Winterkill - C. J. Box [24]
“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,