“Like I said, she’s hysterical. Talking nonsense.”
Kimble looked up at the lighthouse and wet his lips. “Right. You’ve seen the body? You’ve seen Pete?”
She nodded.
“Any chance he wasn’t killed by the cougar?”
“Sure,” Diane said. “If there’s a wolf on the loose.”
He followed Diane through the woods and out to the place where Pete Wolverton lay in the wet leaves. A ring of spotlights had been set up around him as if a film crew were readying for a shoot, and yellow tape was strung between the trees. Everyone was hushed. Death scenes were always grim places, but this was different. This was one of their own.
Kimble ducked under the tape, approached the body of his friend of fifteen years, and dropped into a crouch. He felt something thick in the back of his throat and tight behind the eyes, drew in air through clenched teeth and then let it out slowly.
“No sign of the cat?” he said.
“None,” Diane answered. “With all these people around, he won’t show himself again. But when it was just Pete out here alone… he showed himself then, didn’t he?”
Kimble looked up at her, and she turned away. It had been Kimble’s decision to run a one-man rotation in these woods, and his deputies would not forget that. He wouldn’t either.
He cupped his hands to shield his eyes from the glare of the lights and focused on Pete’s body. There were tears in his uniform across the back, some blood showing through them, but not much. Obvious claw marks, but not the killing wound. He’d bled out from the throat.
“You ready to turn him over?” Kimble asked the lead evidence tech, who was with the state police, a topnotch guy. He’d rolled out fast. That was the way it went when a police officer was killed.
“Yeah. Waiting on you.”
“All right. Let’s turn him.”
Two of the technicians reached out with gloved hands and gently, with utmost care, rolled Pete Wolverton’s body over. The head didn’t roll in sync with the rest of him—there wasn’t much muscle left tethering skull to torso.
Someone whispered an oath, someone else a prayer. Kimble slid closer.
Pete’s throat had been laid wide open, and the cords of muscle showed white against the dark blood, which had spilled in enormous quantity, saturating Pete’s uniform shirt and all of the leaves around him. Kimble brought a hand up to his face and squeezed the flesh between his eyes with his thumb and index finger. He squeezed long and hard, concentrating on the pressure. Nobody spoke.
When he took his hand down again, he looked right at the wound. Not at Pete’s face, not at his eyes, not at the blood-soaked uniform that bound him in brotherhood to the men and women here. Just at the wound.
It was a very straight incision. An end-to-end slash that had cut remarkably deep, severing not just the arteries but the strong cartilage of the throat that people referred to as the windpipe.
Kimble said, “We think a claw did that?”
For a moment it was silent. Then the head evidence tech, from the state police, who was closest to the body, said, “Well, if it had used its teeth, everything would be torn. Chewed up. So that slash, yeah, that must have been a claw.”
“It’s very clean.”
Above him, Diane said, “There are claw marks all over his back, too.”
“I saw them. Not nearly so clean. Not very deep at all.”
Everyone was staring at him now. The evidence technician looked thoughtful. He turned back to the wound and said, “It is very clean.”
Diane said, “What are you thinking, chief?”
“I’m thinking that I’ve seen six people whose throats were cut with knives,” Kimble said. “One cut with a sword, one with an ax, one with a barbecue fork. I’ve never seen anyone’s throat opened up by a cat. I don’t know what it looks like.”
“Like that,” she said, her voice unsteady. The evidence technician, though, was meeting Kimble’s eyes, and there was a glimmer of understanding and agreement there.
“Autopsy will tell us, won’t it?” Kimble said, speaking to him.
“Yeah. We’ll be able to tell.”
“Tell what?” Diane said.
Kimble straightened, dusting leaves from his jeans. “Whether the cougar killed him,” he said, “or found him.”
28
THE IMAGE AUDREY COULD NOT get out of her mind was a Valium bottle. There was one at home, in the medicine cabinet, a prescription she’d filled in the weeks after David’s death. The pills had carried her through the funeral, through the softly spoken sympathies and the offers of help and the sight of him in the casket, but then she’d tucked them in a far corner of the medicine cabinet. Not because they didn’t help, but because she didn’t want to have to rely on that kind of help for too long.