“But you’re going up to investigate,” she said, knowing him better than he wanted her to.
“Yeah.” Carter made his way past glowing computer monitors, jangling phones, cubicles, old desks, and filing cabinets to his office, a glassed-in room with miniblinds he could lower for privacy. His two outside windows overlooked the courthouse parking lot and Danby’s Furniture Store across the street. If he craned his neck, he was able to peer down Main Street. He rarely bothered.
He set his cup on his desk and checked his e-mail, but he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was more to Charley Perry’s story than they knew. It was true Charley was over the top, an eccentric loner who lived by his own rules, especially when it came to poaching game, but he was essentially harmless and, Carter suspected, a decent enough guy. But every once in a while he seemed to freak out, or need attention or something. The Bigfoot fiasco had gotten him some press. Two years later he claimed he’d spotted a UFO and had been beamed aboard so that aliens who looked humanoid with huge heads could study him. Well, if the poor aliens had thought Charley was a prime specimen of the human race, they were probably sorely disappointed in humankind. No wonder they hadn’t been back.
The phone rang and he answered automatically, managing to drink from his cup as he turned from the computer screen.
“Carter.”
“Montinello, Sheriff,” Deputy Lanny Montinello said, his voice barely audible for the bad cell phone connection. “I think you might want to come up to Catwalk Point. It looks like old Charley is right. We’ve got ourselves a body. Or, at least, most of one.”
“Damn,” Carter muttered, asking a few more questions before ordering Montinello to seal off the crime scene and keep Charley on ice. As soon as he hung up, he called the state crime scene lab, grabbed his jacket, hat, and weapon, then collected BJ. On the way he left messages with the Medical Examiner and D.A.’s office.
“What did I tell you?” BJ asked as he drove his Blazer up the winding logging road to Catwalk Point, a mountain that rose three thousand feet from the Columbia River basin floor. They’d been delayed, called to an injury-accident on a county road just south of town that had held them up for nearly two hours.
By the time they reached the end of the gravel-and-mud road, yellow crime scene tape had been strung around the area. Not that there was much chance of rubberneckers up here. Sooner or later the press would hear of it and converge, but not for a while. Carter pulled the hood of his insulated jacket over his head as he stepped out of his rig.
It was cold with the promise of winter, a snowstorm having been predicted for the next few days. The ground was nearly frozen, the tall fir trees shivering and dancing in the icy blasts of an east wind that roared down the gorge.
Carefully he and BJ picked their way down a sharp ravine where detectives from the Oregon State Crime Lab were already at work.
Pictures were being snapped by one photographer while another aimed a video camera at the ground. A grid had already been established over a wide area, the scene secured. Through the snow, soil samples were being collected, debris sorted through, a hollow log tagged. Bones had been carefully laid upon a plastic tarp. The skeleton was small, but incomplete. And the skull was odd, its teeth too tiny and sharp.
“What’ve we got?” Carter asked Merline Jacobosky, a reed-thin investigator with sharp features and an even sharper mind. Her eyebrows were slammed together over the tops of rimless glasses and her lips, devoid of any color, pinched together as she stopped writing on the pages attached to her clipboard and again surveyed the human remains.
“Off the top? White female, mid-twenties to thirties, I’d guess, but don’t quote me until the M.E. releases her to the lab and there’s a full autopsy. She’d been stuffed into that log over there.” With her pen, Merline pointed to the hollowed-out cedar. “We’re missing a few bones, probably because an animal or two dragged off parts of her corpse, but we’re still looking. Already found an ulna and tarsal that were missing at first. Maybe we’ll get lucky with the rest.”
“Maybe,” Carter said without much enthusiasm as he surveyed the forest floor and the craggy hillside that dropped steeply toward the Columbia River. The terrain was rugged, the forest dense, the river wide and wild as it carved a wide trench between the states of Oregon and Washington. Even tamed by a series of dams, it raged westward, whitecaps visible through the trees. If a body were ever dumped in the Columbia, there wasn’t a whole lot of chance of it ever being recovered.
He heard the whine of an engine struggling up the hillside and glimpsed the M.E.’s van through the trees. Not far behind was another rig, one belonging to one of the Assistant District Attorneys.
Merline wasn’t finished. She said, “Here’s what I think is really odd. Check out her teeth.” Jacobosky knelt and pointed with the end of her pen. “See the incisors and molars? That isn’t a natural rot…I think they’ve been filed.”
Carter felt a whisper of dread touch the base of his spine. Who would file someone’s teeth? And why? “To keep the body from being identified?” he asked.
“Maybe, but why not just pull the teeth or break them? Why go to all the trouble of filing them to tiny points?” She rocked back on her heels and tapped her pen to her lips as she studied the skull. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe our guy is a dentist with a sick sense of humor.”
“The sick part is right.”
“Any ID?” he asked, but assumed the answer.
“Nothing yet.” She shook her head and flipped over a page of her clipboard. “No clothes or personal effects, either. But we’ll keep looking, under the snow, through the ice and into the soil. If there’s evidence, we’ll locate it.” She squinted up at Carter as gray clouds scudded overhead.
“What’s this?” Carter bent down and studied the skull with its grotesque teeth and gaping eye sockets. He indicated her hair. There was something clinging to the strands that were visible. A pinkish substance that he didn’t think was flesh. It reminded him of eraser residue.
“Don’t know. Yet. But some kind of manmade substance. We’ll have the lab check it out.”
“Good.” He straightened and noticed BJ talking with one of the photographers as Luke Messenger, the M.E. arrived. Tall and rangy, with curly red hair and freckles, he made his way to the crime scene and frowned at the body.
“Only a partial?” he asked Jacobosky.
“So far.” He knelt beside the bones as Amanda Pratt, the Assistant D.A. lucky enough to be assigned this frigid job, picked her way down the hillside. She was bundled in layers of down and wool and smelled of c
igarette smoke.
“God, this is miserable weather,” she said, her pert nose wrinkling at the partial body. “Jesus, would you look at that? Found in a hollowed-out log?”