Back of Beyond (31 page)

“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
stopped
shaking.”

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:
Gary Shulze.… The difference here is it appears there was a deep puncture wound into his brain … caused by a knife blade driven into his skull and withdrawn.

“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.”

*   *   *

While Cody photographed the body,
the scene, the rope, the rock, and the wounds with his digital camera using his camera case in the shots for perspective, Mitchell ate lunch. The outfitter sat on a large rock with his back toward the lake and his .30-06 across his lap and gnawed on pieces of jerky and washed them down with water. His eyes swept the timber from side to side.

Cody knew he’d fouled the scene. He’d moved the body and walked and crawled all over the sand next to it.

“If it wasn’t for that knife wound,” Mitchell said, “I might have thought the poor son of a bitch could have been mauled by wolves and then sunk in the water to hide him away from more mutilation.”

Cody nodded. He’d been replaying scenario after scenario in his mind for the past half hour.

“It’s happened before,” Mitchell said. “In the deep backcountry like this, folks leave a dead body so they and the Park Service can come after it once they get out. Packing a body along just invites bears and mountain lions and such. It’s like trolling for predators. It’s not a good idea.”

Cody didn’t respond. He pulled his duffel out of the panniers and withdrew the file folder.

It didn’t take long. He said, “My guess is this is Tristan Glode, president and CEO of The Glode Company of St. Louis. He look sixty-one to you?”

Mitchell grimaced when he looked over. “Yup. Could be.”

“He fits the physical description here in the applications,” Cody said. “There’s only two other older men on the pack trip. One is named K. W. Wilson and there isn’t much background on him. The other is Walt Franck, His Richness, and I know that son of a bitch and this isn’t him. Which is kind of a shame.”

“Want some jerky?”

“No,” Cody said. “I want a cigarette.”

“Sorry.”

“I wonder what he did to deserve this,” Cody said. “Knifing a sixty-one-year-old man. His wife’s on the trip, it looks like. I wonder if she’s involved or if we’ll find her body up ahead. I can’t see her just going along after her husband’s been killed. And how many in the group saw it happen? And what kind of hell are they going through now?”

Mitchell shrugged.

“Do you have a GPS?” Cody asked. “Mine got burned up in the fire. I’d like to get the exact coordinates here so we can let the rangers know to come get the body.”

Mitchell said, “I know the exact location of Camp One. I’ll tell ’em.”

“There may be more forensic evidence around here,” Cody said, looking up toward where the tents were pitched on the grassy shelf. “A crime-scene crew could find something if they got here before too long. Maybe where the killing took place, or footprints, or pieces of parachute cord. Or blood. It’s not unusual to find the blood of the killer at the scene of a knifing. It’s amazing how often the assailant cuts himself with his own knife during a struggle. Lots of times they don’t even know it until later.”

“Yeah,” Mitchell said with a slow smile building, “I watch them shows on television. The CSI folks would get here and we’d know the whole story and catch the bad guy in forty-eight minutes flat.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Cody said.

“And it sure as hell wouldn’t work here,” Mitchell said. “I promise you that. It’ll likely rain this afternoon and wash evidence away, or the wolves will come back and clean things up. Nothing works here like normal, like I told you earlier.”

Cody sat down heavily on a rock next to Mitchell.

He said, “I’ve never been on a crime scene before when it was just me. Usually we’ve got evidence techs and forensic guys on the way, not to mention all my own equipment. I can’t even communicate with anyone except you. I feel so goddamned helpless.”

“So maybe we better get on our horses and find the rest of ’em,” Mitchell said. “That’s the only way we’re going to know what’s happened here.”

“Yeah. So you said earlier we have to leave the body?”

Mitchell nodded. “We ain’t takin’ it with us, that’s for sure.”

“Then what do we do with it? Sink it back into the lake? Bury it?”

“Wolves’ll come back,” Mitchell said, shaking his head. “There won’t be nothin’ left. There’s only one thing we can do.”

Cody said, “Hang it up?”

“I know where the food pole is,” Mitchell said, struggling to his feet, his back popping. “A hundred yards up the mountain away from the camp. Unless Jed moved it. We can run the body up the pole until the rangers get here.”

“Man.”

“Unless you’ve got a better idea.”

“I wish I did.”

*   *   *

It wasn’t easy. Cody got kicked
in the face with Glode’s boots as the body was pulled up into the air. Mitchell had dallied the rope around his saddle horn and walked his horse toward the north until the body was raised twenty feet into the air. Cody looked up. Glode’s arms were splayed straight out to the sides from the rope looped under his arms. His head was cocked to the side and his legs hung straight down. The body turned slowly as they tied the rope off after wrapping it around the sap-heavy trunk of a lodgepole pine.

“Birds’ll get at it,” Mitchell said, “but there isn’t much we can do about that. This is about as dignified as we can get for now.”

Mitchell tied the rope off. “Things have changed around here in more ways than one,” he said, as much to himself as to Cody. “If anything, they’ve gotten a hell of a lot wilder and more dangerous than they used to be. The grizzly bear population is
way
up, and there’s nothing going to keep it down. And the reintroduction of wolves has changed the whole ecosystem. I’ve heard old-timers compare this wolf deal to introducing street gangs back into inner cities where the gangs had long since been wiped out. I’m not sure I’d go that far,” Mitchell said, “but it sure has changed things. There are a hell of a lot more critters around that can eat us than there used to be.”

“Great,” Cody said.

*   *   *

As they rode away from Camp
One the trail was instantly recognizable. It was churned up by the hooves of multiple horses and mules.

“One thing I’m sure you noticed, being the detective and all,” Mitchell said over his shoulder as he rode, “was that rock holding the body underwater.”

Puzzled, Cody said, “What about the rock?”

“I guess I mean the knots on it.”

“What about the knots?” Cody asked, annoyed.

“You didn’t recognize the style of knots used to secure that rock to the line?”

Cody sighed. “I’m getting tired of being strung along here.”

“Diamond hitches,” Mitchell said. “Damned near perfect ones. Not the easiest thing to tie in the world, but probably the best damned knot in an outfitter’s arsenal.”