Trapline by Mark Stevens Read Free Book Online Page A

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    The lack of evidence matched the lack of a credible scenario. If it was a mountain lion, which the stick and brush-covering business suggested, then the attack, if confirmed, would send a shudder deep down in the bones of every hiker, camper, or outdoorsman in Colorado. In fact, she should be quaking in her Ropers, the new black pair she’d been breaking in for the season and which, in fact, looked as good as they felt. The same ones that would now leave a nifty track for some other mammal or insect tracker to decipher. But she wasn’t afraid. No quaking. The only mammals in the Flat Tops that gave her pause were the ones that came up this way with rifles, alcohol, and a mad desire to channel their inner Teddy Roosevelt.
    Five more steps. Here, some vole scat but no vole tracks, the soil too firm to collect an impression. Or maybe you’d need to be another vole to notice.
    Three more squats, three more mini-vistas of wildflowers, scrub, and rock in their wonderfully random arrangements. If the attacking beast hadn’t come from the woods, he or she had to have come running across a half-mile or more of open expanse, as unlikely as a Colorado aspen grove suddenly becoming the home for a troop of howler monkeys. This wasn’t the Serengeti, where predator and prey i nteracted in big bloody widescreen Technicolor smack in front of every Range Rover full of safari-esque tourists, this was the goddamn Flat Tops where beast-on-beast takedowns, when they happened, took place off-screen like a movie script carefully crafted to earn no more than a PG-13 rating. Humans were common here and many carried rifles or bows. Thus the term heavy hunter pressure. All the big mammals in the Flat Tops faced the consequences of hunting season and all the big mammals, as a result, were champions of avoiding human contact except during the rut, of course, when sexual urges overrode every other instinct and a 700-pound elk could be manipulated like a horny virgin.
    Allison climbed back up to the top of the ridge. The trio of deputies lifted the half-corpse onto a sheet of plastic. It was wrapped with care, placed in a body bag and then into an oversized saddle bag on Eli, her old reliable mule.
    The threesome pulled their masks over their heads in unison. They packed up trowels, knives, scissors, forceps, evidence bags, glass vials, measuring tape.
    â€œYou have an inquisitive look on your face.”
    The speaker was the most talkative of the bunch, lead deputy Brad Marker. Allison had fallen into easy conversation with him on the ride up. Marker had been a deputy for eleven years but had transferred from New Mexico two years ago.
    â€œI’m that obvious?” said Allison.
    â€œDon’t think we have anything conclusive,” said Marker. “Tom?”
    Garfield County deputy coroner Tom Potts couldn’t have been a day over thirty. He wore mirrored Aviator sunglasses and a plain baseball cap. Besides being truly circumspect and inscrutable all morning, he had complained about his back on the ride up and issued leave-me-alone vibes from the first moment. Not much about him said sports or outdoors. Allison stood a couple of strides uphill so they were eye to eye.
    â€œGoing to be a simple case of undetermined causes until we send the parts out,” said Potts. “There’s a wildlife forensics lab up in Wyoming that handles all these cases.”
    â€œMountain lion?” said Allison.
    â€œCan’t rule it out,” said Potts. “We’ve got all the sticks and stuff that was moved around to cover him up—might be animal hair that shows up in there somewhere, or on the body itself. And maybe the DNA analysis. We have a long way to go.”
    â€œWas there anything on the body—an ID? Did he have a wallet—anything?” said Allison.
    â€œWhat was left of his pockets were empty,” said Potts. “He wasn’t carrying much or wearing much.”
    â€œWhat