Last to Die

good enough, especially on this bright morning, with the sun glittering on the lake. By now the bus would be out of the gate and on its way to Quebec. By noon, they’d be eating at some fancy French restaurant—that’s what Briana had bragged about, anyway—and there’d be a trip to the Quebec Experience museum, and a ride on an outdoor elevator that went up a cliff.
    Meanwhile, I get to sit on this stupid rock
.
    She broke off a chip of lichen and tossed it over the edge. Wondered if Will and Teddy were finished with breakfast yet. Maybe they’d want to shoot arrows with her. But instead of heading back down the ridge, she flopped onto her back, stretching out like a snake warming itself on the boulder, and closed her eyes. Heard a dog’s whine and felt Bear brush up against her jeans. She stroked his back, taking comfort from the touch of his fur. What was it that made a dog’s company so comforting? Maybe the fact you never had to hide your feelings from them, never had to fake a smile for their benefit.
    “Good old Bear,” she murmured, and opened her eyes to look at him. “What did you bring back for me?”
    The dog had something in his mouth, something he did not seem willing to surrender. Only when she gave a tug on it did he finally let it drop. It was a leather glove, black. Where in these woods had Bear found a glove? It smelled bad, and it glistened with the dog’s saliva.
    Grimacing, she picked it up and felt a heaviness to it. Peeking inside, she saw something white gleaming within. She turned the glove upside down, gave it a hard shake. What came tumbling out made her scream and scramble backward, away from the object that lay stinking on the boulder.
    A hand.
    “It’s always the dogs that find them,” said Dr. Emma Owen.
    Maura and the Maine medical examiner stood in the dappled shade of the woods, insects buzzing around their faces, the air thick with the stench of cadaver. Maura thought of other bodies she’d examined over the years, also unearthed by dogs, whose noses are always on the alert for such ripe treasures. Although these remains were hundreds of yards up the slope, Bear had caught the scent and tracked it to this thicket, where dense underbrush partially concealed the body. The man, who appeared to be well muscled and fit, was dressed in camouflage cargo pants, a dark green windbreaker, a T-shirt, and hiking boots. A serrated knife was still strapped to his ankle, and a rifle with a telescopic sight was perched on a nearby boulder. He lay on his left side, exposing his right face and neck to the elements. Scavengers had been at work, greedily stripping away the scalp and face, gnawing at nasal cartilage, and digging into the right orbit, which now gaped empty, the socket scooped clean. Canids, thought Maura, noting the teeth marks on the remaining skin, the punctures in the thin orbital bone. Coyotes most likely. Or, in this remote area, perhaps wolves. Even in this tangle of vines, the cause of death was easy to spot: an aluminum arrow, its tip em bedded deep in the left eye, its tail feathers dyed a deep green.
    Under other circumstances, Maura might have assumed this was just an unlucky hunter, brought down in the woods by another hunter’s carelessness. But this man had been trespassing on Evensong property, and from the boulder where his rifle was positioned, he would have had a commanding view of the valley and the school below. He could have observed who arrived on the property, and who departed.
    Inured as she was to foul smells, Maura had to turn away as the body was rolled onto a plastic sheet, stirring up a stench so foul that Maura gagged and lifted her arm over her nose. Dr. Owen’s staff was fully garbed and masked but Maura, standing here as a mere observer, had settled for gloves and shoe covers, the big-city ME trying to prove she was too seasoned to let a rotting corpse defeat her.
    Dr. Owen crouched down over the body. “There’s barely persistent rigor mortis here,” she said, testing the limbs for range of motion.
    “It was fifty-one degrees last night,” one of the state police detectives said. “Balmy.”
    The medical examiner lifted the edge of the victim’s T-shirt to expose the abdomen. The changes from autolysis were obvious even from where Maura stood. Death sets off a cascade of changes in soft tissues as leaking enzymes digest proteins and disintegrate membranes. Blood cells break apart and leak through vessel walls, and in that soup