“Idiot.” She smacked at his arm with a laugh.
He grabbed her face with both hands, kissed her hard on the mouth, then leaned back to study her eyes. “Sleep well?”
“Too damn well. Wolves could have entered the tent and taken a bite out of me before I even noticed they were there. Don’t know what came over me—I never sleep that soundly. And you? Fast asleep like that out in the open?”
He angled his head and gave a lopsided grin. “What makes you think I was asleep? I saw you come out of the tent.”
She slapped the side of his arm again.
He stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and regarded the scene.
“Going to need a larger perimeter,” he said.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Silence fell as they studied the disturbed loam, the clawed-back carpet of moss, the exposed bones of some loved one.
“What else were you thinking?” Maddocks said. A gravitas had entered his voice.
“I thought it was the female in a relationship who always asked that question?”
He cast her a sideways glance. “Didn’t know stereotyping was your thing, Pallorino.”
She snorted and stuffed her cold hands into her own pockets. “I was thinking that this is not my case.”
“It’s not mine, either.”
“You know what I mean.”
A kestrel shrieked somewhere high above the canopy, and wind rustled through the treetops, releasing a shower of droplets from boughs.
“Doesn’t stop me wanting to know what happened to this decedent, though,” she said with a tilt of her chin toward the body. “How long do you figure he or she has been lying there?”
He pursed his lips. “Could be decades. Depends on the chemical composition of the soil, of course, weather patterns, how cold the winters, how wet. How dry the summers.” As he spoke the distant sound of engines reached them. They turned to face the direction of the noise. The engines grew louder as they neared.
“Sounds like quads,” he said. “Coming from the direction Hargreaves went last night, along that small track.” They began to retrace their steps, moving toward the sound in order to meet the vehicles and head them off before they encroached too close upon the scene.
Two mud-caked ATVs emerged through the trees bearing three people with helmets. The two drivers wore RCMP jackets and pants with yellow stripes down the sides. The third, a passenger, sported a black jacket emblazoned with the wordCORONER.
The quads came to a halt. The engines were killed. The larger of the two Mounties dismounted first. Pulling off his helmet and gloves, he came forward and held out his hand. “Constable Darnell Jacobi,” he said. “Port Ferris RCMP.”
Angie and Maddocks shook his hand, introducing themselves. Jacobi was bald with an aggressive face, hawkish brows over pale-hazel eyes. Leonine eyes, thought Angie. Intense man. With a wrestler’s grip that he declined to soften for a female. She judged him to be in his mid to late fifties.
“And this is Constable Erick Watt,” Jacobi said. “And on-call coroner Robin Pett.”
Officer Watt removed his helmet and shook their hands. He was much younger than Darnell Jacobi, over six feet tall with a clean-faced, buzz-cut, Germanic look. Fresh out of depot division training was Angie’s guess, a newly minted rookie still wet behind the ears and posted to a nice small detachment up the coast to find his feet.
Robin Pett removed her helmet, exposing short dark hair that framed a tiny face with large brown eyes. “I hear you cordoned the area off?” she said.
As the on-call coroner for this region, the body was Pett’s responsibility—she’d take custody of the remains. But if there was evidence of foul play, the criminal investigation would fall initially to the Port Ferris cops.
“Roped it off as best we could in the dark,” Maddocks said. “You’re probably going to want to cordon off a much wider perimeter.” He led the team in single file along their original path of entry. Angie took up the rear. They came to a stop in front of the cordon. The flagging tape fluttered in a gust of wind.
“It was Budge Hargreaves who found the remains?” Pett said as she extracted her camera from her bag.
“Yeah,” Maddocks said, hands in pockets. “Hargreaves alerted us from the riverbank. If he’d had cell reception, he’d have called it in himself.”
The two cops exchanged a glance. The rookie turned in a slow circle, surveying the scene, the monstrous, ancient trees, the fish flesh hanging from dead boughs, the primeval ferns, the devil’s club, the lichen and moss smothering the rocks and trunks, the witch’s hair lifting in the cold breeze. “So Hargreaves just happened to come this way? He walked right into this remote grove?” Watt said. “There’s no discernible trail or anything leading into it.”
