by M K Dymock
Mina didn’t make it more than 30 feet before the snow cracked, separating a distinct top layer from the bottom. She stopped, her knees leaning into the hill to give her skis more edge to grip the mountain.
“Don’t come down,” she said, loud enough for Sol to hear but hopefully not loud enough to create a vibration. Below her lay the bowl; no trees could protect her from what was about to happen. Had her feet not been clamped into ski boots, they’d be shaking.
Skiing forward would require her to cross snow on the cusp of a slide. It didn’t need to be avalanche size; a foot could push her off the ledge. Going back would be more difficult and time-consuming, but it would lead her to the rock and relative safety from avalanches.
All of this debating took less than two seconds. Mina shoved off, pointing her skis in a straight line across and out of the slide’s path. The deep snow flew out behind her in a wake. The slide tugged on her tips, threatening to pull her down, but she didn’t dare turn.
The other side of the slope turned slightly uphill and into the trees. She didn’t stop until she was surrounded by trees and on the next ridge. Only then did she look behind her. A chunk of snow about twenty feet wide and a foot deep had broken away from its foundation. The last little bit rolled into a ravine.
Sol waved from the other side, and she waved back, signaling she was okay. But Mina was far from okay.
The trees she stopped in blocked out the little light of day. The only noise was the snap of branches as they broke under the heavy snow. Taking off her skis would sink her into the powder and probably over her head. She pulled off her goggles to get a better look at her surroundings. Trees and snow and not much else.
Mina stood about fifty above where she’d searched yesterday. Her radio buzzed.
“You okay?” Sol asked.
“Just lost a year of my life, but other than that, sure.”
“I’ll follow.”
“No, not until they do avalanche control.”
“You sure?”
“I’m only 50 yards from the run. The slope isn’t steep enough to slide after this.”
“Still, get out of there.”
“On my way, after I look around for a second.” She wouldn’t let fear push her out again.
After tucking the radio into her vest, she dropped into yesterday’s grove. Once she reached it, the hill flattened and she sank into the snow, her skis buried. She shuffled through the trees, breaking fresh snow with each hard-earned step.
She inhaled, and with the scent of wet pine came something bitter, so strong she could taste decay. As she moved across the terrain, the smell grew more pungent. Trying not to breathe failed as the difficult slog burned her lungs.
At its base, each pine had a hole under the branches that formed a deep well in the snow around the trunk. Deep enough for a skier to sink in, deep enough to disappear in. After the previous night’s storm, some were several feet deep.
Mina stopped at the first drop of blood. A red streak in the snow led to more drops.
She sucked in her out-of-control breath. “No,” she whispered. Proof she’d failed.
There still might be time. She pushed herself across the snow; her small amount of police training made her careful to avoid the blood.
The red trail stopped at one tree well, and a single bare hand reached out. Its blue fingers were barely visible through the tree branches.
Mina forgot about evidence and fumbled to kick off her skis, sinking in the snow. “Do you need help?” She knew even as she yelled it, she called out to a dead man. As she tried to scramble through the fresh powder, she ripped the radio off her chest to call it in. “I’ve got a—”
Mina’s hand released the button. The hand lay wholly unconnected from a body, but the depths of the tree well held something far more terrifying.
“Mina, what is it?” Sol called through the radio, which now lay on the snow.
She didn’t have an answer.
6
The body in the tree, well-hidden under the branches, was barely recognizable as human. The hand and the few other pieces left were clues enough to what it once had been. But what else remained would haunt Mina for a long time.
She wanted to run, wanted not to be the one who discovered that horror in the woods. But she wouldn’t do that again. She did allow herself to rush out of the trees and call in the location. After all, there was no rescuing left to be done. Last night had been her chance, and she’d blown it.
Sol ordered her back down to the lodge, refusing to let anyone up there until the patrollers had time to set off the dynamite and any potential avalanche.
The small avalanche they did set off went straight for the ravine but avoided the trees and the body. Once the okay came to go back up, it took several tries for Mina to click back into her skis. All strength had fled from her legs; she finally used her hands to hold her knees steady as she snapped in.
On the lift ride back up, she told herself the skier had probably fallen and died. Coyotes had found the body and dragged it into the trees, abandoning the site at the approach of humans.
What did she have to be so scared of?
Mina wished she knew what drove her fears. She’d found dead bodies before; one had been attacked by coyotes before she stumbled onto it. She had to wait for two hours until a helicopter arrived to haul it out. This shouldn’t feel different, but it did.
Mina, Sol, and the other deputy, Clint, skied into the site with Patrick and a few other patrollers. They all carried snowshoes attached to their backpacks.
Stopping shy of the tree grove, one rescuer next to Mina went a little off-balance, standing on only one foot, and missed his shoe. His foot hit the ground and sank into the snow almost to his waist. Mina and Patrick stood on either side of him and hefted him out.
“Should’ve stayed in bed, am I right? Going to be one of those days,” he said, laughing as they struggled to get him back on his feet.
Mina had worked with many of these guys on and off for a few years. When she’d first volunteered with SAR, the joking within a few feet of a body angered her. By her second body, she teased along with them, recognizing it as a way to keep from going mad.
“Mini!” one patroller yelled from farther into the trees. “What are your tracks?” That was one bit of teasing she hadn’t learned to embrace: Mini Mina. A nickname she’d held since childhood and had hoped would die in California. At 5’2”, the name followed her everywhere. She had her Korean mother to thank for both her height and her name.
“I came in on my skis.” She moved closer to the body, ignoring every instinct to flee.
“You take off your boots?”
“No, didn’t want to sink in.”
“Not your skis—your boots.”
“Yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “I took off my boots in zero degrees and walked around in the snow. Why?”
She came into a clearing where Clint stood with camera in hand, staring at the ground. The body wasn’t in view quite yet; this was where she had first seen the drops of blood.
“There’s a footprint here,” Clint said.
“You think the fall didn’t kill him?” Mina hated to think their guy survived falling off a chairlift only to be injured and attacked by an animal.
“It looks like a bare foot.”
“What?” She covered the last few yards in a single stride even as her snowshoes sank into the snow. She stayed in Clint’s prints to not disturb the site any more than they had to.
Next to him was an indentation in the snow. She squatted down and outlined it in the air with her finger. The print showed a curve and five indents. The footprint was formed by the toe and ball only, not the heel. But the track narrowed at the ball, unlike a paw print.
She stood and scanned the area, looking for more tracks. Her own tracks from the morning were not two feet away. “Are there any others?”
“Not yet, but we’re still looking. I’m thinking maybe he got disoriented in the fall. Then hy
pothermia sets in, he gets confused, and takes his boots off.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, but that’s what hypothermia does. Makes you disoriented and feel hot.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She squatted once again over the print. “This print wasn’t here this morning, and believe me, that guy was already dead.”
Sol came up to them, overhearing the last of their conversation. “How sure are you about that?”
“You can see my tracks there, but maybe I missed it.” The print was alongside the drops of blood she first saw. She’d scanned the blood trail carefully, and the print was deep, at least a few inches. “Wait a second.” With her palm down, she held her hand flat over the toe print. Her fingers didn’t span half the print.
Sol squatted next to her, pulling out a tape measure and drawing it across the toes. They stared for a long time without speaking. His fingers hovered over each toe. “No claw marks.”
Clint snapped a photo with the tape measure. “It’s going to be hard to get the details in the photo. The shadows from the trees make the snow appear flat. Difficult to tell in the image how big a foot it really is.”
Sol had been commander of SAR for upward twenty years. With his tracking skills, the rest of the crew joked he was the search and they were the rescue. He placed his cheek almost to the snow next to the print, analyzing it from every angle.
“What do you think?” Mina asked.
“Let’s try to get a mold.” Sol stood up. “Clint, keep photographing the site before dark. There’s another storm coming in tonight, and we need to get everything documented and the body down.”
Everyone walked off, leaving Mina and Sol alone with the track. “You don’t have to handle the body,” Mina said. “Clint has more experience than you in crime scene analysis.”
“I’m fine.” Sol turned as quickly as snowshoes would allow.
Mina regretted even hinting at something she never dared mention. That other body she’d found a few years ago ravaged by coyotes had been Sol’s wife, Daisy. Sol never spoke of her.
After more photographs were taken than at any wedding and a mold of the print taken, they loaded the body, or what remained of it, into a body bag.
Two ski patrollers had already puked into the trees, and Mina was determined to not join them. Her attempt to disassociate from the remains as they slid them onto a tarp failed immensely, but at least her bile stayed down. There’d be plenty of time of time for crying and puking in her own bathroom tonight. Wouldn’t be the first time.
After the patrollers left with the body, she stayed behind in the increasing darkness to place crime scene tape around the trees. She hung the tape as high as she could in case the storm dumped out. If it did snow, they’d at least be able to find the site again. December was still early in the season and the snow base would rise considerably.
After tying off the tape around the last tree, she stopped with arms still threaded through the branches. A clump of snow fell off a pine a few feet away. Silence had never been so loud. It had to be residuals from finding the body, but she couldn’t get over the feeling that her movements were being tracked. Not watched, tracked.
A creak in the snow like footsteps echoed through the woods. Mina peered through the tree branches, seeing nothing and no one. With one last glance at the former grave, she snapped back into her skis and booked it down.
As she skidded to a stop in front of the ski racks outside the lodge, Patrick came out from the ski patrol shack. “Did you hear the crappy news?”
“I found a half-eaten body today. Don’t imagine there’s crappier news than that.” She picked her skis up and wiped the excess snow off.
“That boy that went missing, Jason. His friends called about an hour ago. Apparently Jason turned up in the bed of a ski bunny he met on a lift. Told them he left a note on the truck and was sorry they didn’t see it.”
Mina stabbed her skis into the ground in one thrust. “You’re kidding. Then who did we just haul down in a body bag?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
7
Mina didn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep.
Maybe if she’d only waited a few minutes the night before, she would’ve been able to save the missing skier. She should’ve stayed longer, gone back up, done something other than shrug her shoulders in the lodge at the advancing storm. She needed to find out what happened; she owed him that much.
With temperatures below zero outside and her apartment not much warmer, she pulled on her base layer of pants and a long-sleeved shirt while still under the covers before getting up. She was back to teaching after taking the previous day off. Usually the thought of leading eight five-year-olds around the mountain exhausted her, but now she longed to be in a more innocent world.
She stopped in the employee office to check what ability level she’d be teaching. A lone computer sat in the office with two employees lined up to check their own schedules. The first one, Jenny, a close friend of Mina’s, pulled up hers. “Sweet, they changed me to off. I can drop the chutes all day long.” She saw Mina standing behind her. “You in? We’ll have a girls’ day.”
“I’m on Munchkins.” That’s what they called the four- and five-year-old classes.
“Don’t hold your breath,” said Callie, who had been setting the schedule for twenty years, and who everyone tried to butter up to get the good lessons. “Word’s getting out about the body. All the parents are yanking their kids out of ski school.”
“We just pulled it off the mountain two days ago. How does everyone know?”
“I don’t know, but I got a call this morning from some New York tourists coming in for Christmas and they’re already canceling.”
“Sounds like we get the mountain to ourselves,” said Jenny. “I’m going to change out of my uniform. You coming?”
Mina really wanted to hit the slopes and actually ski. “I’ve got to check with my other job,” she said. Jenny lived in a house with five to ten other roommates, depending on the season. She could afford not to work for a time. But if they lost the Christmas tourists, nobody would last long. The town relied on the weeks around the holiday to make up for the fall’s empty rooms.
Some of the roads had been plowed, but she still needed her Jeep’s four-wheel drive to carry her down the mountain to the sheriff’s office, which sat at the edge of town along the highway. To catch speeders, all they had to do was sit in their parking lot.
The building was a prefab with a metal roof to ensure the snow slid off. While it had a “cell,” it was more of a windowless room that locked. It never held a criminal more than a few nights, and those criminals were usually drunks who started fights.
Besides Sol and Clint, there were three other deputies across the county, which encompassed a landmass the size of Connecticut, though with a much smaller population. They had the town of Lost Gorge, nestled in a valley at 7,000 feet, and the actual county of Lost Gorge. Those three deputies worked out of the various towns in the county. None could commute up the canyon on a daily basis, especially in the winter.
Much of the saving done in the county was done on a part-time or volunteer basis. Patrick and the other ski patrollers took turns being on call to work the few ambulances. The freeways and some highways were managed by highway patrol and state police. Emergency calls were routed to the nearest city, who would call state police, who, if necessary, would contact Sol.
What it all added up to was a need for residents to be self-sufficient and survive long enough for help to arrive.
Mina pushed the office door open and almost turned around at the heat wave that accosted her. Clint sat at a desk inside the reception room. His tan uniform shirt hung over the back of the chair, leaving him in a white undershirt.
She immediately stripped off her parka. “What’s up? You beating back winter to the tropics?”
“Heater’s broke. It will only set itself to 85 degrees. I tried keeping the door propped open,
but all that did was make sure it ran constantly.”
“How’s the body coming?”
Clint had taken several courses in crime scene analysis from the FBI, thereby becoming county’s expert. He wiped the sweat off his face. “What body? I’ve never seen anything like it. Far worse than—” He caught himself with a glance toward the closed door of Sol’s office. “I’ve taken photos and poked around a bit, but it’s beyond what we can do here. A courier from the FBI is picking it up for an autopsy.”
Mina sank onto the folding chair in front of his desk. “Find anything that will help ID him?”
“There wasn’t even a face left to know what the guy looked like, but it was a male. I pulled some prints, but nothing so far has come up in the database.” His voice dropped. “Mina, that level of damage to the body was intense. It would’ve taken a pack of wolves or one giant grizzly to do that kind of work in one night. Some of the blood hadn’t even frozen yet.”
“And it’s not the right time of year for a grizzly, and we haven’t had a wolf in a decade,” she finished. “Of course, you wake up a hibernating grizzly and all bets are off.”
Sol came out of his office. “Good, you’re here. I need you and Clint to canvas the town, see if anyone turned up missing.” He rubbed his beard, or what little grew. Every year he attempted to grow one, and every year failed. “You know the seasonal workers a lot better than either of us. A lot of them don’t trust police. Talk to them about what they saw. Figure out if anyone hasn’t shown up when they were expected.”
“I can help with that. Everybody is already talking about what happened.”
Sol turned to Clint. “You focus on the tourist side of it—the hotels, the shuttles. Maybe this guy came in for a trip alone. That’s why no one’s missing him.”
The door opened, bringing in a welcome rush of cold air and Cate, the town’s newest permanent resident. She had been hired by the town council as a public relations person to revive the town’s reputation after the events of last year and bring in the tourists. Tourists were a much-desired and much-despised group of people. Locals needed their money but resented their presence.
