Winter Study

Staring at the dead woman’s face but without seeing it, A

She left the sauna. She flew with the wind. She heard a clanking sound – probably the Sked banging into the metal legs of the workbench under the window. She opened the door and turned on the overhead light.

Without the wind raking her back and Bob’s eyes her front, A

The time for rescue breathing was long past. Had he been kissing Katherine? Love lost and good-bye and rest in peace with Baby Jesus, like Bob claimed?

Or did he like making love to dead women?

That was a gruesome thought. Though, should A

Shuddering out of that mental place, A

A

Katherine had probably stepped in one of the swamp’s natural traps and broken her ankle. Maybe the pack was hounding her, but it seemed more likely she’d broken her ankle and the pack had come upon her. Wolves could have smelled the blood from the compound fracture. There were vials of the dead wolf’s blood in her pocket. She might have smashed them against a stone or the bole of a downed tree.

If they were in the area, the wolves would have smelled it. But wolves smelled blood all the time: crippled moose, injured pack members. Every meal was served up with the smell of blood. All summer long, they smelled the blood of tourists, scraping and blistering and cutting themselves with cooking utensils. It wasn’t like chumming in shark-infested waters; at the scent of blood, wolves didn’t go into a feeding frenzy. The odor of humans was enough to send them ru

The only thing that made much sense was a confluence of events: Katherine breaks her leg, wolves come upon her, she reeks of fresh blood – hers and theirs – and they kill her.

Reeks.

The breath of the windigo.

Smell, the most primitive of the senses, flooded A

21

A

She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A smoking gun maybe, though the murder weapon was clearly tooth and claw. Could be she was bored or paranoid or suffering from the madness of the Far North, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Katherine’s death was not accidental, not entirely. Nor could she shake the feeling that Bob had something to do with it. But, then, she seemed pretty anxious to pin something on the Homeland Security guy and couldn’t be trusted to be objective.

She swabbed and preserved and noted. What struck her most forcibly was how little trauma there was. Researchers hypothesized the size of a wolf pack was determined by how many animals could fit around a kill. When wolves brought down an animal, they surrounded it and ate it warm, often alive – for a while. Canis lupus were designed to eat en famile and efficiently; an adult wolf’s jaws exerted fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, about twice that of a German shepherd and five times that of a human being. A mature wolf could gnaw through a femur in six or seven bites. Speed was also in their nature. They might be the most ferocious of predators, but they weren’t nearly as focused as ravens when it came to scavenging. A single raven could carry away as much as four pounds in a day, meat cached in the branches of a nearby tree for later consumption.

Soft, small-boned, Katherine would have been torn to pieces in minutes. Yet the corpse was relatively undamaged: a foot torn off, throat slashed, arm severed and hands eaten. The rest was superficial damage. In a starvation winter, when moose were scarce, the wolves would not have left fresh meat of their own volition. They had to have been frightened off the kill.

Something had scared the wolves away, then didn’t eat the body itself. The noneating, scary thing vanished before the snow stopped falling. Either that or it traveled in such a ma

A

She couldn’t even be sure Katherine left the shop intending to confront Bob. Nature might have called; A

Again A

Hoping the delicate handkerchief had given Katherine comfort, A

Excitement dwindled as she discovered it hadn’t been covertly sewn into the lining like smuggled jewels but fallen through a rip in the pocket. She worked it up the fabric to the light of day. Blood; one vial of wolf’s blood had not been smashed.

Had Bob been looking for the cell phone like he’d said or was this what he was after? That made little sense when there was enough wolf meat in bags on the tool bench to glean any number of samples. A

A