The brown wolf continued to growl as it took another step forward. The black wolf behind it suddenly began growling, too, a low, guttural warning sound. At first, I thought I was in serious trouble because I wasn’t sure I could take both of them quickly enough. I also wasn’t sure if just one bullet would take each one down. These were big animals… As the seconds ticked by, though, it dawned on me that the black wolf wasn’t growling at me. It was growling at the brown one.
I continued to aim my gun at the brown wolf since he was closest to me. I took another step backward, followed by another. Meanwhile, the brown wolf turned its attention from me to the black one. The two of them began circling one another, both with their hackles raised as they snarled at each other, their fangs reflecting the moonlight. I wasn’t sure how long it was that they circled each other, but eventually, the black one pounced on the other one, immediately pinning the brown one to the ground, pressing its snout into the brown wolf’s throat. The pinned wolf yipped a high-pitched sound and the black one released it. I watched as the brown wolf jumped up and trotted away into the darkness of the trees. Then I brought my attention back to the black one.
Our eyes met again. Somehow, and I wasn’t sure how it was possible, but I felt like those eyes could read me, that this creature was appraising my fear as it looked at me. It almost seemed like I was looking into the eyes of a sentient creature.
But, of course, that was impossible.
Chapter Six
Hope, Alaska, didn’t have much, but it did have a morgue.
The morgue was located beneath Dr. Moody’s clinic, in a narrow basement that felt exactly like hell frozen over. No matter how many autopsies I’d witnessed, or how many morgues I’d been in, I’d never, ever get used to standing in the freezing cold for hours on end. How the examiners did it, day after day, I’d never know. This, coming from someone who chose to live in Alaska in the first place.
Correction. This, coming from someone who’d chosen to run away to Alaska in the first place.
Anyway, the smell you got used to… eventually. Hell, the smell was the easy part; before you knew it, you’d forgotten the putrid, mushroomy odors. But the cold? I had real respect for medical examiners and coroners, putting up with the frigid conditions, for hours on end, while meticulously examining a body.
I wasn’t sure if it was just me, but the arctic temperature in the morgue seemed particularly biting this day. My breath frosted as I looked down at the body displayed before me. John Doe’s chest cavity was open wide. The organs had all been carefully removed, weighed and packed into baggies. Later, when the examination was finished, the organs would be replaced in the body, which would then be sewn up as neatly as possible. I noted that the tongue had been removed, and so had the brain. The skin of the man’s face was still peeled up, which always left me feeling a bit disconcerted. Why it was the peeled-up face and not the butterflied chest cavity that caused me the heebie-jeebies, I didn’t know.
This wasn’t my first rodeo. Or my first dead body. Or my first autopsy. So why did it feel like my stomach was about to revisit the cheeseburger I’d had for lunch?
Come on, Elodie, you’re going soft, I reprimanded myself.
I was now alone with the body. Dr. Moody had completed the autopsy, and he’d fully examined the body for trace evidence. I was now cleared to be alone with it, and that was just fine by me. I liked being alone with the victims, whenever possible.
The dead didn’t speak to me or anything crazy like that. But, in their own sort of way, they kind of did. No, the dead didn’t say anything, but being alone with them strengthened my resolve and connected me to them. I found I did my best thinking when I was alone with them. When it was just me, them and my thoughts, this was the time when I usually found a direction in which to take a case. It was the space where I was oddly at peace, not only with the circumstances of a case but with myself. In the same way that the victims were finally able to find their own peace, no matter how terrible their deaths, I was somehow able to go there with them.
They are at peace, and I am at peace.
I wasn’t sure how it worked exactly, but it was moments like these that I felt a connection to the victims. I just sort of let my mind wander and when it did, it usually came back with something useful, some little tidbit about the case that I hadn’t noticed previously.
“I will find your killer,” I said to the body before me. Except now, as I gazed at the splayed-open man, a man whose stomach contents filled a nearby large stainless steel bowl to overflowing with meat and fur and bone, just as Moody had described, I sensed a problem.
I don’t feel a connection.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I’d never felt a connection to this body. Not like the connections I’d experienced in the past, not like with other murder victims.
In the past, the connection had been immediate, powerful. It helped drive me in my frantic need to find the victims’ killers. And I wouldn’t quit until I had the killer in custody. Nothing would get in my way. Not sleep, food, family… nothing. It got to the point that most of those in my department knew to stay clear of me, knew better than to question me, or try to slow me down. Everyone understood how a case would consume me completely and totally. It was almost as if I became one with it, that I inhaled the facts, ingested the particulars, bled the outcomes.
Truth be known, I’d hoped to escape that side of me out here. Hunting a killer certainly had a way of ruining one’s social life. Hell, I didn’t even know the meaning of a social life for the eight years I’d worked homicide and robbery in Anchorage. The robberies I could take or leave, and I did my best to investigate each thoroughly. But homicides were a different animal altogether. Maybe not musk ox different, but different, nonetheless. Yes, I definitely needed a break, which was one of the reasons why I’d ended up out here.
I walked around the corpse, which was lying prostrate in front of me and considered whether or not I should touch him. Touching the bodies sometimes helped to facilitate the connection I was after.
You don’t need the connection, Elodie, I reprimanded myself. It’s all in your head anyway. You know you can do the job without it.
Maybe that was true, but I couldn’t help but focus on the fact that I’d always had a connection to the victim in the past and usually, I didn’t have to touch him or her to get it.
True, I didn’t know John Doe’s name, but that was nothing new. I’d worked with John and Jane Does before. I didn’t need a name to feel the link. All I needed was the connection itself.
I continued walking around the victim, noting his long, light brown, and muscular arms. His hips were especially narrow, while his shoulders, chest and back were broad.
He was physically intimidating, I thought to myself. Strong.
I’d noted as much when I’d first come across his body in the snow. The man had been heavily muscled. The problem was, muscles didn’t guard against the cold. Fat and fur and layers of clothing did.
Why were you naked? I asked him silently, nearly reaching out and taking his hand. I resisted the urge and, instead, continued around the table. Dr. Moody had already noted that the man had shown no other wounds. No abrasions to his hands, no bruising, no smaller cuts. No signs of a fight. His skin had appeared unblemished, a wide expanse of perfect tanned flesh.