slapped them into the next world.
At length the information she waited for came into view: another patch of the rusty leaves a couple yards deeper in the brush. Shifting her attention down she moved toward it carefully, seeking any further sign underfoot or lower on the bushes. Runoff from the rain had erased any trail that might have been left and the sturdy alders retained no sign of anyone's passing.
Having reached the second cluster of streaked foliage she repeated the process. It took a sweaty, fly-bitten two hours to travel the rest of the trail but before noon she reached its end. Had she been a crow she could have flown from the place Carolyn's body was dumped to the pine tree where the blood trail ended in a matter of seconds. The two places were no more than seventy feet apart.
A pine, a lodgepole, rose gracefully out of the thicket. Its shade and the acidity of the fallen needles had opened a small needle-lined space beneath the boughs into which Anna moved gratefully. Her assumption that this was the blood trail's terminus was based not on what she found but on what she'd ceased to find. Three quarters of an hour's careful search around the tree led her to no new manifestations of rust-streaked leaves. Since the trail had been laid overhead, Anna crouched on her heels and studied the interlocking green of the pine above her.
This time the search was short. Twelve or fifteen feet up, partially secured to a branch with string of some sort was a navy-blue stuff bag vomiting pieces of clear-or once clear-plastic. All had been ripped to ribbons, by talons probably, though a bobcat or cougar or even a very talented fox was a possibility. Other than that, Anna could think of no pawed and clawed carnivores who frequented the avian stomping grounds.
The bark ringing the tree's trunk was unscarred. Whoever had put the package there had not done so by climbing. Having shed her day pack, Anna shinnied up for a closer look. Straddling a comfortable branch she tried to put together the pieces.
It didn't take long. With understanding came fear's cold touch, sickening in the warmth of noon. The torn plastic was blood-smeared as the leaves had been and comprised several different sources, two sandwich bags cut open, and part of what would undoubtedly turn out to be the tail end of a cheap poncho, the kind one can buy at the check-out counter in gas stations and carry in purse or trunk for soggy emergencies. The navy cloth was from a simple stuff sack, the sort hikers used to stow extraneous things. This one was eight or ten inches wide and twice that long. Bag and baggies had been drawn into the tree on a rope pull. A line of torn threads fuzzed the bark where the makeshift rope had been thrown over the limb and dragged. The line was secured with a slipknot. The dangling remainder had been cut, the frayed end tossed up into the lower branches. The rope was as cobbled together as the packaging: strips of torn fabric, white with narrow blue striping, tied end to end.
Carolyn Van Slyke's face had been cut off. The bloody slabs of meat had been carried high like a trophy or a team pennant over the butcher's head, leaving traces of blood on the cloaking leaves as he passed through. Away from the body, the murderer had packaged up the steaks in what he had at hand-sandwich bags and a raincoat-stuffed them in a sack that had been used maybe to carry his lunch, and cached this new treat up high where bears and other animals couldn't make away with it.
He'd been saving Carolyn Van Slyke's face for later.
Chapter 15
Anna seriously wanted to get the hell out of there. Each and every idyllic day in this most beautiful of places had shown an underside that suggested God's Country was under siege from His traditional nemesis. To Anna's mind the most hellish of weapons had been unloosed: fear. Fear was the root of all evil. The others could be tracked to it. Greed was fear of want in pathological form. Lies, fear of being discovered for who one was, punished for what one had done.
The unnatural actions of the bear, Rory's bizarre disappearance, needless murder, now this abomination; fear poured into Anna's mind. In the midst of the very things that brought her comfort, she was being drowned in it. For a moment she clung to the branch fighting a desperate need to run from the wilderness, from sunlight, from solitude and hide in a closed, dark room full of familiar faces.
'Goddamn it,' she muttered. Over her forty-odd years the fates had robbed her of her husband and taken a good shot at her only sister. She would not be robbed of that which made all else endurable, the peace and perfection of the natural world.
Anger helped but did not heal. Her rage was manufactured from two parts self-pity and one part need. It lacked the self-propelling white-hot burn of righteously earned ire. She kept it alive long enough to scorch away at least the core of her panic. She could trust herself to function, not to topple from the tree or dash madly down the trails shrieking.
When her breathing evened out, she knew she could stay and do her work, but peace of mind, joy, freedom, those gifts of the wild country had been stolen away. 'Fuck,' she whispered, then she prayed a jolly little prayer: 'Dear Lord, please let me find a gun in my pack when I climb down. Love, Anna.'
Backup was hours away, but she radioed Ruick to tell him of her find. Mostly, she admitted to herself, to report her location. Should she go missing, Ponce would alert them to where she'd gone off trail but who would think to seek as far as the bush-locked pine?
Harry was in a meeting. Maryanne wrote down the message and Anna was left with no choice but to break contact.
Flinching at every sound, freezing at every change in the shadow pattern, she made several trips up and down the desecrated pine taking photographs of and collecting the shredded bags. The meat they'd held was long gone. Whatever bird or beast had worried it out of its packaging had carried it away and undoubtedly eaten it. Too bad,Anna thought. Unless the killer was of the Hannibal Lecter School of Fine Cuisine, he may have removed the flesh not to eat it but to take away a clue to his identity.
But why string the stuff up if he'd merely been covering his tracks? Surely one would want the telltale flesh eaten or buried or at least exposed so that it might decay more quickly. If something is cached it's because someone means to return for it.
No birds stirred the leaves, no shadows moved with the wind, still Anna stopped breathing, listened, cursed the gods for ignoring her prayer for firearms. Moving as quickly as she could, she labeled each item as she packed it in a paper evidence bag to better preserve the blood samples. The navy stuff sack was old, several years at least, made by REI and common as cotton underpants. The same went for the baggies and the torn scrap of poncho: generic, easily obtained, ubiquitous in the backcountry. The strips that had been tied together to form the line used to swing the cache into the branches were what appeared to be shirting. The cloth was equally unremarkable, probably J. C. Penney or Sears, cotton-polyester sold in bulk. However, if the shirt they had been torn from had once covered the back of the killer, they could prove important.
Regardless of value or lack thereof Anna spent no time studying the evidence. With ingrained care she packaged and stowed. Mind, ears and eyes were occupied patrolling the perimeter around the tree for cannibals, bears, axe murderers and other manifestations of impending violence.
At last the job was completed, everything tucked in her pack. With the possibility of flight nearer, Anna found her unease growing. 'Get a grip,' she ordered herself unsympathetically. Before she could make her escape, she needed to canvass the clearing one more time in case she had missed anything.
Out from the tree at a north-northwesterly heading, five-feet-four-and-a-half-inches as measured by the carpenter's tape she carried for just such a purpose, she found a pile of what could only be bear scat. Whether grizzly or black, she couldn't tell. This time of year, both had about the same diet. The sheer size of the sample would suggest a male grizzly but black bears grew nearly as large at the upper end of their scale. For unscientific reasons, Anna felt certain it was not only grizzly scat but that of her own personal grizzly.
Given its half-melted then dried consistency, the scat had been left before the rain but not too long before. If it had been deposited much before the storm, it would have dried more completely. The downpour would have reduced it to its component parts, not merely smoothed it over.
An educated guess put the age of this sample at five or six days, seven at the outside. Around the time of Mrs. Van Slyke's death not twenty yards away, around the time the flesh cut from her face had been cached in the tree.
