"Already on it.Advise responding units that access will need to be by snowmobile or helicopter—no roads within four miles."
"Understood.Stand by."
Shaw clicked off and looked at Russ, who had lowered the binoculars and was staring at the pattern below with an expression Shaw had never seen on his spotter's face.Russ had pulled bodies from rivers, from cliffs, from car wrecks.He'd carried dead children out of the woods.But this was different.
"I need to photograph this," Russ said."Tight orbit, three hundred feet, steady as you can."
Shaw settled the Bell into a slow banking circle.Russ traded the binoculars for the Canon DSLR behind his seat, and the shutter began clicking.
From this altitude, circling, the full scope became clearer.The spiral tightened as it approached the center, the spaces between each revolution narrowing from several feet at the outer edge to inches near the middle—the geometry of a nautilus shell rendered in snow.Between the lines of the spiral, the surface was pristine, untouched, as if the person who carved the path had walked nowhere except the path itself.The body was dressed in dark clothing.Arms extended, head centered, legs together.Something between a crucifixion and a snow angel, though neither word fit.
No blood on the snow.No signs of struggle.No tracks leading to or from the center.
That was what hit him hardest.There should be tracks.Whoever carved that line had spent hours in this snow—the spiral was too large, too precise to be the work of minutes.Hours of walking, one foot in front of the other, tracing the long inward curve inch by painstaking inch.
So where were the footprints?
The storm had ended Monday night.If the pattern was carved before the storm, fourteen inches of snow would have buried it.Which meant it was made after—in the last several hours.Someone had walked into this meadow, created this enormous design, with the body at its center, and left no visible trail.
"Russ, can you see any tracks?From the tree line, anything?"
Russ lowered the camera and picked up the binoculars, scanning the meadow's perimeter.Shaw held the orbit.
"Nothing," Russ said after a full circuit."Snow is clean all the way to the trees."
"Wind?Drifting?"
"The meadow's sheltered by the ridge.Wind strong enough to erase prints would have wrecked the pattern too."
Shaw's jaw tightened.Every new detail pushed the scene further from the categories his experience had built—exposure, accident, suicide—and into territory he had no map for.
"Danny."Russ's voice was quieter now."There's something else.Inside the center, around the body.Small dark shapes.Evenly spaced.Four, maybe five."
"Can you tell what they are?"
"Negative.Too small from here."
Shaw said nothing.There was nothing useful to say.
"Base, Rescue Three.Update on the scene.Pattern appears to have been created after the most recent snowfall.We're seeing no tracks to or from the site.Advise responding units to approach from the south and east to preserve the northwest snowfield."
"Copy, Three.Sheriff's office has dispatched.ETA ninety minutes by snowmobile.State patrol notified.Request from the state level to forward GPS coordinates to the FBI field office in Duluth."
FBI.In decades of search and rescue, Shaw's finds had been handed to local sheriffs, state patrol.The FBI meant someone down the chain had heard the description and decided it exceeded ordinary jurisdiction.
The helicopter banked and turned and banked again, inscribing its own circle in the sky above the spiral in the snow.Two rings—one mechanical and roaring, one silent and carved by human hands—both centered on the same dark shape that lay motionless in the brilliant, merciless light.
Russ set the camera down.
"Danny," he said."In twenty years, I've never seen anything like that."
Shaw looked at the pattern one more time—the precision, the patience it implied, the body at its heart like a period at the end of a sentence written in a language he didn't speak.
"No," he said."Neither have I."
CHAPTER FOUR
Five days.
