“Where’d he go from here?”
Cork scanned the wall right and left, then said, “Where would you go?”
Stephen studied their surroundings and shook his head. “We’re pretty much blocked in here. Hard to move either way.” He turned and scanned the slope behind them. “There’s a kind of a natural trough up that way. I guess that’s where I’d go.”
“That’s where I’d go, too. Let’s see what we find.”
Cork led the way, working slowly toward the top of the ridge, which was backed by the bare limbs of aspens and the gray overcast of the sky. He paused occasionally, pointing out to Stephen additional places where small rocks had clearly been displaced and, near the top of the ridge, a spot where a partial boot print had been left in a rare, thin layer of damp soil.
“Medium-size foot,” Cork noted. He’d brought a camera that hung in a belt pouch, and he pulled it out. “Probably a common sole type, so it won’t tell us much, but you never know.”
Cork took some digital shots, then he and Stephen continued to the peak of the slope.
The line of trees that topped the ridge began a couple of dozen yards back from the edge. The stand was full of undergrowth that had caught and held many of the fallen aspen leaves, so that it presented itself as an impenetrable-looking wall of gold. Cork and Stephen scanned the area at the lip of the ridge, and Cork said, “Well?”
Stephen squinted at the ground. “Lots of trampling.”
“Azevedo. One of Ed Larson’s team. I saw him come up.” Cork nodded far to the left of the trail that he and Stephen had followed up the slope. “He didn’t find anything.”
“The guy who was down there in the rocks came from somewhere.”
“Exactly,” Cork said. “So where?”
Stephen stood a moment, looking hard at the stand of trees. “There?” He pointed toward a place where the gold wall seemed to have been breached, where the leaves had been disturbed and had fallen to the ground.
“My guess, too,” Cork said. “Let’s go.”
They entered the woods and slowly moved among the aspens. The initial breach opened onto a trail that, because of the disturbance of the leaves among the undergrowth, wasn’t particularly difficult to follow. They paralleled the edge of the ridge for about twenty yards and then came to a place where the trees opened onto a tiny clearing, which offered a broad vista of the lake and shoreline, dominated by Trickster’s Point. As soon as they reached the clearing, they stopped abruptly. Both of them stood stone still, staring at the body splayed at their feet.
The man lay faceup, with an arrow shaft protruding from his left eye. A scoped deer rifle lay next to him, and his hunter’s cap had been knocked from his head. Cork could see that the arrow had gone clear through his brain and out the back of his skull.
He knelt, and although he already knew the result, he nonetheless put his fingertips to the man’s carotid artery to check for a pulse.
“Dead,” he said. “And, from the looks of it, a day at least.”
Stephen’s face had gone ashen. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “So he was here when Mr. Little was shot?”
“He was here. I don’t know if he was alive then, but he was here.”
“Who is he?”
“No idea, Stephen.”
“What should we do?”
“Did you bring your cell phone?”
“You said cell phones don’t work up here, so I left it in the Land Rover.”
“Me, too,” Cork said. “No service there either. Okay, this is what you’re going to do. Take the canoe back the way we came. Here are the keys to the Land Rover. Drive into Allouette or however far you have to go before you get a signal, then call the sheriff’s office and report what we’ve found. Can you handle that?”
“Sure. But what about you?”
“I’ll wait here until the sheriff’s people arrive.”
“Alone with the dead guy?”
“It won’t be the first time,” Cork told him.
“But why? It’s not like he’s going anywhere.”
“I don’t want the body disturbed by scavengers.”
Stephen eyed the dead hunter a last time, with obvious revulsion, then gave his father a look Cork couldn’t quite decipher. “I hope I never get to the point where sitting with a dead man doesn’t bother me.”
He turned and began to make his way out of the trees while Cork thought about his son’s comment and decided that he hoped so, too.
CHAPTER 11
C ork stood at the edge of the ridge and watched his son paddle across the broad gray of the lake. It was like watching a small bird fly alone into a great threatening sky. He felt a deep sorrow in having to send Stephen on that lonely mission. No parent’s child should have had to go through what Stephen, in his brief sixteen years, had already been asked to endure. Cork felt an abiding loneliness as well, but this was for himself, because the tone of his son’s comment in parting hadn’t escaped his notice. Corcoran O’Connor attracted death the way dogs attracted fleas, a phenomenon that his son clearly recognized and just as clearly disapproved of. Cork thought every man wanted to be understood by his children, but-he looked toward the dead man, the second he’d kept company with in as many days-how could anyone understand this?
He turned to a duty that, across the decades of his life, had become depressingly familiar: He investigated the corpse. He didn’t touch anything, just looked the body over carefully.
The dead hunter was Caucasian, with a powerful build. He wore a full camouflage suit, insulated for cold weather, the kind of clothing worn when stalking rather than hunting from a blind. His boots were Danner, expensive but well worn. His rifle was a Marlin 336C, a common make, popular for hunting deer. It was scoped with a Leupold, which was what Cork, when rifle hunting, usually mounted on his own Remington. Cork bent close to the crusted eye socket and studied the entry wound. Probably the hunter had died instantly, or almost so. And, probably, he’d been caught by surprise, otherwise, considering the Marlin, he’d have had the advantage. Cork wished he knew if the hunter had been murdered before Jubal Little or after, and how the two killings were connected, because it was clear that they were. The fletching on the arrow that had killed the man was the same pattern Cork used on his own arrows, the same as on the arrow that had killed Jubal Little.
Cork would have loved to have been able to go through the hunter’s pockets for a clue to his identity, but he knew better. He would have to wait, maybe hours, before the crime scene team from the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department made another visit to that remote location. He couldn’t begin to imagine what Marsha Dross and Ed Larson and the BCA people would make of this. Hell, he had no idea what to make of it himself.
He was about to see if he could track the route of the hunter’s approach, hoping that he might be able to determine if the killer had stalked him there, when movement at the base of Trickster’s Point caught his eye. Cork knelt quickly to hide himself and watched as a figure slowly circled the great pinnacle. It was a man, he was pretty sure, although he couldn’t be entirely certain because the head was down and the face hidden beneath the bill of a cap. The figure wore a blaze orange vest, a wise precaution during hunting season in order not to be mistaken for a deer. Every so often, he would pause and bend and scrutinize the ground, then move slowly on. He spent a good deal of time at the place where Jubal Little had breathed his last, then his eyes seemed to follow an invisible line that led to the base of the ridge. Cork laid himself fully on the ground and continued his vigil.
The man walked to the ridge and began to ascend, but gradually. He spent a while in the small natural box that Stephen had discovered and that Cork was certain Jubal Little’s murderer had used. He continued to climb, pausing in the same places Cork had paused when he’d found the displaced stones and the boot print. He crested the ridge and studied the ground, just as Cork and Stephen had, then he eyed the aspens, went to the breach in the gold wall of captured leaves, and followed the trail. Cork finally stood up and moved to block his way before he
