Wolfwraith (2 page)

He reached into the glove compartment of the truck, fished out a candy bar and unwrapped it. Normally he waited for a donut and coffee at the contact station, but trying to figure out what had happened to the missing campers might take a little while.

At the edge of vision, where sea met sky, a large cargo ship poked its superstructure above the horizon, its hull hidden by the curvature of the earth. Shadow looked away from this reminder of a wider world—a bustling, technological civilization he had once sought but now preferred to steer clear of.

The name of the park, False Cape, reflected the dangers faced by mariners in the days before radar and satellite positioning. With unreliable navigation, ship’s captains sometimes wrongly identified this isthmus, which jutted slightly out to sea, as the more northerly Cape Henry, marking the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. Any skipper making this error would run his ship aground on the shallows. The early inhabitants of False Cape were said to have lighted fires in imitation of lighthouses, luring ships aground so their cargo would become available for ‘salvage‘ by the locals.

Shadow turned off the beach at a dune crossing, marked by a tall pole with a banner reading False Cape. The truck’s wheels spun occasionally in the soft sand as he passed through a small campground in the dunes—merely a couple of outhouses and picnic tables. Coming down the other side, he entered scraggly woods, where only a few hardy live oak trees struggled for existence in the salt-air environment. Live oaks were the only species capable of growing here. The rutted, soft-sand path continued on for couple of hundred yards where it intersected the main road, a one-lane gravel trail that was the only north-south route through the park other than the beach. Shadow crossed the road and entered the meadow. This was the False Cape bayside campground: three tent sites with no modern amenities.

A quick glance showed the campsites and the small, three-sided shelter to be empty, so he decided to check the dock. He continued past two outhouses—even primitive camping required privacy in the privy—into a path through the trees at the opposite side of the clearing.

Shadow eased the truck down the narrow lane, bouncing over the deep ruts made by park vehicles over the years. Mud and water splattered into the woods as the tires splashed through puddles. The track went over a small swamp that never dried out.

He broke free of the trees and looked out on the brown waters of Back Bay. He had traveled less than a half-mile from the beach to reach the bay, the isthmus being narrow here. False Cape was the park’s central landing on the bay side, between Barbour Hill in the north and Wash Woods to the south.

Pulling into a small clearing at the foot of the pier, Shadow cut off the engine and got out of the truck. A glance around showed no hint that anyone had been in the area recently. No kayaks or other craft were beached in the clearing, or tied to the pilings of the dock.

He hesitantly walked onto the pier that extended a hundred feet out into the bay, cautious because a few of the boards had grown old and rotted with age. Not that he was overweight; he’d lost the pounds gained while in the hospital now he was active again. He was stocky, but not overweight.

The dock poked out into the base of a U-shaped body of water, Tripp’s Cove, which opened onto Back Bay. On such an overcast day, he couldn’t see the Virginia mainland on the far shore to the west. He barely distinguished the dark blur of a duck-hunting blind at the mouth of the cove.

He scanned the water without bothering to fetch the pair of binoculars he kept under the truck seat. Since his arrival at the park, his eyesight had astounded the other rangers. Some wondered if it might have to do with his oddly colored eyes, but Shadow knew his vision was a gift from his Indian Grandmother.

Shadow rarely gave a thought to his Native American ancestry; after all, there were plenty of people around here with Indian blood. He had more than most. Grandmother Min claimed they were descended from the Accomattoc, a long-vanished tribe, which had once been part of the Powhatan Confederation.

Shadow’s grandparents had raised him after his unmarried mother died in childbirth. They’d lived in a double-wide trailer on a wooded, isolated spit on Virginia’s middle peninsula, between bay and river. Grandfather, who was also part Native American with a bit of Scottish about him, had taught him trapping, hunting and how to be a Baptist. Grandmother Min, quite the eccentric, had taught him the spiritual side of being a Native American and how not to be a Baptist.

Now, for no apparent reason, Shadow got the sudden feeling he was being watched. Without being obvious about it, he turned his attention to the duck blind, but even
his
vision couldn’t pick up anything strange about it. He ignored his intuition and resumed his search of the water.

When satisfied nothing floated on the open water, he turned his gaze to the shoreline of the cove, where the tall, beige marsh grass and the brown water merged. His eyes quickly found a speck of yellow, far off on his right, near the cove’s mouth. It seemed to be merely a piece of flotsam, a bright yellow piece of shiny fabric billowing with the rippling motion of the waves. Nothing unusual, but he saw something else. A pale forearm and hand stuck out of the bright fabric, which had become snagged by a piece of driftwood. Since the hand hung limp and the rest of the body had to be underwater, he knew he had found his second corpse of the day. This one was human.

Shadow felt the hair rise on the back of his neck and he stared at the faraway arm for a minute, hoping for some sign of life. When he was sure the arm would never move again, he resumed his scan of the shoreline. Two girls were missing, not to mention two kayaks. If he had found one of the girls, where was the other? He spotted nothing else.

The swampy shore of the cove would be impossible to traverse on foot. He needed a boat to get to the body. Going back to his truck, he picked up the microphone.

“False Cape Base, this is False Cape Six, over.”

After a short delay, there came a response. “Go ahead Six.”

“Alex, I need someone to bring a boat to the pier at False Cape Landing.”

“I’m the only one here, but I could come myself if it’s important. Is it something to do with those two girls? Jonesy called in from Little Island. Their SUV is still in the lot.”

“Yeah, I’ve got something. You’d better come yourself, after you call the Coast Guard and the Back Bay refuge. I believe something happened to the girls while they were on the bay. We’ll need to mount a search.” Shadow didn’t want to spill the beans about the body over the radio since their frequency was shared by several other agencies. Also, anyone with a police-band scanner could monitor the conversation. Since he was fairly new to being a ranger, he decided it would best to keep this quiet until Alex could assess the situation.

After a two-second hesitation, Alex replied. “Ten-four. Commissioner Barnett is due in the park sometime this morning, but I guess he’ll have to wait. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Call me back if anything else comes up.”

“Ten-four. Six out.”

As he waited, still scanning the area for any sign of the other girl, he considered the irony of finding a body in such a tranquil location. It didn’t seem right. After a while, he got a chocolate bar from his stash in the truck, and returned to the pier. Edgy, he nibbled on the candy as he looked about, hoping he wouldn’t see a second corpse.

This job was supposed to be a piece of cake, and, so far, it had been. The duties of a ranger, while physically demanding, were not particularly stressful, and working in the park was exactly what he needed. The pay wasn’t great, but he was provided with a residence so he could put away most of the money he got from the government, except for the child support he paid, of course.

His wife, Jessica, had left him shortly after he got out of the Navy hospital. Their twelve-year marriage had always been a rocky road, but Shadow didn’t think that was all of it. Jessica married her attorney so quickly after the divorce that Shadow wondered if they might have been having an affair during his frequent deployments. She now lived with her new husband in Williamsburg, a couple of hours away. Shadow was able to drive up to see his daughter now and then, but Jessica had certainly put the screeching halts on his getting joint custody of Ashley. Then again, Jessica sure didn’t mind gouging him for child support, did she? Even though she drove a Jaguar now, courtesy of husband number two.

He roused from his daydreams as a johnboat came around the point, holding a single man in an orange lifejacket. Soon Alex, a deeply tanned man with kindly brown eyes, eased the flat-bottomed craft up to the dock. Shadow caught the thrown rope with the claw and pulled the boat tight against the pier, tying it off.

The claw consisted of four plastic bendable fingers across from a passive thumb. Even though he had no control over the thumb, he could reach over with his right hand and position it for a wider or narrower grip—the difference between holding a key or a beer can. The fingers, with polyethylene fiber strings running inside jointed digits, would close and bend with the flex of a surgically altered wrist muscle. A realistic, latex ‘skin’ covered the whole affair, including soft foam that molded the contraption to the same shape as his real hand.

There’d been many amputees in this latest mid-east war. Body armor meant you’d probably survive a bombing, even if you lost a few parts. So a few Hollywood prop men had volunteered their services to match the skin tone, size and details of a prosthesis to the amputee. A casual observer wouldn’t guess it was ‘special effects,’ as long as Shadow wore long-sleeve shirts.

Alex killed the engine and pulled his small, thin frame up on the pier. In his late fifties, he displayed considerable gray in his dark brown hair and close-trimmed mustache, yet moved with the agility of a much younger man. Low key in his management style, he had been helpful since Shadow came to the park.

Straightening up, Alex smiled and asked, “What’s the word? What couldn’t you tell me on the radio?”

“I think I found the body of one of the girls. It’s a body, anyway. I figured I’d better get you down here with the boat to confirm before announcing it to the whole world on the radio.”

“Good thinking. Now, where’s the body?”

Shadow pointed to the forearm in the distance. Alex took a small pair of binoculars from a case on his belt and scanned the shoreline.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Looks to me like a yellow piece of plastic, nothing more.”

“It’s a body. I can see an arm.”

“You’re not using binoculars. How can you be so sure? Especially at this distance?”

“I’m sure.”

“Only one way to find out,” the chief ranger said. “Let’s go.”

Minutes after the two men left the dock, Alex eased the flat-bottomed, square-nosed johnboat close to the shoreline.

The yellow material turned out to be a raincoat, ballooning slightly above the water from the air trapped inside the fabric. She was face down. The arm poking from the sleeve was obviously female; slender and graceful. Her skin had turned a shiny, fish-belly white. A bracelet adorned the girl’s wrist, a thin golden chain with a small, plain cross, adding counterpoint elegance to the harsh reality of death.

Alex cut the engine back to idle as they nosed into the marsh grass. Once in position, he steadied the boat with an oar while they considered their find.

“What now?” Shadow asked, feeling uneasy. “Do we leave her so they can get pictures or anything?”

He hoped it would be the case. He’d seen plenty of bodies in his time, but never a young woman and he hadn’t had to pull one out of a bay. Maybe the rocking of the boat was throwing his stomach into a cauldron of nausea.

“No, we’ll take her in. It’s obviously nothing more than a drowning.” Alex pushed the boat closer with the oar. “Can you handle it?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Shadow reached out and grabbed the dainty arm with his right hand. Bile rose in his throat at the unnatural coldness of no-longer-quite-human-feeling skin and the sponginess of slack muscles beneath. The corpse emitted no strong odor, but the rotted-fish stench of the tidal marsh, which Shadow normally didn’t even notice, clogged his nostrils. The putt-putting of the idling outboard motor seemed far away, but the reek of the engine’s oily exhaust seared the tissue inside his nose.

He sensed something else, too. His inner soul responded as he touched the cold, dead wrist. He had once shocked himself with a faulty extension cord and this cold feeling was the spiritual equivalent of that physical electrical shock—a shiver of dread whispering its way up his arm. The knowledge of evil having recently been here was intangible, but undeniable. He’d sometimes been present when his grandmother Min had called upon ancient spirits, even though she worshipped alongside her husband at the Baptist church. Now, many years later, he recognized the presence of something not of this world.

Ignoring his emotional turmoil, he concentrated on the job at hand and applied a steady pressure while he pulled the arm closer to the boat. Her brown hair floated in the water, undulating with the waves. Leaning over the gunwale, he switched and grabbed the arm with the claw and reached his clumsy right hand down into the frigid water, searching around for a grip to pull the body up. By accident, he went down into her shirt and under her bra. Suddenly, to his surprise, he cupped a breast in an obscene parody of a teen-age grope.