THE SUDDEN REEK OF death at the cabin door made my throat close up in protest. Inside, I could feel the smell seep into my skin and clothes like water from a fog.
Her body was seated at a small rough pinewood table. She had fallen forward, facedown on the table, long, brown hair draped over the unfinished planks. The back of her head was misshapen and clotted with gore. The body had bloated at some point during the past day or two. Now it was deflated again, and the skin I could see was gray, like the remains of the man outside. Blowflies buzzed into tiny cyclones as I stepped closer.
On the drywall behind her, two wide splashes of black blood, like spread wings reaching almost to the ceiling.
I couldn’t see her face under the shroud of hair. From the exit wounds on the back of her head, I knew I didn’t want to. But her body was long and lean. Familiar.
The cabin was crowded with fake-rustic furniture, a table and chairs, and two double beds and a single dresser. All expensively designed to appear as though some hillbilly had chopped the pieces from raw trees, and joined them together with crude dovetails and dowels instead of hidden screws. Only a potbellied stove and battered pine cabinets looked authentic.
A woman’s shoulder bag was on top of the dresser. In the bag was a green bandanna. I fished it out and used it to keep from leaving fingerprints as I went through the bag’s contents.
I found a pocketbook, opened it, and saw Elana’s face, smiling up from a driver’s license photo under a clear plastic window. It wasn’t quite the face of my memory. The girlish softness had been sculpted in the past dozen years into something more defined, more striking. Strong Eastern European cheekbones framing bottle-green eyes. And vibrant. That indefinable something that makes one girl hold your eye among a hundred others just as beautiful.
Elana Michelle Coll. Twenty-seven years old. Five foot nine inches, 130 pounds, brown over green. And gone.
God damn it, Elana.
I edged my way around the table. Her suede blouse was heavy with crusted blood, but intact. There were two crude holes in the painted pink drywall four feet behind her chair. More blood on the chair, and the floor.
Two shots, straight and close. A high enough caliber to go through her head and take most of it along.
I suddenly needed to be out of the cabin. Away from the charnel-house smell.
At the instant my boot was about to cross the threshold, I saw a spattered purple line crossing the grain of the oak floor. I stopped so abruptly to keep from stepping on it that I had to catch my fall on the doorjamb.
It was just a thin dappling, as if from a flicked paintbrush. Blood, but not Elana’s. She was on the other side of the table. There was another flaking patch of it, just under the base of the open door. And on the floor, pushed almost against the wall by the door, lay a Glock handgun.
I lay down to put my nose near it. The smell of burned powder in the barrel was strong enough to make out over the fog of decay.
9mm Parabellum, I was pretty sure. Easily enough punch to be the murder weapon. And from this new sprinkling of blood, I guessed that Elana wasn’t the only victim.
No sign of the bear outside. I walked over to check the man’s body, what there was of it. The animal had left his chest alone, finding the belly easier picking. There were no gunshot wounds on his front.
Birds or something else had been at his face and eyes. I knelt to try and get a look at the underside of his head, where his cheek lay against the earth. His right temple was blackened, in sharp contrast with the pallor of his skin. The thick red-brown curls over his ear were fried as black and stubby as candlewicks.
The shot had been so close, it had lit his hair on fire.
Was it self-inflicted? I could make that fit what was here. Kend standing at the open door. Elana sitting at the table. He shoots her twice, then puts the gun to his temple. Dead so fast that he barely bleeds at all. Unlike his woman, whose wings would still be spreading on the wall when his body hit the floor.
He had something in his front pocket. I took it out, very carefully avoiding the flecks of torn flesh. A money clip. Kendrick Haymes’s driver license was at the top of a stack of credit cards, along with maybe three hundred in cash. The photo on his license was handsome in its awkwardness, from the mop of curls to the crooked smile. I put the clip back.
The wind kicked up a little, and the sudden icy prickle on my face and ears made me realize I was flushed. And sweating.
Come on, Shaw. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, a lot of them worse looking than these two. I knew what to do. Take my memories of the girl, and put them in a box at the back of my mind. There would be time enough for her later.
Had they been alone? At least two other people had been at the cabin recently, in the sports car and the dually. Had they all left before the shooting started? Or fled after it happened?
I wondered how long Kend and Elana had been dead in the cabin, before the bear had picked up their rising scent on the wind. Long enough at least for smaller creatures to brave the interior, to get at their faces and fingers.
Willard. I’d have to tell him. I went back inside the cabin. Maybe Haymes had kept a satellite phone, for emergencies.
A backpack lay on the bed against the right wall, a big blue High Sierra with aluminum frame, for camping trips. It was open and half of its contents spread out messily on the bed. Men’s boxers and shirts and thick books on sports history. A yellowed copy of The Boys of Summer, and a collection of essays on boxing from the fifties. Like stuff my grandfather might have read, if he had given a damn for American sports.
I looked under the bed. No other backpacks. Willard had said Elana only planned to be gone overnight. But there didn’t seem to be so much as a toothbrush here. Maybe Elana’s bag was still out in the Volvo.
Kend’s cell phone lay on the bed. I picked it up with the bandanna. No signal here, of course. Before I set the phone back, I copied the numbers of the friends Kend called most often into my own phone. Somebody would have to tell them about Kend’s and Elana’s deaths. If Luce knew any of them, maybe the news would be better coming from her.
I found Elana’s phone in her shoulder bag. Unlike Kend’s, her phone had a security lock. I didn’t want to risk fingerprints or breaking it to mess around with beating the code. Kend’s friends would have to be enough. I put it back.
Then I looked at the table again. Elana’s head, still at rest.
But nothing else on the table’s surface. Huh.
I looked at the squat wood stove again. The powdery ashes fluttered into motion with a wave of my hand, imitating the panic of the blowflies. They were fresh.
So Kend and Elana were here and alive long enough to build a fire. Kend had unpacked. But Elana hadn’t taken anything out of her shoulder bag. Not her cell phone or a book or even the bottle of water tucked neatly in the side?
A quick check of all the cabinets and drawers didn’t turn up a satellite phone. I went outside to look at their car, and to think in the clean air.
The Volvo was unlocked. Its interior had the look of a lot of time spent driving and eating and maybe sleeping inside. Crumpled food wrappers and T-shirts crushed into the crevices. Some back issues of women’s magazines with muddy footprints where they had slipped to the floor. In the glove compartment, under a pile of receipts and maps and paper scraps, I found the registration in Elana’s name.
Something large had taken up all of the space in the back of the car. The rear seats were folded down, and a brown woolen blanket was shoved to one side of the trunk area, like it had been used to cover whatever had been inside. Large, and heavy, judging by the sharp rectangular dents in the nappy fabric of the trunk’s floor.
No second backpack, though. They’d driven up here together. Kend had brought enough gear for a long weekend. Elana had only brought her shoulder bag. And left it alone.
Something didn’t resonate. I couldn’t tell what, or why. But I wasn’t going to get any answers here. It would be dark in another hour. Already the deepening shadows around the glade made me uneasy, thinking about the bear. I had to get down the hill. And give Willard some very bad news.
Before I retrieved my ruck, I dragged what remained of Kend back inside the cabin. It was the least I could do for the son of a bitch.