C Box - Winterkill

“I don’t think you’re being fair to her,” Broxton-Howard sniffed. “She is an amazing woman.”

“Right,” Barnum coughed, rolling his eyes toward Joe.

“When a man takes charge like that, he’s a leader,” Broxton-Howard said. “When a woman does it she’s a nasty bitch.”

Joe waded away from them in the fresh snow. He felt a sharp tug in his stomach. First, an elk slaughter. Then a murder. Then a storm. Now this Melinda Strickland. What in hell is her official involvement?

He found the tree, spotting it by the glint on the twin shafts of the arrows. He had been concerned that the killer might have returned and dug them out of the soft wood with a knife blade. Finding the arrows brought a sense of relief.

Joe stopped and pointed. “I found him right there.”

The party stopped and caught their breath. Billows of steam rose from them and dissipated above. The morning was eerily quiet, almost a vacuum. The storm had stilled the birds and the squirrels, who usually signaled the presence of strangers. The only natural sound was the occasional hushed whump of heavy snow falling from tree branches. One of the DCI men slid his day-pack from his shoulders and let it drop at his feet before unzipping it to dig out his evidence kit.

Joe stepped aside while the sheriff’s officer and DCI men approached the tree.

“These arrows are Bonebuster-brand broadheads,” one of the DCI agents said, leaning close to the thick, camouflage-colored shafts, but not touching them. “They have chisel-point tips that’ll cut right through the spine of a big animal. These arrows are vicious bastards, and judging by how far they’re sunk into the tree, whoever shot them had a compound bow with a hell of a pull on it. It’s going to be tough to get these suckers out.”

Joe shot a glance toward Strickland, who had had been quiet up until then. She stood in the trail, again cradling her cocker spaniel, cooing into the dog’s ear. The Yorkie had been left to follow her, and did so by leaping through the deep snow in clumsy arcs. Strickland had not offered any advice, or suggested any procedure, since they had found the crime scene. Joe wondered if she really knew anything about conducting an investigation.

As if reading Joe’s mind, Melinda Strickland spoke. “Elle needs to take some digital pictures of it,” Strickland said, nodded to her. “We can use them in our investigation,” she said.

“I can?” Elle Broxton-Howard asked, honored.

The local photographer had attached a filter to his lens to cut down the glare, and his camera made a distinctive sipping sound as he shot. Elle Broxton-Howard was obviously new to both her camera and this kind of photography, and she mimicked his actions with her digital camera. Getting the hint, the photographer offered to assist her. When she bent over to retrieve a dropped lens cap, McLanahan and Brazille eyed her form-fitting tights and exchanged boyish grins.

“I don’t know what in the hell we can possibly find up here besides these arrows,” Barnum complained. “This is a whole different world than it was three days ago.”

Brazille shrugged, and agreed. Then he ordered one of his team to fire up the chain saw they had brought. Brazille’s idea was to cover the arrows with a bag and cut down the tree, which was about a foot thick. They would then cut the trunk again, above the arrows, and transport the section back to town, where it would be shipped to the crime lab in Cheyenne. This way, he said, they wouldn’t damage the arrows or smudge prints by trying to remove them from the wood.

“McLanahan, go through the trees over there to the other road and look for tracks or yellow snow,” Barnum barked at his deputy. “If you find anything, take a picture of it and then bag it.”

McLanahan made a face. “You want me to bag yellow snow?”

“It can be tested for DNA,” one of the DCI agents said.

“Shit,” McLanahan snorted.

“That, too,” Barnum said flatly, which brought a laugh from Brazille. McLanahan scowled.

As one of the agents primed the chain saw, Joe turned.

“Do you need me for anything else?” he asked Brazille and Barnum. “If not, I need to check out that meadow.”

Brazille waved Joe away. Barnum just glared at Joe, clearly still annoyed that Joe was there at all, butting in on his investigation.

Joe said nothing, accepting the fact that Barnum had a problem with him. The feeling was mutual.

But if Joe had been given the choice to decide who would head up the investigation-Sheriff Barnum or Melinda Strickland-well, he was glad he didn’t have to choose.

The chain saw coughed and then started, the high whine of it invasive and loud, cutting a swath through the silence of the morning.

Joe slowly cruised through the meadow on his snowmobile, half-standing with a knee on the seat, studying the tracks and re-creating what had happened. There had been at least three snow machines in the meadow, he judged. Two of them were similar, with fifteen-inch tracks and patterns. The third track was slightly wider, with a harder bite, and the machine that made it had been towing some sort of sleigh with runners. The visitors had been there the evening before, since a few fingers of fresh white snow had blown into the tracks during the night.

Whoever had been there had ignored Gardiner’s pickup, which was encased in snow near the tree line. Two deputies were in the process of digging their way to it so they could photograph the inside of the cab.

The piles of snow he had seen from above were where the elk had been found and butchered. The visitors had found all of them.

The discoloration in the snow was from flecks of blood, hair, and tissue. The hindquarters and tenderloin strips had been removed from the elk and, Joe assumed, loaded onto the sleigh. He noted scald marks in the snow, and tissue blowback from where the cutting had been done. They’d used chain saws. Although Joe was grateful that the meat hadn’t gone to waste, the circumstances of its harvesting were bizarre. It wasn’t likely that three snowmobilers had been out for recreation the night before, as the storm finally let up. Their tracks showed that they had entered the meadow from the west, from the Battle Mountain area, and had left the way they’d come. They had driven directly to the meadow, then scouted it in wide circles until they began to find the lumps of the carcasses. He could see that their tracks dug deeper on the way out than when they entered, no doubt due to the thousand pounds of meat they had hauled.

More than a thousand pounds of meat, Joe thought, and whistled. Who had the manpower, the equipment, and the acumen to butcher five elk during a mountain blizzard? How had the visitors known the elk were there? And, obviously, was there a connection between the snowmobiles in the meadow and the murder of Lamar Gardiner?

Joe used his hand-held radio to contact Barnum and Brazille.

“They took five elk somewhere on snowmobiles?” Barnum asked. He heard Brazille ask Barnum for the radio.

“Can you see any tracks heading up this direction?” Brazille asked.

“Nope,” Joe said.

“Then it’s unlikely these meat-lovers knew about Gardiner being up here, or I think they would have checked on him,” Brazille concluded.

“That’s possible,” Joe said. “But they could have done that earlier. It’s been two days. There’s been a lot of new snow since Gardiner was killed, so it’s impossible to see if they were up here before last night.”

“Hold on just a second,” Brazille asked, and clicked off.

A few minutes later, Brazille came back on and asked for Joe.

“McLanahan found some yellow snow near the other road,” Brazille reported. “He bagged it. So we’ve got a little something to go on.”