Chapter Nine
I call Anders on the sat phone and tell him to bring the body in about ten minutes. When I finish, I sigh and slump onto April’s back porch.
“Did I hear that right?” a voice says. “You found a body?”
I look up. I’d forgotten Gunnar. He’s leaning against a tree, patiently waiting to discover what part he’ll play in this.
There are many words to describe Gunnar, but the best is “unexpected.” He’s endless contradictions.
The loudest guy in the room … or the one you won’t even notice is there.
The guy who hangs out in an unfinished storage-room loft, his “roost” for watching the town.
And if that door is open, women are welcome to come up and enjoy his hospitality.
If it’s shut, though, he wants to be by himself—absolutely by himself, sometimes all night, maybe even showing up late for work the next day.
He’ll also be the hardest worker when he does show up, happy to do any task he’s given.
The answer is probably that he needs a whole lotta therapy to deal with his childhood trauma—watching his father kill his mother and narrowly escaping with his own life.
He’s had counseling, and it’s gotten him this far, but Haven’s Rock has multiple options, too.
We need to, with the isolation and the fact that probably half our residents are here post-trauma.
For therapists, we have clinical psychologist Isabel and psychiatrist Mathias.
While even Mathias has grudgingly agreed he’d take on Gunnar, Gunnar seems happy with the casual services—via friendship—with our third option, Kendra, a social worker.
“Too loud?” Gunnar says, when I take a moment to answer his question.
I shake my head. “We’re fine. Just…” I walk into the woods behind the clinic, and he follows. “Yes, it’s a body. A hiker. Seems to have been death by misadventure, but I want to be sure.”
I’m lying. He might even realize it—I can never tell with Gunnar, though I suspect he’s a lot quicker than he acts.
“You said something about a fast ATV ride back?” He leans against a tree. “If the guy’s dead, there wouldn’t be a hurry.”
I exhale. “There was a bear. I just didn’t want to say it in front of Max.”
Gunnar’s brows rise. “Grizzly?”
“Yep.”
“Chased you in the ATV?”
“Yep.”
“Damn. I’ve heard they’re fast.”
“Very fast.”
He seems to be considering this, putting together what I have said with what I’m not saying, and that’s when the ATV arrives. Anders parks about twenty feet from the clinic, and we meet them there.
“I brought help,” I say, “and I handed Storm over to Max. Rory is with Kenny.”
Gunnar stares at the tarps. “That’s not two very small hikers, is it.”
“Nope.”
“This have something to do with why the bear was chasing you? You stole its dinner?”
“Yep.” I adjust the tarps so nothing falls out. “But the bear didn’t kill him. It was scavenging.”
“That’s what bears do mostly, right? Max told me that. From…” He nods toward Dalton. “They scavenge more than they kill. What’s the term? Opportunistic carnivores.”
“They are, and that’s what we have here.”
“Yeah, good call on not telling the kid.” He peers at the tarps. “I’m just helping carry them inside, right? I don’t need to see what’s under there?”
“We won’t open them until you’re gone.”
“Thanks.”
Once the body is inside, Gunnar leaves, but not before I apologize if even that part wasn’t something he’d have chosen to do.
He brushes it off with a joke and only asks whether there’s any concern about the grizzly tracking its dinner back to town.
I explain that we lost it before taking a long route in, but I also ask him to speak to Kendra.
I’d like her on patrol, as our best shot in the militia and the one who grew up in the Yukon.
Dalton and Anders leave next. They need to go to the mining camp and speak to Rogers.
The longer we delay, the more suspicious he’ll become.
We also need to talk to Lilith, but we’ve agreed to do that this evening.
So much to do, with the constant pluck at the back of my mind, reminding me that my daughter also needs me.
I ask April to hold off on doing more than an external examination while I look after Rory. Kenny heads down to help her. I warn him about what he’ll see. He goes a little green but shrugs it off and says he’ll be fine.
Kenny arrived in Rockton before me. Down south, he’d been a high-school math teacher. In Rockton … well, the joke was that what happened in Rockton stayed in Rockton. It was like visiting Vegas under a false name. No one there knew you. No one would ever see you again.
Haven’s Rock is the same. You can be who you want.
For some, it’s a license to be a shitty person.
For others, it’s a chance to explore a new persona.
The high-school math teacher took up bodybuilding and leaned into his carpentry hobby, becoming the town carpenter and lead militia.
Then a bullet to the lower back meant he’s walking with braces …
and lucky to be walking. He’s still our carpenter, though, and still head of the militia.
These days, he’s also resurrected those rusty teaching skills with math lessons for Max and Carson.
So, forensic medicine—or any experience with mutilated bodies—isn’t part of Kenny’s skill set.
But if my sister needs him, he’ll be there, and I know better than to argue.
Kenny has mellowed from the false machismo of our early days in Rockton, but he still has his pride, and he will not appreciate me suggesting he skip this.
After Kenny heads downstairs, I pause a moment to put all that aside. Then I go in to where Rory is playing quietly in her portable crib.
I spend time with Rory, feeding her, changing her, and then just being with her until she falls into a milk coma. When she’s out, I put her back into her crib, slip downstairs, and ask Kenny if he’d mind keeping an eye on her.
“So my options are watching a sleeping baby or watching an autopsy on a bisected and half-eaten body?” he says. “Babysitting duty, here I come. Let me know if you need anything.”
April has reconstructed the body on the exam table, setting the two halves together.
Actually, no, on second thought, Kenny would have done that.
April wouldn’t have seen the point. The body’s owner was long gone.
Therefore, there was no reason to “pretend” the corpse was whole, and it might even be easier to work on it in pieces.
Kenny would realize everyone else who worked on that body would be more comfortable seeing the pieces where they should be.
“I noted that the spine was bisected cleanly,” April says as I walk in. “I presume the bear did not do that.”
“We did, and yes, it added damage, but it really was the easiest way to transport it. Otherwise, the two halves were very tenuously attached.”
“I would agree. It was a clean cut, and it likely kept you from losing some of the internal organs.”
“I thought of that, too.”
“Of course you did.”
I ignore the obvious sarcasm, and I move up alongside the body. The central portion has been covered. When I glance at that covering, April says only, “Kenneth.”
“Ah. Well, as ironclad as my stomach is, I think I’ll leave that there for now. It’ll be easier to focus on the rest without that reminder.”
“Did you know his name?”
That startles me. It isn’t an April question. When I say, “Blake, apparently,” she nods and says, “Given the condition of the corpse, would you prefer to refer to it as a body or by his name?”
I pause and give it some thought. “It doesn’t matter much for me. I didn’t know him beyond a brief meeting. But maybe just stick to the generic. Even though this was postmortem, it’s tough to look at, especially when that was my choice.”
“Your choice?”
I glance up as I run my gloved fingers over the scalp. “We saw the bear taking the body. I noticed the marks on the neck, which meant I needed to examine it, but I decided we weren’t about to try taking it from a grizzly. So we let it feed while waiting for it to leave.”
“That was the correct course of action, on both counts—taking it but waiting.”
“Still tough.” I pause my tactile examination of the skull. “There’s a contusion.”
“Yes.”
She would have already done a preliminary exam. She just isn’t telling me what she found. That’s not a test—it’s a way to get separate sets of observations.
The contusion is to the back of the head. I can palpate it and feel the softness. There’s a slight bump, which could mean either a light blow or that he died before it could fully swell.
April wordlessly hands me a pair of scissors. I cut the hair from the spot and take a closer look. It’s definitely not a “light” blow. Someone clocked him hard in the back of the head. The lack of abrasions suggests a solid object. The angle says Blake was upright when it happened.
I move to the hands and knees. There’s debris under the nails and there are abrasions, but the body was dragged, so that would be expected.
I’ll take scrapings from the fingernails.
Both hands have abrasions on the palms, with embedded dirt, the sort of mark you get if you fall forward.
Chafing on the knees suggests falling to them while wearing trousers.
Of course, none of that can be conclusive, given what the body went through afterward, but it’s a reasonable theory.
Club Blake in the back of the head. He falls to all fours. Get the cord around his neck while he’s down.
I continue examining the hands, making notes and taking pictures. With the damage from the fall and drag, it’ll be hard to tell whether he fought back, and I’m not sure how much difference it makes.
I don’t see any other damage on the arms or legs. No other bumps to the head either.
I move down to his injured ankle. April has already removed the wraps and set them aside.
“Swollen,” I say.
“Broken.”
I look up at her sharply.
“Of course, I cannot positively diagnose that without an X-ray,” she says, “but if you had brought him here, I would have said it was broken.”
“I couldn’t bring him here. You know that.”
“I wasn’t judging.”
“Yes, you were. You’re annoyed because you think I blithely examined his ankle, declared it okay, and refused him medical help.”
“I know you didn’t do that. However—”
“However nothing, April. I offered help. I would have brought you to examine him. If you thought it was serious, we would have made arrangements. He very obviously did not want that.”
“Which suggests he was not simply a hiker.”
I throw up my hands. “Maybe? It also might suggest he was a guy.”
When she frowns, I say, “The sort of guy who doesn’t want to make a big deal of an injury. Tough it out and all that.”
“Women do that as well.”
“Yes, but you know what I mean. Eric and I figured it could go either way—refusing help because he didn’t want to admit he was hurt or refusing it because he wasn’t actually hurt.
There was only a bit of swelling when I saw it, likely because he’d recently iced it in a stream.
All I had to go by was self-reporting. But if it is broken, that suggests… ”
I take a deep breath, pushing down my annoyance with April. “It could be further proof he was just a hiker. But, if he isn’t just a hiker, that might also explain why he didn’t want treatment. Make contact, but nothing more.”
“It’s a minor fracture,” April says. “He could walk on it, but it would have been painful.”
“So was he downplaying it because he’s a tough guy or downplaying it because getting hurt on a mission is very inconvenient.
” I walk along the body again. “Any idea how old the marks on his hands are? I was thinking he fell before he died, likely after being struck, but they could be from his fall yesterday. He’d have cleaned the wounds, but there could be scabs. ”
“I noted no signs of scabbing. There is, however, swelling in the wrist and thumb of his left hand.”
I check it. She’s right. Slight swelling. “So he may have broken his fall with his hands.”
“How did he say it happened?”
“He was scouting after they lost their map and GPS. He went out too far on a ledge and fell about eight feet.”
“Where was his partner?”
“Gretchen?” I nod. “Okay, I see where you’re going. Did he fall or was he pushed? She wasn’t on the ledge with him, but I’d need more details to determine whether she could have snuck up behind and pushed. The fall could have happened quickly enough that he didn’t realize he had help.”
“She fails to kill him and tries again.”
“But under what circumstances would that be? They go for a hiking trip, and she decides she’s had enough and kills him?” I lift the hand with his wedding band. “Or she planned it all along.”
“It does happen, does it not?” April says. “Usually husbands killing wives.”
“Hey, hon, let’s go on a romantic hike up this remote mountain.
I don’t know what happened, Officers. She just fell.
” I nod. “Yes, it’s common enough that I’d investigate any fatal fall when a couple goes hiking.
Resorting to strangulation seems an abrupt switch, but if she got frustrated, or if he got suspicious?
Hell, even if she just realized no one would expect her to produce a body.
Go home, say he died, get a search team out and take them to another spot. The body was hidden.”
“Where is his partner?”
“I have no idea. Finding her is on our to-do list. The priority was getting the body back here.” I tug off the wedding ring. “Huh.”
“Huh?”
I pass it over. “How old would you say this is?”
“Relatively new, I believe. They gave me Mom and Dad’s rings after the accident, and theirs were quite worn.”
“Unlike this one.”
“Yes.”
I take off my own band. “Newer than my ring?”
“It looks like it. Did they give any indication of how long they’d been married?”
“Since right after college. So maybe twenty years?”
“Not judging by that ring, they weren’t.”