The Bramble and the Rose Page 4

  Time passed, and then dissolved. A great shadow entered my tent and surrounded me. The smell of an animal, overwhelming because there was so much of it: wet dog, roadkill, and blood, pulsing out in heavy breath. I was between dreaming and waking. The shadow became a black tree, dead, dancing upside down in the creek beside me. I’d had the dream before, and knew to wake myself up. But I couldn’t, and then with a thud, the tree disappeared. Two more thuds, loud and close enough to rattle my chest bone. I was sliding down the slope, and my bare foot caught a tree root, my eyes took in the trees and the land around me. The .40 was in my hand. From the creek bed, a woman called for me. The sound of my name dispelled an echo that I had only half been aware of, the whine of a bullet’s ricochet.

  “Down there, drop your weapon,” I said, protected by a tree trunk.

  “It’s me,” said Mary Weaver.

  “Drop it anyway, I’m coming to you.” When I heard the revolver fall, I went to Mary where she stood, turning in the open, peering into the woods above her.

  “He’s gone,” she said, her voice tight. “Down the creek.”

  I swept my flashlight beam over the rocks and the water’s surface, finding no prints. “I don’t see any tracks.”

  “No, no. This was a man.”

  THERE WAS A slash in the wall of her tent about two feet long. The doctor had heard the tear, and saw the blade coming in. She’d rolled away, found her sidearm, and shot in warning the first time, a bullet through the tent’s fabric. As the attacker fled, splashing down the creek toward the swamp, Mary managed to get out of the tent and send two more shots after him. It took some convincing to get her back to her vehicle and on the road to my station. But once she’d calmed down, she saw reason. When her taillights had rounded the bend I stepped back into the woods.

  Night is a good time to practice losing yourself to the living world. Once you are lost, the beasts are likelier to tolerate you, because you are the same as them. It takes a slow step that means no harm, and believing you belong. And you must listen as an animal would. I let the slope lead me along the most ready path, crawling under weirs of pine branches, across and back until I was within sight of my little one-man tent. Once there, I waited with no sense of time passing until I was sure I was alone, then went to it. It had been sliced open, all the way down one side. My humanness came flooding back as I understood that Mary and her handgun had not done anything to frighten the attacker away. He’d waited, watching, and come back. I moved back to the shadows and waited once more.

  Time, gravity, curiosity: all brought me down to the creek itself, and the low smooth rock. Putting myself in the attacker’s position, then Mary’s, I watched in my mind as the figure splashed down the shallow water and back into darkness, away from the gunfire. I followed without hope of picking up a trail, the creek urging me toward the swamp. Down at the edge of the water, the sky opened up. Orion was on the rise from the southeast, taking his place among the late-night stars. The swamp was a great flat of soft earth cut through with channels of water and ringed by hemlock and pine. Really, as much water as land. On a distant hilltop to the south, a cell phone tower stood. It was the beginning of fall, and goldenrod, reeds, and cattails grew six foot high, silver in the starlight.

  I can’t pretend to find meaning in a line of bent stalks or a scuff in the earth. I just go where the land takes me, and this in-between place could lead me to any number of dead ends, or bury me if I wasn’t careful. Someone knew more than I did, and he was out there. A rumpled bit of something lay on the ground; I picked it up. A camo boonie hat, new and stiff.

  “JUST A SHADOW,” Mary said, taking a seat by my desk. The coffee maker was doing its job, and filling the tiny office with a welcome, sensible smell. “Tall, probably. Gloves on. I remember the hand coming in.”

  “What kind of gloves?”

  “Work gloves, soft, with rubber fingers. The blade was black.”

  “The knife?”

  “Hunting. Long, not folding. It had a guard.”

  On the desk between us lay Dr. Weaver’s motion-detector wildlife camera, which I’d taken from the tree where she’d hung it. I’d also taken our rifles, but left everything else. Dally had already called me, having been roused out of bed by the dispatcher, who’d fielded a couple calls each from the Moore and Ceallaigh households about the gunshots. I had told the sheriff it was under control, don’t send anyone, keep it quiet. Now that I had the doctor safe, I called Dally again and arranged to meet him in Fitzmorris in the morning.

  “We better get some sleep,” I said.

  “If we have to,” Dr. Weaver said.

  “Mary, you’re still telling me the bear killed that guy?”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “At least I don’t know he didn’t. And here’s the thing: Whether he did it or not, the switch is flipped now. He’s eaten the apple; he understands we’re food.”

  I took Dr. Weaver to Willard and Tina’s cottage, where Julie and I were staying at the time. With my family visiting, room was scarce at my house. I put Dr. Weaver in a guest room, and got a couple hours’ sleep without waking up Miss Julie once.

  THE HOLEBROOK COUNTY Sheriff’s Department was situated in the courthouse basement, beside a grassy square dedicated to the Fiftieth Infantry Division dead of the Civil War. It was about seven in the morning, just getting light. The rear entrance of the courthouse, where Dally let us in, smelled of fox.

  In the years I’d known him, the sheriff’s hair had gone from black to pure gray, but the way he carried himself was stiff-necked as it had ever been, and his age didn’t show on his face. For any sign he was sixty, you had to look to his hands, to a certain pause before speaking, and a slight cocking of his left ear toward you. He had a good computer in his office and we plugged the camera in, repurposing a connector cord from the printer. But the computer told us ‘Device Not Recognized,’ so we sat there looking at it.

  “It needs software, maybe?” Dally said.

  Mary picked the camera up and began flipping switches, eventually happening on a tiny button that lit up a view screen on the camera’s backside. It was an infrared, no-glow model designed not to spook game with a flash. We found we could run the time-stamped images back on that small screen, from the final close-up of me taking the camera down from its roost, to the field of vision down the creek to the bend.

  “Here we go,” said Dally. Our heads knocked gently together as we peered into the view screen. There’s a splash in the creek, sparkling droplets in midair, the tread of a boot, the back of a running figure. The screen went white. “Gunshot,” I said. After that, another, and then the first one, a little less bright because it had been from inside the doctor’s tent. With each shot, Dally gave me the briefest of long-suffering looks.

  The old lady said, “Sorry about the shooting. I dozed off, and in comes the knife.”

  We saw the top of a camouflage hat, which backed away as we reversed through the images, the face hidden. This was the attacker approaching Dr. Weaver’s tent. Earlier, we got a better look at a figure dressed in dark clothes, a camouflage hat, and what looked like a camouflage bandanna. The camera caught him midstride, bent almost double as he crossed from the darkness of the woods to the open space of the creek bed. From his posture and clothing, it was hard to tell how tall the person was, but I did get the feeling it was a man, tall, and fit. Was it possible that there was long hair under his hat?

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Dally. “That tells us very little. What’s he wearing?”

  We stared a moment. “Camouflage?” I said. “Could be anybody out here.”

  Dally gave me another look to tell me he was thinking what I was thinking: It could be anybody, but it looked a bit like one of the Stiobhard brothers, survivalist bandits who came to mind quickly in situations like this. Alan Stiobhard, particularly.

  “The mask,” said Dally. “He went there with a purpose. He knew he could be spotted. Someone was out there, and it panicked h
im. Made him desperate. Terry catches him in the middle of trying to get rid of this body and he wonders, did I leave something out there?”

  “Something that might ID him,” I said. “He came back for it.”

  “Yes, maybe. But he had the knife.”

  “If he came out there to kill us, a gun would’ve been more to the point,” I said. “So maybe he doesn’t have one.”

  “Or maybe he wanted quiet,” Dally said. “Maybe, maybe.” He spun through the rest of the file, until an image brought us both up short. “Is that …”

  “Yeah,” I said. At the edge of the trees, one eye glowed in the infrared haze, an eye in a shadow, a form we could only see part of. The shadow was the same as everything that surrounded it, the darkness of the woods and the hill behind. The eye was looking straight toward the camera. A bear. There were no other images of it. Dally came back to the bear’s eye and met its gaze for a moment or two. Mary took the camera from him.

  “Okay,” I said, standing. “I’m going to go find this guy. Dr. Weaver, you might as well head home. There’s no way you’re going back in the field now.”

  Mary was put out, but didn’t argue. “You can reach me at the lab.”

  The sheriff stood too, his knees popping. “I’ll just be in your way, out in the woods,” he said. “I’ll follow in my car, stay out on the roads, keep you close.”

  We drove through the county, me in my truck, Dally in his patrol car behind. I parked on the shoulder where the creek passed under Red Pine Road, and Dally moved on, not too fast, not too slow, with his windows open to listen. I stood at the edge of the forest, waiting. But there was nothing to hear except the cars passing between distant hills, and the running of the creek.

  THE COUNTY had given Wyatt Brophy a new morgue in the new hospital basement with a separate entrance that opened onto the hill around back. Before that, he’d been in a meat locker in the courthouse, along with the sheriff’s department and the drunk tank. In our new century it had become clear that we’d need a bigger jail and a bigger morgue. More and more, people got lost wandering, and after stumbling down a path, they ended up in one bleach-soaked room or another.

  The morgue had recently been home to the mortal remains of Don Cunningham, sixty-three and stout, a churchgoing husband, father, grandfather, and truck driver for Grace Services who’d nodded off on the highway with a trailer full of logs behind him. Julie had responded to the scene as a paramedic, though there was nothing she could have done. Don had worked all his life and his back was failing him. There was fentanyl in his system. We were at pains to find out where someone like Don would have got it.

  Possibly with Don it was another driver, a truck stop somewhere. A lot of people got theirs across the New York border in Binghamton or Elmira. Up in Wild Thyme I’d handcuffed a father and his grown son back-to-back on the side of the road, broad daylight, after pulling their truck over and finding the father passed out in the passenger seat. The son was nodding over the wheel, eyes leaking. Both had a bag of heroin in their boot. But then there was Aimee Glaser, no fixed address, former waitress and cashier, now prostitute—currently over in the jail because we didn’t know what else to do with her. Hanluain found her half dead camping in the woods between the river and the Dollar General. Fentanyl there, too. She had no car. Her source would have been right there in Fitzmorris, but she wasn’t saying.

  Busy as it was, the new morgue was an improvement in size, tech, and cheer—anything would have been. I expected Wy would be there, gathering his thoughts after examining our body, and he was; I caught him in his front office drinking coffee and looking at his computer, waiting for me and the sheriff. He had a little window facing south with the sun slanting in, and a pair of binoculars there to watch birds.

  After our early morning out, Dally had managed to go home and wash, where I was still damp to the knees. We stepped into the cool fluorescent light of the lab, pulled on gloves, and pondered the dead man where he lay, with his head placed at the top of his neck.

  “Starting with the cause of death,” Wy said. “The likeliest is blunt-force trauma to the head.” He turned the head over to its more decomposed side and pointed to a great purple stain extending from the side of the crown down to where the raccoons had chewed the face away. Wy had cut into the skin and peeled it back in a Y shape, showing some of the skull beneath. “It is very hard to say for sure, but I think this is an antemortem injury, given the amount of blood that collected here. Before I cut into it, it had been, you know, more of a lump. And the skull is fractured here,” he said, pointing with a pencil.

  “Somebody hammered him with something,” the sheriff said.

  “Well,” said Wy. He drew our attention to bruising down the man’s left shoulder and arm. “The humerus is nearly broken in two. At first I thought a car. He’s parked, or maybe driving, I don’t know, and somebody hits his passenger side at great speed, his head snaps against the window, his shoulder against the driver’s-side door. I don’t know why, other than I’ve seen it before.”

  Dally said to me, “We’ll need to look at MVA reports from the last couple days. Although …”

  “Right, this probably wouldn’t have been reported. Haven’t had any up by me,” I said. “But we can call down to PSP, too, they may have handled something.”

  “Up north, to Broome County, Tioga …” The sheriff fell silent.

  Wy pulled back the sheet covering the abdomen, exposing a nightmare of human meat and bone where the man’s center had been. “Henry, you asked about rope abrasions. Right here, under each armpit, could be what you’re looking for. About a half-inch wide. Could have been from a rope. This …” said Wy, looking farther down the body, “this is consistent with a large animal, feeding. You can see puncture marks in the skin here, here, here.” Blue, bruised holes in dead white flesh. “From teeth, large teeth. Here, places where the skin and muscle has been torn away. Much of the small intestine and large intestine have been removed and probably consumed. Genitals too, obviously. Here’s something interesting: the bear, I’m assuming—it’d be nice if Shaun were here—tore away significant portions of the rectus abdominis. But up nearer the rib cage, it left some for us.” Wy pointed with a pencil. “There is a clean cut through the muscle, almost vertical.”

  “How?” I said.

  “A sharp knife. I’d say we have the tail end of a stabbing motion, down on a prone victim, entering near the sternum, then up through the abdominals and back out.”

  “Before or after death, I wonder,” said the sheriff.

  “Hard telling,” said Wy. “Anyway, insect life in the cavity tends to show that the victim was out in the air around forty-eight hours. Heart, lungs, other organs in place, all weighed and bagged now. The liver was intact, not in great shape, so this subject was probably a heavy drinker. There was alcohol in his blood, toxicology otherwise normal. I don’t want to overlook his legs. Left leg, looks like some kind of impact tore the patella clean away from the knee joint. Fractured tibia and fibula. Right leg, some abrasions dorsal above and below the knee, with dirt ground in. In other words, road rash.”

  “Thrown from a vehicle?” I said.

  “We’re thinking about the wrong kind of vehicle,” said Dally.

  “Yes,” said Brophy. “A motorcycle.”

  “What about the head?” said Dally.

  “Yes. You can see that the cervical vertebrae at the top of the neck, here, and by the base of the skull, here, have been pulverized, likely with a heavy, flat rock, as we discussed at the scene. A lot of the soft tissue has been pulped. But there’s at least one clean cut from a sharp knife at the back of the neck, through the trapezius, here. Dirt, decayed leaves, significant insect life in and around the ears, eyes, nose, and throat. Much smaller teeth punctures and claw marks here, here, here, here. Consistent with burial and subsequent discovery by scavengers, as we saw.” Wy covered the body, wheeled it to a bank of drawers, and stowed it. “They left the teeth and the fingers. I’ve finger
printed the body and sent it in; we’ll see what we get back.”

  I HAUNTED THE RAVINE and the swamp that day, but saw no sign of the bear or the man we were looking for. I did chance to see a family of two does and three fawns playing on a grassy bank of the swamp, the does crouching face-to-face with their fawns and then leaping to the side, playing tag. As I was watching them, I forgot to listen, and before I knew it there was Father, easing himself down beside me.

  “Any sign of him?” he said.

  “What’d you, follow me here?” It took some self-control not to tell him how close I’d come to drawing on him. He was dressed in my gear and carried my .270.

  “You got a scanner at home,” he said. “I can’t help it if I’ve been listening. By the way, you ought to use code names. Like we used to. Don’t put your business out on the street.”

  “Father, this is a … I can’t have you out here.” We had started out whispering. Not no more.

  “Well, you need somebody.”

  “I got Shaun,” I said, lowering my voice again. “The CO.”

  “Oh.” Father considered that a moment. “How many bear the warden ever got?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How many bear you got?” I didn’t answer. “I got two,” he said.

  “You never told me.”

  “I don’t tell you everything.”

  “Go home. Or away from here, wherever.”

  Father stood, slowly and with effort. “I go where I please.” He disappeared into the woods.

  That afternoon I was alone because Shaun Loughlin had taken a trip down to Game Commission headquarters to collect a bear trap. About four o’clock, I met him on the road by the Freefall. He drove his official truck with a narrow trailer hitched behind; welded to the trailer was a black canister of corrugated steel, four feet wide by eight feet long. It had heavy mesh on one end, and on the other a trapdoor that would swing shut when the bear had crawled inside it. It was rusted in places, a there-I-fixed-it-type deal.