Page 52 of Cold as Hell

When he’s gone, I hurry into the exam room. April looks up from her note-taking.

“We definitely need that tox screen,” I say.

An hour later, Dalton and I are back where we found Lynn. We don’t have the toxicology report from April, and we won’t untiltonight. That takes time. But the storm has died, with no sign of returning soon. We have another couple of hours before it’s too dark to check that crime scene, and if I can do it tonight I must or I fear waking to find it covered in fresh snow.

Dalton doesn’t argue. It’s hardly a mile trek into the forest. It’s literally steps past the town border to the lake, with the site maybe a hundred and fifty feet away.

A hundred and fifty feet from Haven’s Rock. That’s the equivalent of being on the other side of a four-lane highway. Lynn died of exposure so close to town that, in good weather, she’d be able to smell smoke from our chimneys. She’d be able to see it too, spiraling over Haven’s Rock.

She’d died so close that we’d have been able to hear her screams.

Had she screamed? She might have. But we wouldn’t have heard them last night, over the wind, and she wouldn’t have seen or even smelled that smoke.

The storm meant that we couldn’t have heard her and she couldn’t have seen Haven’s Rock. She might have died never knowing how close she’d been to safety.

Having been out here earlier helps ease my conscience, because I saw what those conditions were like. It seems ridiculous, how much we’d struggled to cross the distance between her body and town. I remember the relief of finally seeing Haven’s Rock ahead. It really had felt like trudging a mile in a blizzard.

The fact that we took such pains to mark the spot proves how far away we’d felt. Returning, we don’t need that hanging wolverine corpse or Storm’s nose. We know right where to go, and we head directly there. Dalton pulls down the wolverine—now that we can see how close it is to town, we really don’t want to attract scavengers.

With the wind having died so soon after we left, the hollowwhere we’d found Lynn’s body is still there, an impression in the snow.

As Dalton holds Storm back, I accept his help and lower myself to my knees. Then I feel around in the snow. My touch is light, looking for something in particular. I find it easily. Beneath the thinnest blanket of snow, there’s a frozen layer. When I brush it off, the shape comes clear. The shape of Lynn’s body.

She’d died here, her body still warm when it melted snow that then froze under her as she cooled. I find the divots of her head and hands. The wolverine had done little to disturb her. She’d died on her back, looking up.

There is, however, something wrong with the shape. There are narrow protuberances from where her shoulders had been. Those look like marks of her arms, but when I found her, they’d been at her sides.

I check where her legs would have been. I found her flat on her back with her legs straight down, but that ice suggests they were parted. She’d died with her arms wide and her feet nearly a meter apart.

My breath catches, and I look up at Dalton. I don’t say anything. I’m just making contact, grounding myself and slowing my racing heart.

Then I put out my hand. He wordlessly helps me to my feet, and I survey the site.

“Can you do me a favor?” I say.

“Name it.”

I tell him what I need him to check for, and he does it while I stand with Storm. He picks his way carefully over the ice and bends in two spots. He clears away snow. Then his gaze lifts to mine in a grim nod.

I head out, and I see what he found—what he’d been able to bend easily and search for.

Two small holes in the ice, where something had been driven deep. Two spots the size of bolt holes, now empty.

Dalton leaves them and moves to two trees I’d indicated. He digs into the snow, checks one and shakes his head, but at the second, he nods. I walk over and bend as well as I can. There, where he’s cleared away snow, there’s a rub mark on the bark.

“So… yes?” I say.

Another grim nod, and I stand in that spot and look out at the scene now coming to life before me. Faint abrasions on Lynn’s wrists and ankles. Holes where bolts had been driven into the ice, about six inches from where her feet would have been. At least one mark on a tree, about the same distance from her extended arm.

She’d been staked out. Tied on the snow, presumably naked, and left to die.

“There’s something else,” Dalton says.

When I look over, he’s rubbing a bare hand over his beard as he looks at something to our left. I only see a fallen tree, stretching along the side. He walks over, circling wide as if to avoid contaminating a scene. Then he bends at the fallen log, leaning right over it to point at the snow.

“That’s been moved,” he says. “Someone filled in snow. Probably covering footprints.”

I ease back for a better look. I can see it now. There are obvious disturbances in the snow all around. There’d have to be—whoever did this would have left footprints and wouldn’t have relied on the blowing snow to cover them.

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