The trail ends here, and there are deep scratches in the dirt, where the grizzly had widened the hole to get at something inside it.
That “something” would have been Blake’s body. Using my flashlight, I peer in to find hair caught on rock. There’s also a boot, which I need to crawl inside to retrieve. I bring the boot out and turn it over in my hands.
“His?” Anders says.
“Yep. I noted what they were wearing, hoping for hintsabout whether or not they were legit, and you know I always pay attention to boots.”
He leans over to check the brand. “Oh, I’ve got a pair of those.”
“Sturdy and comfortable and not too trendy, which supports their hiking story.” I hunker down. “So Blake is killed, and someone—presumably his killer—drags him and stuffs him in here.”
“They were up here yesterday, weren’t they? When he fell?”
I nod. “They indicated this foothill.”
“Meaning his partner—Gretchen—could have seen this cave and knew it’d do the job.”
“Yep.” I straighten. “Okay, this isn’t necessarily the crime scene, but I’ll need to process it. Time for you to head back to Haven’s Rock. Give Rory a kiss for me and tell Yolanda she may need to pass off auntie duties to Dana. I’ll be out here for hours, and she didn’t sign up for all-day baby care.” I take a notebook from my backpack. “Better yet, I should write a note. She’ll need more milk from the icebox and probably diapers and—”
“Yolanda can handle it, Case.”
“I know. I’m stressing over being gone so long, and this makes me feel a bit better.”
He pats my back. “Then write it all out. And Rory is fine. If Yolanda needs a break, there’s Dana, April, Isabel, Kenny…”
Tears prickle my eyes. “I’m lucky, aren’t I? To have so much support.”
“You get what you give, Casey,” he says softly. “And you give a lot.”
I nod, letting the tears of gratitude well as I write the note.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I could have just called April and asked her to run her sat phone to Yolanda for baby instructions. We have three phones. I have one and Anders has the other, while the third is with April. But if I called, she’d demand an explanation, and I’d rather delay the part where my big sister is furious at us for letting a grizzly eat a corpse. Not because we didn’t save poor Blake’s body from that fate—she’d deem getting it from the bear too risky for such a mundane concern. No, her issue will be that we’re asking her to autopsy a partial body when we had a chance to get a whole one.
As for why Dalton doesn’t have a phone, if he’s in trouble, he wouldn’t summon us anyway. I try not to think about that. The truth is that he’s safe in his tree—full-grown grizzlies can’t climb—and he has the rifle. He will not hesitate to shoot if he’s in danger. He doesn’t need the phone because we’ll hear his whistle telling us the coast is clear.
After Anders leaves, I feed the ground. The joys of being a breastfeeding mom away from her baby, with no easy way to pump. My choices are to relieve some pressure or deal withdiscomfort and leaking. Definitely not a part of motherhood anyone warned me about.
After that I spend some time examining the cave. As for what I hope to find, I have no idea. In this situation, I’m just seeing what Icanfind. The answer, as it turns out, is “nothing.”
I’ve taken the hair, in case it’s not Blake’s. It definitely appears human, which means if it’s not his, it likely belongs to his killer. The boot is his and confirms his body was in here. There’s a smell to the boot that reminds me of muscle creams my former detective partner used. The boot is also from the foot that he injured.
I’m guessing that they unwound the bandages, hopefully to soak it in a cold stream. Then they reapplied them with whatever cream they had, hoping that might help. While I’d told them to lace the boot as tightly as possible, from the laces, it looks as if they put the boot loosely on his bound foot, and it came off when the bear dragged his body from the cave.
Is there any chance an animal found Blake’s body and dragged it into the cave? No. As Dalton said, bears will cache, but that just means pulling branches over it. Wolves don’t cache. Back at Rockton, we had a local mountain lion and her grown cubs, but that was an anomaly this far north, and I can’t imagine that’s the answer.
No, a human put Blake in this cave. I even find an evergreen bough that seems to have been stuffed into the entrance as a half-assed cover. Half-assed because I suspect whoever did this wasn’t thinking of predators finding the body—predators who could easily smell it and remove that branch. They were hiding it from passing humans, who might see something.
Is it possible that whoever put Blake in heredidn’talso kill him? Yes. Imagine Gretchen finds him dead. She can’t draghim to the nearest settlement. She could hide his body in a place where they’d seen caves.
All that is postulation. What matters is what I have found—evidence that says Blake’s body was hidden here by a human.
Next, I want to find the actual scene of the crime. I try to set Storm on the trail using Blake’s boot, but she doesn’t seem able to find it.
Does that mean someone carried him, not leaving a drag trail? Or wrapped him up and dragged him? All I know is that Storm doesn’t locate Blake’s trail and there’s no way to say to her “Do you smell another human here? Find that person.” She’s not a scent hound. She’s just a very eager-to-please pet who has been trained to track by an amateur. We wanted her to find missing people—residents who got lost or fled Rockton. Anything else she can manage is a bonus.
Dalton might be able to find the trail. I pick up some signs myself—trampled grasses and broken twigs—that tell me the direction someone came from. Someone who, according to Storm, was not a brown bear. But I lose the trail on open and rocky ground.
