Wolfwraith (10 page)

Since they would over-run the cape if left unchecked, the park held an annual lottery for hunters to participate in a fall pig season. Many sportsmen enjoyed stalking the elusive creatures, which were extremely wary of man.

He considered calling Alex at home, to give an account of his sighting, but the chief ranger might still be asleep and without any evidence, Shadow’s report would leave him open to ridicule. What he had seen was too important to ignore, but he needed something solid to back up his story before making any report.

He looked back down along the face of the dune and saw the gusting wind rapidly filling in both his own footprints and the pig tracks with drifting sand. He had seen the same thing when tracking animals through powdery snow as a youth. In half an hour, the tracks would be only shallow depressions in the sand. In an hour, they would be gone. He decided to go back along their track in hopes of discovering where the hand had come from.

He half-ran, half-slid back down the loose, steep slope to the truck. Getting in, he drove south along the beach until he saw the original footprints, the trail where the pigs had come down off the dune toward him in the beginning. Turning off the lights and ignition, he got out again.

Standing at the base of the dune, he confirmed his fears. Here, in the soft sands of the dunes, the prints wouldn’t last long. He began a slow steady climb away from the shoreline, occasionally grabbing the stalks of sea oats to pull himself up.

When he reached the crest of the dune, the wind was gusting more strongly. He protected his eyes from the driven sand with the claw as the tracks led him deeper into the dunes, away from the beach.

He followed the tracks into the dunes, past sparse grass and sea oats and into bushy, thorny plants that tended to grow in thickets. The pigs had gone in and out of the brush as they ran. Shadow walked around the thicker copses and picked up the trail on the other side but sometimes went straight through to save time. Even though the wind wasn’t as strong as on the beach, there were still zephyrs whirling around the edges of the dunes and particles of airborne sand often got in his eyes, causing tears and blurring his vision. It got brighter as the sun came up behind him and he turned his flashlight off, sticking it in a rear pocket.

Suddenly, something large came straight at him from a thicket. His insides turned over for a moment, until he realized it was a horse. Another feral animal left behind by the settlers, the creature halted and looked calmly at Shadow. After a couple of seconds, it began to walk again, angling away from the man. Four more horses appeared and followed the first, which he recognized as a stallion when the horse showed its rear to him. Each horse regarded him without fear as it went by, three mares, one with a colt walking beside her. Shadow waited for them to pass, despite his feeling of urgency about the pig tracks. Although they were friendly enough normally, the stallion would quickly attack if he felt his herd to be threatened. When it seemed safe, Shadow continued on.

Arriving at a place where the trail split into two diverging sets of prints, he became baffled. How would he figure out which pig had been carrying the hand? He looked carefully and found where one of the animals had stepped in the tracks of the other, and knew this was the chasing pig. Carefully, one footprint at a time, he backtracked the trail and determined which had been the leader, the one with the hand. He continued backtracking the lone set of prints north by west, moving further away from the coast. Then the trail turned due north and ran straight, which put the wind in his face. He was having trouble seeing and the tracks were filling in fast. He crossed a section of gravel road, nearly running now, afraid the footprints would be gone with the wind before he found anything.

The first indication he might be near the end of his quest arrived as a strong, nauseating stench on the wind. How long had the girl been missing? Two weeks? He shivered at the thought of what he might find.

As he crossed over a rise in the sand, he suddenly stopped. Below him was a large, bowl-shaped natural hollow. A few crabs, too greedy to have left when the sun came up, skittered away from the two objects near the center of the depression, frightened away from their meal by his sudden appearance.

Shadow’s stomach began to flip-flop when he realized what the crabs had been feeding on. An arm stuck up from the sand. The hand was missing; bare bone poked from the wrist. A couple of feet away, obviously part of the same body, a larger portion of flesh lay partially out of the sand. It looked like a thigh. Chunks of flesh had been torn from it.

He tasted bitter bile and morning coffee in the back of his throat and fought to overcome his nausea. He’d need his wits about him to decipher what had happened here.

The digging of the pigs and other animals had disturbed the sand around the corpse and their muddled tracks had not filled in, since the hollow was protected from the wind. He saw the ribbon-like trails left by the scraping of crab undersides, paralleled by a twin beadwork pattern made by their four legs on either side. There were a lot of bird tracks, from the delicate feet of tiny shorebirds up to the large imprints of a crow. It didn’t appear the body had been scavenged for very long; perhaps the wind had recently exposed parts of the body.

Shadow walked around the remains in a wide circle, searching for anything to show what had happened here, but found no clues. It had been too long. Then he sat down on his heels and studied his find for several minutes. His nausea faded away as he became preoccupied. Could it be the missing Amanda Gordon? The shape of the arm and leg—and the red fingernails he’d seen earlier—told him the body was almost certainly female. He had no way of knowing if the corpse had been purposefully buried or naturally covered by the shifting sands. There’d been quite a fierce storm around the time she went missing, he remembered. Maybe she’d died of natural causes and the wind buried her.

He was fearful of disturbing any evidence, but his curiosity and strong desire to solve the mystery overwhelmed him. This body had been here for some time; any marks in the sand from when she had first arrived here would have long disappeared, what could he harm? So, careful not to step on anything, he gingerly approached until he was crouching down beside the body.

The mottled black, blue and purple skin didn’t look human anymore. In places, it had peeled away in large patches to reveal grayish yellow tissue beneath. He saw no apparent wounds; nothing gave the slightest hint of what had happened to this once-person.

He caught a hint of the inhuman malevolence he had felt when he found the other body, as though the aura had faded with time. Enough remained, however, to make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Well, no matter what had killed her, it was time to call Alex and bring the authorities in. He began to reach for his belt radio but stopped as a voice barked from behind him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Ranger?”

Shadow whirled around to the glaring eyes of Chief Warden James Moorcock, a lanky man with close-cropped dark hair, a beaky nose above a short mustache. He also wore his trademark perpetual scowl. His uniform, as always, was meticulously pressed and spotless, although his tie fluttered around in the strong wind and dark stains showed under his armpits. Even his gun belt shined squeaky clean. Shadow had spoken to him only a few times and always on a professional level, with Moorcock speaking down to him from a lofty perch of self-anointed superiority. Shadow had figured him for a desk jockey and was not only amazed to see him here in the dunes, but slightly embarrassed the warden had managed to come up on him undetected.

“Oh, uh, hello Warden. I was about to call Alex to let him know what I’ve found, so we can get the police out here.”

“What for? We don’t call the police for poaching, or whatever this is. I want to know why you are on my refuge.”

Oh, shit, thought Shadow. That’s right; the road he had crossed marked the boundary between the park and the refuge. He should have considered it, but he had been obsessed by the mystery of the pig’s gruesome trophy. Moorcock had always had a feud going with the state park rangers, even forbidding them to drive on his dike trails—roads along the tops of the dikes between the many large ponds—in fall and winter, forcing them to use the beach as their only access. This had been a big reason for obtaining the Terra-Gator.

“Er, well...actually I didn’t realize I was. I guess I did cross over the dike trail, though, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. I saw tracks while I was on my way to check on one of the drainage pipes and then I saw someone go over the top of a dune. I followed to see who it was. Now, as you know, I allow you state people to use the dike trails, but I certainly haven’t given permission for any of you people to be in the dunes. If you’re investigating some wildlife problem, you have to use proper channels.”

“Uh, right. Sorry, Warden, but this isn’t a wildlife problem. I had a clue about that missing woman from a couple of weeks ago and it wouldn’t wait. And I found her.”

“You mean...the smell...it’s not an animal carcass?” Moorcock’s eyes became saucers.

“No, it’s not.” Shadow stepped away so his body no longer blocked the remains. Moorcock’s deer-in-the-headlights expression quickly changed to horrified shock. He stared at the incomplete limb for a several seconds and his face went ashen. Then, color began to return—green. When he looked back at Shadow, he licked his lips before speaking.

“Oh my God, i—is it what I think it is?”

“Yep. It may be the woman who went missing. It looks—from what you can see of the body—like a female, anyway.”

Moorcock opened his mouth to reply but no sound emerged. He closed his mouth and began to swallow, then turned his head suddenly and spewed vomit onto the sand. He doubled over and retched again and again, long after his stomach was empty.

Fall off your perch? Shadow wondered. Then he remembered his reaction to the first body and waited patiently for Moorcock to recover.

When the chief warden straightened, he was no longer green, although his face was pallid and sweat beaded his brow. “I guess you’re right, Ranger—Fletcher, isn’t it?—this
is
a matter for the police.”

Moorcock used his radio to call the refuge headquarters and told one of his wardens to inform the police. Shadow called Alex, who always kept a radio on at home. He finished before Moorcock and stood considering what he knew of the man.

The warden’s main responsibility was the protection of the permanent and migratory wildlife inhabiting his refuge and he took it very seriously. Too seriously, Shadow thought. Moorcock believed even the sound of engines near the nesting areas was detrimental to the waterfowl and always kept vehicles out of the refuge during nesting season. It didn’t matter to him if his decision made it difficult for the False Cape rangers. In fact, he made a point of letting the rangers know he considered them to be little more than tourist guides.

When the warden had finished arranging for the police to be escorted to the site of the body, he turned again to Shadow and pointed at the remains.

“How...” He licked his lips and then swallowed. “How did you find her?”

“I saw a pig carrying a hand and backtracked it to see if I could find where it came from. That’s why I’m on the refuge.”

“A pig? Carrying a hand? Are you serious?”

“Yes. I know it sounds weird, but that’s what happened. I figured I ought to follow it up before I reported it, since it was so strange.”

Moorcock shook his head. “Strange is hardly the word for it. Preposterous would be more like it, but why couldn’t it wait until you notified your superior so he could arrange an investigation?”

“I didn’t have time,” Shadow explained. “The pig tracks were filling in fast. I had to follow them right away. There wouldn’t have been time to make a report and wait for somebody to give me the okay.”

“But I followed you from the road and you walked directly here.” Moorcock looked at him accusingly. “To the body. As if you knew exactly where it was.”

“I followed the pig tracks, like I told you.”

“You keep mentioning pigs. They don’t run around carrying human body parts, and I didn’t see any pig tracks—only your footprints. They led me straight here and I found you bending over the remains of a body. I expect a better explanation than mysterious pigs.”

Shadow noticed Moorcock had crooked his right arm, bringing his hand near the butt of his automatic pistol.

Chapter Seven

Why
did
you disturb the scene?

Early the next day, Shadow stared from a window at a world of asphalt parking lots and identical, box-like office buildings with mirrored windows. He had been summoned to the F.B.I. headquarters building in Norfolk, Va., an hour’s drive from the park. Since the body had been on federal property, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had jurisdiction. For the last half hour, he had been waiting in the outer reception area for his interview.

Not that he hadn’t been questioned already. Two detectives from Virginia Beach had quizzed him at length about his gruesome discovery. They had confirmed the body was indeed Amanda Gordon—he wasn’t sure how, they wouldn’t give him any other information. The detectives had also asked pointed questions concerning the girl he had found a month earlier, the kayaker. Trying to establish a link between the three deaths, no doubt.