reached for his Sig Sauer. He’d bought bear spray the day before in Bozeman but it had been in the duffel with his carton of cigarettes so therefore he didn’t have any. He couldn’t get over how doglike they were, yet they weren’t dogs. They had the eyes of dogs and the fur of dogs, but they were wild, big, and menacing. The black one had yellow-rimmed eyes that seemed to burn in their sockets.
“Hold on,” Mitchell said. “Stand tall and tough. They want to protect their food but we’ve got to face ’em down and show no fear.”
To the wolves, Mitchell barked, “Get the hell into the woods where you belong. Now get…”
To emphasize his point, he ratcheted back the hammer on his Ruger and fired again, this time exploding a plume of swamp mud from a depression five feet in front of the wolves.
The black alpha male-Cody guessed he’d weigh 175 pounds-woofed and exhaled and loped away along the shoreline to the south. The silver female followed and Cody caught a glimpse of something long and blue that reminded him of sausage swinging from her jaws as she ran. The mottled wolf, likely also a male, Cody thought, followed her without conviction, as if he’d wanted to fight. He couldn’t believe how fast they ran or how powerful they looked, like ghosts with teeth.
“They might not have gone far,” Mitchell said, “so keep your eyes open.”
“My God,” Cody said, and lifted his hand. “Look at this. I was so scared my hand
Mitchell chuckled while he withdrew the empty brass cartridges out of the revolver and replaced them with fresh hollow-point shells.
“I’ll keep this out and cover us,” Mitchell said, chinning toward the shoreline where the wolves had been. “You might as well keep that little popgun of yours in your holster. It’ll just make ’em mad if they decide to come back.”
The first thing Cody noticed as they approached the shoreline was the smell. Mingling with the thin warm air and algae-tinged odor from the lake was a primal whiff of musk from the thick hides of the wolves and the dank metallic smell of viscera.
A tangle of partially submerged driftwood stretched from the shore into the lake for twenty feet. A scum of algae sucked in and out of the water-worn branches of the structure as if being inhaled and exhaled by the structure itself. There was a deep shadowed undercut beneath the driftwood.
The body was half in and half out of the water with the head on the beach, face to the side. Its legs were submerged in the water and pointed down toward the undercut at such an angle that the feet could hardly be seen in the murk. The body appeared to have no arms.
Male, thin, pale, middle-aged, the waterlogged skin alabaster white except for the jagged gaping holes between its ribs and between the legs. All the soft internal parts had been torn away and eaten by the wolves. The clothing on the victim-a lightweight long-sleeved shirt, baggy cargo pants, cowboy boots-had been flayed into ribbons by the teeth of the wolves. The dark sand beach was trampled with canine paw prints, some slowly filling with chocolate-milk-colored swirls of water. The deep indentations of their claws looked like small-caliber bullet holes in the sand.
“Oh man,” Mitchell said.
It wasn’t Justin. As soon as Cody was assured of that, he felt his cop blinders descending like the shield of a motorcycle helmet. The shield would help him disengage from making a personal connection with the dead body and treat it for what it was: meat whose soul and life spark had long since left it. The wolves had certainly understood that.
Cody turned the body over to find that the arms weren’t missing after all. The wrists had been bound with wire behind its back.
He bent down and found handholds beneath the arms and tried to pull the body fully out of the water but it wouldn’t budge. He frowned.
“Are you going to give me a hand?” Cody asked Mitchell.
“Nope,” the outfitter said. “This is your department.”
Cody looked up for clarification.
Mitchell chinned toward the dark timber to the south as they both heard the muffled crack of a branch. “We interrupted those wolves,” he said. “They like to eat their fill, then drag what’s left into the trees and cache it for later. I’m sure they’re watching us and they probably think we’re stealing it from them. Keep in mind some of these wolves don’t have much fear of man anymore, if they ever did. All these wolves have known for the last couple of decades is that every time they encounter any humans, the Park Service rangers rush in and cordon off the area to keep the people away from them. These critters have learned they have nothing to fear since it’s obvious they’ve been put on the top of the food chain. That’s fine for the wolf population, but the ramifications aren’t so pretty for us two-legged creatures.
“So if they decide to come back, I want to be ready.”
Cody said, “Okay.”
He tugged again but the body was held tight by something under the water that gave only slightly. Then he saw the cord wrapped around the ankles that vanished into the hole beneath the driftwood structure. He waded to his thighs in the water. It was startlingly cold for midsummer, so cold it stung. He followed the cord down with his fingers until he could get a good grip with both hands, and he grunted and leaned back, putting his back into it. Whatever the cord was attached to gave and Cody grunted again and walked backwards toward the sand until he was on dry land. His effort spun the body around as well as revealed the large round rock intricately tied to the other end of the cord. He kept yanking until both the body and the rock were out of the water.
For the first time he noticed another length of cord around the victim’s neck, so deeply imbedded into the flesh he’d missed it earlier. A two-inch length stuck out from a tight knot, with the loose end slightly frayed. Cody recognized it as nylon parachute cord-a staple of hunters, hikers, and trekkers everywhere.
Cody said, “Whoever did this tied rocks to his feet and neck and dropped them under the driftwood, dragging the body beneath the surface. Whoever did it probably thought no one would ever find the body. They didn’t count on the wolves fishing him out and biting through one of the cords.”
Mitchell grunted. He looked pale and a little gaunt, and he did his best to scour the trees for signs of the wolves and avoid looking at the body.
Cody dropped to his hands and knees and crawled around the body, looking over every inch of it. He guessed the victim was in his late fifties or sixties and had been in pretty good shape. Unfortunately, his eyes, throat, belly, and genitals had been eaten away.
“Ah,” Cody said, bending in close to the victim’s head and turning it so the grotesque features no longer faced him, “Here we go.”
There was a one-and-a-half-inch cut under the man’s right ear. It was J shaped, with a jagged entry at its wide end tapering to a narrow slice slightly above the jawbone.
“Knife wound,” Cody said. “The puncture looks deep enough the blade likely went all the way into his brain. An instant kill. Since the thick part of the blade points toward the back, I’d guess the killer came at him from behind, probably grabbed the man’s hair and pulled back, then shoved the knife in hard. Perfect placement, too. The killer could have stabbed the guy in the back or reached around and slit his throat. But he went for the single-thrust kill.”
Mitchell grunted.
Cody recalled Larry’s findings:
“Let me get my camera and my file,” Cody said. “We’ll treat this as a crime scene, as low-tech as it is.”
“You’re the cop.”
“I’m going to get my file of the applications for the pack trip,” Cody said.
Mitchell said, “I’ll go with you to cover you and I’ll bring the horses down here with us. Wolves like to eat horses, too.”
