She almost smiled. McKenzie was old-school in ways that could be annoying but mostly weren't. He'd been a detective with the Adirondack County Sheriff's Office for three years, had come over from New York a decade before that, and he still wore a tie to crime scenes. He still opened doors for people. The Scottish accent he'd inherited from his parents surfaced most when he was relaxed or annoyed, which covered most of the day. He also still called her Thorne instead of Callie, which she'd stopped trying to correct about six months into working together.
They crossed the parking lot toward the trailhead where a uniformed officer was standing next to the cordoned-off entrance, yellow tape strung between two wooden posts. The rain darkened the packed dirt of the lot and made the tape sag.
"Speaking of next steps," McKenzie said, tossing his empty cup into a trash can near the trailhead. "You hear back on your detective exam date?"
“It’s in two weeks," Callie said.
"Two weeks." He nodded. "You'll pass. Then I'll have to stop doing all the thinking for both of us."
"You do all the thinking?"
"It's exhausting."
The officer at the tape was Tim Daniels, High Peaks PD. Callie recognized him from a domestic call they'd assisted on back in March. Young guy, eager, still had that look patrolofficers got in their first couple of years where every call was either terrifying or thrilling and they hadn't yet learned that most of the job was paperwork.
"What have we got?" McKenzie asked, lifting the tape so Callie could duck under.
“Female. A hiker found her a few hours ago, called it in anonymously."
"Where?" Callie asked.
Daniels pointed up the trail. "About a five-minute walk. Off the main path, maybe twenty yards into the tree line. One of our guys stumbled on a secondary trail that branches east. She's just off that."
"Ozzy here yet?" Callie asked, meaning Ozzy Westborough, the county coroner.
"Been alerted. Hasn't arrived."
McKenzie looked up the trail, then back at Daniels. "Go ahead, Thorne. I want a word with Daniels about the hiker."
Callie nodded and started up the path.
The rain came through the canopy in fat, irregular drops that had collected on the leaves above and fell in clusters when the breeze shifted. Mud sucked at her boots with every step. Early June in the Adirondacks meant the woods were green and overgrown, everything pushing outward after the long winter. On a better day it would have been a nice walk. Today the overcast sky made everything gray, and the deeper she went into the woods the quieter it got. The sounds from the parking lot faded until all she could hear was the rain and her own footsteps and the occasional bird that hadn't gotten the message about the weather.
She followed the main trail for about four minutes before she spotted the branch Daniels had described, a narrow footpath veering east through a gap in the brush. Two more officers were up ahead, one leaning against a tree and the other crouchednear a cluster of rocks, both looking like they'd been waiting a while and were running low on things to say to each other. They straightened up when they saw her.
"Through there," the standing officer said, pointing past a fallen birch into a shallow depression where the ground dipped away from the trail. "About fifteen feet in. Watch your step, the ground's soft."
Callie stepped over the birch and pushed through a section of low brush. The depression opened up into a small clearing, ringed by pines. The ground was thick with years of fallen needles that had gone dark and pulpy in the rain. And there, at the center of the clearing, face down, partially covered by dead branches that looked like they'd been dragged over the body rather than fallen naturally, was a woman.
She was young. That was the first thing Callie registered. The build, the length of the limbs, the size of the hands. Young and slight. She was wearing jeans, hiking boots that looked too new to belong to someone who hiked regularly, and an oversized green jacket that hung loose around her frame as if she'd borrowed it or grabbed it in a hurry. Her dark hair was matted against the side of her face and the back of her neck.
Callie moved closer, circling to avoid disturbing the ground near the body. The smell hit her when she got within a few feet, not the full overwhelming decay of a body that had been out for weeks but something sharper and more recent, that sour, metallic scent that came with exposed tissue and blood that had been sitting in warm air for a matter of days. The dead branches over her torso and legs looked intentional. Someone had tried to conceal her. Not well, but enough that a casual hiker on the main trail would have walked right past.
Callie crouched and looked at what she could see of the back. The jacket had multiple cuts in it, clean slashes through the fabric, and beneath them the skin was dark with dried blood.The wounds were concentrated between the shoulder blades and along the lower back. Whoever did this had come at her from behind. Some of the cuts in the jacket didn't line up with the wounds beneath them, which indicated the victim had been moving, turning, trying to get away.
She heard footsteps behind her and McKenzie appeared at the edge of the clearing, picking his way through the brush. He stopped when he saw the body and let out a slow breath.
"Thorne, can you turn her?"
"Not until Ozzy gets here. But look at this." She pointed to the victim's left hand, which was visible beneath the branches. The knuckles were scraped raw and there was dried blood under the fingernails. "She fought."
McKenzie moved around to the other side and crouched opposite Callie. From his angle he could see more of the victim's face, what was left of it. His expression changed.
"Oh, shit," he said quietly. "That's quite a mess."
Callie shifted her position and looked. The face had been destroyed. Not by animals, not by decomposition, but deliberately. The features were swollen and caved in, the nose flattened, the orbital bones shattered. Someone had beaten her face until it was unrecognizable, as if identification was the thing they wanted to prevent.
“Aye, that's not from the stabbing," McKenzie said.
