“Seems so.”
We return to Storm, who has lain down to wait. When we approach she rises, ready to continue. We get her to where, as Dalton said, the forest opens up, and then we let her take over tracking Gretchen. She follows the trail for another hundred feet or so before stopping in a clearing.
“Huh,” Dalton says, when Storm lies down.
He starts searching the perimeter of the clearing. He’s looking for signs of where Gretchen might have exited. I focus on what she was doing here. If Storm is lying down, that means Gretchen stopped here—that her scent is all over this clearing.
I look first for debris, but Gretchen seems to be a seasoned hiker, and we didn’t find a single scrap of trash at the campsite.
Could she have camped here? It’d be an odd choice. Murder your husband. Hide the body. And then set up camp less than a kilometer away. You know, to rest. Moving a body is hard work.
And as I’m thinking there’s no chance I’ll find signs of an actual encampment, I spot one. A divot in the ground. Only it’s not quite a divot. It reminds me of my very rare golfing excursions, when I had a habit of hacking the ground. That’s what I’m seeing. A spot where the “turf” seems to have been lifted.
I take a stick and prod under it. There’s no real sod here where the ground cover can be sparse. But what I lift is the closest approximation—a layer of hardened soil held together by root systems. I take hold, and it peels back in a square about thirty by thirty inches.
By now, Dalton has seen what I’m doing and come over. He frowns at the piece of sod. I dig around all sides of the open square, but it was just that one section.
“Something buried?” he says.
“I think so.”
He takes out the collapsible shovel, but I motion for him to hold off. I bend and start clearing with my hands. I lift out handfuls of dirt. Then my fingers brush something and I stop. I take a deep breath and gently clear away dirt to reveal hair. Light brown hair.
“Gretchen,” I murmur, sitting back on my heels and exhaling.
Dalton crouches at the hole. “Buried standing up?”
“Seems that way.”
“Fuck. That takes some work.”
“Less soil disturbance, but yes, much trickier to dig the hole.” I exhale slowly. “Since she didn’t put herself in there, I’m going to need to get her out. And we need to figure out how to do that.”
In the end, the only real solution is to dig a bigger hole. Go in from the sides and loosen the soil enough to extract her body.
Dalton has his collapsible shovel, but that’s not really meant for this kind of work. We’re going to need to go back to town. Still, Dalton makes a start at it, and as he does, I kneel to brush dirt from her head. And two minutes later…
“Eric?” I say.
He stops, wipes sweat from his brow, and grunts. Then he looks over. “What the hell?”
I have the top of the head exposed up to the brows. Now I clear lower on the face, revealing thick brows under a heavy brow ridge.
“That is not Gretchen,” Dalton says.
I keep clearing. The rest of the face comes clear. A man’s face. He’s maybe in his thirties. Light brown skin seems to be the result of a tan. He has dark blond wavy hair and a short beard.
Dalton stares down at the man. “Did we just…?”
“Find another corpse in the forest? It seems so.”
“Fuck.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After that, we don’t bother going to Haven’s Rock to get the bigger shovel. We call for it, along with a bigger guy to help dig out our dead man. We ask Anders to help my sister find someone to take Rory and then come on foot with April, and to be alert for anyone in the forest.
Dalton and I keep working for twenty minutes. Then I return to the main trail, where I meet our deputy and doctor.
