Summer’s abdomen is split open, with her stomach, a fetid, stinking mass of swollen intestines, sticking out.
I need to get samples, but I have to take a break. The eyes are too much for me. They should be more decomposed, but the T-shirt and surrounding soil chemistry somehow preserved them. It’s as if she’s still seeing the last thing she ever saw.
I step back and lean against a tree, catching my breath, trying to hold it in.
Be a scientist, Theo. She doesn’t need someone to mourn her right now. She needs someone to find out who did this.
I turn back and kneel down to continue excavating around her.
As I brush the dirt from her arms, I think about when Summer was a child and her mother bathed her and scrubbed her. If her mother had any idea what fate the world had in store for her little girl, would she have ever let her go?
The arms are predictably stiff. I raise the right one high enough to take a photo of the gashes and get a tissue sample. For a moment, it obscures her powerful eyes. But when I set it back down she’s still staring up—almost as if she’s looking to God for an answer.
Nobody is home, darling. And if he is, he doesn’t care.
My ear twitches, and I get the feeling that I’m being watched. In the moment I try to analyze the sensation—it’s like a tickle across my back.
First I just move my eyes slowly across the surrounding trees. When all I observe is forest, I turn my head slightly.
Forty feet away, up on the hill, are three sets of glowing eyes catching the setting sun.
Wolves.
Large ones.
They probably smelled her corpse long before I reached the shirt. Attracted by the scent, they gathered to watch and wait.
I can’t leave her here. I buried Chelsea because nothing was around that would dig her up.
The moment I leave Summer, no matter how deep or what I cover her with, the wolves will come for her. They know she’s here.
I have to take her with me.
The sun has set by the time I fully unbury her. I placed my flashlight on the edge of the hole, facing the wolves, but they vanished when I wasn’t looking.
As I gently lift her body and move her to the plastic tarp I’ve laid down, I spot silvery eyes watching me from much closer.
They’ve walked around my cone of light and are just a few yards away.
Wolves are supposed to be people-shy, and attacks are exceptionally rare. I’m not sure what the data set looks like for humans all alone in the forest next to a decomposing corpse.
I lay Summer in the middle of my blue tarp. Her knees are slightly bent, with white flesh showing through tears in her black leggings. As I try to bundle her up, drops of my sweat hit her face and slide down her dirty cheek like tears.
The snarling sound of one of my watchers snaps me back to the present.
Summer’s muscles have degraded long past the effect of rigor mortis, making her body flexible enough to bend over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
I place my duffel bag over my other shoulder and use the flashlight to guide my way back down to my car.
My gray shadows follow me in the dark, making futile growls, hoping I’ll drop the body.
But I don’t. Nor do I ever reach for my gun or the shotgun—even to fire a warning shot.
These creatures are opportunistic cowards, afraid to take on something larger than them. Perhaps not unlike the man who killed Summer.
I hope.
I pray.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
INERTIA
Police Chief Shaw is standing near the tailgate of my Explorer with his flashlight aimed at Summer’s face. Dressed in a T-shirt, parka jacket, and track pants struggling to contain his expanding stomach, the light is the only thing about him that resembles law enforcement.
“Who is this girl, again?” he asks.
“Summer Osbourne,” says the lean deputy with receding auburn hair. He was the only one at the station when I arrived. It took him all of two seconds to call his boss down to the station after I showed him photos of the body in the back of my Explorer.
“Osbourne?” replies Shaw. “I don’t recall anybody by that name.”
“I think you might have known her daddy. He goes by MacDonald,” the deputy explains.
“They live out by Finley stables? That big house? Daddy owns an irrigation pipe company?”
“That’s them.”
“What were there, six of them MacDonald kids?”
“Five including Summer. She was a stepdaughter.”
“Summer MacDonald?” Shaw shakes his head. “She ran off with that fella from Wyoming.” He turns to me. “You say her name was Summer Osbourne?”
“That’s the name on the missing-persons report.”
“Well, there’s your problem. They never get around to updating them. Some kid runs away for a few days, and their parents come down here and make us go through the hassle of making a report, then don’t bother to tell us when they come home.”
I get frustrated at the backwoods-genealogy quiz. “Chief, this girl ain’t goddamn ever a-comin’ home.”
He spins the light around and shines it in my face. “You watch your mouth, son. You show up here in the middle of the night with a half-naked dead girl in your trunk. That is suspicious.” He turns to his deputy. “Didn’t some fella show up with a body in Hudson Creek?”
“The second bear attack,” replies the deputy.
“Jesus Christ,” I groan. “First, it wasn’t a bear attack. Second, I was the guy that found that body.”
Chief Shaw’s squinty eyes stare at me for a moment; then he comes to life, using the flashlight to gesture at Summer. “You’re telling me you found another girl just like this one?”
“More or less, yes.”
He turns to his deputy, “Is he for real?”
“That’s why I called you down, Chief.”
“That’s one hell of a coincidence, you finding two bodies. Don’t you think?”
I realize the closest this guy has ever been to a murder case more complicated than a domestic dispute is what he’s seen on television.
“I’m a scientist. I’m working on a new detection procedure. I was looking into Summer Osbourne’s case because it was similar to Chelsea Buchorn’s and Juniper Parsons’s.”
“A detection procedure?”
“Just ask the people at Hudson Creek. They know all about it.” Right . . .
“And you just brought the body here? Don’t you know that’s tampering with evidence?”
“When I uncovered it, wolves showed up.”
“Wolves never bother anybody. They’re cowards.”
“I wasn’t worried about me. I was worried about her. They’re scavengers. They knew where I dug her up.”
“If you were worried about wolves eating her, then why did you dig her up?”
Is this a serious question? I take a deep breath. “I wasn’t sure if she was buried there until I started digging.”
“If you had a notion where her body was, why didn’t you just come tell us?”
Seriously? “I didn’t want to waste your time in case I was wrong.”
“Well, now I got tampered-with evidence. What am I supposed to do about that?”
“An hour ago you didn’t even think this girl was missing. You have a heck of a lot more to go on now.”
“Carl, go take a statement from him. I’m going to get the doc over here to take the body. Call Warren over at Fish and Wildlife.” He pauses for a moment. “And call in Jefferson with the fingerprint and forensic kit. I want to make sure this girl didn’t die in the back of this SUV.”
Carl stares at Summer’s body, then turns back to the chief. “From the looks of that girl, I don’t even think this had rolled off the assembly line by the time she was killed.”
“Just do it, Carl.”
“Yes, sir.”
I spend the next two hours making a statement and answering questions about my whereabouts. Chief Shaw then has me fingerprinted and photographed and runs them through their computer to make sure I’m not a mass murderer.
I then take a trip with Chief Shaw, Warren the Fish and Game guy, and another deputy to show them where I found the body.
The wolves are long gone, of course, but the shallow grave where I found her is just as I left it.
It’s midnight before they finally release me. As I leave, I overhear Warren explaining how bears will sometimes bury their victims to come back to later.