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Penny has mostly standard-issue gear. There are a couple of T-shirts, and both make me smile. They’re ironic goth—an adorable reaper and a kitty vampire.
I also find an ebook reader with a battery pack. I remember Kendra saying that Penny seemed to spend her spare time reading, and this is how she managed it without a massive stack of books. This is how we’ll manage it, too, in Haven’s Rock. Oh, we’ll have physical books, but we’ll also have e-readers stocked with titles that residents can borrow. They don’t take much power to charge or need charging all that often. That’s what Penny’s done, with Yolanda obviously giving her permission to charge that backup battery now and then.
I open the e-reader and skim the contents. There are years’ worth of architectural journals, and that makes me smile again. I know what that’s like—when you see enforced offline time as an opportunity to catch up on your professional reading. There are architectural books there, too, along with a bunch of popular-fiction titles—mostly science fiction and fantasy.
The only other personal items are photographs that look as if they were hastily printed and put into a cheap photo album—probably when Penny realized she wouldn’t have access to her phone and pictures on the jobsite. Photos of family, photos offriends, photos of someone that I realize by the reaper shirt must be Penny. I take that photo out and lift it into the light.
Penny looks nothing like our dead woman, except in superficial ways. About forty, white, full-figured with blue eyes and ash-blond hair to her shoulders. What catches my attention most in the photo are those eyes. They sparkle with something that makes my heart clench, thinking of what has probably befallen her in these woods. This is the woman who gave us our dream home. Our dream town. Who saw it as a challenge and dove in without a word of complaint, however ridiculous our demands.
I slip the photograph into my book to show Dalton. It will help to have a mental image of who we’re searching for.
I’m leaving the residence when I hear a deep woof. I shield my eyes against the sun and see Storm running for me, leash dangling, Dalton sauntering along behind.
A few people working stop to watch the dog. One woman puts out her hand, as if to call her over, but Storm is on a mission, and that mission is me. After all, we’ve been separated for nearly five hours. That’s five weeks in dog time.
I hug and pet her while Dalton makes his way to us. I don’t ask whether he found anything. He’ll tell me, and when he only lets me cuddle Storm, I know the answer is no.
“Heard the plane,” he says. “Figured I’d head back, grab you and lunch, and set out again.”
“Anything out there?”
He shakes his head. “I had a couple of hunches. Thinking of what happened to Bruno, I wanted to check out places where Penny might have gotten herself into trouble, near where her trail ended. Storm couldn’t pick it up past that point. Neither could I. We checked a few places. Nothing. I figured you’d want to go back, though. Get a look at the crime scene.”
“I do. Thanks.”
“Let’s see what they’re serving in the commissary, and whether we’re authorized to eat any of it.”
We eat lunch with Anders. April is too busy to join us. Afterward, we head out and soon we’re back at the spot where we found the dead woman. I’ve searched up above again, as has Dalton, but we don’t seem to have missed anything. Then it’s down into the pit. With a flashlight, I make a more thorough examination of the floor, looking for prints. I detect a few impressions, but nothing that would serve as an identifier.
What I mostly find is hair. Dalton identifies several that seem like they belong to animals—black and gray strands that he’ll tentatively say are black bear and wolf. Was that the purpose of the pit then? Trapping predators? There are much easier ways of doing it. Unless you want them alive and relatively unharmed.
I think of the wolf we saw. The tame wolf.
“Nah,” Dalton says when I offer up a theory. “I mean, yeah, some moron would certainly try that. Oooh, a pet wolf. How cool.” He snorts. “Not cool at all. Not for the human or the wolf. That one was tame enough that I’m going to hazard a guess and say it was reared from pup-hood. Still not a domestic dog, but with the proper handling, it’d be tame enough.”
“Like Raoul.” That’s Mathias’s wolf-dog. We’d found it as the sole survivor of an attack, and he’d taken it in and reared it. “Though in that case, being part dog helps.”
“Yep.” Dalton looks around the pit. “If someone was trapping live predators, it wasn’t for that.”
I have the exemplar hairs on a piece of paper, the ones he identified as animal set aside. There are several more. One Isuspect is mine—black and straight and over six inches long. Two others might be the dead woman’s. The last one is shorter. Either black or dark brown. I take them all, but that’s the one I’ll concentrate on.
After that, I focus on the part where the woman was buried. I’ve brought a sieve from the kitchen, and we take turns working through the excavated dirt. It’s backaching work. I turn up several more hairs that seem to be from our dead woman. When we finally do find something, though, it’s big enough that we didn’t need the sieve. A small piece of white paper gleams from a spot where I’d removed the dirt hiding it.
I pick up the paper, and it feels oddly soft and malleable. Not notepaper but some kind of thick tissue. A disposable napkin, I realize as I unfold it. The napkin is emblazoned with a logo for Air North. That’s the Yukon’s airline, flying mostly from the Yukon to BC, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories. On the napkin, someone has scribbled three sets of coordinates. Two are crossed off. One is not.
I pass the napkin to Dalton.
He reads it and then says, “They’re all around here. Three sites, maybe ten miles apart. This last one?” He taps the one that hasn’t been crossed off. “It’s near us.” He takes out the sat phone and hits a few buttons. It takes a moment, but then it zeroes in on our location. He enters the numbers. Then he points.
“A half kilometer that way.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We are standing on the spot that the GPS insists is the correct coordinates. There’s nothing here, and no sign that anything has been here.
Dalton peers around. “It won’t be perfectly accurate. We’re going to need to take a look around.”
We mark the spot. Then we circle out from it. Ever-growing circles until we reach a creek. We look up and down it, still seeing nothing.
