Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds Read Free Page A

the others. The bark had crumbled and the sap was old and crusted. He chiseled the amber with his thumbnail. It had to be several years old. Maybe more.
    The arrow pointed to the west. He turned in that direction and saw another arrow, pointing deeper into the valley. They were haphazardly carved using a dull instrument. Definitely not a knife. Maybe a rock?
    The second arrow led him to a third, which, in turn, guided him into a dark ravine and a fourth arrow, only this one pointed straight down.
    Seaver approached the broad pine tree slowly. It leaned forward from the bank as though preparing to fall. Its upper canopy was long dead and it was only a matter of time before it came down. Its roots protruded from the dirt. Something had burrowed into the ground between them. There was no scat near the mouth of the warren or tracks in the dirt. It was too big for a ground squirrel and too small for a fox.
    Again, he looked up at the arrow, which appeared to be pointing directly at the burrow.
    He knelt and craned his neck to see inside the hole. At first, he saw only darkness. He leaned closer and saw just about the last thing he expected to find. Rather than a pair of small eyes looking back at him, he saw his own distorted reflection on the circular lens of a video camera.
    * * *
    The Archuleta County Sheriff’s Department was responsible for more than 1,300 square miles and a seasonal population of as many as forty thousand clustered in the town of Pine Springs and scattered through the surrounding wilderness. Crime was largely of the domestic variety and generally involved wives and livestock, although not necessarily in that order of priority. This time of year, it was either feast or famine. In the summer, they could always count on the revenue from issuing speeding tickets, but the roads were rarely nice enough to go the speed limit in the winter, which meant that rather than patrolling, the deputies were often reassigned to ancillary duties, from working with emergency management to assisting animal control, issuing permits, and serving warrants. Considering even that was barely enough to keep two men busy, Sheriff Wayne Dayton gave his staff his blessing to moonlight wherever they could find the hours. Most worked night or weekend security at the college over in Durango or drove armored transport for Wells Fargo. Very rarely did he need to call for all hands on deck, but it was starting to look like today might have potential.
    He stared at the video recorder on the corner of his desk. It was an older RCA model with a cracked viewscreen that folded out from the side and recorded onto a mini cassette with actual tape inside. There was still mud embedded in the seams and it had taken the AV kid from the library fifteen minutes with swabs and alcohol to clean out the sockets well enough to connect the cables so they could view the recording on the TV. Like the game warden sitting across the room and staring blankly out the window onto Main, he’d seen several seconds of the recording played back on the camera, and the last thing either of them wanted to do was watch it again, let alone in full color and on the big screen. The sheer terror on that woman’s face…
    Dayton had no doubt in his mind that wherever this woman was now, she was long dead.
    “I cleaned it up as well as I could, but you have to understand these old cassettes weren’t designed to hold up to the elements,” Thom Harvey said. He was more than just the AV guy for the library. His mother was the librarian and had homeschooled him right there at such an advanced pace that by the time the other kids were ready to graduate high school, he was already starting his senior year at MIT. The first app he designed hit iTunes the week before his twentieth birthday and now, at age twenty-two, he was so rich he could spend the majority of his time in-game or online, except when his mother summoned him to the library to make their computers, archaic microfiche