but long spatters of blood that stretched more than a dozen feet up a nearly vertical surface implied an attack of unimaginable violence. And they hadn’t been caused by a firearm. A shotgun would have created a large blot spatter; a pistol or a rifle a similar high-velocity starburst. In either case, the mess would have been surrounded by a mist composed of droplets of various sizes. These arcs had been caused by a blade, and one wielded with frightening strength.
Gabriel tried to convince himself that Will must have encountered a cornered mountain lion and been forced to battle it with a hunting knife, but Will had been carrying a rifle with which he was intimately acquainted. If push had come to shove, he would have shot the animal and its skin would have been tanning between the trees while its carcass rotated on a spit over a roaring blaze.
“They should be here within half an hour,” Jess said. “Or at least they hope so.”
Gabriel nodded. He couldn’t force himself to look away from Oscar. The cat was like a machine, showing no sign of tiring, licking over and over and over and over—
“Are you okay?” Jess asked.
“They died here.”
“Maura and Will?”
“All of them. They all died right here. Where we’re standing at this very second.”
“You can’t know that for sure. These bones could belong to anyone and that blood—”
“Is still fresh, Jess. It hasn’t even frozen yet.”
The wind shifted and blew the salty steam between them.
“What are we doing here then?” Jess asked. “We should just leave.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened here? Don’t you want to know how your sister died?”
“Of course I do. I loved Deb, but she would never have wanted me to risk my life for that knowledge.”
“They obviously risked their lives for the sake of knowledge. What’s the difference?”
He felt her hand close around his, but she said nothing more.
Together they watched Oscar slather his sandpaper tongue on the steep granite outcropping without any indication of slowing.
***
Gabriel sat at the edge of the spring and scooped gobs of slime out of the water with a branch. Were it not for the striking red color, it could have been any pond scum from anywhere in the world. And maybe it was. Haloarchaea certainly didn’t aggregate like this. Without a microscope, he couldn’t determine a blasted thing about the microorganism. He was stalling anyway, postponing the task he had originally sat down here to begin. And he only had a few minutes to do it while Jess was still up the slope, out of the trees, trying in vain to reach the sheriff’s department again on the emergency transceiver.
She had promised not to go very far and to stay within earshot. He could see her perched on the top of a rock to the left of Oscar, who seemed to have forgotten they existed as he tried to consume every drop of the rapidly freezing blood. The barely audible hiss of static and the occasional squawk of feedback told Gabriel everything he needed to know.
He had to be quick. Cavenaugh had told Maura to leave the bones where they had found them. Obviously, she and Will had shoved them back into the spring. Gabriel understood he would have no idea which bones may have belonged to his sister, but he held out hope that none of them did, that he would pull them out and recognize immediately that they weren’t human at all, but instead belonged to some deer or wolf that had fallen into the water and drowned while trying to get a drink.
A glance in Jess’s direction confirmed she was still battling the transceiver.
Gabriel jabbed the stick down under the surface and dragged out an interlocked tangle of bones to where he could reach them. They were unmistakably human and belonged to at least two distinct individuals. Some were longer and thicker than others, most evident in the curvature and width of the ribs and the height of the vertebrae in the red-stained columns. Rolling the first pile away from the jumble beneath, he dragged several more long bones toward the surface. One was clearly a humerus, another a tibia through which a vertical fracture coursed. There was another, this one still articulated in spots despite the rotting cartilage. The radius and ulna were still connected at both the proximal and distal joints, and the carpals held the rest of the skeletal hand to the wrist. But there was something wrong with the arrangement. The wrist and the hand were contorted, twisted.
He reached down and examined it in his gloved hands. The carpals were fused, making the wrist curl in upon itself, and the metacarpals and phalanges appeared too short and thin in proportion to the rest of the forearm. The fingers were curved inward in such a way that they were more reminiscent of a bird’s claws than—
The truth struck him, but it was too late to throw it back into the spring.
Jess moaned behind him and he turned to see her face contort with pain. He watched a part of her die in her eyes.
It was a palsied hand.
He remembered the picture on the website, of all of the kids smiling on their first day at the cabins, and the girl to the right with her stunted hand held to her chest.
Deborah MacAuley.
Jess’s sister.
***
“I’m so sorry,” Gabriel said. He stood, still holding the arm, unsure of what to do with it. Jess couldn’t look away from it. He didn’t want to throw it back into the water right in front of her, nor did he suspect offering it to her was the right thing to do.
Jess nodded. She appeared to have disappeared somewhere inside of herself. Her eyes no longer shimmered, but drained a steady stream of tears. She reached out tentatively, then jerked her hands back to her sides.
“What are you doing?” Cavenaugh snapped.
He and Kelsey emerged from the forest with the racket of snapping branches.
“I told you to wait for us before coming down to the spring,” he said. His face flushed purple-red when he saw the bone in Gabriel’s hands. “And I said I don’t want anyone touching or moving those bones in the slightest. Jesus Christ! That’s evidence of a crime! We can’t risk anyone contaminating—”
Cavenaugh fell silent. He looked from the forearm to Jess and then back again. The color drained from his cheeks. When he resumed speaking, his voice was even and calm.
“For the time being, why don’t you put that back where you found it.” He turned to Jess. “We’ll make sure that everything is handled with the utmost care and respect. She’s somewhere better now. You and I both know that.”
Jess stared through him with a glazed expression of shock. Gabriel used the distraction to return Deborah’s arm to the pile under the water, where it mercifully sank beneath the bacterial sludge.
“Any sign of the others?” Kelsey asked. He alone appeared unaffected by the significance of the finding. His jaw was thrust forward, his lips a grim line, reflecting a frightening measure of determination.
“We couldn’t reach you on the radio…” Jess whispered.
“Where are they?” Kelsey asked. “Will? Maura?”
“The blood,” Gabriel said. “There’s blood all over the rocks. It was still warm when we arrived.”
He pointed toward the stone abutment.
When Oscar saw all of them turn in his direction, he abandoned his meal, bolted up the slope to the right, and vanished behind a sharp crest of stone.
“That’s the same cat, isn’t it?” Cavenaugh asked, but Gabriel was already walking away.
Gabriel affixed his stare to the point where the cat had disappeared, passed the spring, and began to scale the cliff. He should have seen Oscar emerge from the other side of the rock. Maybe the cat was still hiding behind it, but he had been moving so fast it would have been nearly impossible to stop so suddenly, even for a clawed feline. Gabriel clambered over a granite pinnacle and had to drop to all fours to maintain his balance on the slick stone. Behind and below him, he heard the others calling to him. Cavenaugh had found the spatter patterns and cursed him for allowing the cat to disturb them while Jess cautioned him to be careful. He made no reply as he crawled toward the jagged slate fin.
Oscar wasn’t crouching behind it, nor were there any footprints leading away on the snow-dusted ice.
