C. Box - Force of Nature

“Ever find any bodies?” Brueggemann asked.

“Nope.”

They almost missed it. Joe was taking a slow rocky turn to the left through the trees when his headlights swept quickly across a dark box twenty yards into the timber.

“Any time now,” Brueggemann said, his eyes glued to the GPS.

“You’re a little late,” Joe said, reversing until the beams lit up the old structure.

The heavily falling snow didn’t obscure the fact that the line shack was a wreck. It was tiny-barely ten by ten feet-and made of ancient logs stained black with melting snow. The roof sagged, and there was no glass in the two rough-cut windows on either side of the gaping door. A dented black metal stovepipe jutted out of the roof at a haphazard angle.

“What a dump,” Brueggemann said.

“Yup,” Joe said, swinging out of the cab. He dug his green Game and Fish parka out from behind the bench seat. It had been back there, unused, for the last five months, and he shook the dust off. His twelve-gauge Remington WingMaster shotgun was behind the seat as well, but he decided to leave it. He reached inside the cab for the long black Maglite flashlight, which was jammed between the seats. He clicked it on and shined it toward the line shack. He choked the beam down so it peered into the open windows, but all he could see were interior log walls.

“I’ve got the camera,” Brueggemann said, tossing the evidence bag into the cab of the truck.

Joe took a step toward the line shack, then stopped. He turned and got his shotgun.

“You think you’re going to need that?” Brueggemann asked.

“Probably not.”

The snow crunched under their boots as they approached the line shack. Joe held the flashlight with his left hand and carried the shotgun in his right.

“Why a shotgun?” Brueggemann asked. “What’s wrong with your service pistol?”

“Nothing,” Joe said, “except I can’t hit a damned thing with it.”

Brueggemann chuckled. He said, “I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

“You’re starting to get on my nerves,” Joe said. “Now, get behind me.”

The heavy snow hushed the rumbling of the running motor of Joe’s pickup as he neared the front of the line shack. He swept the beam left to right and back again, covering the front of the structure as well as the roof and several feet to each side. Because of the snowfall, any boot prints that might have been there were hidden.

“Anybody home?” Joe asked, feeling more than a little silly.

He heard Brueggemann’s breath behind him, and was grateful he didn’t giggle.

As he got close to the line shack, still sweeping the light across the windows, he saw something that surprised him: a glimpse of brightly colored cloth on the cluttered dirt floor inside.

“There might be something,” he said over his shoulder.

“Really?” Brueggemann asked, surprised.

Rather than enter the sagging open door, Joe moved to the left to the broken-out window.

Joe took a deep breath of cold air and inhaled several large snowflakes that melted in the back of his sinus cavities. Then he stepped forward and thrust the Maglite through the window frame toward the floor, slowly moving it up and down the length of the body wrapped in a blanket. The beam swept across the partially exposed skull, the matted hair, the gaping eye sockets where the flesh had been eaten away by rodents and insects.

“Want to look?” Joe asked Brueggemann.

“Is it her?”

“Not exactly,” Joe said, stepping aside and handing his trainee the flashlight.

On the way out of the forest toward the highway, Luke Brueggemann said, “Jesus, who would do something like that? Wrap a dead deer in a blanket and leave it in a line shack? What in the hell could they have been thinking?”

Joe shrugged.

“That’s just sick, man,” the trainee said.

“It happens,” Joe said. “My guess is some hunter shot an extra deer than he had permits for, and decided to dump it. Why he’d wrap it in a fake Navajo blanket-I don’t know. I hate it when hunters waste a life and all that meat. It makes me furious. Luckily, it doesn’t happen very often.”

“I wish we could have found the bullet,” Brueggemann said. He’d watched Joe perform the necropsy with equal measures of curiosity and disgust. But because of the deteriorated condition of the carcass, the fatal wound couldn’t be determined. “I’d like to figure out who did that and ticket their ass.”

“We’ll never know unless someone fesses up,” Joe said. “Sometimes it takes years to solve a crime like that. But we’ve got the photos, and we’ll write up an incident report for the file. One of these days we may solve it. Someone talking in a bar, or telling the right person about it-that’s when we can cite them. And you’d be surprised how many of these miscreants show up and confess. Crimes against nature eat on some of these guys the way nothing else does.”

“It’s a puzzle,” Brueggemann said, withdrawing his cell phone and glancing at the screen.

“What’s even more of a puzzle,” Joe said, “is how those hunters saw a deer carcass in a blanket and thought it was Alice Thunder. There seems to be something strange in the air right now. The missing people and that triple homicide have everyone looking over their shoulders and seeing things that aren’t there, I think.”

When his trainee didn’t respond because he was concentrating on his phone, Joe said, “We’re still a few miles away from getting a signal.”

“I can wait.”

“You’ll have to.”

The snow had accumulated so quickly they couldn’t see their entry tracks in the rough two-track on the way out. The big rocks in the road made them pitch back and forth inside the cab like rag dolls.

“I’ll be glad to get back on asphalt,” Brueggemann said.

“Uh-oh,” Joe said, as his headlights lit up a dead tree that had fallen across the road in front of them, blocking their progress. Luckily, the tree didn’t look too large to push aside.

“When did that happen?” Brueggemann asked.

Joe said, “Heavy snow brings down those old dead trees. Try and push it out of the way. If that won’t work, I’ll get the saw out of the back.”

The trainee hesitated for a moment, as if preparing to argue, but apparently thought better of it. “It’ll just take a minute,” he said, pulling on leather gloves.

While Brueggemann walked toward the fallen tree, his back bathed in white headlights, Joe withdrew his own cell phone to check messages. No bars. He glanced to the bench seat and realized Brueggemann had absently left his there. Joe wondered if Brueggemann’s smart phone picked up a signal yet, and picked it up to check.

There was no signal yet, but the darkened screen hinted at the text thread underneath. Joe glanced up to make sure Brueggemann’s back was still to him-it was, as his trainee lifted the tree and walked it stiffly to the side-before tapping a key to light up the screen. Although Joe had no business looking at the extended text thread, he was curious. But the phone was locked and a password was required for access. He lowered the phone back to the seat, ashamed of his attempted spying.

Out on the road, Brueggemann stepped aside and brushed snow from his sleeves and signaled for Joe to drive forward. When he drew up alongside, Joe stopped for his trainee to crawl in. He noted that the first thing Brueggemann did when he swung inside was to immediately retrieve his cell phone from the seat and drop it in his breast pocket.

“Thank you,” Joe said.

“The pleasure is mine,” Brueggemann said sarcastically. “It’s snowing like a motherfu-” He caught himself before the curse came out. “Like crazy,” he said instead.