Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) (8 page)

“Your government dollars at work,” said Slater. “Whatever it takes.”

“At least I can’t moan about the lack of responsiveness from the US Forest Service,” said Allison.

“In more ways than one, if you get my drift,” said Slater. “And drift may not be the best choice of words, given all this snow.”

They huffed and grunted as they worked—stepping out of their last spot, sinking into the next, probing down with the sticks, waiting to see how the feel of the bottom registered on their gloved hands. Allison was dubious this would work, but it beat shoveling or waiting for spring. Slater recounted how he once found a dead hunter this way. The hunter’s tracks led into an area creamed by an avalanche that had plummeted off a windblown cornice a hundred yards up. It was Slater’s probe that found the body and others had come around to see how the probe felt. It had been too late to hope for a rescue, so the moment was used for training. Slater told Allison she would know if she hit elk. It was
different
.

Step, sink, probe, wait, feel. They hit the hour mark and then 90 minutes. They had snacks and a drink, hot Lemon Zinger from a thermos. Just a quick bite before they were back at it. Allison wondered how long it was worth exploring. What if they poked this whole section and came up empty? In which direction should they look? Would there be time, or even the inclination? They were more than half finished with this plot when Slater stopped his methodical rhythm.

“We got a bite,” he said.

But this find wasn’t a matter of feel or touch. Allison worked Slater’s probe to see if she could feel the body below, but couldn’t register anything. This find was a matter of height. The probe wouldn’t sink as low as it did immediately nearby. End of story.

Digging down and around the elk was hard work, but the effort was eased by the fact that she knew she hadn’t been whacked out and had remembered enough to find her way back to this spot. The frozen elk emerged like a breach birth. It came butt first like a hairy, unwieldy rock. Slater worked from the antlers down and she worked from the rear up, scooping snow off the carcass by hand.

“Nice one,” said Slater, standing back to admire the specimen. “Healthy size rack, too. But what makes you so sure he’s not completely shredded underneath?”

“Two things. This guy didn’t fall, he decided to get down. He’s not crumpled up. Second, no exit wound. Sure it’s possible. But not even a nick on this side? Nothing. It didn’t look like this guy had been in pain.”

“Interesting,” said Slater. “I don’t think it would have ever occurred to me, but you might be right.”

They dug underneath the elk’s legs, fitted ropes up and around the front and tied them as close to the body as they could, walked their horses around, tied one rope to each saddle and stepped the horses away. The rope pulled taut and the elk’s feet slowly rose up. The feet pointed oddly to the sky and the elk flopped over. They scraped through caked-on snow, studied the elk’s head and double-checked the rump and belly for holes, blood, or trauma of any kind. There was nothing.

“He was a beauty,” said Slater.

Allison was on all fours, peering into the elk’s face. The shadow from Slater’s head moved and she caught a flash, a glint of steel. She refocused her eyes on the bright snow to catch sight of it again, reached down and wiggled free a rectangular metal box not much bigger than her hand.

“GPS,” said Slater.

“Yep,” said Allison.

“Your basic gear for any wildlife biologist.”

“For tracking,” said Allison.

“And study,” said Slater.

“So this is strange or not strange?”

“Medium strange. We get our share of people who want to study the elk migration or diseases or impact on the habitat. It’s possible something was authorized that I didn’t know about.”

“But to have him go down now, at the beginning of the hunting season?”

“Odd, no question,” said Slater. “And why didn’t the elk survive?”

“Do we know all the ways they can die?” said Slater.

The GPS collar, which Slater now flipped around in his hands, put a human in the area where Allison said there had been a human. She thought this, but didn’t say it. Wasn’t that obvious? She stood and stared down the hill, looking for anything out of place, out of line, out of the ordinary. The snowfield returned a blank stare.

“Whatcha gonna do?” said Slater.

“Me?” said Allison. “How about the authorities?”

“We’ll see if we can trace which scientists might be using the Auditrak 535,” he said, reading off the monitor. “But it’s the equivalent of asking which hikers wear boots.”

Allison looked away, thinking she’d wasted Slater’s time and trouble. Or maybe someone would come climbing back up out of the snow right now and explain it all, the same way dead-looking bodies had scrambled up out of Long Island Sound. Only here, the pristine and unforgiving cover of white snow swallowed all the possible answers.

****

Grumley squeezed a hunk of horse manure in his bare fist and felt the heat in the lump’s core. Two horses. And they hadn’t been gone long. He could catch them if he wanted.

The field of snow was churned up and the elk had been flipped over. Fuck. It wasn’t hard to imagine his house and barn now filled with cops looking for him. And Trudy might be there answering questions or filling in the blanks for the detective.

How could things have gotten so screwed up?

The bullet in Rocky. Was it in Rocky? What would they make of it? What had anyone seen? How much?

Applegate. Christ, Applegate had better stay cool or the whole thing could be unzipped in a flash. Maybe he’d spill his stinking guts and decide to take all the honorable, puked-up blame himself for killing the protester. And then bumble his way around and mention having run into Grumley. More than anything, Applegate’s muzzle had better stay put.

****

Trudy Grumley didn’t start crying until the body was being hoisted up to the helicopter. He looked so small and frail, dangling below this mechanical monster by a thread. The sheriff ’s people and one of Dawn Ellenberg’s people held up the oversized brown cloth the protester had been wearing. The television news stations showed a clip of Ellenberg reading the note the guy had left in his tent. The report showed pictures of the dog bounding through the snow to find the body and pictures of Ray Stern as a kid. Trudy let the tears flow and the tissues pile up around her on the blue comforter. And then there was an interview with the sheriff during which he basically said they would stop at nothing to find the stupid hunter who couldn’t tell the difference between an honest-to-goodness whitetail and a two-legged human in a cloth suit.

It was a CNN reporter, an older one who looked like an entire vat of coffee wouldn’t put a jolt in his heartbeat, who first used the term “creative suicide.” The other stations picked it up. It was a neat, simple description that made her ache. She felt the strength of the dead protester’s decision, the conviction that went with it. There was nothing more admirable.

They showed an extended interview with Dean Applegate, who had also been in the search party for the dead protester. He was dressed in his camouflage outfit sitting in a barn on a chair plunked down in the middle of the dirt and muck. The guy looked familiar. He talked about how the protest movement had affected him, how it had made him stop and ponder the real need for hunters, the real necessity of “ripping an animal apart” with a high-powered bullet. “The sport is an anachronism,” said Applegate. “Everything else has changed in this world except the way we treat animals. And that’s changed for the worse. Now we can scope ’em from a mile away, fire bullets that are really small missiles. I simply came to realize that it isn’t fair.”

Something about him was old-friend-familiar, or met-once-familiar. High school?

And still no Rocky. The wait was agonizing.

Trudy sat on the corner of her king-size bed, her right hand absently snipping the air with her pruning shears and the left flipping the satellite dish from one end of the sky to the other, looking for bits of news about the dead protester. It was starting to get repetitive.

Smoke, the gray cat, gave himself a bath on her lap while two black kittens played with a ball of string on the bed behind her. She glanced down the long driveway, watching for cars. The only delay that made any sense was that Rocky got mucked up with the animal people, an event so well orchestrated that it had drawn coverage by CNN, all the network news operations and, of course, every television station out of Denver.

Trudy was impressed with Ellenberg’s pure sense of spunk. Ellenberg was one of those women willing to lead a rebellion on an entire cultural issue—fighting for all those living things, disrupting all of those hunters, screwing up all those cops.

Trudy scratched Smoke’s chin and gently put him down on the bed. The delay was worrisome, the uncertainty worse.

Trudy’s world was her house, a massive stone structure at the end of a long, snaking driveway off in the woods, a couple of miles west from the Colorado River and just outside the southeastern flank of the Flat Tops Wilderness. George had picked the spot for its seclusion. Eighteen trees had been plucked to make room for the site and they still had half the timber in firewood stacks off the garage. Six years in the house and nine trees’ worth of wood had gone up the chimney.

A moss rock fireplace dominated the living room, a giant wood-burning stove nestled inside. A stone ledge fronted the fireplace as long as the living room was wide. Three matching leather couches formed a U-shape around a coffee table, which was a varnished slice of tree from the tallest Douglas fir they had destroyed to make room in the woods for themselves.

The living room was for show. They rarely had guests or parties. Trudy spent half the time in her greenhouse, which was accessed through the kitchen. She had gradually covered the greenhouse and kitchen in plants, her mute pals. The collection now expanded to the living room and hung from the ceiling. It took up every corner of unused space.

It was an easy life that had put roundness, a layer of padding and real hips onto her bony build. Her frame, gaunt in high school, was now more recognizably that of a woman. The humidity from the plants, especially in the greenhouse, kept her skin soft. Her hair hung down to the middle of her back. Her face was long, with clear brown eyes and it looked okay, nothing spectacular, with straight teeth and a smallish nose.

The problem, of course, was mobility. Seven years now of seizures. She had simply come to accept the house as a comfortable, familiar cell. She could drive, but it was risky. The doctors had trained her to watch and sense the faint aura in her vision, like a smear of Vaseline, as a warning sign. She could stop the car and wait for the seizure to pass. The doctors had said her spells didn’t seem to be violent, but that might not always be the case. They only wanted her to drive on the back roads where she could go slowly. But the only way to Glenwood Springs and Eagle, the two closest towns, meant fourteen miles of interstate in one direction, twenty-two in the other. Take your pick. She didn’t want to be going sixty-five and watching for auras. Nor did she want to be picking her way around the winding roads that hugged the banks of the Colorado River and worrying about where she would pull over to let the episode run its course. She didn’t want strangers tending to her or calling ambulances.

And when they did start, there went the sales clerk job at the clothing store in Glenwood Springs and gradually her sense of independence. When George was gone for one of his long stretches, either on a hunt or flying his plane up to a remote neck of the woods, a member of his crew was given the task of visiting once in the morning and once in the afternoon to check on her, to make sure she hadn’t keeled over in a fit and to do any odd chores she wanted done. They called it “Trudy Duty.” It hadn’t taken her long to get over the strange feeling of having what amounted to a personal valet. Few of them refused a warm plate of her best food—Chinese chicken, Thai beef salad, or pork chops in apricot-ginger marinade. It was one way of saying thanks to those who helped her out. She could get chauffeured into town when she wanted to go to the bookstore or eat lunch. Groceries were delivered once a week. She had a satellite dish for entertainment. Trudy was made to feel her illness was being compensated for and accommodated. But it was not treated.

George had stalled when it came to her desire to travel to Denver where specialists were perfecting fixes for her type of seizures. They could peel off a chunk of your skull, attach a bunch of probes, reattach the skull, wait for the next seizure, determine precisely which part of the brain was going haywire when the seizure took place and then, if the part of the brain involved didn’t seem crucial to memory or speech or motor control, snip it out.

“Wait until they perfect the procedure,” George had said. “We don’t have insurance or the thirty thousand dollars to put up front. And what’s wrong with the way things are?”

That’s where Rocky Carnivitas had offered a refreshingly different point of view. There was a sweet and amiable side to Rocky, despite a slightly tousled and unschooled manner. He had drawn “Trudy Duty” three days in a row earlier in the summer and had held her and comforted her through a fierce seizure that came on while they sat in the car in the dirt parking lot after the annual rodeo in Eagle. The rest of the night Rocky had stayed close, like a first-time dad. Rocky was the only one of the hands who had shown any interest in her situation. The others all wanted to know as little as possible.

“If George doesn’t say it, he manages to imply that he doesn’t have the money,” Trudy said.

“Christ, he’s worth ten times that,” said Rocky. He had driven her up to an overlook in Glenwood Canyon a few months earlier for a picnic. Grumley had flown to Texas to meet new clients. Rocky and Trudy sat on a blanket up on a cliff more than a thousand feet above the river. A bottle of wine and curried chicken sandwiches were slowly devoured. A fleet of rafters bobbed in the sparkling river below.

“George says some months we barely make the mortgage. I mean, it’s a great house, but from time to time he’ll grumble about business and suggest getting a smaller place.”