Back of Beyond

by C. J. Box

  Dakota laughed. “Yeah, even I can see how pretty she is.”

  “So do you love him?”

  “Jesus, girl,” Dakota said, actually blushing.

  “It just seems…”

  “It seems like what?”

  “You seem really different from each other.”

  “You mean because he’s older?”

  “That,” Gracie said, “and he’s your boss. But you don’t seem to be the kind of person who needs a boss. And he’s not like you at all, you know?”

  Dakota went silent for a few moments and Gracie feared she’d offended her. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Dakota said. “I’m just trying to figure out how to answer.

  “I guess,” she said, “it’s kind of an unusual situation. I never knew my dad except that he worked in the oil fields in Wyoming, and when I grew up the only thing I could do well was hang around horses. I trust horses more than people, even though they can be knuckleheads. At least they’re innocent knuckleheads, though. They never do anything because they’re mean, only because they’re scared or spooked or trying to get away. But they aren’t mean, like people are. When I talked to Jed he pretty much said the same thing. Plus, do you know how hard it is for a girl like me to find a partner my age who isn’t an idiot? So many of the guys my age are slackers who are just plain scared of girls in general and me in particular. I get tired of waiting for them to grow up, you know? I don’t think I can wait forever. I tried to find someone to take me as I am, but pickings are slim, girl.”

  Gracie nodded. “So what’s he like? I mean, when he isn’t being the boss?”

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me these questions,” she said. “And I especially can’t believe I’m answering them.”

  “He seems mysterious,” Gracie prompted.

  “Oh, he is that. He’s always got something going,” she said. “Did you know he was a poet? He’s published a couple of books of poetry. Can you believe that?”

  “Is it good poetry?”

  “I can’t tell,” she laughed. “It’s beyond me. I mean, I get parts of it, but it’s really difficult to understand. He’s even won a couple of awards for it, I guess. And there have been times when he reads it to me. It sounds beautiful when he reads it out loud because he has so much passion, but it’s not like I understand most of it. I pretend I do, but I don’t. I think he’s kind of frustrated more people don’t recognize his genius.”

  Gracie peered ahead, trying to see Jed McCarthy in a different light.

  “Is he nice to you?” she asked Dakota.

  “Much of the time,” Dakota said.

  “But not always.”

  “No,” she said. “He can be the most obtuse son of a bitch I’ve ever met sometimes. Worse than a mule. And when he gets a new idea in his head, like a new poem or a new way to make more money, he gets pretty full of himself. I think he prefers his own company to anyone else because he’s the only one smart enough to stand himself, if you know what I mean. That’s when I feel like throwing in the towel and just hitting the road.”

  “Are you feeling that way now?”

  Dakota looked over and gave Gracie a long searching look. “How did you know that?”

  “I watched you two earlier.”

  “Sometimes I just can’t figure out what’s going on under his hat,” she said. “And this is one of those times.”

  “Why do you think Mr. Glode left?”

  Dakota sighed. “Mrs. Glode,” she said.

  “Simple as that?”

  “It’s a hell of a lot more complicated,” Dakota said. “I think the two of them were hoping they’d find something out here they didn’t find. There have been other couples on these trips looking for the same thing. So at least I can sort of understand that.”

  “What else?” Gracie said.

  “Wilson,” Dakota said.

  “You mean you don’t know why he left, too?”

  Dakota nodded. “I’m going to tell you something nobody knows,” she said. “I didn’t stay with Jed last night. We had a fight and I slept outside by the fire. At one point I had to get up to pee and I walked up above the tents into the trees. In the moonlight, I could see somebody lurking around. Kind of moving real slow and deliberate—walking back and forth from the tents to the lake. I sort of snuck down there and I saw it was Wilson. I don’t know what the hell he was doing, but he gave me the creeps. He was just out walking around.”

  “Did you tell Jed?”

  “Not yet. His head is too far up his butt to listen to anyone.”

  “What do you think Wilson was doing?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. But it looked like he was planning something, or waiting for someone. Maybe it was Tristan Glode, but that doesn’t make much sense to me.”

  Gracie thought about that.

  “Maybe it was Wilson and Mr. Glode who had a fight?” she said.

  “Maybe. But you’re the only one who said they heard anything.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  Dakota said, “Let me put it this way. I believe you think you heard something.”

  Gracie said, “But why would they leave together after that? And what would they fight about? I mean, if it was Tony and Mr. Glode at least they’d have a reason.”

  “I know. It beats me.”

  “I didn’t hear an argument,” Gracie said.

  Dakota shrugged. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but something is. You look ahead of us at all those people on horses in this setting, and you think, what a perfect thing. But what you don’t know is what’s going on in everyone’s head, and what they might be thinking about everyone else.

  “That,” she said, “is the reason I prefer horses.”

  * * *

  Jed had pulled his horse and mules off to the side of the trail to let his clients ride past. When Gracie and Dakota reached him, Jed said, “Dakota, you take lead for a while. I’ll tail up.”

  Gracie saw that Dakota wanted to argue but clamped her mouth closed, pulled her hat tight, and urged her horse and mules on. Jed fell into place where Dakota had been but he didn’t stay there long.

  * * *

  He said, “So, you enjoying the trip so far?”

  There was something disconcerting in the way he asked, she thought. Like he couldn’t wait to get past the formalities. Like he kind of enjoyed playing with her, enjoyed reeling her in with his soft voice.

  “I guess.”

  “What about your sister? She seems like maybe this isn’t her dream vacation.”

  Gracie had to smile at that.

  “Thought so,” he said.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “I saw you talking away with Dakota. What on earth were you girls chatting about for so many miles?”

  “Nothing in particular,” she lied.

  “Really?” A hint of sarcasm.

  “Girls do that,” she said. “We just talk about nothing for hours. You know, clothes, nails, shoes. Girly things. That’s just how we girls are.”

  He chuckled. “You are a pistol,” he said. “Now really, what were you two talking about for so long?”

  Gracie squirmed in her saddle. She wondered why it felt like it had gotten warm, like those car seat heaters did in her mother’s Volvo. She said, “I asked her how she liked her job. Since I like horses and all.”

  “Ah,” Jed said. “And she told you what?”

  “She said it was pretty good most of the time.”

  “My name come up?”

  “Of course,” Gracie said. “You’re her boss.”

  Up until that moment, she hadn’t noticed the sheath knife on his belt that lay across the top of his thigh. She guessed it had always been there amidst the things he wore, but she’d just not focused on it before.

  He said, “Females always talk too much.”

  She didn’t know if he meant her or Dakota. Or both. He had looked away from her but there seemed to be a lot going on
in his head.

  “Are we going to find those two guys?” she asked.

  “Oh,” he said, almost vacant, “we’ll find ’em.”

  26

  Bull Mitchell roared and fired his .44 Magnum over the backs of the wolves. The concussion in the epic stillness was tremendous and Cody flinched and came back up with his ears ringing. The big slug slapped the surface of the water twenty feet out and all three wolves wheeled toward them on their back haunches.

  Cody could look into their black eyes and see their long red teeth and pink-tinged snouts and he instinctively 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 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.”