“West?”
“Go left.”
They trotted as fast as they could along the gash in the mountainside until they reached the area Lawrence had spotted from above. Donna jumped first and was splashing through the shin-deep water of the brook before he had eased himself over the rocky ledge. “Shoo! Shoo!” she yelled, windmilling her arms as she charged the ravens. With a chorus of croaks and calls, they lifted into the air in a dark whirlwind and settled in the stand of birch trees. Their shiny black bodies tipped the thin branches down, and they looked so much like a caricature of vultures that Lawrence would have laughed if it hadn’t been so damn creepy.
“Honey…” Donna’s voice was uncharacteristically hesitant. “I smell something.”
The tent, the narrow one-person kind ideal for long hiking trips, was zipped up tightly. But Donna was right. As he got closer, he could smell it, too, sickly sweet. He wrinkled his nose. They looked at each other. “I’ve got my cell phone in my backpack,” she said. “We could…”
Lawrence shook his head. “We can’t just leave.” A few feet in front of the tent, ashy stones enclosed a scorched circle. He bent over and placed his palm on top of the crumbled charcoal. “It’s cold.”
Donna took a deep breath. “Okay, then. Let’s open it up and see.” Before he could say anything or stop her, she unsnapped the flap covering the zipper and unzipped the front of the tent.
“Oh, my God!” They both recoiled—Donna turning her head, eyes watering; Lawrence covering his mouth and nose with one hand. The smell from the confines of the overheated tent was like the worst-ever rotten egg. Inside, in the dim, dun-colored light, he could see—
“Mmmmmph!” Donna spun away and retched.
The only dead people Lawrence had ever seen were his own parents, antiseptically clean and laid out in satin- lined coffins. They had been made up, their sunken cheeks padded and rosy, looking bizarrely as if they had fallen asleep while dressed for church. They bore no resemblance to the smoothly bloated body in the tent, but Lawrence knew he was looking at death, the real thing, without any prettying up or euphemisms.
“We should—” he started to say, and then he watched, horrified, as a single greenfly buzzed through the overheated air, entered the tent, and settled delicately on the dead man’s open eye.
Lawrence grabbed his wife’s arm and hauled her away, their stumbling steps turning into a run, and they splashed across the brook and clawed themselves up over the low rock ledge.
Running through the forest toward the trail, Donna’s hand clutched tightly in his, he remembered the collective nouns he had been searching for earlier: A conspiracy of ravens. A murder of crows.
Lights in the darkness. Heat radiating off the tarmac. The inescapable
Only this time, he didn’t have Clare’s exhilaration to distract him. Instead, it was Kevin Flynn and Mark Durkee leaping out in a display of youth and machismo, followed more slowly by Lyle MacAuley and Dr. Scheeler, who, Russ was pleased to notice, eyed the slowing rotors above his head and walked bent nearly in half until he was well beyond their range.
“You should have come, Chief! It was great!”
Russ sighed and fixed Flynn with a baleful glare. “I keep telling you, Kevin, we don’t describe felonies as ‘great.’ ”
“The helicopter ride! That’s what was great. You ever been on a helicopter?”
“Yes, I have.” Russ turned to Lyle and Dr. Scheeler. “Well?”
“He was carrying a driver’s license and cards that ID’d him as Chris Dessaint. Looked sort of like the picture on the license. Kind of hard to tell,” Lyle said.
“Two days sealed in a hot tent will do that to you,” Dr. Scheeler commented. His sardonic tone reminded Russ of Emil Dvorak. Maybe it was a pathologist thing.
“Wait till you hear what we brought back with us,” MacAuley said. From around the corner of the nearest hangar, Russ could see the meat wagon pulling up to the now-quiet chopper. “Kevin, Mark,” MacAuley yelled at the pair, “you two collect the evidence bags and meet us at the cars.” The two younger officers ambled back the way they had come, dancing out of the way of the two mortuary attendants, who were sliding a shiny black body bag out of the belly of the beast.
He turned on his heel, forcing Lyle and Dr. Scheeler to accelerate to keep up with him. “Why don’t you two fill me in on the whole picture?” he said. “From the beginning.” He knew he should have been there that afternoon. He wouldn’t have needed a hand-holding briefing from Lyle and the medical examiner if he had just been able to get into the chopper and go with the rest of them. Lyle frowned at him from under his bushy gray eyebrows but didn’t comment on his abrupt departure. They headed toward the squad cars, which were parked behind a chain-link fence near the North Country Aviation hangar. “We were able to put down a half mile or so from the scene. The two Cornell professors who found the body showed us where it was. Kind of an out-of-the-way spot. If there hadn’t been a bunch of birds attracting their attention, he could have been there for a lot longer.”
“You get statements from them?”
“Yeah. They didn’t have much that was helpful. They were shook up pretty bad, as you can imagine.”
Yeah, he could imagine it.
“We offered to fly them back,” Lyle went on, “but they decided to walk out. I’ve got contact numbers for them if you want to talk with them yourself.”
“What was the scene?”
“Looks like Dessaint hiked in and pitched camp. I’m guessing he knew what he was doing. His equipment was top-of-the-line, but a few years old, well used. He was ready to travel light. A single-man tent, a bedroll, a couple
