Instinct by Jason Hough (ebook reader web TXT) 📗

“You mean, like, with alcohol? Drugs?”

He glances at me, then back at the body. “Yes,” he replies carefully.

“There are other ways?”

Doc takes his time, thinking carefully before he finally nods. “I was speaking more about conscious effort.”

“Meaning what?”

“Consider a zookeeper, for instance. Any human being of sound mind would flee, or perhaps fight when faced with a tiger or a bear like this one. But with enough training and focus, that behavior can be tempered, even controlled.”

“Huh. But it was probably drugs, right? I mean, c’mon. What are the odds that this guy works in the bear den of the Seattle Zoo?”

Doc shrugs. “I’m just giving you possibilities, Sheriff. Perhaps he worked at an animal rescue. Who knows? Finding out is your area of expertise, not mine.” He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and shrugs again. “If you want my opinion, Psych 101 information about primitive behavior won’t help you here, Sheriff. In my estimation, the bear is what we should be worried about, not its victim. The most likely explanation is that this man was simply caught off guard and froze in panic. Ah, here’s Kyle.”

I glance toward the eastern edge of the clearing as Kyle emerges from the trees. He’s got his shotgun held casually, and shakes his head when our eyes meet.

Kyle stops opposite me, the three of us making a sort of circle around the victim.

“Found a track leading away. The bear is long gone. What now?” he asks me.

“Can you help us move him?”

“Whatever you need.”

“I’ll need to see if he’s got a wallet and phone. After that… listen, we can work together to get him down the trail, but I wonder if you two might wait for me to take his companion out of here before he’s brought into the parking area.”

The two men exchange a glance. Doc checks his watch before giving a resigned shrug.

“No problem,” Kyle says for both of them.

On the drive back to town I ask her name.

“Katherine Pascoe.” Her hands have stopped shaking, the look of shock replaced by numbness that matches her voice.

“Tell me again about what happened.”

Her response takes a while to form. So long, in fact, I think maybe she didn’t hear me. Her wide-eyed gaze remains fixed on some distant imaginary point.

Eventually she says, “We were hiking.”

I glance at her, expecting more, but she doesn’t elaborate.

“Just hiking?” I prompt.

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“We saw a bear.”

Whoa, slow down, I think. You’re gonna bury me under this avalanche of information.

The lopsided conversation goes on like this for the duration of the ride. At first I chalk this up to shock, then perhaps cold detachment, but as the trees whisk past us I change my mind. This is one seriously introverted woman. She doesn’t offer anything unless I press for it, and it takes the entire drive to get precious few results.

Katherine is a grad student at the University of Washington, and met the deceased at a book signing. They’d come up this way without a real plan, just a weekend of adventure and brewery hopping. They’d started down in Seattle and worked their way up to Granston, where they’d toured a new brewery and gastro pub.

While there, some idiot had given them the stellar advice to hike up to the old mine near Silvertown. This, I assume, was an innocent practical joke. One that proved fatal, but I decide to withhold from Ms. Pascoe the news that the silver mine is a dud and her boyfriend just might have died because of someone’s warped sense of humor.

All that takes twenty minutes to extract, and maybe fifty questions from me. My eyes itch, bleary from lack of sleep.

At our tiny police station I preempt Clara’s questions. “Later,” I mouth, at her inquisitive look. “Brew some coffee, would you?”

While she tends to that I take Katherine by her arm and guide her to one of the four holding cells. She explained on our drive back, at my constant prompting, that she couldn’t head home in Jeff’s Subaru even if she wanted to. No license, never learned. So she’ll stay put until we can contact his family and figure out what to do. Maybe put her up at Mrs. Kensington’s B&B when the shock wears off.

“I’ll just be right over there at my desk,” I say to her. “Clara’s making coffee. Just hold tight for a bit, okay? We’ll sort this out.”

Katherine nods, sitting down gingerly on the cot.

I plop my own butt at my desk, gulp some of the terrible coffee, and run the deceased’s driver’s license along with the Subaru’s plates. My fingers drum impatiently on top of the computer’s mouse as an icon spins.

And spins.

Despite all the talk around town, I have no idea if the big new cellular data tower on the mountain is working yet. In addition to wireless service for phones, it also has these microwave antennas that look like bass drums, providing fast internet as long as you have a similar antenna on your roof and line-of-sight to the metal monstrosity. The tower’s disguised, quite poorly, as a pine tree. Not even a variety of conifer native to the Northwest, as Greg pointed out to me.

Some thirty seconds pass before I’ve got information on the deceased. Date of birth, Social, last known address. The poor guy was only twenty-four. An absolute shame. Then his driver’s license photo pops up. It was smudged and worn on the actual ID, so much so I paid it no attention. But here on the screen it’s crystal clear. I lean back, momentarily speechless. The charming half grin, the welcoming blue eyes, the scruffy beard… He looks exactly the same here, posing for a Department of Transportation camera, as he did staring into the jaws of a bear that was about to gut him from stem to stern. I mean the look on his face is identical. Disinterested, a little smug