“Hopefully not. The problem right now is knowing whether we have the remains of three people to transport back to Rockton or the remains of two … plus a survivor in need of rescue.”
NINE
It’s two hours later, and I don’t have my primary answer. I have answers to other questions, but not that all-important one, and I am well aware that I might be fussing with dead bodies … while a survivor is dying somewhere in the forest. On the other hand, I could race off into the woods hunting for a survivor, only to later discover that I have the remains of three people here. Better to see what I can assess first.
I definitely have two victims. One man and one woman. I’d been generous in my age estimates, but I’d peg them both close to Sophie’s age.
All she told us about her group is that it’d been four people—two heterosexual couples. Am I looking at one couple? Or Sophie’s lover and Sophie’s female friend? Getting more information had been on my to-do list, but it’s really not important at this moment. It’s just the romantic in me who wants to believe this is the other couple, and Sophie’s partner is out there, alive, and I can return him to her when she wakes.
I’m guessing all four are Danish or at least Scandinavian, and while there are certainly people of color in Denmark, all the body parts I have come from the stereotypical Scandinavian light-haired, light-skinned Caucasian. That makes body-part matching tougher.
I attempt to separate limbs based on muscle mass and body-hair density. The torsos suggest that both were the same body type as Sophie—average height and lean-muscled. Even that is tough to judge when, well, the limbs are no longer whole.
What I’m looking for is a male limb that doesn’t fit. One that’s too thin or too muscular to belong to the dead man before me. Perhaps one with a different color or density of body hair or a different skin tone. In the end, I can reasonably identify one humerus as belonging to the woman, judging by bone size, and the femur matches up with the dead man. That leaves a humerus that cannot belong to the woman … because she now has both of hers. I can’t tell if it belongs to the man. The foot, though? That’s definitely male, still encased in a hiking boot. The hair on it seems darker than the other dead man’s remaining limbs.
Does this mean I’m holding the foot of the missing man? I imagine taking it back to town for Sophie and having her fly into a flurry of excitement, certain it means her lover is out there
somewhere, only missing a foot. No, sadly, he is not, and I hope I don’t need to delve into the gruesome realities of that foot and the torn flesh and the gnawed bone, all of which leave zero doubt of what happened to the second man.
No, I’m sorry. The wild men of the forest did not hack off his foot before he escaped. No, he did not hack off his own foot to escape. This is scavenging. A predator found his body and chewed on his leg, and when they hauled him away, this was left behind.
No one needs that much detail on a loved one’s final moments, even if I can assure Sophie that he was dead when it happened. Also, the fact that I don’t have a body means I can’t assure her of anything. I would lie, of course, but if Sophie is a smart woman, she’ll figure it out and spend a lifetime imagining her lover’s final moments as a grizzly ripped into his living body.
It might not be her lover.
It might not even be the second man’s foot.
Even if this isn’t his foot, judging by the remains, the degree of decomposition tells me the attack happened at least three days ago. Sophie was extremely lucky to survive. The missing man—even if he has both feet intact—probably wasn’t as lucky. If he was, he’d have been with her, right? They’d have fled together or found each other afterward. Still, we will search, just in case.
As for what else the bodies tell us, the short answer is “nothing new.” I’m hoping to get more from the autopsy, but at this point, I see evidence of stabbing on both torsos. While that isn’t easy to determine, given the degree of predation, there are stab wounds through the man’s back, preserved because he fell onto them, leaving the scavengers to work on his chest instead. As for the woman, her throat has been slit. Yes, ripping out the throat is a common method of killing prey, but there’s a huge difference between ripping and slitting, and I don’t need an autopsy to see the clean edges on the wound.
Two tourists, murdered by what seems to be hostiles. I hate jumping to that conclusion, but from what Sophie said, I can’t imagine she mistook “settlers in desperate need of a shower” for wild men of the forest.
I try sending Dalton into the forest with Storm to search for a potential survivor. That goes about as well as one might expect, complete with profanity and pointed comments about the dead people on the ground, who should serve as a Klaxon-loud warning against separating. I let him talk me into postponing further crime-scene investigation while we search for our potentially missing man.
Storm takes the lead there, joyfully, as we give her a reason to leave the death tableau behind. She always struggles with a search ending in people she cannot wake with a lick and a bounce. I have to wonder, though, if this scene upset her even more because, well, what’s lying on the ground isn’t so much people as meat. Either way, she can hardly contain her delight at being asked to do a proper task and leave this place.
I don’t have anything for her to sniff—the tent had been cleared of all belongings. Still she understands she’s looking for a person. We don’t use her to hunt, so work means finding people, preferably alive. She snuffles the scene, and then she’s ready to go.
Newfoundland dogs are not trackers. However, they are used in search-and-rescue, and they have an excellent sense of smell, which are the excuses Dalton used to get me the dog breed of my dreams. I never handled a tracking dog down south. Never even owned a pet. So, despite my deep-dive studies, I am quite certain that the fact that Storm has become a very fine tracking dog is entirely owing to her innate intelligence and eagerness to please. If she is not quite on par with a bloodhound, well, that isn’t her fault. We both try our damnedest, and at the risk of bragging, we make a good team.
Storm takes a quick sniff of the torso, knowing that’s not who she’ll need to find, which helps her weed them out from the scents around the campsite. I’d also brought her Sophie’s jacket to exclude her scent, but I swear Storm gives me a look when I hold it out.
Umm, I met that woman last night, Mom, and she’s in town—why would I think she’d be out here?
Like I said, smart dog, one who does indeed find a scent leaving the campsite. But something about it bothers her. She doesn’t whine anxiously. She just seems … This is one of those million times when I wish we could communicate. Something is amiss with this trail, and she cannot tell me what it is, and I cannot ask.
When she follows it, I see the problem. It leads to the remains of another camp. There’s a firepit ring and logs pulled over for sitting, and when Dalton digs through the ashes, he finds tinfoil, suggesting a cooked meal. He also finds evidence that the fire was extinguished properly.
So, someone made camp here. Someone from down south, judging by the tinfoil and matches. There’s also evidence of a tent—rope fibers where it’d been strung between trees.
This might seem perfectly logical. Storm followed the missing Dane’s trail from their most recent camp to their previous one. Except that the two are maybe an hour’s walk apart. No one is going to pull up stakes and make a new camp that close by.
This could be someone else’s former campsite. The Danish quartet found it and considered making camp there to take advantage of the preexisting firepit, but ultimately they chose another site. There, anomaly explained.
Except for one problem. The firepits are identical: a double ring of stones with a log-cabin-style fire built within. The similarities extend beyond that—enough that I know the same people constructed both camps. The Danes, I presume. So why the hell are they a mere hour’s walk apart?
“Maybe one came after the attack,” Dalton says. “Guy’s injured and, as he’s recuperating, he builds—” He stops short. “Well, that makes no fucking sense, does it?”