“Thanks, Officer.” Smith followed a line of small orange flags that delineated where he could walk without angering the lead crime scene investigator. “Go ahead and just head back to the road,” he yelled over us to him, “and continue making sure no one without clearance tries to wander back here, will ya?”
I had worked with Joe not only in DC for seminars we were all forced to attend, but several times when I was on the local force and needed to collaborate with park officials. Actually, I considered him a friend. We had gone out to shoot the shit a time or two when we needed an off-duty beer in DC. As far as I could see, he never let ego interfere with his work or his friendships, and in this line of work that was certainly refreshing.
“Systead.” Joe refocused on me and smiled. He held out his hand to me.
“Good to see you, Chief.” We shook, grabbing each other’s shoulders with our free hands. He then greeted Monty and introduced us to Sheriff Walsh, using my full title, Special Agent Ted Systead from the Northwest Homicide Division of the Department of the Interior.
Walsh looked me up and down, not a hint of anything but confidence in his icy blue stare. He obviously could care less about titles—special agent this and that division—and I have to say I respected him for it. “Heard you used to work for the Kalispell force in the midnineties. That so?”
“That’s correct,” I said.
“Oh.” He shrugged, still unimpressed. “Well, not sure how this one’ll break down, but the victim might be local.”
I could sense Joe tensing a bit. And so, the usual pissing contest had begun on some level. I couldn’t blame Walsh if he was irritated. I mean, the Park Police had called his forensics unit first. From his perspective, there was no need for our intrusion, and I wasn’t convinced yet that there was a need for us either other than that we were federal and Glacier Park was federal.
“From Martin City,” Walsh continued. “Outside the park. Before that, he lived in Trego, that’s t’ward the Canadian border.”
I shrugged, knowing that where the victim came from made no difference. The crime was clearly in Glacier, but again, I could understand where he was coming from. He and his boys, being from the area, would have an easier time investigating a local. “Yeah, Trego, right past Fortine.” I couldn’t help but remind him that I knew the area well. I caught a glance from Monty out of the corner of my eye and could sense Smith subtly let out a pent-up breath, relieved that I was local enough for at least some credibility with Walsh.
I looked around to take it all in. Blood smattered the dirt and bushes around the tall ponderosa. Layer upon layer of duct tape circled the victim’s chest under his armpits, around his hips, and all the way around the tree. What was left of his upper body hung limply like a broken and solitary puppet someone had raided for parts. Blood soaked what was left of a barely recognizable strip of shirt draping from one shoulder toward the hip on the same side. I caught my breath and held it until my pulse began to race.
Some equally shredded and bloody jeans still hung from a belt around his waist, but his entire thigh had been ripped cleanly off as if a butcher had sliced it off with a knife. Huge chunks had been bitten off the other leg as well, and one arm from the shoulder down had been ripped clean away. His head dangled so that I couldn’t see his face straight on, but could tell that a large flap from his skull and the side of his face had been bitten away.
My throat began to tighten, and I began to feel as if my feet were barely touching the ground. I swallowed hard. “Who’s lead tech?” I turned away, found Walsh’s steely gaze first.
Walsh pointed to a woman whom I’d not spotted when we first came. She was walking to join the other techs in the woods farther past where the taped line ended. “Gretchen Larson. I’ll introduce you in a minute.”
I turned back to the body and the smell of earth, decaying flesh slowly warming in the October sun and a hint of that overly pungent skunky bear smell seemed to grow stronger. Flies buzzed everywhere, and I could feel the fingers of that imaginary fist in my sternum spread out as if trying to reach my stomach and my throat, where the beginning of either fear or nausea built. A tech snapped photos somewhere off to my side, and the smooth clicking of the camera in the distance pulled me away from the chill rapidly spreading inside me.
“Have you ID’d him yet?” I asked.
“We think so. A Victor Lance.”
“He have ID on him?”
“No, our guys found a first initial and last name on the inside of his belt and we have someone in the system who matches the name and what we’ve determined of his build. Won’t be sure about prints until the remains get to the lab; his remaining hand has been chewed on.”
My father’s gold wedding band flashed in my mind and I wasn’t sure why. He rarely even wore it because, as he always told my ma, it interfered with scrubbing and putting on and taking off his gloves.
“From the pinkie and ring fingers that are left,” Walsh continued, “we think we can get a match. So far, we can’t tell from the face, but if it is him, turns out he was charged ’bout four years ago with threatening to beat up the attendant of a Town Pump quick stop if she didn’t hand over a couple cans of chewin’ tobacco and some cigarettes.”
I stayed quiet, and Monty seemed to have enough sense to follow my lead, perhaps because he was starting to look a little faint. I wondered if he’d been around a stiff before.
“We might have to look at his teeth if we can’t get it from his prints. If there’s family around, we’re leaning against having them ID’ing him for obvious reasons.” Walsh adjusted his belt, hiking his pants up a notch. “Tape is thickly layered and tight under the armpits and around the hips. Arms were not bound. Like some goddamned freak show.”
Monty whistled a low note to express his utter understanding that it was weird.
I said nothing and slowly walked closer to the victim, my head tilted to the side as if from curiosity, when really I was trying not to allow that internal fist from getting a straight shot up the back of my neck and into the back of my skull. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen numerous dead bodies, some of them downright gruesome, like the time some guy took an ax to his wife in his backyard not far outside Kalispell. Or the victims from that serial-killer case in the Grand Canyon that got so much press. LaMatto and I almost didn’t nail that scrawny Uncle Lasko—not until he had slit three women’s throats, raped, and dismembered them.
And it’s not like I hadn’t seen bodies picked at or chewed on by wild animals before either; there was no way to avoid that when you worked with murder in the woods. No, the deep-reaching queasiness was nothing new, but the sensation I was getting with this one was: I felt as if my legs had suddenly detached from under me and my torso was simply hovering slightly off to one side, as if my body had been transposed into an out-of-focus holograph.
I put on my gloves. “Mind if I have a look?” I yelled over to the crime scene tech, crouched at the base of a tree outside the taped area with another tech. This was my subtle cue to Walsh that I would now be taking the investigative lead; I had no intention of waiting for him to introduce us later. The county crime scene group would, of course, stay on the scene.
She stood and came to us and before she caught up, Monty whispered, “Know her?”
“No. You?”
Monty shook his head.
She was stout and no more than five foot five. Very blond with fair skin and pale blue eyes. “I’m Gretchen Larson.” She spoke with an accent that explained her name, her eyes, and her blond hair. I figured she was either Norwegian or Swedish. Possibly Danish or maybe German, but I doubted it. The consonants were not so hard.
I introduced myself and Monty, who seemed to stand up taller as I did. “What’ve we got?”
“White male, late twenties to midthirties. Dark hair from what’s left of his scalp. Part of it from his forehead back was peeled off. Canines, not
claws. But we really need to get this to the lab.” She glanced at her coworkers as if she were a bit hurried and annoyed that we were on the scene so late, even though we all knew that she and her crew would be at it all day and possibly tomorrow. She wiped her forehead with her sleeve.
I nodded and noticed perspiration still catching on her wide brow, the shimmering white blond at her hairline giving way to a honey color farther out, her hair tied into a tidy, short ponytail. She wore thick, black-rimmed glasses that clashed with her fair complexion and seemed like they belonged on a brunette instead. An interesting contrast, I thought, but I didn’t understand why she seemed a bit irritated with us. It’s not like they were holding the body here for me. Crime Scene Services does what needs to be done to preserve and investigate the scene and keep things intact for as long as possible. Once the body is removed, it can take an entire day, or even two, to get it all checked out and with the blue sky, we had lucked out in terms of weather. If rain or snow were encroaching, they’d be setting up tents and tarps and frantically trying to get the body out of here, and it wouldn’t matter if we’d gotten a peek or not.
“Not a big guy, maybe five foot eight. Medium build.” She pushed her glasses farther up on the bridge of her nose with a cocked wrist.
“Can we have a look?” I held up my gloved hands.
“Sorry, only a look. Too fragile to prod around—like shredded beef at this point.” She pronounced the sh sound so that shredded sounded like sredded.
“I can see that.” I could also see flies on the thick, coagulated blood that hadn’t fully dried and yellow jackets—no maggots yet—on the patches that were on the ground and had fully dried. It’s as if they had already come to some agreement on who got what. The type of bugs, among other things like the blood’s degree of coagulation, would help Gretchen and the pathologist determine how long the body had been dead.
Monty, paler by the minute, pointed at the victim’s side, under his rib cage, where a gaping hole exposed his intestines, almost as if a great white shark instead of a bear had taken a bite. Grizzlies could go one of two ways: they could behave almost civilized and take clean, neat slices of meat as if they had used a carving knife, or they could rip everything to shreds like wild coyotes. These remains had the look of the knife around the thigh and stomach cavity, which—to our benefit—left the bloody duct tape in place, but had the coyote look on the one arm and the leg from the knee down on the same side.
“Nice.” Monty swallowed hard, looking as though he might faint. “Teeth.” He was barely audible. It was more of a statement than a question, but Gretchen answered.
“For sure. The punctures are from canines here”—she delicately pointed one white, gloved index finger—“definitely not curved claws.”
“Do we know yet whether he was alive or dead when this happened?” I felt something move on the back of my neck and for an instant thought it was a yellow jacket, until I realized it was a bead of sweat sliding down my back.
“Don’t know yet for sure.” Smith’s voice came over my shoulder, sounding closer than I thought. I was starting to feel like my senses were off—like the slanted light was transporting me into some twilight zone where at any minute a grizzly would charge me from behind with the ghost of my father riding him. “All we know is that someone bound him and gagged him here.”
“Wouldn’t make sense to tie up a dead guy, now would it?” Walsh added, his voice sharp in the woods.
“No,” I admitted, shaking my head slowly. “It wouldn’t.”
Monty chuckled. Good for you, I thought, that you’re getting your game face back on. “Footprints?” I looked at Gretchen.
“Bear and deer prints that are much older. I think we have some boot tracks that have been messed up by our bear shuffling around. Victim had boots on.”
“You find ’em?” I asked. Gretchen threw her head in the direction from which she had come. “Found more remains over there. Buried.”
“Did you get some prints from the trail?”
“We have a few and possibly some from the road too, but they could be the ranger who found them. We won’t know until we get the plaster from them and compare.”
“How about nails from the fingers that are left?”
“We’ll be checking those for DNA to see if he fought whoever put him here or the bear.”
“Any prints on the tape?”
“No, there’s blood on it, and on the other side of the tree, which has less blood, we’ve so far just found smudges, possibly from gloves. Quite a bit of the tape by the hips has been decimated by the bear. We’ll see what we can get for fibers in the lab. But as I said”—she pointed to the tree again, where a tech still crouching snapped pictures of what lay at his feet—“we’ve found some buried clothing scraps and remains over by that tree.
“Typical grizzly behavior,” she added, “to bury remains, just like a dog or a lion.” She directed this to Walsh, as if she figured she didn’t need to explain to me, with my slightly prissy and shiny gold badge attached to the pocket of my navy coat that read Department of the Interior, National Park Service, what was typical bear behavior and what wasn’t.
“Gee, didn’t know that,” Walsh said sarcastically. Being local, he was obviously just as familiar with bear activity as any of us.
Gretchen’s face was stone-still, as if to let Walsh and the rest of us know that she had no time or patience for sarcasm, ego, or turf wars at a crime scene. I liked her for this, but I wondered what could possibly possess a forensic specialist with a foreign accent to take a job in the narrow atmosphere of the Flathead Valley, where about every tenth car had a huge decal of the Ten Commandments on the back window. I knew, however, that the valley’s beauty was a draw for quite a few high-level professionals wanting to live in the mountains. Not to mention my father.
She began to shuffle away toward the buried remains and all four of us—Walsh, Smith, Monty, and I—followed, knowing better than to step out of the line she cut. She kneeled down by the other techs and pointed to part of the victim’s leg that still had scraps of jeans on it and his foot clad in a bloody and dirt-caked cowboy boot.
“Good, then,” I said. “We’ve got his tracks and prints off of these, I’m presuming. And we can see if we can find tracks that aren’t from this boot print around here and see if any additional fingerprints might be on it.”
“Long shot on more prints than just his, but you never know. At the very least, if he’s in the system, as the name on the belt suggests, we should be able to make a match.” She looked around at the ground. “We’ve got a lot of grizzly tracks around.”
“Let’s keep looking for boot tracks that don’t belong to this boot,” I added.
Gretchen shot me an I-know-how-to-do-my-job look, but her tone did not betray her professionalism. “Sure thing,” she said. “I’m going to have the guys wrap what’s left of the body and get it out of here in the next fifteen to twenty to the refrigerator and off to Wilson in Missoula. So if you need to look at it some more, have at it. Just don’t touch anything and follow the path I’ve designated.”
I turned back at the victim, lifeless and torn to shreds, then at the dirt around me and saw the track. The elongated shape with toe pads close together and claw points a good two and a half to three inches away from the tip of the pad. A black bear’s prints are easily distinguishable from a grizzly’s since the black bear’s pad has a wider spread and the claw points lie closer in. I glanced up and noticed Monty observing me curiously. I wondered if I was pale, then I looked back to the ground that no longer looked firm and hard but soft and shifting, as if it might open up and swallow me.
That print, innocent and natural in the dirt, haunts me still.
3
FROM THE MOMENT I set foot back into Glacier, that clench at the base of my chest had become more pronounced, and I wish I could say that I was professional enough to wo
nder if I should mention something to Sean: that a grizzly-mauling-combined homicide might be a bit tricky for a guy with my history. But to be honest, I never even thought of it. Why would I have? The mauling was secondary—a fairly obvious occurrence when you’ve got bait tied to a tree.
When I entered the agency, none of the guys on the force, including Sean Dewey, our managing supervisor, inquired about my dad’s death, even though we had to go through extensive background checks. I can’t describe how thankful I am for that, because for months I lost sleep (even had a nightmare or two—the angst-filled exposure type where you show up for an interview late and nude) over whether or not they’d look into it. I never lied about anything; that bit of history just never came up after I passed my psych eval.
In general, I don’t talk much about the attack at Oldman Lake, which is on the east side of Glacier Park, because it’s like an old injury that has thick scar tissue covering it. Talking about it only rips bits of that scar away, which seems like a useless thing to do to a wound.
I did do some counseling for a few months right after the incident, but it turned out to be a waste of time. The counselor didn’t know what to do with me and my puffy adolescent cheeks, oily skin, and my too-long wavy hair shading my eyes as if to give a constant finger to the world. I think she thought that if she sat silently and patiently in front of me, I would get so uncomfortable that I’d begin to talk or she’d eventually ask the key question and I’d ignite, emotions flying from me like a Fourth of July sparkler.
Only I wasn’t ready to talk, especially to her—this overly thin, birdlike woman who made the hour go on forever by only asking two or three questions throughout the session. How is concentrating on your schoolwork going? How is it dealing with your friends now that you are grieving? How are your sisters handling things? Most of the time, I’d just shrug or give one-word answers: fine. I was at least thankful that she didn’t make me look at Rorschach inkblots or play games in the small box of sand filled with plastic dinosaurs, soldiers, and other creatures that she had in her office for little kids.
The Wild Inside Page 3