Sergeant Wallace started the police SUV and pulled onto View Road without looking for oncoming traffic. “There are only twenty-nine kilometers of road. Most of them are around town. This one dead-ends at the airport. The rest of the island is National Park wilderness.”
Alexa fastened her seat belt. “How big is the island?”
“Rakiura is seventy kilometers long and forty-five at its widest.”
“Rakiura?” They zoomed past a quaint red-tin-roof chapel—no, it was a restaurant—on the right and a handful of cottages on the left.
“It’s the Māori name. The Māori have come here seasonally—like our tourists—since moa times.” Wallace looked at her. “Do you know about the moa?”
“A big bird, like an ostrich.”
“Larger than the ostrich.” He took a curve without slowing. “The Māori hunted them to extinction. Now they come for muttonbird. Rakiura translates as ‘the great and deep blushing.’”
The road straightened. “Do you have beautiful sunsets?” Maybe she would send Dad and Rita, her stepmother, a postcard. She had called Dad last week to fill him in on her decision to stay in New Zealand longer. “But what about Christmas?” he’d asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, half true.
Her relationship with Dad was fragile as a glass Christmas ornament. How could it be otherwise when Alexa believed for many years his wife, Rita, had deliberately maimed her?
As a gangling thirteen-year-old she had skated the kitchen linoleum in fuzzy socks and slid into Rita as she poured boiling water from the electric kettle. The coldness in Rita’s eyes as the water scalded Alexa’s back, her shirt melting into her skin, was etched in Alexa’s memory.
Or maybe that was a false memory.
“It was an accident. A terrible accident,” Rita wailed to the EMTs.
She finally accepted Rita’s story—even felt pity for all the times she had rebuffed her stepmother’s overtures: hell no, she didn’t need a ride to the mall or a new backpack or—God forbid—a makeover. Alexa had moved onward. Eight thousand, five hundred miles onward.
“The Māori probably named it for the Aurora Australis.”
She guessed the Aurora Australis was equivalent to the Northern Lights. Northern Lights down under. Yep—she’d send a postcard.
The village was gone. Glistening green woods crowded the pavement, greedy to encroach.
“March is the best time to view the lights,” Wallace said.
She’d be long gone.
“I was born here,” he said as if Alexa had asked. “Had to leave for secondary and uni. Stayed away ten years. Thought I’d leave forever, but the place gets in your blood.”
Small talk wasn’t Alexa’s forte. “So the remains are probably the missing hunter?”
“That’s right. Hunting, tramping, birding are what bring tourists here. And, for the past couple of years, shark cage diving. We’re dependent on tourism for the most part. Fishing, too.” The sergeant raced down the middle of the road.
“What makes you think it wasn’t suicide?”
“I haven’t been to the scene. There’s a ranger with the body. He has his reasons.”
Alexa stared at the seamless blur of trees. The rain had stopped and the wipers were complaining.
“There were people protesting shark cage diving in front of my hotel,” she said.
“Bet I know who. Julie from the lodge. Mason—he’s a fisherman. Liz Chambers. She’s a teacher. Tippy Jones. No, wait. Tippy was on the ferry.” Wallace fished sunglasses out of his jumpsuit pocket and slipped them on. “We’ve always had plenty of white sharks—my grandfather fished these waters and never had a run-in—but the chumming has made sharks more aggro. They follow boats now. Cage diving is turning islanders against each other.”
Alexa looked at the sea of foliage out the window. The thought of sharks following boats gave her chills. But sharks weren’t the reason for her visit. “Is it easy for someone to become lost around here?”
“Too easy.” Grunt. “Last week a sixty-four-year-old man from Timaru got off track hunting and set off his PLB. It happens out there.”
“PLB?”
“Personal locator beacon. They transmit a satellite signal to the rescue center in Dunedin. They call us, we activate a search and rescue. It took forty-eight hours to find him.”
Probably like the beast tracker the constable had given her. “Did King have one of those?”
“Supposedly, but it was never set off or recovered.”
“Dan Goddard, my boss in Auckland, said it was hikers who found the body.” She knew remains were often found accidentally.
Wallace switched the wipers off. “A couple. We’re lucky we found King at all. We have a cold case—a tramper who went missing twenty years ago—never found. Heavy forest, manuka, leatherwood scrub, mud. Right now we have four alerts issued for higher-than-normal tides. Waves roll right up to the cliffs. The tracks get submerged. Hikers cut through bush, onto hunting land, get lost. Course, it’s worse when they risk the tides and get sucked out to sea. That’s my theory for the cold case.”
“Dan said the wound was in the cheek.”
“That’s what the ranger reports.” Wallace swung onto a dirt road. They bumped along until the road ended at a landing strip. Two small planes were visible, one tethered on the grassy shoulder, the other ready on the runway. A single gray shack was the only structure. A couple of men stood next to it.
“Ryan’s Creek Airport. It’s no LAX, is it?” Wallace laughed and parked next to a dirty jeep.
At the far end of the runway, a channel of blue-gray water churned uneasily. On the opposite side, undulating hills melted into haze. Alexa thought of her clean hotel room, a warm shower, a beer at the bar, and then shook off those longings and followed Wallace. She was thrilled to have this job. Moments later she was buckled into a six-seater Piper Cherokee and they were scuttling down the unpaved strip. Sergeant Wallace sat in the copilot seat, and the other man—a ranger—sat behind her.
This job allowed her to stay in New Zealand. She had resigned her job at the forensics lab in Raleigh, and Jeb, her ex-boyfriend, had most likely moved on. His biological clock and all. They had lived together almost two years, but she had turned down his marriage proposal. “You can’t commit, can you?” he had said, his eyes full of hurt.
It had been for the best. Jeb hadn’t been Mr. Right, and therefore she would have been Mrs. Wrong. She thought of Detective Inspector Bruce Horne, who had given her her first job in New Zealand. They had sparred during the case, Bruce’s eyes flashing in anger more than once at Alexa’s unorthodox techniques. But she had helped solve it, and sparks had arced between them. Last week Bruce had driven to Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city and home of her new job, “for a meeting” he claimed, and afterwards they had met for lunch.
A date, she supposed. She was pretty sure he’d driven there just to see her.
Lunch at Lord of the Fries had been delicious, but they had argued over who would pay. Afterwards, he hadn’t wanted to leave and suggested they rent scooters. Alexa envisioned crashing into the bay so they walked along Wynyard Quarter instead, bumping shoulders and ogling fancy boats. The wind kicked up whitecaps and turned her hair into a Medusa maelstrom. No way she could invite him to her two-bedroom apartment. Her new roommate, Natalie, a cop, worked the night shift and had been sleeping.
Aargh. Thirty-seven years old and she had a roommate. Auckland rent was twice as high as Raleigh rent, and she was earning half as much.
In parting, Bruce’s cheek peck had slipped—warmly, delectably—to her lips. The memory heated her face.
A jolt of turbulence took her mind off Bruce. The pilot banked over the harbor and turned inland. The ranger behind her yelped. Maybe he was afraid of flying. He worked for the Department of Conservation, which she surmised was like the United States National Park Service. She hadn’t caught his name. Out her oval window, a carpet of green stretched luxuriously, a river winding through it.
Wallace craned his neck and shouted. “We’re crossing the island. Little Hellfire Beach is on the west coast.”
Alexa nodded. No buildings, roads, signs of life. Just thicket, and then postcard golden sand, and an abrupt landing on a lonely beach. The plane juddered across the sand, avoided several large boulders, and stopped.
“I’ll be back tomorrow morning at ten, weather permitting,” the pilot said. “Tide’ll be right. That give you enough time?”
Wallace nodded.
The pilot looked over his shoulder at Alexa. “She know about the mud?”
“What’s to know?” Wallace unlatched the door and clambered out. The ranger contorted himself past Alexa’s seat and followed.
“What about the mud?” she shouted to the pilot.
“Like quicksand. Watch your step.”
God almighty. Quicksand. Saturated silt. You sink, but can’t rise. Get prone and “swim” out if you get caught. She had read about it in a book when she was a kid. That was all she knew.
Crime kit on one shoulder and borrowed backpack hanging off the other, Alexa climbed out, scrunched through sand and shells, and turned to view the pilot swivel the toy plane round, past the boulders, nose it to the wind, and improbably lift off. She watched it turn inland and disappear. Just like that. Her flutter of panic came back. She searched for Wallace and the ranger. There they were—twenty yards past crashing waves, in the shadow of tangled mangrove-like bushes abutting forest. She hustled across the sand, hopping over emerald kelp, to catch up. A bellow—like an angered lion—stopped her midstep. What the? She whipped around.
One of the brown boulders was speeding at her like a tsunami mass.
Move, run! her mind shouted, but her legs stayed planted.
The ranger dude dashed from the forest and jumped to her side as the heap of muscle charged closer, flipping up a sandstorm, bellowing and barking. “It’s a bull,” he shouted.
God almighty. No boulder. A large marine mammal was using its flippers to propel itself, a bullet train so near she could smell the brine of its breath.
And see its teeth.
“Move!” the ranger shouted.
Alexa dropped the crime kit and ran at the trees, stumbling over driftwood. Wallace grabbed her arm, pulled her up. “A sea lion,” he said.
She heard clapping and turned. The ranger stood like a schoolteacher and clapped again. As if that would stop the freight train. What was he thinking?
The sea lion didn’t like the clapping. It stopped and quivered, opened its enormous mouth, and emitted an earsplitting roar that echoed off the bulwark of trees. Alexa believed the sea lion would eat the ranger or flatten him to death. A steamroller. Like one of those horrible nature shows where the lion takes down the gazelle.
The oceanic lion snorted, twisted its tree trunk neck like a wrung washcloth—left, right, left—then pivoted and humped toward the other boulders, which Alexa could now see were smaller sea lions.
The ranger dropped his hands to his side and bowed his head as if in prayer.
Wallace let go of her arm. “That was close.”
“Jesus. What kind of place is this?” Alexa snapped, then wished she hadn’t. Foot-in-mouth syndrome. Don’t insult the locals.
Wallace ignored the snap. “Here’s an opening.” Without waiting for the ranger, he turned sideways, disappearing into the woodland.
She followed on his heels, wedging between clawing branches, her breath coming in spasms. On the other side, trees blocked sunlight and the sound of waves. Disoriented by the dimness and quiet, Alexa pressed against a tree trunk. Everything was happening so quickly. Wallace stood near, foraging in his pack.
Then the ranger appeared. Whipped the hair off his forehead. Halted. She started at him, but he lifted a hand. “I’m okay. A bull lion is all. The ruckus from the plane scared it. He was protecting his harem.”
An insane desire to laugh bubbled up in Alexa’s mouth. She choked it back. “Can it get into the woods?”
“No. I grabbed this for you.” The ranger held out the crime kit.
How could she have forgotten about it? “Thank you.” She forced herself to take yoga breaths, five counts inhale, three counts hold, five counts exhale. She remembered something she learned during her odontology program: you can tell a sea lion’s age by counting the growth rings on a sectioned tooth—like rings in tree trunks. But it hardly seemed wise to check if that were true.
“Excitement over, eh?” Wallace said. He unfolded a paper and gave it to Alexa. “This is the permit King and his buddies filed last February.”
She remembered why she was here—a dead hunter—and read the form. The ranger drank some water and moved close to her so he could see the sheet. Four names were listed, one of them Robert King, and the dates were February 2–8. Six days of male bonding, Alexa thought.
She pointed. “What does this ‘block’ mean?”
“A block is an area.” The ranger was thirty years old, tops. A tumble of brown hair covered his eyes. His uniform was total REI: olive shorts, socks, boots, forest-green pullover with zip-pull. Te Papa Atawhai was etched at the breast. She wondered what it meant.
“Hunting areas are divided into blocks.” He swept his hair back, revealing otter-brown eyes ringed with purple shadow. “King’s block was Little Hellfire.”
Wallace’s radio squawked, making Alexa jump. He stepped aside to answer.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch your name,” Alexa confessed. “Thanks for coming to my rescue out there.”
He avoided her eyes. “I’m Stephen Neville.”
“How do hunters know their boundaries?” she asked, getting back to business.
“Each party gets a map.” The ranger’s voice lowered. Alexa had to concentrate to hear. “Hunters have to know their boundaries. They take the block system seriously. Many spend their first day walking boundaries. If you shoot a deer outside your block or the open hunting zone, you have to pay a fine.”
“How do you enforce that?” Alexa looked around—at the shrubbery and trees and weird ferns. And some bugs. She swatted one away.
“It’s honor system.” He put his pack down, unzipped a side pouch, and produced a folded map. “Take a look.”
It was a combo map of Big Hellfire Block 13, Little Hellfire Block 14, and Open Hunting Zone. The back-to-back blocks bordered long stretches of beach.
“Here’s where we landed,” Stephen pointed. “We’ll hike here, to the body.” He pointed to a spot in the Open Hunting Zone.
There was no scale, so Alexa had no idea how long the hike would be. Each of the blocks had a hut: Big Hellfire Hut and Little Hellfire Beach Hut. She pointed to the beach hut. The map was made of waterproof paper. “Is this where King was staying?”
“Yeah,” Stephen said. “He and his mates. On the second day King never returned.”
Never returned. The thought gave Alexa chills.
Stephen folded the map and stashed it away.
“How many rangers work on the island?” Alexa asked.
Stephen shifted his backpack onto his shoulders. His hair hid his eyes again. “It varies. This time of year there are around thirty. Not all of them are full time, like me.”
“Do phones work here?” Alexa patted her jumpsuit pocket where she had stuffed hers.
“No.”
So, basically, she was cut off. She went back to studying the names and addresses on the form Wallace had given her. One guy was from Dunedin. Two were from Rotorua. She smiled; maybe the Rotorua connection would give her an excuse to call Bruce. Gun license numbers were listed for each hunter. She looked at the ranger. “What type of firearm is used for deer hunting?”
“Depends.”
She waited.
“It depends on where and what you’re hunting. Short-barreled rifles are best for Stewart Island deer. Certain shotguns. Game needs to be shot at close range, due to the dense bush.”
Alexa nodded although, despite her last name, she didn’t know boo about guns. As far as she could see, Stephen wasn’t packing. “Do rangers carry guns?”
He frowned. “Only on special occasions.”
“What? Shotgun weddings?” She laughed at her joke and slapped her ankle with the form. Wallace, his back turned, still jabbered on the radio.
Stephen didn’t smile. “Do you have repellent on?”
“No.”
He swung his backpack off again and unzipped another side pocket. “Spray all over. Sandflies are a bitch. Māori say when the gods created Aotearoa, the land was so beautiful that people stopped working. The goddess Hinenuitepo got upset no work was getting done, so she created the sandfly to get them going again.”
“Works for me.” She traded the permit for the repellent and sprayed liberally. “Was King’s body found in the Little Hellfire block?” She loaded back up.
“Ah, no. It’s in the Big Hellfire boundary.”
Wallace rejoined them. “Let’s get a move on.”
Stephen followed Wallace, and Alexa brought up the rear.
Everything looked the same. Tall trees. Drooping leaves. Thigh-high ferns. Although she jogged several times a week, she wasn’t exactly outdoorsy. The tangle of flora and fauna was freaky. Not to mention they were hiking toward a suspicious death. To calm herself, she caught up to Stephen and asked what a ranger’s responsibilities were. “Besides warding off sea lions?”
“Every day is different.” He skirted a mud puddle and didn’t turn around.
“Like what?” she encouraged.
“Eh, well. Weed control. We’re trying to get rid of the marram grass. And always pest control, track maintenance—that’s a biggie—we have hundreds of kilometers of track. Yesterday I had a go with the chainsaw. We schedule the huts. Search and rescue. Boat safety.”
He paused and looked over his shoulder before launching into a story about a stranded whale. “A little calf was in knee-deep water. Whales can’t swim backwards, you know. We turned him round and rolled him onto a tarp so we could lug him to deeper water.”
Alexa was listening so closely she stepped in a puddle.
The ranger swept the blowzy hair out of his eyes and waited while she wiped her boots on moss.
“Took twenty of us, even some school kids. The calf made it.” Then Stephen’s voice changed, lowered, and he stopped walking. “A month later eighty-two pilot whales beached at Big Hellfire Beach. Around the time the hunter went missing. A tramper girl from the States found them. Not too far from here. When I arrived—it was hard to reach—lots were dead, but others were thrashing, desperate, digging deeper into sand. Gulls were having a go at their eyes. While they were still alive, mind you.” He rubbed his own as if to erase the image.
Wallace had faded into the forest, and Alexa shuddered, her heart thudding in her ears, drowning the sound of birds and insects.
“A calf—this baby—kept clicking and moaning.”
Stephen obviously needed to vent, Alexa thought.
“They cry, you know. Whales look at you with their big eyes. Tears rolling into the sand. I pushed and shoved, even pulled one by the tail—that was dodgy, I could have been crushed—but I couldn’t budge them.” Life force drained from the ranger; he rag-doll slumped.
Alexa was immobilized.
“I—euthanized—I shot them, one by one, orders from the boss. That’s an occasion where we can check out a Department of Conservation rifle—for euthanasia.”
My stupid shotgun wedding comment. Alexa swallowed a whale-sized lump.
“The whales knew what was happening,” he said. “They’re intelligent. Probably smarter than me. You can see it in their eyes.”
An urge to hold the ranger, comfort him, confused her. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “That must have been…”
“We flew in a Māori group a few days later. I led them to the spot. Some of the whales had already been carved up, and the elder got mad, yelled, I think, at the gods.” Stephen sniffed like his nose was running. “The elder prayed, said the whales could now return to their ancestral home, and then they flensed the carcasses.”
“Flensed?”
“Carved up. I wasn’t around for that part. They remove the flesh, carve out the jaw and teeth, then they bury the carcasses. They couldn’t flense them all—there were too many. The Māori will let nature clean the bones, and then return after six months or a year, and dig them back up and let them bleach in the sun.”
Alexa now wished she hadn’t asked about ranger duties.
“Using whale bone and teeth isn’t illegal for Māori,” Stephen said as if she had asked. “They make art with it.”
Scrimshaw. Alexa had a scrimshaw brooch from her mother. Back in her Raleigh storage unit. It’s not like she wore brooches with khakis or jeans. She was jittery to get moving.
“And now this—body retrieval. Add that to my list of duties.” Stephen straightened, shook his hair back, and hustled ahead, his uniform blending into the woods.
Her innocent question about a ranger’s duties had unleashed a tale of woe. Alexa followed slowly, as if space was a protective bubble from the horrors of nature and memory. The saturated ground muffled her footsteps, the canopy blocked wind, the birds twittered erratically. To take her mind off the whale tragedy, she began reviewing the four stages of decomposition in preparation for viewing the hunter’s remains. A heel slipped in mud, but she caught herself before landing on her butt, and remembered the rate of decomp depends on heat and moisture.
Heat. Mid-fifties.
Moisture. The rain had ceased, but the canopy dripped from the morning’s deluge.
Stage One begins four minutes after death when the body begins to self-digest.
She thought of the victim in Rotorua who had been thrown into a molten mud pot. He had melted instead of decayed. His teeth had remained.
Flies arrive almost immediately to lay eggs in eyes, mouth, ears, nose, vagina, and rectum.
She thought of the sandflies and hoped her bites didn’t harbor eggs. Up ahead, Stephen scrambled over a tree carcass blocking the path. When it was Alexa’s turn, she sat on the trunk a moment, her breath unnaturally loud.
Twenty-four hours after deposit, maggots hatch.
The bark was wet and slimy, probably housing and hatching its own maggots. She quickly swung her legs over and barreled onward, searching for Wallace’s orange SAR suit. Her right foot sank in mud. She pulled it, but it wouldn’t budge, sank further instead, up to the laces in viscous muck. She pulled again.
Something. Someone. Below the ground. Holding. Death grip. Quicksand.
“Hey!” she called. “I’m sinking.”
An evil squawk echoed in the prehistoric forest. Now her left foot sank to the ankle, then shin. Alexa threw the crime kit and backpack to the side, went prone, grabbed at a grounded limb extending from the fallen tree and, throwing her upper body into the fight, began pulling forward, her legs in cement.
Pull. Tug. Strain.
The underworld let go, and in a squelch she freed her left leg.
Stephen reappeared. “You right?” He grabbed her armpits and pulled. He was stronger than he looked and freed her right leg.
“Hell, no. Something pulled me under.” Her voice trembled as she assessed the damage: boots slimed, orange suit dyed java brown up to the knees, chest heaving. “You and Wallace walked over the same spot. Why didn’t you go down?”
“You broke through a sink hole. The soil is shallow, only supported by a web of roots. The rain, plus our footsteps, weakened the support. Camel’s straw concept.”
Alexa glared at the churned mud pot. “Thanks.”
“For weakening the structure?”
“For coming back.” And trying to save the whales.
A hundred yards ahead, the path faded. Alexa dodged and wove through thigh-high ferns. The purple-brown ferns were long, creepy, and scaly. The green ones looked similar to North Carolina ferns, but bigger. These were so thick that she surrendered and began stepping on the emerald fronds. Above all were the umbrella fern trees, the likes of which Alexa had never seen.
After fern valley, the ground became hilly, speckled with rock, moss, boulders paisley with lichen, and more umbrella trees, and then segued into a gully so that she was forced to walk with one foot on a narrow track and the other foot halfway up a steep bank. She had heard the Kiwi phrase hard yakka. This was a hard yakka. She refocused on her Stage One decomposition review. The top layer of the skin begins to rupture and loosen.
Alexa lowered the zipper of her jumpsuit.
“Take a break. Drink some water,” Stephen said, suddenly next to her. Wallace stopped walking too.
“I’m fine,” she said as sweat trickled down her chest.
“No. We should drink.”
Alexa put down her pack, uncapped her water, and took a long swallow. “Listen to the birds.”
Stephen scanned the trees. “Tui and bellbird. Keep a lookout for kiwi. Stewart Island is the only place where they forage during the day.” He sipped water as his eyes continued to rove the tree line. “Botanists say the island looked like this before humans arrived. It’s a forest primeval.”
“Forest evil, more like it,” Wallace called, capping his bottle. “For the hunter, anyway.”
Alexa imagined Robert King’s body as the forest darkened and the decaying wood and organic matter all around them released dank, fusty oxygen.
During Stage Two, the corpse will bloat and emit an odor.
The death stink. When Alexa was a newbie, the Raleigh police had called the forensic team to a dumpster at an apartment complex. A woman’s body, enshrouded in shower curtain, was beneath garbage. It took Alexa three showers to wash the smell from her hair and body, but the combination of putrescine and cadaverine, chemicals released as a body decomposes, remained in her throat and taste buds for days.
She took a swig of water, swished, spit out.
Ten minutes later, the bank of a rushing, roaring stream stopped her. Stephen was balanced on a rock, halfway across, when he looked back. “No worries,” he shouted over the din. “Hop rock to rock.”
A hiker doing the famous Milford Track had recently been swept away crossing a rain-swollen stream. Her body, found two days later, had washed a mile and a half downstream. Alexa had read about it in The NZ Herald. She and Mary were scheduled to hike Milford in February. Now she’d have to hike it alone.
If I survive this.
She hurtled forward to the first slick turtle-back rock, balanced precariously, awed by the froth and frenzy, and lunged, toddler-like, to the next, and so forth. Jesus. Somehow she made it, her boots washed clean of mud.
“Piece of cake,” she told Stephen and Wallace, who had watched impassively.
Up the path, something scurried in a leathery-leaved bush near her foot, making her wonder what critters feasted on King’s remains. Back home it would be rats, coyotes, foxes, possums, dogs, birds. Vultures could strip a deer to bone in twenty-four hours.
“What scavengers do you have?” She trudged between the men now, Wallace leading, and when he turned, apprehension, maybe fear, was etched on his face.
“Rats, possums, and birds. Kiwi will eat carrion.”
The sergeant had maintained a quiet reserve on the hike, so she was pleased to engage him. “How much farther?”
“Not far,” he answered.
Fatty acids leak from the body, killing vegetation.
Wallace’s walkie-talkie bleeped just as yellow caution tape near a giant tree caught Alexa’s eye. She stopped to survey the area. First impressions were important. Why the hell had hikers been here, in the middle of nowhere? There was no trail. When she hustled to catch up, she stumbled over a root and fell forward.
“Crack-up entrance,” a man said from behind the tape. “Who’s the klutz?”