Budge whistled—three short blasts, one long—Tuck’s special call. But no hound came crashing through the forest. Nochinkleof Tuck’s bear bell sounded. Tension clumped in Budge’s chest. He whistled again, then listened carefully to the noise of the rain forest.
Water drummed steadily onto the sleeves of his Gore-Tex jacket. It leaked down the back of his neck. All about him droplets quivered and plopped down from the canopy and fell from the plate-size leaves of the primordial-looking devil’s club that grew over a meter tall around him. The smell was of wet soil, fecund. He caught a distant snatch of voices carrying up from the river, which widened into a delta maybe two hundred meters down a thickly forested slope from where Budge squatted. Must be the fly-fishers he’d seen drifting the currents in jet boats earlier.
A chipmunk exploded into a machine-gun barrage of chirping as Tuck burst abruptly through the ferns. Fright punched through Budge, followed quickly by a wave of relief. Tuck was panting, his eyes bright, his snout caked with black mud. Budge grabbed Tuck’s collar and ruffled the animal’s coat.
“Where’s your bear bell gone, eh boy? You snag it loose on a branch or something? And whatcha been ferreting out with that filthy ol’ snout yours, eh, you old goof? You found something good and rotten? Rootin’ out that chipmunk’s stash, were ya?”
Tuck wiggled and whirled his stumped tail, trying to lick Budge’s cheek.
“Whoa, back up there, bud. You’re gonna squish my chanterelles.” He slapped Tuck on the rump and allowed his hound to scurry back into the bush to continue digging at whatever had snared his attention. Light was fading fast under the old-growth canopy, and they still had a fair trek back to where he’d parked his truck off an old forestry road. Yesterday Budge had scored only about six pounds of goldens. Today would prove a much better haul if he got cracking before darkness fell.
Rapidly harvesting the chanterelles, Budge moved deeper and deeper into the woods. Vegetation grew denser around him, mossier, more primal. Sound became hushed. Witch’s hair trailed from massive cedars, and black lichen smothered bark. A chill trickled down his spine suddenly. He stilled. It felt creepy in there, the fog sifting through the trunks like ghosts. Somethingthwockedonto the bill of his cap. He jumped and fell back on his butt. The object flopped from his cap onto the ground.
Budge’s heart hammered as he stared at what had hit him. A rotted fish carcass. Adrenaline thumped through his veins. He looked up. Another carcass dangled from the branches above, slimy white and glistening. Eagles, he thought. The bloody scavengers. They flocked north each year when the salmon came up the Nahamish to spawn. When the fish died, the eagles plucked them from the river with their talons and carried them high into the trees, where they fed on the ripe flesh.
Bears also brought the carcasses up into the woods. Budge had been a logger. He could always tell a good salmon year from the rings in trees—lots of nitrogen in the soil those years. But a rotten carcass smacking him on the head in the goddamn spooky twilight like this?Too much for an old dude’s ticker.He snatched up the knife he’d dropped, swore out loud for good measure, and decided he was done.
He creaked back up onto his feet.
“Tuck?” he yelled.
No response.
“Tucker!Where in the hell are you, boy? We gotta go!” Budge pushed his way deeper into the brambles and ferns. A rustle and growl sounded along the far edge of the clearing, beneath some wild blueberry and salmonberry scrub. Budge stilled. Unease crawled deeper into him. “Tuck?” He moved closer toward the snuffling, hand fisting around his knife. “What is it, boy?”
He edged aside fern fronds and then froze. Tuck looked up at him, eyes aglow. He growled again, teeth clamped around a long, dirt-encrusted bone.
“Jeezus, give me that! We’re leaving.” Budge snatched for the bone. But Tuck backed away, jaw tightening around his prize as he dropped his head, his growl deepening as his hackles rose.
“Fucksakes, Tuck! You know not to do that. Drop it.Now.”
The hound lowered his head even farther but acquiesced, reluctantly releasing the bone. Budge leaned in to see what animal the bone might have come from. That’s when he caught sight of the clawed-back carpet of moss behind Tuck. His blood turned to ice.
Protruding from the moist black earth was part of a large rib cage. Budge swallowed. His gaze tracked up from the ribs. A skull lay sideways in the loam, as if in sleep, the exposed eye cavity caked with dirt. The left side of the skull had been bashed inward.
Blood began to boom in Budge’s ears. This was no hunter’s kill. This was not a moose or big buck that had perished in the rain forest.
This skull was human.
CHAPTER 2
Angie Pallorino flicked her wrist, trying with sheer force of will to land her fly exactly where she intended. It fell short in a snarl of fishing line. She cursed, pulling her tangled line back into the boat. She and her boyfriend, Detective James Maddocks, were into the last hours of their four-day guided trip down the Nahamish, and today they were fishing in the flats below the Plunge Falls. She’d hoped to have nailed this fly-fishing gig by now, but it eluded her, this apparently esoteric art. Angie didn’t like failing at anything. Irritably, she wound the dry line back onto her fly reel and got set to attempt another cast.
“Try not to aim directly into the wind—it’s picking up,” their young female guide called from the back of the jet boat, where she sat steering their drift down the river.
Yeah, yeah, do this, don’t do that, try again.But Claire Tollet was right. The breeze was turning testy, shooting riffles across the smooth surface of this flat section of water. Every now and then a sharper gust brought an icy chill down from the snow-dusted peaks to the north. Angie yanked her woolen hat down lower over her ears and proceeded to cast her line out. She muttered a curse as her fly settled barely a few meters out from the boat. She seated herself in the boat to watch her line.
“Hey, that one wasn’t so bad,” Maddocks said. Angie still called him Maddocks rather than James. They’d worked together, and not only was it police department custom to use last names, the tag had filtered over into his social life decades ago. No one called him James, let alone himself.
“You’ll be surprised how much easier it’ll be next time.” He stood above her in the boat, holding his rod as he slowly stripped in his line, making his fly dart atop the water like the real thing.
“Nexttime?” she said.
“Sure, there’ll be a next time.” He grinned. It put light into his dark-blue eyes and creased his face in a way that warmed her heart. In his wading gear and fishing vest, his jet-black hair ruffled by wind, he looked all mountain man—a far cry from the sharp homicide cop in suit and tie she’d fallen so hard and fast for almost a year ago. But the words he’d spoken in the car on their drive up the island to the remote lodge sneaked back into her mind.
She broke eye contact and returned to watching her fly, a disquiet settling into her chest. Autumn on the Nahamish—it had sounded so romantic when he’d suggested it. And their trip was designed to be just that: a romantic getaway to rekindle their relationship away from cell phones and the stresses of their respective new work commitments.
But his words—that one question—had somehow sent everything off-kilter before they’d even arrived at the river.
