Free Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) by Mark Stevens

admire the specimen. “Healthy size rack, too. But what makes you so sure he’s not completely shredded underneath?”
    “Two things. This guy didn’t fall, he decided to get down. He’s not crumpled up. Second, no exit wound. Sure it’s possible. But not even a nick on this side? Nothing. It didn’t look like this guy had been in pain.”
    “Interesting,” said Slater. “I don’t think it would have ever occurred to me, but you might be right.”
    They dug underneath the elk’s legs, fitted ropes up and around the front and tied them as close to the body as they could, walked their horses around, tied one rope to each saddle and stepped the horses away. The rope pulled taut and the elk’s feet slowly rose up. The feet pointed oddly to the sky and the elk flopped over. They scraped through caked-on snow, studied the elk’s head and double-checked the rump and belly for holes, blood, or trauma of any kind. There was nothing.
    “He was a beauty,” said Slater.
    Allison was on all fours, peering into the elk’s face. The shadow from Slater’s head moved and she caught a flash, a glint of steel. She refocused her eyes on the bright snow to catch sight of it again, reached down and wiggled free a rectangular metal box not much bigger than her hand.
    “GPS,” said Slater.
    “Yep,” said Allison.
    “Your basic gear for any wildlife biologist.”
    “For tracking,” said Allison.
    “And study,” said Slater.
    “So this is strange or not strange?”
    “Medium strange. We get our share of people who want to study the elk migration or diseases or impact on the habitat. It’s possible something was authorized that I didn’t know about.”
    “But to have him go down now, at the beginning of the hunting season?”
    “Odd, no question,” said Slater. “And why didn’t the elk survive?”
    “Do we know all the ways they can die?” said Slater.
    The GPS collar, which Slater now flipped around in his hands, put a human in the area where Allison said there had been a human. She thought this, but didn’t say it. Wasn’t that obvious? She stood and stared down the hill, looking for anything out of place, out of line, out of the ordinary. The snowfield returned a blank stare.
    “Whatcha gonna do?” said Slater.
    “Me?” said Allison. “How about the authorities?”
    “We’ll see if we can trace which scientists might be using the Auditrak 535,” he said, reading off the monitor. “But it’s the equivalent of asking which hikers wear boots.”
    Allison looked away, thinking she’d wasted Slater’s time and trouble. Or maybe someone would come climbing back up out of the snow right now and explain it all, the same way dead-looking bodies had scrambled up out of Long Island Sound. Only here, the pristine and unforgiving cover of white snow swallowed all the possible answers.
    ****
    Grumley squeezed a hunk of horse manure in his bare fist and felt the heat in the lump’s core. Two horses. And they hadn’t been gone long. He could catch them if he wanted.
    The field of snow was churned up and the elk had been flipped over. Fuck. It wasn’t hard to imagine his house and barn now filled with cops looking for him. And Trudy might be there answering questions or filling in the blanks for the detective.
    How could things have gotten so screwed up?
    The bullet in Rocky. Was it in Rocky? What would they make of it? What had anyone seen? How much?
    Applegate. Christ, Applegate had better stay cool or the whole thing could be unzipped in a flash. Maybe he’d spill his stinking guts and decide to take all the honorable, puked-up blame himself for killing the protester. And then bumble his way around and mention having run into Grumley. More than anything, Applegate’s muzzle had better stay put.
    ****
    Trudy Grumley didn’t start crying until the body was being hoisted up to the helicopter. He looked so small and frail, dangling below this mechanical monster by a thread. The sheriff ’s people and one of