A Stranger in Town: a Rockton novel

by Armstrong, Kelley

  * * *

  We get to bed early, and even if it’s a while before we actually sleep, it still counts as rest, and we’re up at dawn to head out. While Dalton grabs food, I pop into the clinic. Diana is on night duty and reports no change with Sophie. I pack an extra-large medical bag—we have no idea what we’ll find out there.

  We take the smaller ATV and my dirt bike. Storm happily lopes behind us. It’s a good thing she’s young and in excellent shape, because it’s a long run, which can be particularly hard on a large breed. We stop regularly to give her water and a rest. Normally, going so far on motorized transport, I’d have left her behind, but we’ll need her tracking nose once we’re there. After a couple of hours, the forest is too thick to continue with the vehicles, and we’re off and walking.

  We don’t need to go far on foot. Even before we find the spot, Storm whines and presses against my legs, nearly toppling me into the underbrush. When I bend, she gives an apologetic look, but only crowds closer, anxiety strumming through her.

  “Shit,” Dalton mutters.

  There is very little that scares our dog. Less than I would like, if I’m being honest. The only wolf she’s encountered tried to mate with her . . . and still occasionally sneaks around, a would-be suitor whose behavior borders on stalker but doesn’t quite cross the line. She has a wary respect for caribou and moose after catching a hoof in the ribs. Black bears confuse her, and she’s never seen a grizzly. Settlers get a happy bark if she knows them and wary caution if she doesn’t.

  There is only one situation where Storm reacts like this, seeking not protection but comfort. I crouch and hug her and assure her everything is fine, even if it’s not. Once she’s settled, I say “Wait?” with a questioning inflection. Her answer is the withering look of a police cadet who’s been given the option of staying outside a crime scene.

  Yes, she’s uncomfortable, but this is her job.

  As I rise, Dalton slips his hand into mine for a quick squeeze. I’m never really sure who is reassuring whom. Mutual comfort, I guess. Mutual understanding that this is never easy, and the moment it became easy, we’d need to take a long look inside ourselves and find the path back to the empathy we need to do the job right.

  Hoarse croaks lead us in. We arrive to see two ravens diving at a weasel, which zooms our way before spotting Storm and nearly backflipping as it races off in another direction. Storm glances toward the weasel and sighs, seeing a potential distraction she cannot accept.

  “I know,” I say as I pat her head.

  I take a deep breath . . . which is a mistake. I cough, Dalton thumping my back as I shake my head, face screwed up.

  He takes another step and then lunges, his sudden cry scattering the ravens. Storm happily accepts this distraction, joining him with a deep baying woof. The ravens are gone in a blink, and we are alone with the scene they’ve left behind.

  I see the campfire first. The remains of a long-dead fire, logs pulled over, a tent still standing. Like any other camp . . . until you see that the tent lists to one side, slashed fabric fluttering in the breeze.

  I walk to where the ravens had been, in a tangle of winter-bare brush behind the fire. From the brush protrudes what had once been a human arm. It’s the humerus only, the radius and ulna and hand having been taken by something larger than a raven.

  I start to take another deep breath before the smell reminds me why I don’t want to make that mistake again.

  Dalton is already at the edge of the clearing, looking my way. He isn’t hesitating to get closer. As the child of doctors, I was raised to have an iron stomach, yet he far surpasses my comfort with internal views of the human body. He grew up hunting and butchering, and to him, what lies in the brush is nothing more than human remains. The person who once inhabited those remains is long gone. Dalton will be respectful, but “squeamish” isn’t part of his vocabulary. He waits because I’m the homicide detective and this is a murder.

  I walk to him and survey the rest of the scene. Initial assessment: at least two adult human bodies in advanced stages of predation. I see two heads, both attached to torsos, and a minimum of two separated limbs. That’s the way my brain assesses. “Separated limbs.” It’s a cold and clinical wording, as if these are mannequins. The alternative is to see at least two horribly mutilated corpses and start thinking about what happened here, how much they suffered, whether their bodies will ever lie in graves that their loved ones can visit . . .

  Keep it cold and clinical. Watching my footing, I take three more steps. A third limb appears, attached to one of the torsos, the arm having been hidden by the thick brush. Before I can say a word, Dalton is handing me a sturdy branch, which I take and use to push through the brush, searching for more parts without moving from my spot.

  I clear my throat. “At least two victims. Both adult, between the ages of twenty and fifty. Both Caucasian with light hair. Eye color will be impossible to assess.”

  “Fucking ravens.”

  I nod and continue. “One torso has retained a partial leg and an arm which appears tucked under the body. The other has a partial humerus. There is an unattached humerus and unattached femur. That appears to be the total—Oh, strike that. I see a partial foot over here.”

  “Two torsos, five limbs and a foot. So predators hauled off three complete limbs and several partials.”

  “If we presume two victims. Sophie was with three companions. We could have detached limbs from a missing torso.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yep. Given the advanced state of predation, it’s not a simple matter of putting the pieces back together. We may need to resort to DNA.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Hopefully not. The problem right now is knowing whether we have the remains of three people to transport back to Rockton or the remains of two . . . plus a survivor in need of rescue.”

  9

  It’s two hours later, and I don’t have my primary answer. I have answers to other questions, but not that all-important one, and I am well aware that I might be fussing with dead bodies . . . while a survivor is dying somewhere in the forest. On the other hand, I could race off into the woods hunting for a survivor, only to later discover that I have the remains of three people here. Better to see what I can assess first.

  I definitely have two victims. One man and one woman. I’d been generous in my age estimates, but I’d peg them both close to Sophie’s age.

  All she told us about her group is that it’d been four people—two heterosexual couples. Am I looking at one couple? Or Sophie’s lover and Sophie’s female friend? Getting more information had been on my to-do list, but it’s really not important at this moment. It’s just the romantic in me who wants to believe this is the other couple, and Sophie’s partner is out there, alive, and I can return him to her when she wakes.

  I’m guessing all four are Danish or at least Scandinavian, and while there are certainly people of color in Denmark, all the body parts I have come from the stereotypical Scandinavian light-haired, light-skinned Caucasian. That makes body-part matching tougher.

  I attempt to separate limbs based on muscle mass and body-hair density. The torsos suggest that both were the same body type as Sophie—average height and lean-muscled. Even that is tough to judge when, well, the limbs are no longer whole.

  What I’m looking for is a male limb that doesn’t fit. One that’s too thin or too muscular to belong to the dead man before me. Perhaps one with a different color or density of body hair or a different skin tone. In the end, I can reasonably identify one humerus as belonging to the woman, judging by bone size, and the femur matches up with the dead man. That leaves a humerus that cannot belong to the woman . . . because she now has both of hers. I can’t tell if it belongs to the man. The foot, though? That’s definitely male, still encased in a hiking boot. The hair on it seems darker than the other dead man’s remaining limbs.

  Does this mean I’m holding the foot of the missing man? I imagine taking it back to town for
Sophie and having her fly into a flurry of excitement, certain it means her lover is out there somewhere, only missing a foot. No, sadly, he is not, and I hope I don’t need to delve into the gruesome realities of that foot and the torn flesh and the gnawed bone, all of which leave zero doubt of what happened to the second man.

  No, I’m sorry. The wild men of the forest did not hack off his foot before he escaped. No, he did not hack off his own foot to escape. This is scavenging. A predator found his body and chewed on his leg, and when they hauled him away, this was left behind.

  No one needs that much detail on a loved one’s final moments, even if I can assure Sophie that he was dead when it happened. Also, the fact that I don’t have a body means I can’t assure her of anything. I would lie, of course, but if Sophie is a smart woman, she’ll figure it out and spend a lifetime imagining her lover’s final moments as a grizzly ripped into his living body.

  It might not be her lover.

  It might not even be the second man’s foot.

  Even if this isn’t his foot, judging by the remains, the degree of decomposition tells me the attack happened at least three days ago. Sophie was extremely lucky to survive. The missing man—even if he has both feet intact—probably wasn’t as lucky. If he was, he’d have been with her, right? They’d have fled together or found each other afterward. Still, we will search, just in case.

  As for what else the bodies tell us, the short answer is “nothing new.” I’m hoping to get more from the autopsy, but at this point, I see evidence of stabbing on both torsos. While that isn’t easy to determine, given the degree of predation, there are stab wounds through the man’s back, preserved because he fell onto them, leaving the scavengers to work on his chest instead. As for the woman, her throat has been slit. Yes, ripping out the throat is a common method of killing prey, but there’s a huge difference between ripping and slitting, and I don’t need an autopsy to see the clean edges on the wound.

  Two tourists, murdered by what seems to be hostiles. I hate jumping to that conclusion, but from what Sophie said, I can’t imagine she mistook “settlers in desperate need of a shower” for wild men of the forest.

  I try sending Dalton into the forest with Storm to search for a potential survivor. That goes about as well as one might expect, complete with profanity and pointed comments about the dead people on the ground, who should serve as a Klaxon-loud warning against separating. I let him talk me into postponing further crime-scene investigation while we search for our potentially missing man.

  Storm takes the lead there, joyfully, as we give her a reason to leave the death tableau behind. She always struggles with a search ending in people she cannot wake with a lick and a bounce. I have to wonder, though, if this scene upset her even more because, well, what’s lying on the ground isn’t so much people as meat. Either way, she can hardly contain her delight at being asked to do a proper task and leave this place.

  I don’t have anything for her to sniff—the tent had been cleared of all belongings. Still she understands she’s looking for a person. We don’t use her to hunt, so work means finding people, preferably alive. She snuffles the scene, and then she’s ready to go.

  Newfoundland dogs are not trackers. However, they are used in search-and-rescue, and they have an excellent sense of smell, which are the excuses Dalton used to get me the dog breed of my dreams. I never handled a tracking dog down south. Never even owned a pet. So, despite my deep-dive studies, I am quite certain that the fact that Storm has become a very fine tracking dog is entirely owing to her innate intelligence and eagerness to please. If she is not quite on par with a bloodhound, well, that isn’t her fault. We both try our damnedest, and at the risk of bragging, we make a good team.

  Storm takes a quick sniff of the torso, knowing that’s not who she’ll need to find, which helps her weed them out from the scents around the campsite. I’d also brought her Sophie’s jacket to exclude her scent, but I swear Storm gives me a look when I hold it out.

  Umm, I met that woman last night, Mom, and she’s in town—why would I think she’d be out here?

  Like I said, smart dog, one who does indeed find a scent leaving the campsite. But something about it bothers her. She doesn’t whine anxiously. She just seems . . . This is one of those million times when I wish we could communicate. Something is amiss with this trail, and she cannot tell me what it is, and I cannot ask.

  When she follows it, I see the problem. It leads to the remains of another camp. There’s a firepit ring and logs pulled over for sitting, and when Dalton digs through the ashes, he finds tinfoil, suggesting a cooked meal. He also finds evidence that the fire was extinguished properly.

  So, someone made camp here. Someone from down south, judging by the tinfoil and matches. There’s also evidence of a tent—rope fibers where it’d been strung between trees.

  This might seem perfectly logical. Storm followed the missing Dane’s trail from their most recent camp to their previous one. Except that the two are maybe an hour’s walk apart. No one is going to pull up stakes and make a new camp that close by.

  This could be someone else’s former campsite. The Danish quartet found it and considered making camp there to take advantage of the preexisting firepit, but ultimately they chose another site. There, anomaly explained.

  Except for one problem. The firepits are identical: a double ring of stones with a log-cabin-style fire built within. The similarities extend beyond that—enough that I know the same people constructed both camps. The Danes, I presume. So why the hell are they a mere hour’s walk apart?

  “Maybe one came after the attack,” Dalton says. “Guy’s injured and, as he’s recuperating, he builds—” He stops short. “Well, that makes no fucking sense, does it?”

  It does . . . until you work it through. If you’ve just seen two of your companions brutally murdered and the third stabbed in the stomach, you are not going to flee and build yourself a nice campsite while you recuperate.

  Even if your brain was somehow addled enough for you to merrily construct a new camp a kilometer from the murder site, where would the tent come from? The tinfoil-wrapped meals? The matches? The rope? The attackers took their supplies. That’s presumably why they attacked.

  I crouch in front of Storm. “Can you find his trail again?” I repeat trail with the appropriate gestures, but she is unsure. I understand now what bothered her earlier. The sequence of events. Trails have an age, based on strength, and she’s had enough training and experience to know that the trail between this campsite and the murder scene seemed older than others. She’d been backtracking along a trail. That means this is the earlier site.

  She snuffles around and indicates the entrance trail to this site by walking down it a bit and then pointing. He came from that direction, Mom, and I can follow it if you’d like, but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for.

  No, it is not.

  I do a thorough examination of this campsite as I tell Dalton my thoughts. He doesn’t have a solution to this particular mystery. There’s nothing left here but signs of habitation. No marks in the dirt or the vegetation to suggest a struggle. A campsite used and cleared as they moved on.

  We return to the crime scene, and I resume my investigation. Here we do find those signs of violence, and not just in the bodies left behind. There’s blood in the dirt, more spattered on the tent and the campfire rocks. Scuffle marks in the soft ground. Footprints, too. I take pictures of them—I have a digital camera, and there’s a screen in Rockton for me to enlarge them on, a reasonable use of our limited solar power.

  I have the one hiking boot. That’s it—Sophie came to us barefoot. I match this boot to some of the prints. I also see ones with a similar tread but smaller. I measure what remains of the dead woman’s foot and roughly size it at a seven or eight. I’d sized Sophie’s earlier, so I could locate her prints, and she’d been an eight. Two women with similar shoe sizes and likely similar footwear. The boot I’m holding matches Dalton’s size
ten. In other words, average for a man.

  Two men and two women, wearing the same brand of hiking boots, all with average-size feet. Useless.

  What’s more important, though, is that I don’t see any significantly different treads. I do, however, spot prints from footwear without treads. Different treaded boots would mean other hikers or miners or trappers. Some settlers also traded for modern boots, and everyone in Rockton has them. These, however, are the soft-soled outlines of the homemade footwear worn by most settlers . . . and all hostiles.

  As I’ve already noted, the supplies are gone. That’s not surprising. It doesn’t matter if they were attacked by settlers or hostiles or fellow hikers—their gear wouldn’t be left behind. There is only the tent, which appears to have been slashed in the attack. It’s nylon and lightweight, perfect for camping, but too flimsy for settlers or hostiles.

  The tent . . .

  Something about the tent . . .

  I contemplate it for a moment before turning back to the bodies. My gaze goes straight to that lone hiking boot with the foot inside.

  An image flashes. Dalton and Kenny and me in a clearing, not unlike this. Surrounded by hostiles. The leader telling Dalton to undress. For a moment, I thought it was about humiliating our leader. Then I realized the truth. They were going to kill him, and they didn’t want his clothing ruined.

  I shiver at the memory. Dalton steps behind me, fingers going to my elbow.

  “Okay?” he murmurs.

  I turn and hug him—a fierce, quick hug. He kisses the top of my head as I pull away, and I pause a second before regaining my composure.

  “I’m trying to determine whether they took the clothing,” I say. “The packs, yes, and there’d be clothing in them but what they were wearing . . .”

  “Ah.” One arm goes around me in a quick embrace as he understands that sudden hug. “May I speculate?”

  “Please.”