On the way up the mountain to check out the line shack, Luke Brueggemann tried to hide the fact that he was trading text messages with his girlfriend. He’d turn his shoulder to Joe to keep his phone out of view while pretending to be enthralled by something outside his passenger window while he tapped messages by feel.
“You’re not fooling me,” Joe had said as they neared the summit. Storm clouds from the north had marched across the sky and blacked out the stars and moon. “I can see the glow of your phone.”
“Sorry.”
“Luke, I’ve got teenage daughters. I know every texting trick in the book. I even know the one where you look right at me with a vacant expression on your face while you text under the table.”
Brueggemann looked away, obviously embarrassed. He said, “I told you, this is tough on her.”
“It’s going to get tougher,” Joe said, slowing the pickup, “because once we leave the highway you’ll lose your cell signal. We won’t even be able to use the radio for a while.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Consider it tough love,” Joe said. “For the both of you.”
Joe didn’t know the area well, because he rarely patrolled it. The mountainside had burned in a forest fire twenty-five years before, and the surface of the ground between the new six- to eight-foot pine trees was still littered with an almost impenetrable tangle of burned logs and upturned root pans. The slope was so crosshatched with debris even the elk steered clear of it, thus there were few elk hunters for Joe to check. And although the topo map he’d consulted showed several ancient logging trails through the mountainside, the first two trails they’d found were blocked by dozens of fallen trees.
The third, which of course was the most roundabout route to the abandoned line shack, was passable only because the hunters who’d reported the body had cleared it painstakingly with chainsaws.
“Less than a half mile,” Brueggemann said.
It was snowing hard enough that it stuck to the hood of the pickup and topped outstretched pine boughs like icing.
Joe said to Brueggemann, “The chance of there being a body way in here, and that body belonging to Alice, is slim to none. But that’s not the way we approach it. We approach this like a crime scene. We’re professionals, and we take our job seriously. Don’t touch or move anything. Be cautious, and keep your eyes open and your ears on.”
Brueggemann sat up straight and looked over at Joe, wide-eyed.
“When we get there, grab my gear bag from the back,” Joe said. “Find the camera. We may need to take some shots.”
After a beat Brueggemann said, “I gotta ask. What’s a line shack, anyway?”
Joe was surprised. “You really don’t know?”
“I guess not.”
Joe said, “Cowboys built them back when all of this was open range. It’s a shelter against sudden bad weather, or if the ranch hands got caught in the middle of nowhere toward dark. None of them are very fancy, and most of them are in bad shape these days. But they saved some lives back in the day, and we’ve found more than a few lost hunters in remote line shacks.”
“Ever find any bodies?” Brueggemann asked.
“Nope.”
They almost missed it. Joe was taking a slow rocky turn to the left through the trees when his headlights swept quickly across a dark box twenty yards into the timber.
“Any time now,” Brueggemann said, his eyes glued to the GPS.
“You’re a little late,” Joe said, reversing until the beams lit up the old structure.
The heavily falling snow didn’t obscure the fact that the line shack was a wreck. It was tiny-barely ten by ten feet-and made of ancient logs stained black with melting snow. The roof sagged, and there was no glass in the two rough-cut windows on either side of the gaping door. A dented black metal stovepipe jutted out of the roof at a haphazard angle.
“What a dump,” Brueggemann said.
“Yup,” Joe said, swinging out of the cab. He dug his green Game and Fish parka out from behind the bench seat. It had been back there, unused, for the last five months, and he shook the dust off. His twelve-gauge Remington WingMaster shotgun was behind the seat as well, but he decided to leave it. He reached inside the cab for the long black Maglite flashlight, which was jammed between the seats. He clicked it on and shined it toward the line shack. He choked the beam down so it peered into the open windows, but all he could see were interior log walls.
“I’ve got the camera,” Brueggemann said, tossing the evidence bag into the cab of the truck.
Joe took a step toward the line shack, then stopped. He turned and got his shotgun.
“You think you’re going to need that?” Brueggemann asked.
“Probably not.”
The snow crunched under their boots as they approached the line shack. Joe held the flashlight with his left hand and carried the shotgun in his right.
“Why a shotgun?” Brueggemann asked. “What’s wrong with your service pistol?”
“Nothing,” Joe said, “except I can’t hit a damned thing with it.”
Brueggemann chuckled. He said, “I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it.”
“You’re starting to get on my nerves,” Joe said. “Now, get behind me.”
The heavy snow hushed the rumbling of the running motor of Joe’s pickup as he neared the front of the line shack. He swept the beam left to right and back again, covering the front of the structure as well as the roof and several feet to each side. Because of the snowfall, any boot prints that might have been there were hidden.
“Anybody home?” Joe asked, feeling more than a little silly.
He heard Brueggemann’s breath behind him, and was grateful he didn’t giggle.
As he got close to the line shack, still sweeping the light across the windows, he saw something that surprised him: a glimpse of brightly colored cloth on the cluttered dirt floor inside.
“There might be something,” he said over his shoulder.
“Really?” Brueggemann asked, surprised.
Rather than enter the sagging open door, Joe moved to the left to the broken-out window.
Joe took a deep breath of cold air and inhaled several large snowflakes that melted in the back of his sinus cavities. Then he stepped forward and thrust the Maglite through the window frame toward the floor, slowly moving it up and down the length of the body wrapped in a blanket. The beam swept across the partially exposed skull, the matted hair, the gaping eye sockets where the flesh had been eaten away by rodents and insects.
“Want to look?” Joe asked Brueggemann.
“Is it her?”
“Not exactly,” Joe said, stepping aside and handing his trainee the flashlight.
On the way out of the forest toward the highway, Luke Brueggemann said, “Jesus, who would do something like that? Wrap a dead deer in a blanket and leave it in a line shack? What in the hell could they have been thinking?”
Joe shrugged.
“That’s just sick, man,” the trainee said.
“It happens,” Joe said. “My guess is some hunter shot an extra deer than he had permits for, and decided to dump it. Why he’d wrap it in a fake Navajo blanket-I don’t know. I hate it when hunters waste a life and all that meat. It makes me furious. Luckily, it doesn’t happen very often.”
“I wish we could have found the bullet,” Brueggemann said. He’d watched Joe perform the necropsy with equal measures of curiosity and disgust. But because of the deteriorated condition of the carcass, the fatal wound couldn’t be determined. “I’d like to figure out who did that and ticket their ass.”
“We’ll never know unless someone fesses up,” Joe said. “Sometimes it takes years to solve a crime like that. But we’ve got the photos, and we’ll write up an incident report for the file. One of these days we may solve it.
