Chapter Fourteen
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I run forward and lower myself beside Lynn. She’s on her back. I don’t need to check for a pulse. If those staring eyes, frozen open, didn’t tell me she was dead, the gaping wound in her stomach would. This is what the wolverine had been protecting. What it’d been eating.
I kneel there, and I know I should feel something, and when I don’t, guilt floods me. But it’s not that I don’t grieve for Lynn’s death. It’s that so much else spins through my brain that this isn’t fully processing.
Caught in the storm, realizing we are on ice, the wolverine charging. It’s too much in quick succession, and when I find Lynn, there’s a confused and exhausted piece of my brain that doesn’t know what to do with this information. We have been searching and searching, growing discouraged and even panicked, and now we’ve finally found her… and she is dead.
Was she killed by the wolverine? Almost certainly not. It could do the job, but at this time of year, it’ll only be scavenging.
There’s another reason why I highly doubt the wolverine killed Lynn.
She’s naked.
Lying on the ice, frozen stiff and naked.
The grief hits then. Grief followed by rage. I see Lynn yesterday at the general store, so eager to help find Kendra’s attacker. I see her light up when Thierry walks in.
After our early negative interactions, I haven’t known what to make of Lynn, but yesterday, I got my first glimpse of the woman I could have gotten to know, if not for the rest. That doesn’t negate the rest—she’d judged other residents and interfered with an investigation—but she’d realized her mistakes and tripped over herself to do better.
I should have done better, too. We all should have, and if Lynn’s loneliness somehow led to this, if she trusted someone she shouldn’t have…
“We need to mark the spot,” Dalton says in my ear.
His voice startles me from my thoughts. The storm rages around us, but he has let me kneel here beside Lynn without comment, because he knows I must.
“I can carry her back to town,” he says. “But we can’t stay out here.”
He’s right. Whether she was led out here or drugged like Kendra, her lack of clothing means I can’t imagine it’s not a crime scene, so I need to investigate. Right now, though, that’s impossible. Even getting Lynn’s body back to town will be tricky. But we have to do that… or there might not be anything left to take back. It’s late winter, and even in a storm, that wolverine won’t be the only creature who’ll come at the scent of easy scavenging.
In abandoning a likely murder scene—and taking the body before I’ve examined it—I am committing unforgivable law-enforcement crimes. But leaving her body here would be a crime of a higher order.
Dalton helps me to my feet. Then he takes the wolverine over to a tree, and I frown in confusion, especially when I see he’s attached a rope to its thick tail. He hoists it up and ties it there, and my brain spins, baffled. It’s not even a good hide. Why is he—?
He’s marking the spot, like he said. The wolverine is hanging far enough from Lynn’s body that if it attracts scavengers, they won’t leave tracks over my scene. But that corpse will make it easy enough for Storm to find the spot again.
Once the wolverine is in place, we wrap Dalton’s scarf around Lynn’s torn abdomen. Then he lifts Lynn over his arms. Firefighter’s carry would be easier, but I don’t suggest it. He’s chosen the more awkward maneuver because it is more respectful.
He has to take a moment to adjust, and he moves back and forward, testing Lynn’s weight and finding his footing. As he does that, Mother Nature finally decides to give us a break. The wind dies down so fast it’s eerie, and I peer about, half expecting that when the snow stops swirling, we’ll find ourselves in some alternate dimension.
Even Storm whines, and now I can hear her. She moves against me, and I pet her head. Then I remember why she would whine, and I awkwardly drop to one knee and hug her.
“You found her,” I say. “And I’m sorry.”
She leans against me and exhales, and I hug her tight.
“Thank you,” I say. Then I use her bulk to help me rise, and when I look out, I can see smoke rising ahead and slightly to our left.
Haven’s Rock.
I reach over to squeeze Dalton’s arm. Then I set out with Storm, and he brings up the rear with Lynn’s body over his arms.
With the storm abating, we decide to veer a little more and take the perimeter path to our chalet rather than get close to town with Lynn’s naked body over Dalton’s arms.
I go inside first and grab a blanket to lay on the kitchen floor. It’s not the most ceremonious place to put her, but it has the best lighting.
Dalton sets her on the blanket, and she’s still in the position we found her in. I don’t know whether she’s in rigor or literally frozen.
“I’ll get April,” Dalton says.
I shake my head. “Warm up a bit first.”
“And let you have a look first?”
I glance up at him. “Please.”
My sister is an amazing doctor, and she’s become a good medical examiner, but if I have the chance to examine a body first, I want it. And after being out in that wind, Dalton really should warm up. When I start to bend beside Lynn, though, he shakes his head. I think he’s going to insist I sit down, but he only unzips my coat.
Right. He’s not the only one who needs to warm up. I can’t feel my toes, and my cheeks have long since gone numb.
I shrug out of my parka and sit to let Dalton take off my boots. The process seems obscenely slow when there’s a dead woman on our kitchen floor. I should be on my knees examining her without a thought for my personal comfort. But it’s not comfort—it’s safety. My toes are indeed numb, and they burn enough to make me hiss in pain as Dalton gently warms them with his hands. The chalet is maybe fifteen degrees. Hardly cozy, but a roaring fire wouldn’t be safe for potential frostbite or for examining Lynn’s partially frozen corpse.
As Dalton warms my toes, I do the same for my cheeks. Then I insist he remove his outerwear. Thankfully, his feet are fine—I’ll blame poorer circulation from my pregnancy for my brush with frostbite.
Just when I think I’m ready to get to work, Dalton wordlessly plucks at my sweatshirt. It’s wet from snow and sweat. I pull it off as he goes upstairs to get dry clothing. Only once I’m changed does he let me finally get down beside Lynn’s body.
“If I make you hot chocolate, will you drink it?” he asks.
I want to say no, of course not. I have a corpse to examine. But I’m still shivering and as I warm up, I’m getting sleepy, and part of that is low blood sugar from not having eaten for hours.
I nod, and he sets to work on that while I take my first good look at Lynn. When Dalton returns with my phone, I smile weakly at him.
“Thank you,” I say, and I hit Record on the voice memos and turn back to Lynn as I give the date and time.
Then I continue, “The deceased is known as Lynn Williams, resident of Haven’s Rock. Lynn was definitely seen by customers at around one thirty yesterday afternoon, although we have a secondhand account of her being seen with another resident after the storm hit. We still need to interview all residents to secure a complete timeline. For now, it is possible she had been missing for as long as twenty-four hours. Victim was found south of town near the edge of the lake. On-site examination was impossible due to the weather conditions. She was lying on her back. All clothing had been removed. The body was disturbed by a wolverine who seems to have…”
I hit Pause and move closer. When my small medical kit appears from nowhere, I look up at Dalton and murmur my thanks.
My fingers still sting from the cold, but any numbness has faded and I pick up the metal probe easily. I use it to prod around the wolverine damage. Then I start recording again.
“I count three distinct bites on the abdomen where the wolverine had begun feeding. Each chunk is…” I measure. “No deeper than an inch and a half. There’s some damage to the internal organs from the bites, but I’ll tentatively say none should be the cause of death. They’re all shallow and, at the scene, I confirmed that the interior of each wound was unfrozen, suggesting they had been made very recently. The deceased is in full rigor and partially frozen. With the cold, the onset and the speed of rigor would be slowed. While I need to run calculations based on the weather, the cold and the exposure means she likely died at least eight hours ago.”
I pause and take a few temperature readings, internal and external. Considering we moved Lynn’s body, a defense attorney would jump on any conclusion that involved those readings, but that isn’t something we need to worry about here. Even if it’s murder, there will be no trial. This is to help my own investigation.
Is it murder?
The lack of clothing would certainly suggest that. But while a storm might not keep someone from sexually assaulting her, would he strip her entirely?
I make the briefest examination of her inner thighs. That part I really do want to leave for April. For now, I’m just looking for blood or obvious contusions. There are none.
I report that on the recording. Then I say, “I will turn the subject over in a moment, but I did get a good look at her back before she was set down, and I saw no sign of injury or blood there. Nor is there any on her front, other than the scavenger damage. No stab wounds. No bullet holes.” I stop and curse under my breath.
Be more careful. Do not jump to conclusions. There could be bullet holes or even thin stab wounds in one part of her body.
Using the probe, I examine those wolverine bite marks. If she’s been stabbed or shot in the stomach, the bites would hide it. While the tender belly is an obvious place for a scavenger to start feeding, blood could also have drawn it there.
I pull apart the wounds and shine a light in. The wolverine had bit her after she’d been frozen and her blood had settled into her back. There was no bleeding.
I resume the recording.
“I’ll need April to make a closer examination, but I see no sign that any of these bite wounds cover a deeper injury. Even if the deceased had been fatally wounded in the stomach, the location of the bites would have meant a slow and painful death, and she was found lying on her back with her limbs slightly spread, abdomen exposed.”
I move up to her head and run the probe through her hair. “No obvious contusions on the scalp, nor any blood in the hair, though again, April will need to confirm. Poison is another possibility, but again, I see no signs of it in her posture.” I check her mouth. “Nor any signs on her lips or mouth. There are no ligature or other marks on her throat. Her eyes are open and display none of the hemorrhaging I’d expect to see with strangulation.”
I move back on my heels and run my gaze up and down Lynn’s body. “There’s the possibility of a pinprick injection. We’ll need to run a tox screen for both poison and drugs—if this is the person who attacked Kendra, he likely drugged Lynn. At this moment, though, I don’t see any indication of how she died. The obvious answer would be hypothermia, but she isn’t going to remove her own clothing in a…”
I slow, something nudging at me. When Dalton clears his throat, I turn to see him holding out the hot chocolate, but his expression says that’s not the cause of his polite interruption.
“She might have removed her own clothing,” he says.
I stare at him. Then that nudge cracks open a box in my memory. “Paradoxical undressing,” I whisper as I wince. “Of course.”
A few years ago, Dalton and I had read an article on two strange things that can occur in extreme hypothermia. One is “terminal burrowing,” where someone about to die from the cold finds a small spot to curl up in, even digging into the earth. It’s something animals do in extreme cold, the tight quarters helping to produce body heat, and it could be our brain-stem instinct overriding everything else in our final moments.
Before that, an even stranger phenomenon has been observed. Victims of hypothermia have been found naked—or in states of partial undress—as if they threw off their clothing while freezing to death.
That does indeed seem paradoxical, until you look at what happens during hypothermia. When I started losing heat from my extremities, my body would have induced vasoconstriction—the blood vessels reflexively constricting to stop the heat loss. Vasoconstriction consumes a lot of energy, though, and at some point, the body gives up. Blood rushes to the extremities, and it feels like a hot flash. Anyone in their right mind would know better than to strip when they’re freezing to death, but by that point, the victim isn’t in their right mind. They take off their clothing, and they never regain the mental capacity to put it back on.
So what happens when a hypothermia victim is found naked? Or wedged into a tight space? It doesn’t look like death from exposure.
It looks like murder.
I push up to sit on a kitchen chair and drink my hot chocolate. Dalton refills it, and I’m still sitting there, staring down at Lynn.
“Hypothermia,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. It’s the obvious solution.
Do I want Lynn to have been murdered? Of course not. That would mean a killer in our midst, and a murder to solve when I am in no shape to solve it.
So why am I not dissolving in a puddle of relief? Because this feels like negligence. A resident disappeared during a storm, and we didn’t even know she was gone, and she died barely a hundred feet from town.
Exhaustion sweeps over me, the exhaustion of feeling as if we’re constantly running uphill. We built this town confident in the fact that we could do better. We saw all the issues with Rockton and vowed to fix them. Yet every time something goes wrong, we realize we failed to fix something else.
We’re supposed to be doing better.
Better means that we make damn sure everyone is safe when a storm hits.
“They aren’t sheep,” Dalton says as he pulls another chair over beside me. “I know it can feel that way. They’re the sheep, and we’re the shepherds, here to keep them safe, but they’re grown-ass adults.”
He’s right, of course. He’s been wrestling with this from his earliest days as sheriff in Rockton. At what point do we need to stop herding and say “they’re grown-ass adults”?
I’m not saying it was up to Lynn to stay safe in a blizzard. But it was up to her damned husband to tell us when she didn’t come home during one.
A buddy system is a good idea, and we will institute it for all emergency situations. But even that wouldn’t have saved Lynn. Her buddy would have been Grant, who wouldn’t have behaved any differently.
I stare down at Lynn.
We may not have failed her, but we’ll still feel as if we did.
“Time to get April?” Dalton asks.
I shake my head. “Time to get Will or someone else who can help you carry her to the clinic. If this isn’t a murder, we can get her body where it needs to be. There’s no rush for an autopsy.”