartridge scorch to her. Of course, it could’ve come from a legitimate hunter out here to blow away whatever it is legitimate hunters blow away.

  There were plenty of bits of bare rock nearby where the gunman could have stood to retrieve his brass and plenty of places Vicki had cleared herself but she searched for tracks anyway. Not expecting to find any didn’t lessen the frustration when she didn’t.

  Better to find where the shot came from. The ridge stood barely two and a half feet higher than the forest floor and the lines of sight hadn’t improved. Vicki looked up. The pine was higher than most of the trees around it but its branches drooped, heavy with needles, right to the ground. Then on the north side, she found a way in to a dimly lit cavern, roofed in living needles, carpeted in dead ones. It was quiet in there, and almost cool, and the branches rose up the trunk as regular as a ladder; which was a good thing because Vicki could barely see.

  This was it. This had to be it.

  Had she seen the pine from the field? She couldn’t remember, trees all looked alike to her.

  She peered at a few tiny spurs snapped off close to the trunk, her nose almost resting on the bark. They could have been broken by someone scrabbling for a foothold. Or they could have been broken by overweight squirrels. There’s only one way to be sure. Settling her glasses more firmly on her face, she swung up onto the first branch.

  Climbing wasn’t as easy as it looked from the ground; a myriad of tiny branches poked and prodded and generally impeded progress and the whole damn thing moved. Vicki hadn’t actually been up a tree since about 1972 and she was beginning to remember why.

  If her nose hadn’t scraped by an inch from the sneaker print, she probably wouldn’t have seen it. Tucked tight up against the trunk on a flattened glob of pine resin, was almost a full square inch of tread signature. Not enough for a conviction, not with every man, woman, and child in the country owning at least one pair of running shoes, but it was a start. The stuff was so soft that removing it from the tree would destroy the print so she made a couple of quick sketches—balanced precariously on one trembling leg—then placed her foot as close to it as possible and heaved herself up.

  Her head broke free into direct sunlight. She blinked and swore and when her vision cleared, swore again. “Jesus H. Christ on crutches. . . .”

  She’d come farther into the woods than she’d thought. About five hundred yards away, due north, was the spot where Ebon had been shot. A half turn and she could see the small pasture where Silver had been killed, a little closer but still an amazing distance away. If Barry Wu had pulled the trigger, he should have no trouble making the Olympic team or bringing home a gold. Vicki knew that some telescopic sights incorporated range finders but even they took both innate skill and years of practice to acquire the accuracy necessary. Throw in a moving target at five hundred yards. . . .

  She’d once heard that according to all the laws of physics, a human being should not be able to hit a major league fastball. By those same laws of physics, the assassin had hit not one, but two, and hit them out of the ballpark besides.

  A quick search turned up rubs in the bark where he’d braced his weapon on the tree.

  “Unfortunately,” she sighed, leaning her head back against a convenient branch, “discovering how and where brings me no closer to finding the answers to why and who.” Closing her eyes for a moment, the sun hot against the lids, she wondered if she’d actually go through with it; if when she found the killer, she’d actually turn him over to the wer for execution. She didn’t have an answer. She didn’t have an alternative either.

  It was time to head back to the house and make some phone calls, although she had a sick feeling that a drive into town and a good look at Constable Barry Wu’s sneakers would be more productive.

  Climbing down the tree took less time than climbing up but only because gravity took a hand and dropped her seven feet before she landed on a branch thick enough to hold her weight. Heart pounding, she made it the rest of the way to the ground in a slightly less unorthodox fashion.

  Had her Swiss army knife contained a saw, she would have attempted to remove that final branch, the one that lifted the climber out of the tree and into the light. Unfortunately, it didn’t and whittling off a pine branch two inches in diameter didn’t appeal to her. In fact, except for attempting to keep them out of those fields, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to prevent the tree from being used as a vantage point to shoot the wer.

  “Never a beaver around when you need one,” she muttered, wishing she’d brought an ax. She had, however, uncovered two facts about the murderer. He had to be at least five foot ten, her height—any shorter and his shoulder wouldn’t be level with the place where the rifle barrel had rested—and the odds were good that his hair was short and straight. She dragged a handful of needles and a small branch out of her short, straight hair. Had her hair been long or curly, she’d never had made it out of the tree alive.

&
nbsp; “Excuse me?”

  The shriek was completely involuntary and as she caught it before it passed her lips Vicki figured it didn’t count. Her hand on her bag—it had made a useful weapon in the past—she whirled around to confront two puzzled looking middle-aged women, both wearing high-powered binoculars, one of them carrying a canvas bag about a meter long and twenty centimeters wide.

  “We were just wondering,” said the shorter, “what you were doing up that tree.”

  Vicki shrugged, waning adrenaline jerking her shoulders up and down. “Oh, just looking around.” She waved a not quite nonchalant hand at the canvas bag. “You out here to do a little shooting?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Although this is our camera tripod, not a rifle.”

  “It’s illegal to shoot on conservation authority property,” added the other woman. She glared at Vicki, obviously still unhappy at having found her up in a tree. “We would report anyone we found shooting out here, you can be certain of that.”

  “Hey.” Vicki raised both hands to shoulder height. “I’m unarmed.” As neither woman seemed to appreciate her sense of humor, she lowered them again. “You’re birders, aren’t you?” A recent newspaper nature column had mentioned that birders was now the preferred term; bird-watcher having gone out of vogue.

  Apparently, the column had been correct.

  Twenty minutes later, Vicki had learned more about nature photography than she wanted to know; learned that in spite of the high-power binoculars the two women had seen nothing strange on the Heerkens farm—“We don’t look at other people’s property, we look at birds. ”—and, in fact, didn’t even know where the Heerkens farm was; learned that a .30 caliber rifle and scope would easily fit into a tripod bag, allowing it to be carried into the woods without arousing suspicion. Although neither woman had ever come across a hunter, they’d both found spent shell casings and so were always on the look out. With middle-class confidence that no one would ever want to hurt them, they laughed at Vicki’s warnings to be careful.