Winter of the Wolf Moon by Steve Hamilton Page B

looked at each other again. I felt a sudden urge to knock their heads together. “Can we get something straight right now?” I said. “She slept in this cabin by herself last night. And I slept in mine.”
    “Nobody’s suggesting otherwise,” he said.
    “If we were in the same cabin,” I said, “then none of this would have happened.”
    “We hear you,” he said. “Please. Let’s work together on this.” The deputy pushed the door open and looked inside.
    “Careful,” I said. “Don’t contaminate anything.”
    “I won’t.”
    “I’m serious,” I said. “What if there’s evidence here?”
    “If we see something, we’ll bag it.”
    “No, I’m talking about hair or fibers or …”
    They both looked at me. He’s seen this stuff on television, they’re thinking. He expects us to set up a crime laboratory and start picking up little strands of stuff with tweezers.
    “I was a cop once,” I said. Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. “Never mind. Go ahead.”
    “We’ll be careful,” she said.
    I followed them as they entered the cabin. Therewas a complete silence in the place that made me feel sick to my stomach.
    At least we’re not looking at a dead body, I said to myself. If he wanted to kill her that badly, he would have done it right here. It was the only positive thing I could think of.
    The troopers walked around the overturned table, looked at the scattered chairs. The young man stopped at the bed where the blanket had been turned back. “Looks like she went to bed,” he said. “Then got up later. Doesn’t look like she left anything behind. Did she have a backpack or a suitcase or something? You said she was running away from this guy.”
    “She had a bag,” I said. “A white duffel bag.”
    “She must have taken it with her,” he said. “Or he did, I mean. This Bruckman guy. You say you played hockey with him a couple of nights ago?”
    “Yeah, I did.” It felt like a lot longer.
    “He a big guy? How easy would it be for him to take her out of here?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s a lot bigger than her, but I can’t imagine her going with him without a fight.”
    “So why is the door unlocked?” he said. “She must have opened it, right? There’s no sign of forced entry.”
    “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “She wouldn’t have opened that door if she knew it was him.”
    “Maybe he comes to the door and says he just wants to talk to her. Then when he’s inside he starts busting up the place.”
    “Impossible.”
    “You said you were a cop once. You’ve seen these situations, right?”
    “I know where you’re going,” I said. He was right, I
had
seen it before, more times than I could count. The man begging for forgiveness, the women caving in. “But I just can’t see it here.”
    “Then why did she open the door?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “The way she talked about him last night, I just don’t know.”
    I looked down at the table leg that had been broken off, almost bent over to pick it up before I stopped myself. Then I noticed something else.
    “Look at this floor,” I said.
    The troopers stopped and looked at me.
    “There’s too much melted snow here,” I said. You could see the faint imprints of snow puddles all over the room.
    “She had to walk through snow to get here, didn’t she?” the man asked.
    “Yes, of course,” I said. “And I did, too. I even had to go around back and turn the water on. But I remember thinking about the floor as I came back in. I always try not to track too much snow in here. The white pine, it gets dirty fast. I’m sure there wasn’t this much snow on the floor when I left. Not all over the place like this.”
    “So he
did
come in,” the man said. “She definitely had company.”
    “I can’t believe it,” I said. “I can’t believe she’d let him in here.”
    “How would Bruckman know to find her here, anyway?” he said. “Does he know where you live?”
    “I don’t