Stone Cross (Arliss Cutter #2) - Marc Cameron Page 0,128
talking about.”
“Nice try,” Birdie said. “We caught you here with them—”
Kilgore swallowed hard, grunting as he came up on one elbow. “I’m not denying I was at the lodge. Hell, I’ll even admit to giving the girl a whack in the head after Rick shot that big guy with that humongous rifle of his. But I’m telling you we didn’t take any caribou shoulder. Why would I lie about that?”
Birdie motioned Cutter to the door. “The Meads need some soup,” she whispered, nodding toward the ATV outside. “I was hoping I could find some meat I didn’t have to chop with the same axe that killed that guy on the floor.”
She’d insisted on cutting off another backstrap and a large chunk of back fat from James Jimmy’s caribou before they left the campsite. It was now an icy block tied to the back of the four-wheeler.
“I’ll go get it,” Cutter said, dreading another second in that biting wind. He wondered if hypothermia was like heat stroke—when you got it once, you were more prone to the effects of it a second time.
Birdie put a hand on his arm, her voice still hushed. “If they didn’t take the shoulder when they kidnapped the Meads, then who took it?”
Cutter rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. This was on the low end of the scale of mysteries he had the energy to solve. “Birdie—”
“Remember those tracks Vitus Paul told us about?” She gave a little I-told-you-so nod. “Maybe that was the Hairy Man and he took the shoulder.”
Cutter chuckled, exhausted. “Maybe it was that old lady with the long toenails.”
“Now you’re just being crazy.” Birdie grinned. “You gotta admit it’s weird, though.”
“I’m sure there’s a more plausible explanation,” he said, going out the door. Though when he watched the storm whip through the shadowed forest beyond the ATV, he half expected to see the Hairy Man.
Ten minutes later, Birdie had a caribou soup heating in a dented pot on top of the woodstove. She found salt and pepper in Halcomb and Kilgore’s meager larder, along with a couple of ramen noodle mixes, which she added to the broth along with a good quarter of the backstrap and a handful of creamy white fat. There was some hair in it too, but Birdie said that was not out of the norm in bush soup. Cutter didn’t care. He was so hungry he would have eaten more eyeball fat.
Cutter went back to carving on his wolf-dog cottonwood root while he waited for the soup to boil. Birdie sat at the little table preparing the rest of the backstrap for later use, in case they ended up being here for more than a few days.
She looked up suddenly, her knife in one hand, a chunk of bloody caribou in the other.
“What about that thing in the meat house?”
Across the room beside her husband, Sarah Mead gave an audible shudder. “Are you talking about that design on the concrete?”
“Yeah.” Birdie glared at Kilgore again. “The blood circle. What was that all about, anyway? Something to throw us off the trail? Make us think it was a cult or something.”
Kilgore tried to roll onto his side, but much of his lower leg stayed in place on the mattress, putting it at an unnatural angle and bringing a grimace to the man’s face. “You’re talking out your ass, lady,” he said through gritted teeth. “I got no earthly idea about any blood circle.”
“I might,” Cutter said, looking up from his carving.
He found a piece of twine about a foot long and tied it to the bloodiest piece of caribou from Birdie’s pile. Even Kilgore craned his head to watch as Cutter suspended meat at the end of the twine over a relatively clean portion of the table, about a foot from Birdie’s face.
“The meat shed had screened windows,” he said.
“Right,” Sarah said. “To allow for air flow.”
Cutter nodded to the caribou pendulum and winked at Birdie. “Blow on it. Softly, but enough to make it move.”
She leaned across the table and blew a puff of air on the swinging chunk of meat. A drop of blood plopped to the table. Cutter held the end of the string steady in the same spot, while the meat swung slowly ahead of Birdie’s breath, spinning and unspinning, as it made slow arcs. Drop after drop of bright red blood fell to the table, creating an almost perfect design of concentric dots and circles.