Part 5
By noon, the storm had thinned into a hard, exhausted brightness.
Evan returned to Black Spruce Ridge with Deputy Tessa Quinn from the county sheriff’s office, a state wildlife investigator on speakerphone, and Mara in Lena’s old pickup. He had told Mara the ridge was no place for her. She had not argued. She had simply loaded evidence bags, a field camera, spare batteries, and a ruler into the truck with the same calm expression Laura used to wear whenever Evan mistook worry for authority.
So he said nothing.
In daylight, the road looked almost innocent. Snow softened the edges of the trail. Ice glittered on spruce branches. Even the wash where F-14 had been trapped seemed smaller without the night pressing around it.
But the woods had not hidden everything.
Evan found the branch he had jammed upright beside the trail. The human print was nearly gone, but enough of the heel remained for Tessa to photograph it from three angles. Mara set the ruler beside the impression and took close images without stepping near the track.
“You’ve done evidence work before,” Evan said.
She kept the camera steady. “Lena gets called on wildlife cases when they go legal. I help sometimes.”
“Since when?”
“Since Mom was sick.”
There was no accusation in it. That made it worse. Evan stood with his hands in his coat pockets and felt the shape of his failure shift. He had imagined his daughter on the other side of a closed door for years, unreachable and angry. All that time, she had been driving the same back roads, helping the same wounded animals, carrying grief into work instead of away from it.
Tessa cleared her throat gently. “Evan.”
He followed her gaze.
Ten yards beyond the first print, beneath a drift near a fallen cedar, a second cable loop hung from a bent sapling. It was set at chest height for a wolf, nearly invisible unless a person knew how to look. Farther in, they found bait buried under snow and another steel trap chained to a root.
Mara stepped back from it, her face going pale. “How many did he set?”
“We don’t know it’s one person yet,” Tessa said.
Evan looked at the blue tape marking the approach. “No. But it’s not one mistake.”
They worked the ridge for two hours. The pattern revealed itself the way most bad things did: piece by piece, then suddenly all at once. Blue survey tape marked approach points. A narrow boot path had been packed down and dusted over by fresh snow. Tire tracks at an old turnout showed where a pickup had backed in more than once. Tessa photographed the tread. Evan bagged a short piece of cut antenna wire caught near the base of a spruce.
The most useful thing came from Mara’s camera check.
Lena had placed motion-triggered cameras throughout the corridor for the Ash Hollow study. Most were too far from the trap line to matter, but one camera facing a beaver pond had recorded a pickup at 5:17 that morning. The image was grainy. Snow and road salt blurred the plate. But a decal on the back window showed a red musky fish above the words ROURKE’S BAIT & PROPANE.
Evan knew the truck.
Everybody in Elkhorn Falls knew the truck.
Glen Rourke had run the bait shop on County M for more than twenty years. He sold minnows, propane, night crawlers, bad coffee, and every grievance in town before breakfast. Evan had written him two citations years earlier for illegal sets too close to a protected corridor. Glen had paid the fines and spent the next decade telling anyone who would listen that the state cared more about wolves than working families.
Last fall, after Glen’s old hound disappeared near Ash Hollow, his complaints had become quieter.
Quieter did not mean softer.
They found Glen behind the bait shop splitting kindling beside the propane cages. He was broad through the shoulders, sixty or close to it, with a gray beard and a blaze-orange cap pulled low. When he saw Evan, Tessa, and Mara step out of the truck, his expression barely moved.
That was the first thing Evan noticed.
“Hell of a storm,” Glen said.
Tessa did the talking. She asked about his truck, Black Spruce Road, the blue tape, the morning before. Glen answered too quickly, then too slowly. He said half the county used blue tape. He said his truck had been at the shop all morning. He said cameras lied when snow blew sideways. He said wolves were everywhere now, and nobody in Madison cared what they did to people up north.
Mara stayed quiet until Glen looked past Evan and saw her.
“What’s she doing here?” he asked. “This some family errand?”
“I helped keep her pups alive last night,” Mara said.
For the first time, Glen’s eyes shifted.
Tessa saw it. Evan did too.
“Pups?” Glen said.
“The female was in labor,” Mara said. Her voice stayed quiet, but it changed the temperature around them. “One pup was born in the snow because somebody left her with steel on her leg and wire around her mouth.”
Glen’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know anything about what happens out there.”
“I know what hypothermia looks like in a newborn animal. I know what crushed tissue looks like when a trap has been on too long. And I know she still tried to clean him before she had enough strength to lift her head.”
“Mara,” Evan said softly.
She stopped, but she did not look sorry.
Tessa told Glen they would be seeking a warrant for the truck and outbuildings. Her words were careful, procedural, and unsatisfying. Real consequences rarely arrived like thunder. They came in paperwork, evidence logs, lab reports, and people insisting they had been misunderstood.
Glen looked at Evan. “You and me used to understand each other.”
“No,” Evan said. “I understood you were angry.”
“My dog was killed.”
“I know.”
Glen laughed once, flat and hard. “You know? You ever find something you loved torn up in the snow?”
The question struck a place Glen had not aimed for. Evan saw Laura’s hospital bed. Mara’s unanswered calls. The blue mug by the sink. Loss did not make a man cruel, but it could offer cruelty a chair and let it stay if he kept feeding it.
“I know what losing something does,” Evan said. “I also know it doesn’t give you the right to make another living thing suffer.”
Glen looked away first.
Then he made his mistake.
“Maybe if that orange collar mattered so much,” he said, “somebody should’ve kept better track of what it was attached to.”
Tessa went still. Evan felt Mara turn beside him. The deputy lowered her notebook a fraction. “Mr. Rourke,” she said, “I never mentioned an orange collar…”
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