On the ground Drake saw the wolf had been shot through the head, the right foreleg badly mangled by a metal trap.
“They killed her,” Ellie said. She had recovered a bit and she stood a few feet off. The redness still in her eyes.
There was nothing for Drake to say. He was kneeling in the same place Ellie had, looking down on the wolf. Someone had tried to cut the GPS collar away but the knife used hadn’t been sharp enough for the job. He put a hand out and ran his fingers up through the fur, gripping it in his hands for a moment before letting go. The meat had begun to go bad and he could smell it.
The wolf had pawed up the ground around where the trap had been, tearing the grass and leaving a small patch of exposed earth that had grown muddy with the rain. There were paw prints everywhere, bits of fur, and in one section near the wolf’s left hip, the partial indent of a boot. Ellie had already seen it and Drake examined it for a long time before he stood. Ellie already scanning the tree line like she might find the killer out there in the shadows.
The light was fading in the sky and Drake checked his watch. It would take them an hour to hike back down and by then the sun would be completely down. “We’ll come back tomorrow,” Drake said. “I can help you with the tracking.”
Ellie turned and looked back at him. She was kneeling near the edge of the forest where the grass ran out and the shadows began. When Drake came over to her he could see another boot print, much clearer than the last.
“Looks familiar, doesn’t it?” Ellie said. “Looks a lot like one of the prints from those poachers a few weeks back.”
Drake knelt and examined the indentation in the mud. “Probably a day old. The edges are clean.” If it wasn’t for the GPS collar Drake knew they never would have found the wolf at all.
“Tomorrow,” Ellie said.
“Yes.”
“First thing.”
“Okay.”
Chapter 28
BEAN STOOD WATCHING THE empty road. Fields of soybean ran along one side. The line of wire fence running down it and out of sight on both sides. He turned and looked up the road, just the same as it had been for ten minutes. Nothing but the deep shadows of the mountains farther on, avalanche chutes turning from rock to snow as the elevation grew and the trees thinned to clusters and then nothing at all. The light beginning to fade in the west and the road Bean stood on taking on a slanted otherworldly look that seemed to tilt away from him as he waited there.
The couple’s property was back a few hundred yards on a gravel access road. The trees opposite the soy field hiding the house from sight. Weeks before they’d taken the couple’s car and then ditched it as soon as they came into Seattle.
Where Bean stood he was visible to both lanes of traffic, an empty red gas tank he’d found in the garage at his feet.
By then he had lived a week in the old house at the base of the mountains. Waiting for things to die down and for whatever decision he was going to make, but that he hadn’t been able to make until that point. A few days before, eating canned soups and stale bags of cereal in front of the couple’s computer, he’d come across an article in the Seattle paper.
The article was brief, only a recap of a much larger article he assumed had run earlier in the week. The money listed at two hundred thousand and all of their names mentioned one way or another, Bean still at large. And the amount of money Patrick had always told them much too small. He scanned down through the article, making sure he had the facts right. Somewhere out there Patrick was still running around, and the money Drake had led them to somehow not enough.
He read the article five times before making up his mind and now he stood alongside the road, clean shaven and looking respectable in a set of clothes he’d taken from the house. No car or truck for ten minutes.
While he waited, he picked gravel from the side of the road and targeted the fence posts, playing a game with himself to pass the time. He was juggling a collection of these rocks when an RV showed on the horizon, the body just visible in the twilight and the headlights turned dimly on.
As the RV came closer he stepped a foot into the road and began to wave his arms over his head. He wore a blue sport coat he’d taken from the man’s closet, cotton khakis, and a white undershirt. With his hair combed neat and pulled back over his scalp, he looked like a man who’d lost his way in the country, or abandoned his car in search of gas.
He continued to wave and the RV came to a stop a few feet past where he stood. Bean arrived at the window as it came down and looked up on an older man wearing a white shirt and clear wire-rimmed glasses.
“Where’s your car?” the man asked, speaking through the open window, his hands still on the wheel.
Bean smiled. He’d forgotten the gas can and he looked back at it now. “A mile or so down the road.”
The old man at the wheel nodded like he understood. “I can give you a ride into town if you like. I was just out tooling this baby around. It wouldn’t be more than twenty minutes.”
Bean smiled again. “That’s real good of you,” he said. He jogged back to the gas can and scooped it up in his hand and then returned to the RV. He heard the door unlock as he approached and with one hand holding the gas can he slipped Drake’s gun from inside his waistband and shot the driver at point-blank range through the open window.
The man slumped into the wheel and the horn sounded, but Bean reached a hand in and pushed the driver’s body back, resting the bloody scalp against the headrest. With the engine still idling and the RV in park he opened the side door and came up the stairs into the RV. The thing was big as a bus and built with a dining area on one side and a kitchenette on the other; in the back a small bedroom with cupboards lining the ceiling and a small flat-screen mounted in one corner.
He went down through the RV looking the place over, Drake’s gun in his hand and the Walther resting in his waistband at the small of his back. The bathroom was empty and the rear bedroom held only a mattress and single mirror. There was no one else on the RV.
When he came back to the front he saw that the man’s blood had sprayed a good amount of the dash and part of the passenger seat, but the windshield was relatively clean. He put Drake’s gun on the passenger seat and then bent to look through the glass at the road ahead. Nothing to see, not even a farmhouse or an approaching car.
Taking the driver under his arms Bean dragged him off the RV and into the forest, where he covered the body with dead branches and bits of moss. The white shirt stained red in places seemed now almost a piece of the forest itself.
He came back out from beneath the trees wondering how fast a vehicle like that could get up over a mountain pass and down into Silver Lake. The door stood open before him and he put a hand out on the railing and pulled himself up the stairs.
Chapter 29
IT WAS NIGHT BY the time they got the wolf down off the mountain. Ellie gave Drake a ride to the Buck Blind. He came in through the front entrance and watched Sheri carry two plates out of the kitchen and set them on a table. She came over and they kissed and then she sent him into the bar for a beer.
Drake nodded to Jack, the bartender, as he took a seat. Ten minutes passed before Gary came in and Drake looked to the bartender, wondering if Jack had called him or if it was just coincidence.