In the Barren Ground (6 page)

CHAPTER 6

“Looks like a bloody butcher’s shop,” Van Bleek said, panning his beam over the slaughter.

Or big game kill . . .
apart from clothing and other gear that had been shredded to ribbons and littered the site. The snow had turned pink and red and was all chunked up. Wolf carcasses lay among the remains of the two humans. Rib bones gleamed through dark red, wet flesh. Bits of human meat and innards congealed in the subzero temperature. Entrails tangled across the snow.

Tana moved toward the closest human body, careful to minimize her own tracks by making only one line of footprints both in and out of the main kill area. But it might prove futile since the entire site appeared to be tracked out with both boot and animal prints, along with other drag and pull and scuffle marks. The boot prints were likely Van Bleek’s and Kino’s, left when they came to shoot the first pack of wolves.

The stink in the air was thick, heavy. It smelled of sweetish, raw meat, and it was underlaid with the corroded green copper tang of blood. An odor of violent death, never forgotten once you’d smelled it before. A memory slammed into Tana—finding Jim in the bathroom. She inhaled sharply at the impact of it. Mistake. It forced a whiff of punctured bowel deep into her nostrils, and her stomach heaved violently.

She doubled over, trying to control herself.

“Here,” called Van Bleek. “This is it. The decapitated head.” He bent down to take a closer look.

“Step back,” she commanded.

He glanced at her, blinding her with the spotlight on his head.

“Christ, keep that thing out of my eyes. Stand up, and get away from that. Don’t touch or step on
anything
. Back out the way you walked in. Go around to the base of that cliff over there,” she said. “Keep guard from there in case any animals come.”

Her brain reeled. Assess. Contain. Control any further contamination until daybreak. After which she could inventory the whole thing—photograph and document it.

He stood in balky silence for a moment, his breath heavy white steam under the glow of his headlamp.

“And you?” he said.

“I’m going to string two electric fences up. One around each body.”

“Body parts are fucking all over the place.”

“The . . . main parts.” She cleared her throat. “Go, please. Now.”

He hesitated a moment longer. “Yes ma’am.”

She watched until he’d made his way to the base of the cliff. When he’d positioned himself and was panning his light into the fog in search of animals, she returned her attention to the massacre.

What was left of the body closest to her she determined to be Raj Sanjit, although most of his face had been chewed off. His hair was matted with gore, but it appeared to be black and cropped short. A hand, partially torn from an arm still attached to the body, looked dark-skinned in the light of her headlamp.

His stomach was gone, vital organs rich in nutrients hollowed out, leaving a cavernous, glistening maw beneath his rib cage. Tana moved to the other body. Her stomach recoiled violently.

Only a ragged stump with bone and gristle remained where the head had been. The rest of the torso was mostly eaten. Inside the ripped-open rib cage, the body cavity was empty. The heart gone, just a bit of lung left.

Tana panned her light over to the decapitated head.

It lay facedown. Ragged neck stump. Skull gleamed through torn scalp. Long hair, lighter in color. Frizzy looking.

Selena Apodaca.

Near the head was something pale blue. Part of a woolen hat. An eyeball was stuck to it.

Tana puked almost at once, stumbling to the side. She tried to stop herself, but nature’s urge was uncontrollable. Seized by cramps, she bent over, bracing her hands on her knees, and she threw up again, and again. Until all she had was the acid burn of bile in her throat and mouth, which made her stomach clench all over again. Heaving, sweating, she waited for the cramps to pass.

“You okay out there, ma’am?” came Van Bleek’s voice.

She swore like a trooper and swiped the back of her sleeve across her mouth. “Fine.”

I’ve gone and puked my DNA all over a fucking scene—so, yeah, I’m great. I’m doing fucking just swell . . .

“Want me to come over?”

“Stay where you are. Keep covering for us.”

She retched one more time. Tana cursed again. She could usually control herself. But her body was no longer her own. She was being commandeered by this tiny thing growing inside her womb. Even out here, even among all this blood and death and pointless gore, it was asserting its presence, reaching determinedly for life. And Tana’s own will to survive—for her baby—was so sudden and sharp and fierce that it stole her breath.

She took a moment to marshal herself, planning how best to tackle this.

One of her fences would cover an area of about twenty-seven square feet. Not much. But it was better than nothing, because if the wolves, or bear, returned before dawn, the electrical jolt would give them pause. Enough so that she or Van Bleek could shoot.

And in case of more snow, she’d need to get the small tarps in her pack covering those torsos at least.

The fencing was going to take a while to set up. Which was fine—better than sitting and doing nothing but staring at this mess in the dark and waiting for more predators. Carefully, she retraced her footsteps, retreating to an area where she could set down her pack. Shadows leaped in the mist as her head moved with the lamp. A bird, probably an owl, swooped low,
fwopping
wings in the dark. Tana glanced up, saw the big shadow, then it was gone into the darkness.

A feeling of cognizance hung in its wake, a sense of being watched by unseen eyes.

She glanced at the cliff. Van Bleek’s shape hulked at the base under his headlamp. A chill snaked down her back. That man felt no safer than a wild predator. Tana shook herself. It was fatigue. Hormones. Blood sugar. It was the violence that seemed to scream in the silence. The fact that she’d been forced to slaughter so many beautiful wolves who’d just been doing what they were programmed to do—stay alive. Hunt. Eat meat.

She first unpacked the two small tarps. Tana walked carefully back to the bodies, and covered them gently. She returned to her gear, crouched down, removed her gloves, pocketed them. Fiddling with bare fingers in the cold, she unstrapped the bags of electric fencing and assembled the poles.

When she had all the poles assembled, she carried them to the gutted torsos and poked the first pole into the ground, struggling to find a soft spot between rock and stones. She got it in at a good thirty-degree angle, moved on to plant the next stake. Once they were all in place, she unspooled the thin wire and affixed it pole to pole with clips. It was finicky work and her fingers grew painful from the cold.

An hour passed before she was able to connect the batteries and make her two fences live.

Once she’d finished, Tana circled around to join Van Bleek, who sat on a rock under the cliff face, gun resting in his arms. His hunting spotlight was planted on a boulder beside him, pointing out into the dark night.

She clicked off her own spotlight to conserve batteries, and seated herself beside him. It was almost 1:00 a.m. Monday morning. They had another seven hours at least until the beginnings of faint dawn light. If and when the batteries from Van Bleek’s spotlight failed, she’d have hers as a backup.

Hours ticked by. The night grew colder. Quieter. No more animals came. It was as if word had gotten out—this was a bad place.

“First time you seen real blood and gore, Constable?” Van Bleek said quietly.

“I’ve got a bug.”

Silence.

“Flu or something,” she said. “It’s going around. Rosalie—our dispatcher—her grandkid has it.” Why was she even justifying herself? She didn’t have to lie to anyone. She needed to embrace this, feel proud. But holy crap, she’d thought the “morning” sickness would have quit by now. She was five months in. And heaven forbid that
anyone
should ever grow so inured as to
not
be sickened by a scene like this. Or was it just a sign she’d never be a good cop? Never make homicide detective someday?

And it made her wonder about Van Bleek.

“How about you?” she said.

“I lived in Africa.” He offered nothing more, and she didn’t press.

She leaned back against the cold rock face, wrestling with her doubt demons. The night always brought the demons. They got off on mocking her lack of self-worth. They laughed in her face, and said,
ha ha, little half-breed, you think a badge and uniform and gun will prove to the world that you’re not the abused offspring of a drunk hooker? You think people won’t know how your mother beat you when she was wasted? You think you are
worth
something, you little slut—apple never falls far from the tree, Tana Bee . . .

She cleared her throat. “You want to catch some sleep while I keep first watch?” she said.

“Don’t think either one of us wants to risk sleep tonight,” he said quietly.

He was right. Even though no scavenger had approached, there was a sense of them lurking, just beyond sight—wolves. Bears. Coyotes, maybe. Foxes. Wolverine, even. She’d throw out another flare in about an hour, just to see what was out there. Warn whatever off. She had several flare cartridges ready. Bear bangers, pepper spray, an air horn, too.

Wind soughed, moaned in the rocks. A wolf howl came over the hills. Answering cries sounded from a far-off pack. Communication. Wild style. Informing of the kill in Headless Man Valley. As the world tilted toward dawn, air currents began to shift, as if the earth was stirring, getting ready to wake.

“You do hunt, right?” Van Bleek said after a long period of silence. “Your sort all hunts.”

She shot him a look. “My
sort
?”

There was a glimmer in his eye. He was toying with her. “Oh, you mean Natives.”

He chuckled.

She let it slide. Gallows humor took odd shapes.

“I hunted with my father,” she said after a while. “Since I was five. That was the first time he took me away.”

“Away?”

“I mean, out into the wilderness, for several months. I don’t know exactly how long.” The image of her dad filled her mind. Big, strapping Norwegian. Bushy beard. He seemed so very large in her mind’s eye. So strong. Even now. She quickly blocked out the other memories that she knew would follow—the reason he’d taken her away that year. “He taught me how to track. He was a prospector, an illegal trapper. He did whatever kept him off grid and alive in the bush.”

“So, the daughter of a man who walked on the wrong side of the law becomes a cop.”

She said nothing.

“And your mother?” he asked.

“She was Dogrib, the Native, yeah.”

He waited for her to say more, but Tana kept quiet, thoughts churning unwillingly, inexorably, back toward her mother.

“So,” he said after a long period of silence, and she almost briefly liked him for distracting her, “I take it that you’ve seen enough animal kills over your lifespan, at least—what’s your read here. Something a bit . . . off about this one?”

“Off?”

“Like . . . weird. Like not normal.”

“Never seen a human mauling. Nothing normal about that.”

“You know why they call this place Headless Man?”

“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

“Two prospectors were found a few miles southeast from here, in the twenties, sitting with their backs leaned up against a cliff face, just like we’re doing. Fully dressed. Boots on, packs and picks and guns at their sides. Only trouble—no heads. Just gone. Just the two torsos propped there like they were having a good old chat. Still had diamonds in their bags.”

She turned to him. “They ever find the heads?”

“Nope.”

“How’d the heads been removed?”

“Ripped. Clean off. Bodies all intact, just those heads torn off their stumps.”

She swallowed. “Legends,” she said, voice thick. “They have a way of growing larger than the reality that inspired them.”

“I dunno. I tell you, there’s bad juju in this valley. In these rocks. I can’t explain it, but you can feel it. Even in the hot summer sun, you press your bare palm to these stones, and you can feel it. Like it’s transferring into you. Cold shit. Black shit.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for superstitious, Van Bleek.”

He snorted. “Lived long enough in central Africa, some very deep and dark places, to know that there is sometimes more than meets the eye. On those edges of civilization, the Congo, sometimes . . . boundaries are crossed that you don’t understand.”

“What did you do in Africa?”

“Diamond mines. Security for De Beers.”

“Is that what brought you out here—De Beers?”

“Ja. Worked up at Snap Lake.”

“And then what, you defected to Harry Blundt? He recruit you?”

“Something like that.”

“Blundt isn’t worried about having potentially inserted a De Beers spy into his midst?”

He gave a low, guttural chuckle. “Everyone in this business worries about spies, Constable. It’s diamonds. Canadian ones, at that—the cleanest currency in the world. It’s why Blundt hired me to head up a security team from the get-go, before he’s even got approval for the mine. That kimberlite core he’s testing, if you watch the industry news, you’ll know that he’s onto some of the strongest pipes in the north. This whole place is going to change.”

Yeah, starting with that new ice road come January.

Tana’s thoughts turned reluctantly to the tiny diamond ring she wore on a chain under her uniform, the futility of it all.

Around three in the morning Van Bleek’s spotlight failed, and Tana clicked hers on. Temperatures dropped even lower. She was grateful for the earflaps on her muskrat hat, the big hood of her parka, her long-john underwear, and her insulated waterproof pants. Even her bullet-suppression vest was welcome now. Wind came up, carrying scents from miles across the arctic. It whispered in the rocks above them, telling stories of other kills. Downwind, noses would be rising to meet it, and waffling softly, catching and reading the scents.