Blood Lure

by Nevada Barr

  With the exception of arsonists, who liked to see the fruits of their labors, most criminals did not return to the scene of the crime. Could be a curious visitor who had learned of the location by some means. Could be a hiker coincidentally chose that spot to take a leak and clean his pockets. Still, Anna bagged the candy box, marked the day, time and place she'd found it, and tucked it away. One never knew.

  The Good & Plenty was the sum total of excitement. In the irregular opening in the alders where Gary had found Mrs. Van Slyke, Anna sifted through leaf litter, crawled into the neighboring tangle of bushes, examined weedy trunks and found nothing.

  At length, enjoying a childish morbidity, she lay down in the place where Carolyn had been dumped and, folding her hands behind her head, contemplated being among the quick, and the sure knowledge that one day she would join the dead. Molly said thoughts of mortality came with one's fiftieth birthday. Anna still had a few years to go. But then she'd always been precocious.

  Free from what she expected to see, Anna finally saw what was actually there.

  In law enforcement classes, teachers were always admonishing students not to forget to look up. In real life, officers, rangers, forgot. Unless it was obvious, evidence in treetops went largely unnoticed. Both times that Anna'd crawled into this ravine, she'd seen little above eye-level.

  High in the scrub, hard to assess from a supine position but probably six or seven feet up, a handful of the dusty-looking leaves were striated. Had the marked leaves not been so far from the ground Anna would have thought they'd been brushed with mud, painted by a passing boot after the rains and, so, after the body recovery. High as they were, above where tracks could be found, they held less interest.

  Plants, like other life forms, were subject to disease and death, molds and rusts and parasites. Anna wasn't well enough versed in the pathologies of Montana's flora to speculate what this augured and her mind drifted. Drifted far enough to notice no other leaves, no other bushes were affected.

  The world of the shrubbery pressed around her, began to feel claustrophobic. Sticks poked in her side. Leaves stuck in her hair. Skinny bark-clad fingers scratched at her arms. Light was deceitful, playing tricks with leaf shadows stirred by a wind that scarcely ever penetrated down to ground level. Heat, held close and dusty, itched on her skin.

  Time to abandon her macabre resting spot. She rose and pushed into the branches to pluck one of the marred specimens. The rust-colored markings were smeared from the rain, but protected by the leaves above, enough remained for study. Dried blood—in her chosen profession Anna had had the opportunity to see plenty of the stuff—was slathered on various surfaces. A spit test reconstituted the brown to red. She took a small paper bag from her pack and collected several of the leaves. Blood in trees was not as rare as it might seem. Predators roamed the skies. These twiggy boughs were insufficient to support a dining hawk or eagle but occasionally they dropped wounded prey. If this was the case the tiny critter's corpse had been whisked away by a lucky groundling.

  Her gory find stowed in an inside pocket, Anna stood in the alder and waited. Flies found her. Deerflies with jaws like airborne Chihuahuas flew kamikaze missions at the backs of her knees. Absently, she slapped them into the next world.

  At length the information she waited for came into view: another patch of the rusty leaves a couple yards deeper in the brush. Shifting her attention down she moved toward it carefully, seeking any further sign underfoot or lower on the bushes. Runoff from the rain had erased any trail that might have been left and the sturdy alders retained no sign of anyone's passing.

  Having reached the second cluster of streaked foliage she repeated the process. It took a sweaty, fly-bitten two hours to travel the rest of the trail but before noon she reached its end. Had she been a crow she could have flown from the place Carolyn's body was dumped to the pine tree where the blood trail ended in a matter of seconds. The two places were no more than seventy feet apart.

  A pine, a lodgepole, rose gracefully out of the thicket. Its shade and the acidity of the fallen needles had opened a small needle-lined space beneath the boughs into which Anna moved gratefully. Her assumption that this was the blood trail's terminus was based not on what she found but on what she'd ceased to find. Three quarters of an hour's careful search around the tree led her to no new manifestations of rust-streaked leaves. Since the trail had been laid overhead, Anna crouched on her heels and studied the interlocking green of the pine above her.

  This time the search was short. Twelve or fifteen feet up, partially secured to a branch with string of some sort was a navy-blue stuff bag vomiting pieces of clear—or once clear—plastic. All had been ripped to ribbons, by talons probably, though a bobcat or cougar or even a very talented fox was a possibility. Other than that, Anna could think of no pawed and clawed carnivores who frequented the avian stomping grounds.

  The bark ringing the tree's trunk was unscarred. Whoever had put the package there had not done so by climbing. Having shed her day pack, Anna shinnied up for a closer look. Straddling a comfortable branch she tried to put together the pieces.

  It didn't take long. With understanding came fear's cold touch, sickening in the warmth of noon. The torn plastic was blood-smeared as the leaves had been and comprised several different sources, two sandwich bags cut open, and part of what would undoubtedly turn out to be the tail end of a cheap poncho, the kind one can buy at the check-out counter in gas stations and carry in purse or trunk for soggy emergencies. The navy cloth was from a simple stuff sack, the sort hikers used to stow extraneous things. This one was eight or ten inches wide and twice that long. Bag and baggies had been drawn into the tree on a rope pull. A line of torn threads fuzzed the bark where the makeshift rope had been thrown over the limb and dragged. The line was secured with a slipknot. The dangling remainder had been cut, the frayed end tossed up into the lower branches. The rope was as cobbled together as the packaging: strips of torn fabric, white with narrow blue striping, tied end to end.

  Carolyn Van Slyke's face had been cut off. The bloody slabs of meat had been carried high like a trophy or a team pennant over the butcher's head, leaving traces of blood on the cloaking leaves as he passed through. Away from the body, the murderer had packaged up the steaks in what he had at hand—sandwich bags and a raincoat—stuffed them in a sack that had been used maybe to carry his lunch, and cached this new treat up high where bears and other animals couldn't make away with it.

  He'd been saving Carolyn Van Slyke's face for later.

  15

  Anna seriously wanted to get the hell out of there. Each and every idyllic day in this most beautiful of places had shown an underside that suggested God's Country was under siege from His traditional nemesis. To Anna's mind the most hellish of weapons had been unloosed: fear. Fear was the root of all evil. The others could be tracked to it. Greed was fear of want in pathological form. Lies, fear of being discovered for who one was, punished for what one had done.

  The unnatural actions of the bear, Rory's bizarre disappearance, needless murder, now this abomination; fear poured into Anna's mind. In the midst of the very things that brought her comfort, she was being drowned in it. For a moment she clung to the branch fighting a desperate need to run from the wilderness, from sunlight, from solitude and hide in a closed, dark room full of familiar faces.

  "Goddamn it," she muttered. Over her forty-odd years the fates had robbed her of her husband and taken a good shot at her only sister. She would not be robbed of that which made all else endurable, the peace and perfection of the natural world.

  Anger helped but did not heal. Her rage was manufactured from two parts self-pity and one part need. It lacked the self-propelling white-hot burn of righteously earned ire. She kept it alive long enough to scorch away at least the core of her panic. She could trust herself to function, not to topple from the tree or dash madly down the trails shrieking.

  When her breathing evened out, she knew she could stay and do her work, but
peace of mind, joy, freedom, those gifts of the wild country had been stolen away. "Fuck," she whispered, then she prayed a jolly little prayer: "Dear Lord, please let me find a gun in my pack when I climb down. Love, Anna."

  Backup was hours away, but she radioed Ruick to tell him of her find. Mostly, she admitted to herself, to report her location. Should she go missing, Ponce would alert them to where she'd gone off trail but who would think to seek as far as the bush-locked pine?

  Harry was in a meeting. Maryanne wrote down the message and Anna was left with no choice but to break contact.

  Flinching at every sound, freezing at every change in the shadow pattern, she made several trips up and down the desecrated pine taking photographs of and collecting the shredded bags. The meat they'd held was long gone. Whatever bird or beast had worried it out of its packaging had carried it away and undoubtedly eaten it. Too bad, Anna thought. Unless the killer was of the Hannibal Lecter School of Fine Cuisine, he may have removed the flesh not to eat it but to take away a clue to his identity.

  But why string the stuff up if he'd merely been covering his tracks? Surely one would want the telltale flesh eaten or buried or at least exposed so that it might decay more quickly. If something is cached it's because someone means to return for it.

  No birds stirred the leaves, no shadows moved with the wind, still Anna stopped breathing, listened, cursed the gods for ignoring her prayer for firearms. Moving as quickly as she could, she labeled each item as she packed it in a paper evidence bag to better preserve the blood samples. The navy stuff sack was old, several years at least, made by REI and common as cotton underpants. The same went for the baggies and the torn scrap of poncho: generic, easily obtained, ubiquitous in the backcountry. The strips that had been tied together to form the line used to swing the cache into the branches were what appeared to be shirting. The cloth was equally unremarkable, probably J. C. Penney or Sears, cotton-polyester sold in bulk. However, if the shirt they had been torn from had once covered the back of the killer, they could prove important.

  Regardless of value or lack thereof Anna spent no time studying the evidence. With ingrained care she packaged and stowed. Mind, ears and eyes were occupied patrolling the perimeter around the tree for cannibals, bears, axe murderers and other manifestations of impending violence.

  At last the job was completed, everything tucked in her pack. With the possibility of flight nearer, Anna found her unease growing. "Get a grip," she ordered herself unsympathetically. Before she could make her escape, she needed to canvass the clearing one more time in case she had missed anything.

  Out from the tree at a north-northwesterly heading, five-feet-four-and-a-half-inches as measured by the carpenter's tape she carried for just such a purpose, she found a pile of what could only be bear scat. Whether grizzly or black, she couldn't tell. This time of year, both had about the same diet. The sheer size of the sample would suggest a male grizzly but black bears grew nearly as large at the upper end of their scale. For unscientific reasons, Anna felt certain it was not only grizzly scat but that of her own personal grizzly.

  Given its half-melted then dried consistency, the scat had been left before the rain but not too long before. If it had been deposited much before the storm, it would have dried more completely. The downpour would have reduced it to its component parts, not merely smoothed it over.

  An educated guess put the age of this sample at five or six days, seven at the outside. Around the time of Mrs. Van Slyke's death not twenty yards away, around the time the flesh cut from her face had been cached in the tree.

  The killer had been here. The bear—or a bear—had been here. It was conceivable the smell of the meat in the plastic bags overhead had attracted a passing animal. Their noses were exceptionally keen. But Anna could find no indication this bear made any effort to retrieve his prize: no claw marks on the trunk or lower branches, no disturbed leaf litter or soil around the tree as might be expected from a frustrated three-hundred-pound scavenger.

  It appeared as if the bear had simply come to this minuscule clearing, quietly relieved himself and went on. No law against that. Anna thought of the old joke "Where does a bear shit in the woods?" and smiled in spite of herself.

  Too much coincidence, though. Bears, grizzly and otherwise, were high-profile inhabitants of Glacier National Park, but given the park's forty-one hundred square kilometers, there weren't all that many of them. According to Resource Management statistics, less than three hundred. One of the things the DNA study would do was give a more accurate count. Wishing she'd thought to pack one of Joan's handy scat sample bottles, Anna made do with another evidence bag—plastic this time—and procured a spoonful for the bear researcher. Anna noted a few of the standard bear leavings: berry seeds, twigs, grasses, most in mint condition. The bulk of this scat sample was made up of a dull brown-gray grainy matter that looked to be closer to digested dirt than plant matter. Another mystery for Joan. As long as there weren't buttons or buckles or human fingerbones, Anna couldn't get too excited.

  She was glad to leave the pine clearing, scared to reenter the thick of the brush. It was an act of will to move up the side of the mountain through the obscuring undergrowth at a sensible pace. The urge to claw her way frantically out of the shrubbery didn't abate till she was not only in the open sunny world of West Flattop Trail but upon Ponce's broad back. Cowboys were braver on horseback. It was a little known codicil to the code of the west.

  For no reason more logical than a bad case of the willies, Anna put a couple of miles between her and the flesh-eating pine tree. At a bend in the trail, a hillside of broken stones created a thousand unique, earth-bearing planters displaying such a breathtaking show of yellows, blues and reds that Anna wondered how human gardeners could bear to enter the competition. She tethered Ponce to a downed tree deep in tasty grasses and emptied her pack: water, lunch, map, evidence packets. Lunch first, she decided. Scrambling up and down the tree had given her the insistent appetite of an active child.

  A peanut butter and honey sandwich under her belt, she was better able to concentrate on her find. Donning a new pair of latex gloves, she examined the torn bags, all that was left of the macabre food cache. The blood, she had little doubt, would turn out to be that of Carolyn Van Slyke. As she'd discerned in the tree, other than these sinister smears, the plastic baggies had nothing to tell her. With its sophisticated equipment, the lab might do better.

  The blue sack was slightly more forthcoming. Gray-green dust and a pale yellow residue of a delicate almost glittering nature, like pollen but more reflective, streaked the fabric. Whatever the substance was, it had been scuffed onto the sack recently. Perhaps the lab could use it to tell where in the park the bag had been before it was shanghaied into service as a ditty bag for the deceased. In a civilized environment, that information might lead to the killer. Here, time was a deciding factor. The days it would take to get the bag down to West Glacier, then to the lab and back, would be too long. The killer would no longer be "living" in the same place.

  Having returned the evidence to storage and divested herself of the surgical gloves, she unwrapped her second sandwich. Her fingers smelled of the talc used in the gloves and tainted her enjoyment of the peanut butter. Ignoring that and the busy ticklings of flies, she leaned against the log where Ponce was tied and listened to the reassuring tearing sounds as he went on with his picnic.

  The killer was still in the park. Either that or Anna's intuition had finally slipped over into paranoia. That was a distinct possibility. Sitting in the sun, in a world where she had felt comfortable and whole much of her adult life, she was unpleasantly aware that she gasped and started at every noise. Her eyes never ceased scanning the horizon, alert for danger.

  Though the most obvious, the wilderness wasn't the only thing she was at odds with. With the possible exception of Joan Rand, Anna had not had anything even resembling a genuine connection with another human being since she'd come to Glacier.

  She thou
ght of Sheriff Paul Davidson, her—her what? Her boyfriend? Her sweetheart? Or merely her lover? Paul was a good man and once, a long, long time ago in mind, two weeks ago by the calendar, she'd fancied herself falling in love with him. Since her adventures began in Glacier he'd scarcely crossed her mind. She'd not even called Molly though she'd told herself she would. There was something about this case that was causing her to isolate.

  Anna snorted. Sensing an equine conversation in the offing, Ponce snorted back. "Isolate myself more than usual," Anna said to him. Ponce lost interest once she reverted to the human tongue. He returned to his grazing.

  Humans were tribal creatures. Isolation was a form of punishment so extreme even in prisons it was only used for serious breaches of conduct. Those who isolated themselves usually suffered as a consequence. Anna'd long been aware of the tiny cracks in what passed for normalcy when she'd purposely been too long alone, locked inside the ivory tower of bone that served as skull.

  Shifting position, her back to the trail so her ever-vigilant eyes could keep watch on the woods, she considered her slow withdrawal. The unseen scratchings of a small woodland beast sent her pulse rate up and she realized what it was. She had been dispossessed, made homeless. Not removed from her house and cat and dog in Mississippi—the park housing she enjoyed on the Natchez Trace Parkway was simply one in a chain of way stations. Her home, where she felt safe and centered, had always been the wild country. Towns, streets, houses, dumpsters, PTA meetings—that was where evil lurked. In the backcountry was only the often pitiless but never malicious work of the gods.