The Wild Inside

by Christine Carbo

  What was left of Victor Lance lay pathetically under the bright lights, a pitiful combination of ripped, sagging flesh, exposed bones, and innards arranged to look as put together as possible. Ford was actually lucky because the bear’s violation had already been so brutally thorough that Wilson’s necessary incisions were minimal, more of a stitch-up job, a salvaging of puzzle pieces. It was more difficult to see intact, pure skin sliced open, the Y incision making the skin fold to the side, exposing the unfathomable parts of our bodies that we carry daily but never glimpse.

  Wilson motioned for us to approach the table as he put on his plastic gloves. I walked right up, but Ford hesitated. I thought I heard him swallow hard. Wilson did too and said kindly, “You sure you’re up for this?”

  Ford nodded, his face much paler than minutes ago, and shuffled closer to the table.

  “So what we have here is an adult male, twenty-seven according to your records.” He glanced at me. “Height and weight both on the very lower end of normal for an adult male, but I don’t think from disease. I see no evidence of any obvious pathology other than his teeth.” Wilson pointed to the victim’s gum line set against bone since half of his face had been peeled away by the bear. His cheekbone, jaw, and teeth, too long and yellow—sinister as any teeth without a mouth enclosing them tend to appear—were exposed. “His teeth show past decay along the gum and the classic collapsing jawline of a meth user. Meth dries out the gum, a condition called xerostomia, and leads to excessive bruxism, or grinding of the teeth and the inward cave of the jaw. And even though the bear has cracked the skull and made this indentation”—he pointed at the right side of his skull—“we can still see that his jaw is inwardly caving from wear and tear and not the bear’s crack.”

  “His mother,” I added, “has verified that he was a user.”

  Wilson nodded. “When the toxicology report comes in, we’ll know if he was using within approximately seventy-two hours of the time of death. My bets are on some type of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, all chemicals frequently used to make methamphetamine.”

  “And time of death?” I asked.

  “Well, there are some interesting time-of-death issues. First—” Wilson poked at the dark gaping cavities around the rib cage and stomach. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ford take a step back and look away. Wilson glanced at him. “Okay there?” he questioned again with a kind voice.

  Ford nodded. He was tougher than I thought. I was waiting for him to bolt at any minute, but he was putting up a good fight.

  Wilson cleared his throat. “The arterial bleeding is interesting because, though from your perspective it doesn’t seem so, the volume is less than you would normally see with a bear attack victim. The arteries produced less blood than would have been typical.”

  “Wait.” I held up my hand. “So are you saying that he was or wasn’t alive when the bear attacked?”

  “I’m afraid, alive. But usually victims of animal attacks bleed more excessively since their panic level is so high and the heart is pounding furiously. With this guy, it’s almost as if he was in a state of shock already. Or was only semiconscious since his arterial bleeding indicates that he was not in a state of panic.”

  “So, the bear,” Ford finally spoke, but his voice sounded thin in the large room. He covered his mouth, turned away, and coughed, letting a retching sound escape. The sound pierced the cold room and seemed to echo. Suddenly the air felt difficult for me to breathe. “Excuse me.” Ford gulped. “The bear,” he tried again, “so the bear was attacking someone limp and weak, maybe unconscious, almost dead? Dead to the bear?”

  “There was enough arterial bleeding at the time of the attack to show that he was antemortem—” He glanced at Ford. “Alive,” he added. “But like I said, when the bear attacked, he was not struggling or moving vigorously. In essence, he probably would not appear to be a threat to the bear like a healthy person might.”

  “Tracks showed a grizzly.” I felt the clench, remembering the track with the claw track measuring around three and a half inches. I knew a black bear’s claw usually measured about one and a half inches long. “Is that consistent with your findings?”

  “Absolutely. Canine marks are consistent with the measurements of grizzly teeth, jaw angle, and claw depth.” I knew that the fang of a grizzly could measure up to four and half to five inches, while a large black bear’s fang was closer to three to three and a half inches.

  “Any possibility of human DNA on the body?” I asked.

  “There’s very little blood, skin, or hair beneath the fingernails of the remaining arm, indicating not much of a struggle with the bear, consistent with the fact that he was not panicking when the bear came at him. We haven’t completed the tests yet, but I don’t think there will be human DNA samples available. Unless we luck out on some of the duct tape, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. I’m not seeing much to indicate that we’ll get anything.”

  I sighed, shaking my head grimly at the thought of no DNA.

  “But, ah.” Wilson held up a finger, a faint delight emanating from his eyes. Of course. There had to be some enjoyment for him, or how would he come to work each day? Just because the dead bodies were the visible reality (not the campfire stories one heard) that violence dwells in the cracks between our safe, small worlds didn’t mean the bodies were finished telling their tales. Wilson might even listen to them with compassion. I remembered the Latin cliché, mortui vivos docent, mumbled by my father when he took me to the university with him and told me that we’d be moving three thousand miles away—how he whispered it softly. The dead teach the living.

  “I found”—Wilson pointed a white-gloved finger to the right shoulder of the victim— “something interesting. As you can see by the canine marks here, the right pectoral has been ripped clean away to and under the rib cage.” He pointed to the dark cavity below the ribs. “The grizzly has also cleanly ripped away the spleen and the ascending colon. But if you remember, part of the victim’s shirt was draped over the right shoulder. We’re still running tests, but the part of the shirt hanging over the rib cage, although soaked with coagulated blood, shows a small amount of granular residue in a shape that looks as if it were part of a saucer or small plate-size circle that I think is a stippling pattern.”

  “Really?” My voice must have sounded excited enough for Ford to pipe up.

  “Stippling?” Ford asked, his mouth completely green now.

  Wilson nodded. “Stippling is the pattern the firing of a gun leaves on a victim if fired at close range. We’ve run those tests, and there’s just enough residue to see that it is part of a larger pattern emanating outward from the abdominal area that was eaten by the bear.”

  “And the bullet?”

  “Gone. Most likely in the gut of your grizzly.”

  I made a low whistling similar to Monty’s. “Okay then. So victim was chained to a tree, then shot. From what distance?”

  “Having any pattern at all suggests a proximity of six to twelve inches. If farther away, stippling wouldn’t appear. Plus I’ve found some interesting marks on the lowest rib that appear to be made from the bullet, which, if I’m correct, the trajectory of the bullet would have been downward.” He delineated a path from the right pectoral to the medial side of lowest rib.

  “So the shot would have been fired from high to low and at an angle?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking so far.”

  “Hmm,” I mumbled.

  “Yeah, the trajectory angle of the bullet is a little weird. I’ll let you know if I come up with a different read after more analysis.”

  “Any signs of sexual abuse?”

  Wilson tilted his head for a moment, as if to consider the question. “No. From all I’m seeing on the remains, which isn’t that much, but enough to make some solid deductions, is that this man was not sexually abused. We have found no bodily fluids on him. He wa
s chained, shot, and eaten by a grizzly. And he was eaten within a short time frame before dying from the gunshot wound—close to being in shock or unconscious.”

  “Do you know the time of death?”

  “Just a window. He died between one and eight p.m. on Friday, but”—he held up his finger— “from the remaining skin, the enlarged pores, the frostbite on his fingers, and the state of dehydration in the liver, it looks like the victim was exposed for a long time before he was even shot. His level of dehydration and the abrasion marks on his ASIS and under his armpits from the tape suggest he was chafing against those for a number of hours.”

  “Can you say how many?”

  “I’d say he was out there for at least eighteen to twenty-four.”

  “So he was out there Thursday night too?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long would you say passed between the bullet entering the victim and the bear attacking?”

  “About sixty to ninety minutes.”

  “So the bullet could have been fired as early as eleven thirty and as late as six thirty on Friday?”

  Wilson nodded. “Give or take. Yes.”

  • • •

  On our way out of the building, Ford excused himself and went into the men’s room. I had to use the restroom myself, but decided I would give him his privacy. I had no desire to hear someone retching in a stall next to me.

  He returned with a damp look around the edges of his thinning hairline, as though he’d splashed water over his face, and I figured he had, indeed, lost his breakfast. I found myself vacillating between having contempt for the old man for having worked for the Park Service for over thirty years and still unable to keep his cookies down to having a strange sympathy when I considered my own troubled breathing back in the lab. His face looked deathly and deeply etched with thousands of small lines. I considered that in a few years he’d be replaced by some experienced ranger who would run circles around him.

  He recovered from his pallor by the time we made it back to the car and said he would give me a ride to the helicopter. While he drove, he reminded me that he planned on staying in Missoula for the night, said his wife was coming to meet him for the evening, and they’d both drive back to the Flathead the next day. He even offered the fact that the wife put Missy, a two-year-old golden retriever, in the kennel for the night to join him. He didn’t tell me his wife’s name. I don’t know why he gave me any details at all, but I sensed he needed the small talk to try to shuffle the images he now forever held in his psyche to some other place not so present.

  After he pulled up to the aviation office, killed the engine, suddenly everything seemed to get too quiet, and I thought I smelled expensive cologne. I was certain he wasn’t wearing it when I stood next to him during Wilson’s presentation, so I figured he had a bottle in his briefcase and had put it on in the bathroom to get the smell of formaldehyde out of his nostrils. Again, I felt an odd sympathy I wasn’t expecting. “Look, Systead.” He turned to me. “The park’s just seen its best attendance in years, even with it being the rainiest summer in a long time.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So there’re a few obvious things here that I don’t feel like I need to spell out to you but will anyway, just for the sake of being direct.”

  “Fair enough,” I offered. “Shoot.”

  “The most obvious is that this should be very much downplayed with the press, which I would think works to your investigative advantage as well.”

  I nodded. “It does.”

  “Okay then. We’re on the same page.”

  “Sounds like we are.” I opened the car door, ready to get out and be on my way. The cologne was making me slightly nauseous. Plus I had a lot of interviews to conduct upon my return, and whatever modicum of sympathy I was feeling was quickly vanishing with the haughty tone of Ford’s voice. “Thank you for the ride.” I placed one foot out the door.

  “Additionally—” He wasn’t finished. “We’re in a bit of a pickle with this grizzly situation mixed up in it. I don’t want this smeared all over the nation like some major grizzly mauling because it’s not. It’s simply an issue of remains. You heard him, the guy didn’t even put up a fight. He was half-dead already.”

  I nodded.

  “But I also don’t want this going down as some hyped-up park murder either. I don’t know what freaky thing happened out there, but I can tell you it was just some weird fluke. Nothing’s as scary as it first seems.”

  I shrugged. “That’s what I’m here to try to find out, sir.”

  “I understand that, but you need to know where I’m coming from.”

  “I do understand.”

  “Good then. You’re welcome.”

  It took me a second to recall that he was responding to my earlier thank you for the ride. He smiled a stretched smile, a little too tight, toothy, and coffee stained, and the corpse’s skeletal Halloween smile stabbed into my mind. “You know,” he continued, “one of my top priorities this year is to strengthen communication between the four hundred and fifty employees and fifteen hundred volunteers the park has.”

  I grabbed the door handle to signal my departure. “Sounds like a solid plan.”

  “It is a good plan. And teamwork—we’re looking for teamwork when it comes to Glacier, between all its factions. Canada and us, the tribes and us, DC and us.”

  “I can see that that would be good too.” I stayed put in my seat, my hand still reaching out to the handle.

  “And with this particular investigation, I’m thinking a little teamwork is important as well.”

  I shrugged. “Most certainly, sir. It’s been a teamwork situation since the get-go with the county sheriff and their forensics lab, your rangers, Park Police, the Department of the Interior, the state crime lab.” I gestured in the direction of the university nestled against the brown, eastern hills of Missoula. “A lot of chefs in the kitchen already. But by nature, certain things in an investigation need to be kept under wraps.”

  “I understand that, but I need to be kept apprised of all developments.”

  I gave him a single nod, not feeling like making a verbal affirmation. I thought of saying, Isn’t that what Monty is for? Instead, silence dropped heavy into the space between us.

  “So”—he wrapped his hand around the keys in the ignition, ready to turn the car back on— “that’s why I’ve been keeping in close touch with Walsh, Smith, Bowman, and Sean Dewey.”

  I climbed out of the car and looked back in, resting my elbow on the door. I decided I needed to play nice. “Look, whatever I’ve got is yours unless it somehow jeopardizes something in the investigation, which I can’t see why it would. So no worries.” I forced a smile.

  “Good, then you also shouldn’t have a problem with the fact that I’ve spoken to your boss and we’ve come to an agreement that my office will handle anything to do with the press.”

  This didn’t necessarily bother me; dealing with the press was a pain in the ass, but it was crucial that it was done right. I knew, of course, that reporters had been in to check the activity logs with both the city and the county, as they do every day, and that they knew about the dispatch to Glacier. And I knew, from Sean, that Walsh and he had agreed that the feds would handle all releases. What I didn’t know was that Ford had talked Sean into deferring to Ford’s department for all releases.

  I thought of how Ford and his gang handled my father’s mauling. The saved clippings I saw only once before I left for college. My mother kept them in the top drawer of a bedside table in her room, the thin paper now slightly yellow with age and smelling like the oak of the drawer. A strong urge to walk away without saying a thing overcame me. I fought it. Told myself that he would do all he could to protect the park, and this was a plus for me to not have to deal with reporters.

  “So,” he said, “I’ll need you to
defer all questions from the press to my department.” He stared at me, his brow up.

  I nodded. “Just make sure you give them enough so that they keep their noses out of my work.”

  “All right then.” Ford held out his hand, smiling.

  I shook it and forced a smile. “Hope you and your wife enjoy Missoula.” I shut the door and walked away, needing to take a bigger, deeper breath than I expected. I definitely needed some coffee.

  7

  WHEN I RETURNED to West Glacier, I ran into Joe Smith and a younger blond gal, a good inch taller than him, who turned out to be one of his daughters. Although I felt a kinship with Joe, I didn’t know much about his family. I remembered that he had, in the past, mentioned a thing or two about his wife and kids, who were off living their own lives. He introduced her as Heather, his oldest, and said they were heading out to lunch.

  “I’d invite you along, but Monty’s in there waiting for you. He’s been diligently working.” Before I had left for Missoula, I had left orders for Monty to see if Victor had a cell phone and if so, to get the records, to check with the border patrol in Eureka and St. Mary, the train stations in Whitefish and Essex, and to contact the airport for anyone suspicious who either came in or tried to leave in the last week. None had anything strange or out of the ordinary to report. Additionally, I had asked him to contact Walsh for information on known meth dealers in the area and to make sure he had tracked down the addresses of all the individuals we planned to question when I returned.

  “Glad to hear that,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I need to speak to you.” Heather had her father’s almond-shaped eyes, but they were green, not blue. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but you wouldn’t mind if I stole your dad for a few minutes?”

  “No.” She fidgeted, shuffling her feet a bit and glancing to her father, then back to me. “Of course not. Take your time,” she said with a tentative, but pleasant, smile.

  Joe put an arm around her. “Hon, you go ahead in your car. I’ll meet you there in ten.”