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  Shock’ll do that to folks; turn off all sense, making some people unproductively and irrationally frantic while turning others meek as babies. Finding a body, especially because you stepped on it, could jolt most anyone. Took him only about seven steps to make it back to me. About that time I started to notice the smell. Wasn’t strong, but that heavy, musky odor laced with a touch of mildew—you knew something dead was nearby.

  “Damn, something died.” Guess Randy smelled it as well.

  I started checking over Kabe, rubbing his cheeks with my thumbs to generate some heat in his face. “Unless deer ‘round here have taken to wearing clothes, that something dead is human.” I jerked my head toward where that twisted, dried hand seemed to be clawing its way out of the snow bank.

  “Shit.” I might not have agreed with Randy’s word choice, but I sure couldn’t argue with the sentiment. This pretty much ended my hunt and told me where I’d be spending the rest of my afternoon.

  “Joe.” Kabe’s rapid breathing seemed to be slowing and I could see some pink coming back into his face. “Crap. I heard this snap and I looked down and there’s this hand coming up out of the snow at me. I fucking freaked.”

  Randy came up beside us and tapped Kabe’s shoulder with a metal flask. I glared at him some, but neither Kabe nor Randy shared my beliefs, so I didn’t say nothing about it when Kabe took the little bottle and knocked back a slug. Instead, I squeezed his arm and praised him some. “Well, you kept your wits about you and didn’t move none.”

  “I was too fucking scared.” Kabe shuddered. “What if I moved and like stepped on its head or something.”

  Now that Kabe was coming ‘round, my mind started thinking less like his boyfriend and more like a cop. We were somewhere off Highway 22 between Widtsoe and Antimony. But exactly where, that was up to debate. One of the reasons I went with a professional guide was that Randy made sure we had the okay to go on any private land he thought had a good shot of getting lucky. We’d gone through maybe a dozen gates during the morning…and my permit allowed for hunting on National Park Service territory.

  So, honestly, I wasn’t all sure whether we were in the Dixie National Forest or out of it. It’s not like it’s one big chunk of federal property. No, Dixie’s a patch here and a big swath over there and maybe a mile or so of a little nothing town carved out of the middle. Jurisdiction around these parts tends to sometimes be more a function of guesswork than maps, especially when you get on into the mountains.

  Pretty much where we were.

  I pulled out my little handheld GPS and took a reading. It didn’t settle my mind at all. “Okay, I need to get hold of Noreen in dispatch and have her get in touch with the rangers as well.” I started planning the next several hours out. The County Coroner, well last I heard he was off in Aruba, so I put a nix on that. I was off duty—wouldn’t have been hunting if I weren’t—but I was one of two deputies trained in crime-scene processing, so I guessed I’d be pulling some overtime on this.

  Not that I knew this was or was not a crime. What I knew right then was I had a hand sticking out of the snow and an arm under it, least if Kabe’d heard right. There might be a whole body down under a good two feet of snow or the body could be anywhere and some scavenger dragged that bit over this way. Whoever owned that arm could have died from foul-play, misadventure or had a heart attack while out hiking for all we knew.

  I did know I was going to need help.

  I huffed out in frustration, my breath hanging in frozen mist in front of my face. “We’ll need to backtrack out to someplace where we can get cell reception.”

  “I got a satellite phone.” Randy coughed and spat. “It’s a buck and change a minute, but I think this qualifies as an emergency.”

  “How’d you afford that shiny toy?” Kabe’s voice sounded a lot less off than it had earlier. Between the question and his tone, the shock seemed to be fading.

  “Ain’t no toy.” Randy turned and started back towards where we’d all come from. “I run hunting trips all up in the middle of nowhere all the time.” Since the body weren’t going to get up and go for a run I followed and Kabe kept in step with me. “Locals like Joe know how to handle themselves…” He grinned back at us as he talked “…but get some idiot up here who’s got a permit, a rifle and no sense. When they go ahead and shoot their own toe off, well that’s not the time you want to be wondering how the heck you’re gonna get the nice moron who paid you twenty-five hundred bucks, in advance, out of the woods and into the hospital.”

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  Chapter 3

  I heard the diesel engine long before the two-track snow-cat lumbered into view. A pair of National Park Rangers, both of whom I knew by sight, sat bundled in the cab and a bunch of stuff-sacks, totes and crates, most likely holding emergency gear, were strapped to the pipe frame in the open back bed. That solved my problem of how to haul the body out once we freed it from the snow.

  Randy’d taken off with the horses almost an hour back. No sense in having them standing around getting cold. He’d left us with a bunch of gear and supplies to keep me and Kabe from becoming secondary casualties, then headed on out. Said he’d leave flags along the route we came in on so that the responding officers could find us.

  Once the snow-cat shuddered to a halt, Ranger Nadia Slokum slid out of the passenger side of the cab. Even under a layer of parka I knew that sleek, compact frame. I waved and got a, “Morning, Sugar!” in return greeting. Her dark cheeks, from what I could see over the scarf around her face, were all pinked up from the cold.

  The other law enforcement ranger unfolded his lanky frame out of the small vehicle. Shifting his gloves to cover the gap where his parka didn’t quite cover his wrists, Fred Noces corrected her. “It’s damn near half-past noon.” His smile, flashed out of a dry creek bed of a face, pulled some of the sting out of his words. Fred could come off cranky to folks who didn’t know him, but I never took nothing by his gruff attitude. It’s just who he is and he’d been that way all the years I’d known him.

  Nadia and I didn’t go so far back. When I first met her this summer, she’d been stationed at Bryce Canyon. Sorta helped me out when things got bad back then and kinda adopted Kabe and I like we were her wild children or something. Now that she’d settled in, her actual beat covered the whole of Dixie National, all two million acres of it. Fred and Nadia had likely caught my dispatcher’s call out and headed on over to pitch in.

  Whether or not this body turned out to be on US government property or state land, we all helped each other out ‘round here. My department, Garfield County Sheriff, only had seven members and, while the Forest Service boasted a lot more rangers, most weren’t law enforcement. A state trooper, Sheriff Simple and one of the other Garfield County deputies were on their way over as well.

  Fred dug into the gear on the back of the cat. “Brought you something,” he called as he pulled a heap of black rubber out of one of the sacks and tossed it towards me.

  “You are an angel, sir!” When I caught the package the legs came unwrapped and one rubber sole hit me in the thigh.

  Kabe narrowed his eyes. “Hip waders? You’re going fishing?”

  “No.” I laughed and shook out the bundle. “But I’m gonna spend the next few hours kneeling in snow.” I’d have to take off my boots to put them on, but, luckily, I had on my heated socks so I might actually stay warm during this adventure. “Might as well not get wet while I’m doing it.” I braced myself against a tree and toed out of my left boot.

  “That’s pretty intense work.” Nadia gave us a slow once over, like she thought we might have done lost our minds. “You going to wait for specialists?”

  Left foot half in the wader’s boot, I spread my hands and gave her one of my big ol’ country boy grins. “You’re looking at ‘em.” A little more serious, I added, “I am actually one of the few officers in this county who have advanced training in evidence collection and preservation.” I jerked my thumb over toward
s where Fred sat on the bed of the cat jerking up his hip waders. “That man there’s another.”

  “Little rusty, but yep.” He stood and stomped his foot into the boot portion. “When I worked Smokey Mountain in Tennessee, back in the late nineties, I took the opportunity to go take the four day Outdoor Body Recovery Course they give for law enforcement out at the U of T’s Body Farm.”

  While he’d talked I’d managed to get my other boot off and foot into the waders. “Jess Garts of my department and I went down to Arizona and took a three day course. The other two are State Troopers.” Then I fought with pulling the darn things up my legs.

  “One of them would be Doug Dougherty, he’s on his way over.” Suited up, Fred dove back into the bins and bags on the back of the cat. “Caught him on the phone as I was out the door.” When he came back up, Fred checked his tongue at Nadia. She looked up in time to catch the roll of crime scene tape rather than get hit in the chest by it.

  “So, yeah,” I caught the roll of twine Fred tossed at me with one hand, “We’re what we got out here.”

  Kabe’d parked himself in Fred’s vacated seat in the cat’s cab. “You do this a lot?”

  As he pulled out more gear, a couple of thin pipes with T handles and a bundle of wooden stakes, Fred chuckled. “Define a lot.”

  “Yeah, we do a fair share of body recoveries…more than some jurisdictions.” There were some law enforcement agencies that saw a body, maybe, every ten years. Up here we weren’t so lucky. “Most of them are what they call death by misadventure.” Not a lot of population, but a lot of darn stupid people and space where no one could find you.

  “Good bit of the time it’s skeletal remains out in the woods. Hikers who fall, folks who drove off the wrong road and die of exposure, poacher who had a heart attack.” Fred used the pipe probes to aim his next words at Nadia. “You ain’t been here long enough, but we get more than our share of suicides.” Then he swung them up onto his shoulder for toting over to the body. “Every time I get a call out for one of these, I think ‘don’t let it be another dead Mormon boy swinging from a tree.’” Almost like an afterthought he added, “Sad.”

  Nadia huffed and coated the air in front of her with sparkles. “I thought religion was supposed to give you solace.”

  “It’s a tough row to hoe,” I shrugged, “if you’re a bit different and don’t quite fit the ideals you’re supposed to strive for.” Lord knows I spent thirty odd years trying to fit myself into that mold. Since I weren’t really up to a discussion about theology and my former church, I switched the subject. “We ought to get started. I’d like not to be here past dark thirty.”

  “Not waiting for the coroner, again?” Nadia’s question played on our own local little joke. The current man who held the job spent more time avoiding his work than he would have spent doing it.

  I took a pack of stakes from Fred when he walked over to me. “Where the heck did he take off to this time, Fred?”

  “Cabo.” Fred grinned. “I think, maybe Mazatlan.”

  Kabe jumped into the teasing. “I thought Joe mumbled something about Sao Paulo while we waited for you guys to show up.”

  “I think we all agree he ain’t anywhere near here.” Not all the folks who held the position were this lazy. All of us at the station/jail complex had a pool going about how long it might take before the county supervisors got sick enough of his ducking the job and booted him. Figured we’d wasted enough sunlight, time to get to our gruesome task. “Okay, you know where we’re at. You can follow the tracks back here.” I jerked my chin at the snow-cat. “Nadia, why don’t you take Kabe and head back towards the road so you can ferry the others back here?”

  “Alright.” She patted Kabe on the back. “You and I can swap stories about San Francisco.” They’d both lived there at one time; Kabe until he wound up here on probation, and Nadia back when she worked Alcatraz Island for the Park Service—her, and her lady friend.

  “We’ll start the setup and basic perimeter work.” I talked more to Fred than the others. “When Trooper Dougherty gets here he can direct us.”

  As he swung his legs into the cab of the snow-cat, Kabe shot a tease, “What, he took a week long course?”

  “No.” Fred hefted a rucksack of other things we’d need. “He worked as a crime scene technician in Salt Lake while he was getting his Criminal Justice Degree, before he went to the academy.”

  Nadia started the engine back up and yelled over the sound of the diesel. “We’ll check on you every so often.” Then she threw the cat in gear and headed on back out to the road.

  I kinda wished I still had Kabe to keep me company, but he’d be pretty useless at the scene. The boy knew how to keep me amused without distracting me overly much. Not many people I could say that about. Still, no sense all of us freezing our nuts off in the snow. He and Nadia would at least have some shelter in the cab of the cat.

  “How do you think the body got in here?” Fred’s question jerked me back to the here and now.

  “It’s a little off the beaten path.” I started following our tracks from earlier towards the body and Fred fell into step beside me. “But, I can tell you that coming on in this way on horseback, I didn’t see any signs of tires or snowmobiling.”

  “Okay, well last snow was about a week ago.” Fred glanced around at the trees and the undisturbed mantle of white powder. “So figure at least that long.” As the sound of the cat faded off into the distance, a blanket of silence settled down around us.

  “Probably longer by the look of the hand.” That heavy sense of quiet made me keep my voice low. Our footsteps crunching along seemed to be the only sign of life around. “I mean, decomp’s been arrested some because of the cold, but the skin’s gone pretty black.”

  “That would mean a bit of time has passed.” By then we’d come up on the place where Kabe stepped on the arm. I could still see it sticking up out of the mess of branches and brambles. “We’ll have to wait on the medical examiner’s office to tell us just how long.”

  “Yep.” Didn’t say much more after that. We just got down to our business. Fred pulled out a pad and began sketching off the scene. Once he finished that, he’d write a description down in longhand. I started on with the stakes and the twine marking out a perimeter a good ten foot square. We might have to expand it to accommodate, well, other parts if a scavenger had gotten to the body. Good enough to start with now. Once that was done I fished out the camera from Fred’s bag. The twine would give a good focal point to the evidence shots. Between Fred’s drawing and notes and my photos we would have a fairly serviceable reconstruction of the scene should we need one. After I finished the first round of photos, I’d start stretching the twine crosswise to make a grid for our search.

  The crime scene tape we’d given to Nadia, that’s so she could close off the closest gates leading towards where we were. No sense having some snowmobilers tear through and muck the area. About as secure as we could make hundreds of miles of forest.

  I’d finished off the pictures and started tying the twine along one side when Fred broke the silence. “You doing okay, Joe?”

  By the way he asked the question, I knew he weren’t discussing what I was working on. “Why wouldn’t I be?” I shrugged.

  Instead of answering, Fred’s gaze locked up on mine. I couldn’t hardly take that stare, ‘cause I kinda figured what was hidden behind it. Fred was the first one to really ever guess at my personal tastes…for guys. The only time he ever mentioned it in my presence was when I noticeably set my eye on Kabe. Fred warned me off, just that once, and never mentioned it again. ‘Least ways, until now.

  Fred tucked the pad of paper under one arm and then shoved his hands into his parka’s pockets. “You’re still on with him.” There wasn’t a question there.

  There weren’t a lot of people who I wanted to talk on the subject with. “Why you care?” At this point they either accepted it, or they didn’t, but I wasn’t going to change my life and go back to
hiding.

  “‘Cause you’re my friend, Joe.” By the way he held himself, all tense and aggravated, I figured Fred didn’t much want to be talking to me about it either. “I trust you with my life, you know that.” But like he said, he was my friend, one of the few I still had up here, and he must have felt like he had to. “And I don’t want to see you go down.”

  I shrugged off his concern. “Whatever.”

  “You know I did my training over in Salt Lake.” He reminded me. “Five years with Utah Highway Patrol before I put on the green and khaki. I know what the law is in this state.”

  “And?” I wish he hadn’t known. Then we wouldn’t be having this discussion and I could just keep on like nothing really was wrong.

  “So are you okay?” He stepped in close, the worry tightening up his face. “Kabe’s on probation and you’re keeping on with him. How are you handling that?”

  “It’s been handled.” Fred hit me with a harder, far more worried stare than the first. “Don’t look at me like that, Fred.” I swallowed and tried to brush off his fear. “Look, I know what you’re getting at, but I crossed that line the first time. It don’t get worse ‘cause I keep at it.”

  Silence slipped around us for a bit, nothing but the wind scraping the branches together. Fred flipped the pad around in his hands for a while. Then he stopped and asked, “You ain’t heard nothing from the POST folks, then?”

  “I got a letter.” All nice and official with the logo of the Peace Officer Standards and Training Council on the top of it. Came by certified mail a few days back. “Got a hearing coming up here shortly.” They wanted to have a little chat with me about allegations of custodial sexual misconduct.

  A hissed out, “Shit,” let me know his thoughts pretty darn well. “Why? Why did you risk it, Joe?”

  What could I tell Fred that could explain it? Nothing really. I knew it was wrong to take up with Kabe the first night he and I got it on in the back of my truck. Not just because we were both guys—that was between me and my former church—or that he’d been a person of interest in a suspicious fall out at the Harding Ranch where he lived. No, a big old messy part of it all was his status as a probationer and mine as sworn officer.