Annie forced her hands and feet forward, like an insect clinging to the gully wall. Stretching her arms high, she clambered up onto the rocks. The shelf was narrow at the outset, only a foot wide where it jutted out over the drop, and with her eyes glued to her shoes, Annie inched forward, shuffling toward the dark hair dancing in the wind.
The rocks beneath her feet were smooth and precariously sloped. Risking a quick glance at the darkening sky overhead, she prayed that the rain would hold off. Wet rocks would be an absolute nightmare right now.
Foot by foot, the drop beneath her steepened into the vertical fall that was Lewis Ridge, and foot by foot, she edged nearer to the body. Fifty feet more. Forty. Annie blew out a breath as the shelf of rock beneath her feet widened, expanding into a trail of its own. Still, the ever-present plummet into the gulley kept her stomach balled up like a fist as she moved forward.
Another gust of wind ripped past, and Annie tensed, rigid on the rocks, but Jake was right behind her, pressing a steadying hand to her back.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “You can do this.”
The woman was lying in a place where the shelf jutted out broadly, creating a wide, flat space, eight feet of standing room; the plateau that had broken her fall.
Annie moved forward in what felt like slow motion until she was standing over the body with her trembling hand at her mouth.
Blood darkened the rock around the woman’s head, dried now in a clover-shaped shadow that was half covered by her hair. Her head seemed off in proportion, too small somehow, and Annie realized with horror that it was because the right side of her skull had been crushed against the unforgiving stone and now lay flat.
But worse by far was the absolute carnage inflicted by razor-sharp claws on the back side of her body. Annie had seen the carcasses of animals. Many times. Countless times. Deer and elk, left headless and skinless, their hides and antlers claimed as trophies and their flesh leftto rot in the woods by the worst sort of men. But this… Her gaze traveled the length of the woman from head to toe and back again. Something had torn into her out here on the rocks, shredding the dark clothing to get at the body underneath—flaying it in long, deep gashes. There were dozens of marks, slashing down to the bone in places, and Annie let out a muffled cry at the sight of the woman’s spine, white and knobby, exposed in one particularly vicious stripe.
Beside her, Jake muttered something under his breath that sounded like a prayer.
Annie took a step forward, but Jake’s hand landed on her shoulder, pulling her back.
“Don’t. I don’t know what I was thinking. You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do,” she said without turning around.
“No.” His hand was still on her shoulder. “I’ll take pictures and you can look at them back at the station. Let’s do it that way.”
Annie turned to face him, shrugging out from under his hand. “I can help, Jake. Let me do my job.”
After a beat, he nodded, and Annie turned back to the body, shoving the horror into the back of her mind as her training took over. There would be time later to process what she was seeing. Right now, it was time to work.
As Jake fiddled with his camera behind her, she took a knee on the rocks and zeroed in on a single mark breaking fabric and skin across the woman’s back. She had seen the damage that different predators could do to human flesh, in pictures at least, in slideshows on classroom walls and photographs passed around in study groups, and she mentally thumbed through those images now, pulling them up one at a time to compare with the butchery in front of her.
They were impressive, these marks, sharp and deep, and she counted them, nodding to herself. There was a pattern, gashes together in groups of four, sometimes two or three, but never more than four. Never the five claw marks that she would have seen if a bear had done this, and they were too large to belong to any canid of these woods.
“I wonder how long she’s been out here,” Jake said behind her.
Annie lifted her nose, inhaling to catch any scent in the air, but there was no detectable smell of decay.
“Less than thirty-six hours.” She pushed herself to her feet. “In all likelihood, I’d say it happened yesterday, but only an autopsy will tell us for sure.”
Jake gave her a questioning look, and Annie’s shoulders rose and fell.
“I’ve seen a lot of death in the woods. Not people, but plenty of animals.” She met his gaze sadly. “There’s no difference.”
The startled look on Jake’s face told her how callous the comment had sounded, and she quickly added, “As far as decomposition is concerned.”
The wind howled through the gulley, whipping Annie’s braid sideways and lashing her cheek with it as a few barely there drops of cold rain peppered the back of her head.
“We have to hurry,” she said, and Jake nodded, raising the camera in his hands.
His face was colorless as he took several quick shots, and Annie stepped back when he moved around to the woman’s other side, kneeling to brush the hair away from her face. The gesture was gentle, so tender that it was almost intimate, and Annie fought the urge to look away.
Jake lifted the camera and snapped several more pictures; each click of the shutter overloud to Annie as she stood waiting.
“There they are,” Jake murmured, lowering the camera an inch.
He nodded toward the bruises, four blackish-purple marks running in an uneven line on the woman’s pale skin like a necklace of shadow.
