Wolfwraith (4 page)

“What happened? Drowning?”

“Don’t know for sure. We found her in the bay, but she’s got a horrible wound to her throat. Alex and I couldn’t decide what to make of it.”

“Alex...? Oh, Chief Ranger McGuire. What kind of wound are you talking about? Gunshot? Maybe a hunting accident?”

“No, sir. Not like that. It looks like her throat was ripped out. I think something killed her.”

“Something? What do you mean? Like an animal, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

Barnett looked at him quizzically. “You’re new here.” He made it an accusation. “What’s your name?”

“Shadow Fletcher.”

“Fletcher’s a Scottish name, isn’t it?” Barnett’s brow wrinkled as he squinted. “You don’t look Scottish, more like some kind of Pakistani or Arab or something. And Shadow?”

“I’m Native American.” Shadow stressed the word “native.” “Accomattoc tribe.” He knew he was being perverse but couldn’t help himself.

“Accomattoc? Never heard of them.”

“From up on the middle peninsula. Near where the first English settlers established Jamestown. You’ve heard of Powhatan? Pocahontas?” Shadow tried to put an inflection in his tone to hint Barnett was probably too stupid to know of Pocahontas, but the commissioner ignored it, or missed the jibe.

“Pocahontas? Sure, the Disney movie—I took the grandkids to see it.”

Shadow just looked at him.

Barnett dropped his gaze. “Hmm, well, I suppose I’d better have a look at it,” he said. “Take the tarp off, Ranger.”

Shadow grabbed a corner of the covering to keep it from blowing away and began removing the bricks. The tarp fluttered with every breeze, causing him to struggle with the task, especially since he tried to be respectful of the body. Barnett made no move to assist him. When Shadow had managed to remove the tarp and blanket, he laid them in a heap on the dock and weighted them down.

The commissioner stared down at the dead girl with an expression of distaste, but no sign of unease. It was as if he disapproved of something on his plate while dining at a restaurant.

“I see what you mean,” he said. “That’s a horrible injury.”

“Yes, sir, it is,” Shadow said, pleased the man had finally agreed to something. “It looks like something tore right through her throat.”

“Hmm.” A pause. “You say you found her in the water?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then that’s it. Something got at the corpse in the water. Sometimes crabs or other scavengers get at them. That’s probably what happened. There are no dangerous animals in the park; surely you’ve learned that by now.”

“Something killed this girl,” Shadow said stubbornly. “I don’t know what, but she didn’t accidentally drown.”

“Yes, she did!” Barnett snapped. “Other than the mutilation, what makes you think she didn’t drown?”

“Er...just a strong hunch.” He didn’t want to mention how he had sensed evil, not to this man. “And knowing an animal doesn’t take only one bite if it’s feeding on a corpse. I’ve hunted enough to know that.”

Barnett glared at him. “Look, Ranger, there are going to be reporters here; one girl dead and one girl missing is news enough. If you mention to any of them you suspect this girl was killed, it will be all over the media in no time. Visitors to our parks have nothing to fear—as you well know—and I don’t want a lot of bad publicity. As a matter of fact, I don’t want
any
publicity right now. I’m sure the coroner will learn what caused that, uh, disfiguration—crabs or something, I’ll bet.”

“Yes, sir.” Shadow clenched his teeth, grateful for his military training, which enabled him to keep his temper with his appointed superiors. He ruefully remembered, though, that it hadn’t helped him when arguing with his wife.

The commissioner’s manner changed immediately when Shadow agreed. He even cracked a thin smile.

“That’s the ticket,” he said. “You’re new here, and I’m sure you’re upset after finding a body like you did. You did find it yourself, didn’t you? Good job, by the way.” There was a flash of phony-looking smile. “This unfortunate incident will be investigated thoroughly. I assure you that, if there truly is a problem, I’ll be the first to acknowledge it. But let’s not get any bad press we don’t deserve, okay?”

Shadow nodded.

“I noticed you’re having a bit of trouble with your left hand. Did you injure it?”

Shadow shook his head. “No. Just stiff, that’s all.”

Barnett’s eyes shifted to look at something over Shadow’s shoulder. “Ah, here comes McGuire. I’ll go and chat with him a while. You remember what I said. Right, ranger?” He slapped Shadow lightly on the shoulder. “Pocahontas. I liked that movie.”

Shadow turned and watched as Barnett and Alex met near the vehicles and talked. Barnett waved toward the dock once, but there was no telling if he was talking about Shadow or the body.

A parade of vehicles soon emerged from the woods, including a car marked Virginia Beach Medical Examiner. Along with a couple of cops, the coroner came out on the dock. He began examining the body while two teams of police search-and-rescue units backed their boat trailers down the launching ramp.

Barnett drove away and Alex came back onto the now-crowded pier.

“Have you had breakfast?” he asked.

“No. I thought I’d grab something later, but never got a chance.”

“Go over to my place. Lillian will make you something to eat. After that, get another johnboat and make sure both boats are ready to go. I need to get back to the contact station, but Jonesy is coming down to take the other boat. Call me on the radio once you’re on the water and I’ll assign you to your areas.”

“Sure thing. Thanks.”

“Oh, one more thing. The commissioner...aah...sometimes gets, uh, an idea about something and right now he’s worried you’re going to say something premature about what happened to this poor girl. Let’s keep a lid on it until we know a bit more, huh?”

“Sure, Alex.”

As Shadow walked toward his boss’s trailer home, he thought how difficult it would be to ‘keep a lid on it’ if something similar had happened to the other girl.

Chapter Three

He’s quite a little Napoleon, isn’t he?

At the end of a fruitless day searching for the second girl, Shadow tied up his search vessel and returned to the False Cape dock in a boat piloted by Lester Jones, the head of volunteer services for the park. Jonesy wore a ranger’s uniform, but did not have a badge or carry a firearm. Because, as a youth, he’d spent many summers with relatives on False Cape and had learned to love the place, he assisted the park without pay. He helped the rangers and arranged for volunteers to perform odd jobs such as picking up litter, answering the contact station phones on weekends or clearing trails of underbrush.

A Vietnam veteran, he had retired from a successful, self-owned business a few years back. His wife died shortly thereafter. Preferring to keep busy, Jonesy spent most of his days in the park and usually slept, despite his wealth, in an old trailer there rather than his large home in nearby Sandbridge. Now in his sixties with thinning hair, he looked overweight but Shadow knew the man’s bulk to be mostly muscle. Laugh crinkles surrounded his blue eyes and he was quick to flash a winning smile or tell a tall tale in his southern drawl. He and Shadow had readily become friends; they lived close together in the isolated park and shared a dislike for bullshit and a tendency to cheat at card games.

Jonesy steadied the boat while Shadow pulled himself up on the dock. It had been an exhausting day, with the prospect of another like it tomorrow. He undid his lifejacket’s fastenings and tossed it into the boat.

“Want to come over to the Taj Mahal later?” Jonesy asked, referring to the old trailer. “I’ve got a couple of six-packs in the fridge.”

“Sure, sounds good. I’ll give you time to take the boat back and relax a bit, then I’ll be over.”

They had been relieved for the night by other teams, who would search during the clear, moonlit night with spotlights. They had found the two kayaks and there was still a good chance the other girl was alive, since much of the bay was shallow enough to wade to safety.

“Then ta-ta for now,” Jonesy said cheerfully. He gunned the outboard and spun the johnboat expertly away. Shadow heard the sound of the motor fading away as he walked up the pier toward his truck, still parked where he had left it. The nearly full moon was low in the sky behind him and he had no trouble seeing his way. A sudden, chill breeze hit him, though, and Shadow glanced up to see clouds rolling in from the north.

Almost to shore, he noticed some lighter marks atop the dark timbers forming the seawall at the dock’s base. Even though he was tired, he stopped to examine them since they seemed so out of place. They appeared to be smears of yellowish-gray mud, perhaps from the bottom of the bay. Like footprints, as though someone had been standing atop the wall. Then he noticed more mud on the side of the seawall, which drew his eyes down to the muck at the base of the pier.

The tide was out and he could see deep depressions in the mud. They’d been invisible that morning when he’d sighted the girl’s body, under a foot of brown water. Had someone been slogging around down there? Bending over, Shadow studied the marks. The mud was too soft to hold clear footprints but many of the marks seemed roughly the right size and shape for a human foot.

He went back to the truck and searched around in the back seat’s usual litter—empty candy bar wrappers and out-of-date reports—until he found his flashlight. Returning to the pier, he studied the marks but found them harder to see in direct light. He might never have seen them except the moonlight shadows emphasized them. Someone—or something—had been mucking about down there and it looked like a heavy object had been dragged.

Suddenly he felt as if someone was behind him, watching him from farther out on the pier. He turned, but there was nothing there—except the duck blind, a faraway blur back-lit by moonlight. Surely no one in the blind could see him in the dim light, yet the sensation of being spied on was so strong Shadow wished for a speedboat so he could rush out to the blind and check his suspicion.

Trying to ignore the sensation, he went back to studying the marks. Had someone dropped something and gone down to pick it up? Not likely. He had another thought. Maybe, with the water so far below the pier at low tide, the girls had walked into the mud to launch, even though their feet would get filthy. That made more sense, he decided, since one of the kayaks could have left the drag marks. He was letting himself be spooked.

Then again, it wouldn’t hurt to look around a bit more. He left the dock, walked past his truck and entered the tunnel-like passage of the vehicle path, guiding himself with the flashlight. He watched carefully for any sign of footprints or drag marks but, if there’d ever been any, he’d wiped them out by driving down the path that morning.

Away from the dock, the frogs’ mating calls, which he rarely noticed anymore, were impossible to ignore. As portended earlier by the rolling clouds, large drops of rain began to fall when he was halfway to the meadow. For some reason—perhaps even frogs went to cover in a storm—the mating calls ceased, as though by the flick of a switch. At first, in the sudden silence, he could only hear the rain spattering on the canopy above his head, but soon it became a downpour. Water penetrated the branches and came down as if he was walking beneath a thousand showerheads, the rain hammering like a freight train above his head. He considered turning back, but he’d get as soaked going that way as continuing on.

When he emerged from the trees, the effects of the storm forced him to shield his eyes with the claw. He walked over to the campsite the girls had used, checking the ground with his flashlight. Although he knew where they’d pitched their tent a couple of nights earlier, he couldn’t even make out a depression in the grass.

His light’s beam picked up something straight and gray on the ground. Bending, he found an aluminum tent peg sticking from the soil. Pulling it out, he wondered if it might indicate someone striking the tent in a hurry. Or had they merely been careless? Or, more likely, was this peg left over from last summer’s camping season? Aluminum didn’t rust or show other signs of weathering.

Straightening, he walked back into the trees.

Back at the bay side, large gobs of rainwater pelted the seawall, which now showed no sign of the mud that had been there only minutes before. With a weary shrug, he walked to his truck and got in.

He decided to drive home along the beach. The interior road would have been an easier and quicker route, but the cold ocean air and the sound of the surf suited his mood more than the gloomy, overhanging woods. Even going the long way, the trip to Wash Woods took only minutes.

His residence, an old, cedar-shingled, two-bedroom cottage, had originally been a hunting cabin. Moss had grown so thickly on the faded siding that the structure seemed to be one with the woods surrounding it. Going through the kitchen, which dated back to the sixties, Shadow stopped briefly at the refrigerator. He searched through the jumble of food and beverages until he found a quart of orange juice, and went on to the bathroom. The house was hooked up to well water, not potable, but suitable for washing and flushing, so he had a real bathroom. Undoing the Velcro straps and taking the claw from his wrist, he dropped his soggy clothing on the floor. He scoured himself in the hot-as-he-could-stand-it water, occasionally pulling the orange juice into the shower for a deep swig. He had felt tainted ever since he’d sensed something about the body, so he scrubbed until the hot water was gone. Dressing in old jeans and a sweatshirt from a pile of clean clothing on a chair, he put the claw back on.