Wild Montana

She giggled, like she had been able to read his thoughts, and the heat rose higher in his face.

He held his head low, fearing that if he looked in her direction she would be able to see how embarrassed he was, but instead of studying him, she reached in the bag and pulled out the last brick and documented it.

She flipped the bag over. At the bottom was a wad of cash, at least a thousand dollars, held together by a thick rubber band.

“How do you think the bag got up here? You think the bears stole it?” she asked with a slight laugh at her twisted joke.

“You know of any bears that need a thousand bucks and some drugs?”

She laughed again, the sound fluttering through the air like a rare butterfly, and just as quickly as it had come, it disappeared.

“But really, either the guy dropped it when he was running or...” He picked up the bag and showed her the claw marks. He flipped it so she could see the dark bloodstains that were speckled over its surface. “This is definitely arterial spray. Which means this guy must have been carrying this when he was mauled.”

She shrugged. “It definitely could have been a mauling. It wouldn’t be the first and I doubt it will be the last, but something about this whole thing—maybe it’s the drugs—it just doesn’t feel right. There has to be something more, something we’re missing.”

He felt it, too, the strange charge in the air that came with a great case. “Do you think someone murdered this guy, Alexis?”

“Call me Lex,” she said, interrupting him. “My friends...they call me Lex.” A faint tinge of pink rose in her cheeks.

He smiled. So they were friends, just as he had hoped.

“Anyway...what were you saying?” she asked, her voice soft and coy.

That place deep inside him—that place in his heart he often pushed aside for logic and reason—reawakened.

“I...I guess I was just saying that you might be right was all... I mean, if I was a killer and I wanted to hide a body, this is one heck of a place to do it. It’s late in the season. It would be easy enough to bring a person up here, shoot them and leave them to be reabsorbed by nature. Another few days and no one would have been back up here until next year. It could have been a nearly perfect attempt at a murder and cover-up.”

She nibbled her bottom lip, and it made him wonder what it felt like to kiss those lips. They were so perfect, pink and full, even a little suntanned from all her hours hiking. He ran his tongue over his lip and gave it a slight suck as his mind wandered to more sultry thoughts of all the places of hers he would like to kiss.

“How do you know that’s arterial blood?” she asked, motioning toward the stain on the bag.

He forced himself to look away from her mouth. “Arterial blood spatter tends to have a redder color, and the droplets are small or medium because they are expelled from the body at a higher speed.”

Her face pulled into a tight pucker and she looked up the mountain. “You thinking it could be from a bullet?”

He shrugged. “Without having the medical examiner go over the foot, and without more of the body...well, it’s hard to say exactly what might have happened. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we go get Travis and the other guys.”

“No,” she clipped. “We don’t need Travis. We’ll be fine.”

There was definitely something between her and this Travis guy. Jealousy zinged through him.

She snapped another quick picture of the drugs and the money, and stuffed everything back into the bag before she stood up. “Let’s keep moving up the mountain. Maybe we’ll find the rest of whomever this belongs to. If we do, it’s possible we can get a few more questions answered.”

Maybe it was selfish, or adolescent, or whatever his therapist would’ve called it, but what he really wanted more than to find this body—and open whatever can of questions it would entail—was to spend more time with Lex. Their time together was the first real human contact he’d had all summer. Sure, he’d seen hikers and tourists, but their interactions had been little beyond looking at passports and the normal small talk.

In the deepening shadows, they picked their way up the hill into larger and larger clumps of snow, which made their tracking easier. A squirrel chirped overhead, making him jump.

“There,” she said, pointing toward a reddish patch on the snow. “Look...”

There, half-buried in the snow, was a yellow patch of bone. On its surface were smears of blood. His stomach dropped. Hopefully he’d been wrong about this being a murder. Hopefully this was nothing more than a mauling. A death was always a terrible thing, but if this was a murder the ramifications would play out until the case was solved, and the deeper the investigation would go, the deeper he would be forced to go into his former world—a world he had promised to leave behind.

Alexis carefully snapped a picture and documented the scene. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and reached down and picked up the bone that was buried in the snow. The bone was round and, where it wasn’t tacky with blood, it was oily from fat.

It could have been his years of seeing the dead, but as he watched her work to gently move the heavy, wet remains from the ice that had formed around it, he wasn’t thinking about the life that this bit of flesh had once belonged to; rather, all he could think about was Lex and the way her face had paled the second her fingers had touched the bone.

“You don’t have to stay, Lex. You can go get the guys,” he offered. “I can handle this.”

She shook her head and wiped the back of her sleeve over her forehead.

“Seriously, Lex. You don’t have to do this.”

“No. I’m fine,” she said, but her voice was weaker than what he was sure she had intended it to be. “This is my job. I got it.”

Ever so gently, he reached over and took the bone from her.

She gave an appreciative sigh. “Do you think...it is him?”

“It could be,” he said. He slowly turned the bone.

Lex gasped.

In his hands, barely discernible thanks to the jagged holes and chew marks, was the partial face of what had once been a man.

Chapter Three (#u6a77f333-7a0f-5c4e-bf16-f4852752ef79)

The coroner laid the skull down on the black body bag. There was a patch of hair, dark with dried blood and grease, and an ear that hung limp, tethered by only a thin strip of pale skin. “Look at this mark right here,” he said, pointing to a jagged, round wound at the base of the man’s skull. “If this was the entrance of a bullet wound, it would be smooth around the edges, and depending on the angle, there would be a large exit wound.”

“So this wasn’t a homicide?” Casper asked as he leaned in closer to look at the mark on the bone.

“If you look right here,” Hal said, “the margins of the wound are jagged. It’s the type you normally see associated with a high-pressure compression wound, consistent with that of a bite. However, without the rest of the body, it’s hard to say if this wound was the cause of death or was caused antemortem, perimortem or postmortem.”

She looked away. To get through this she had to think of him as just another man. A random being. A victim of the fates. It was nature.

“Are you okay?” Casper asked, putting his hand on the small of her back.

She swallowed a bit of bile that had managed to sneak through her resolve. “I’m fine,” she said, her voice hoarse.

Hal zipped up the bag, hiding the gruesome head from view. “I’ll get this to the medical examiner. Maybe he can tell us a little more, but for now I’m going to rule the cause of death as undetermined. Don’t be surprised if this comes back as being likely due to unintentional injuries. This bite,” he said, motioning toward the bag at his feet, “would have been fatal.” He stood up and wiped off the knees of his pants.

Travis tapped Hal on the shoulder, drawing his attention. “You ready? The pilot is starting to get antsy.”

Hal nodded. “You guys need a ride out?”

Casper took a step toward the copter, but Lex stopped him as she looked over at Travis. The last place she wanted to be was sitting next to her ex-husband in a flying death machine. “Thanks, but we’ll hike out.”

“Are you sure? Alexis, I think you should get back to the station—” Travis started to protest, but stopped as if he had realized, a moment too late, that he no longer had control over her. “Or do whatever. You never listened to me anyway.”

It wasn’t that she hadn’t listened, it was simply that she wasn’t the kind of woman who was ever going to have her actions dictated to her—especially not by someone who had once said that he loved her. “Would you and John let the other rangers know that we have a possible dangerous bear?” She carefully sidestepped his jab. “We’re going to need to send up the biologists and a ranger in the morning to track this bear down. We don’t need any more tourists getting hurt.”