The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(60)

I drop the shovel and slip on a pair of latex gloves to dig with my hand.

As I carefully remove the dirt from the surrounding area, the outline of a head begins to emerge. The fabric is a T-shirt. When I pull it back, a ghastly white face is looking up at me with milky, azure eyes that match the morning sky. Strands of blonde hair lie across her face—almost as if they are waiting for her to brush them away.

I uncover the torso, revealing a naked chest with dark, dirt-clogged gashes across her small breasts.

Summer’s abdomen is split open, with her stomach, a fetid, stinking mass of swollen intestines, sticking out.

I need to get samples, but I have to take a break. The eyes are too much for me. They should be more decomposed, but the T-shirt and surrounding soil chemistry somehow preserved them. It’s as if she’s still seeing the last thing she ever saw.

I step back and lean against a tree, catching my breath, trying to hold it in.

Be a scientist, Theo. She doesn’t need someone to mourn her right now. She needs someone to find out who did this.

I turn back and kneel down to continue excavating around her.

As I brush the dirt from her arms, I think about when Summer was a child and her mother bathed her and scrubbed her. If her mother had any idea what fate the world had in store for her little girl, would she have ever let her go?

The arms are predictably stiff. I raise the right one high enough to take a photo of the gashes and get a tissue sample. For a moment, it obscures her powerful eyes. But when I set it back down she’s still staring up—almost as if she’s looking to God for an answer.

Nobody is home, darling. And if he is, he doesn’t care.

My ear twitches, and I get the feeling that I’m being watched. In the moment I try to analyze the sensation—it’s like a tickle across my back.

First I just move my eyes slowly across the surrounding trees. When all I observe is forest, I turn my head slightly.

Forty feet away, up on the hill, are three sets of glowing eyes catching the setting sun.

Wolves.

Large ones.

They probably smelled her corpse long before I reached the shirt. Attracted by the scent, they gathered to watch and wait.

I can’t leave her here. I buried Chelsea because nothing was around that would dig her up.

The moment I leave Summer, no matter how deep or what I cover her with, the wolves will come for her. They know she’s here.

I have to take her with me.

The sun has set by the time I fully unbury her. I placed my flashlight on the edge of the hole, facing the wolves, but they vanished when I wasn’t looking.

As I gently lift her body and move her to the plastic tarp I’ve laid down, I spot silvery eyes watching me from much closer.

They’ve walked around my cone of light and are just a few yards away.

Wolves are supposed to be people-shy, and attacks are exceptionally rare. I’m not sure what the data set looks like for humans all alone in the forest next to a decomposing corpse.

I lay Summer in the middle of my blue tarp. Her knees are slightly bent, with white flesh showing through tears in her black leggings. As I try to bundle her up, drops of my sweat hit her face and slide down her dirty cheek like tears.

The snarling sound of one of my watchers snaps me back to the present.

Summer’s muscles have degraded long past the effect of rigor mortis, making her body flexible enough to bend over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

I place my duffel bag over my other shoulder and use the flashlight to guide my way back down to my car.

My gray shadows follow me in the dark, making futile growls, hoping I’ll drop the body.

But I don’t. Nor do I ever reach for my gun or the shotgun—even to fire a warning shot.

These creatures are opportunistic cowards, afraid to take on something larger than them. Perhaps not unlike the man who killed Summer.

I hope.

I pray.





CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT


INERTIA

Police Chief Shaw is standing near the tailgate of my Explorer with his flashlight aimed at Summer’s face. Dressed in a T-shirt, parka jacket, and track pants struggling to contain his expanding stomach, the light is the only thing about him that resembles law enforcement.

“Who is this girl, again?” he asks.

“Summer Osbourne,” says the lean deputy with receding auburn hair. He was the only one at the station when I arrived. It took him all of two seconds to call his boss down to the station after I showed him photos of the body in the back of my Explorer.

“Osbourne?” replies Shaw. “I don’t recall anybody by that name.”

“I think you might have known her daddy. He goes by MacDonald,” the deputy explains.

“They live out by Finley stables? That big house? Daddy owns an irrigation pipe company?”

“That’s them.”

“What were there, six of them MacDonald kids?”

“Five including Summer. She was a stepdaughter.”

“Summer MacDonald?” Shaw shakes his head. “She ran off with that fella from Wyoming.” He turns to me. “You say her name was Summer Osbourne?”

“That’s the name on the missing-persons report.”

“Well, there’s your problem. They never get around to updating them. Some kid runs away for a few days, and their parents come down here and make us go through the hassle of making a report, then don’t bother to tell us when they come home.”