A Fractured Peace Read online

  Elia Seely

  A Fractured Peace

  Copyright © 2020 by Elia Seely

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Elia Seely asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  About Elia

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction. Gold Creek is a fictional town in a fictional county, and although I do mention actual place names, all of the characters and situations are complete figments of my imagination. I have nothing against Buddhism or any spiritual path, but I am deeply curious about how spiritual power (or the illusion of it) is used or abused.

  For my Captain, who always encourages me to write, especially while at sea.

  Chapter One

  June is a sweet season in northern Colorado; the heat of summer isn’t yet baking off the valley floor, but the threat of a deep spring snow is past. I had the weekend off rotation and wasn’t going to show my face as Creek County law enforcement for a whole two days.

  My kids had gotten out of school the day before, and the hot and luxurious summer stretched ahead. They went off in their separate directions with friends, so I decided to head up to Gold Creek Canyon for a trail run.

  The parking lot was empty as I pulled in and parked near the pit toilet and trail notice board. I grabbed my lumbar pack: bandanna, two water bottles, a granola bar, and the end of a TP roll. I warmed up for a few minutes with a quick walk, then I started an easy run up the Pinto Ridge trail. I soon got into the rhythm of it and thoughts started floating through my mind rather than settling in. The chorus from the Katrina and the Waves song that Margo loved merged with Bruce’s new single Glory Days, followed by a fleeting thought about whether the Lakers or the Celtics would win the ’85 NBA championship. Worries came: childcare for my daughter Margo, the ongoing antagonism with another deputy at work, my loneliness. Eventually, though, it all drifted away until it was just me and my heartbeat and my breath.

  A mile in, the path evens out before the next steep climb up to the Pony Creek trail junction. I came up onto the flat where the creek pours through a grove of cottonwoods at the edge of a meadow. Several ravens shrieked from the tops of the trees. I stopped and drank from one of my bottles. Two turkey vultures flapped up over the cottonwoods, circled low, and dropped back down behind the trees. I thought there must be a deer or elk carcass nearby for so many carrion birds to gather; possibly they had discovered a cached mountain lion kill.

  As I drank and watched the birds, I felt the hair standing up on the back of my neck. I’m no psychic, but when something isn’t right my body tends to go on alert before my brain does. I’d head over, see what was there, and finish my run. I knew this spot well; on a wall of rock behind the creek, hidden now by the trees, was a series of petroglyphs, left by the indigenous people that populated our valley thousands of years ago.

  An easy walk through the meadow brought me to the cottonwoods. I slowed before stepping into the trees where I’d seen the vultures. They are intimidating birds and I hadn’t ever been close to any that were enjoying a feast. Would they try and protect it? Images from Hitchcock’s classic film, The Birds, flitted through my mind. The thought of a hungry mountain lion gave me a little thrill down in my belly too. Mountain lions hide their kills and return to them, so if this was a cougar spoil, I wouldn’t want to hang around.

  The ravens made an even greater racket as I came into the trees. The vultures flapped and settled on the ground nearby. I could see the creek now, surging with spring snowmelt. I felt its coolness; Pinto Ridge rose up behind the creek and blocked the sun, and with the cottonwoods and willow created a deep shade. I smelled the carcass before I saw it: sour-milk rotten-meat putrid, a quick gag reflex, and a deep breath.

  I almost stepped on it, in fact, by the time my brain made sense of what was there and sent the red alert to the rest of my body.

  It was a head.

  A human head, covered in short black hair, attached to a partial neck, torn up from the birds and stinking.

  I stopped. Gagged again, tasting bile. My heart thudded loud in my ears; my tongue stuck in my mouth. It took what seemed like a long time to have my brain kick into some kind of procedure about what to do when you find a head laying on the ground, half eaten and what the hell?

  The vultures shifted and the ravens sank lower into the trees, observing me. I scanned the area around the head, now sinister in the shade. The creek rushed with indifferent force, but the air seemed eerily still. Had this been a hiker, taken down by a cougar? I did not see the rest of the body nearby, but it must be. I forced myself to look at the head again, noting with a strange numbness that the remaining skin was brown and smooth with a sparse goatee of black hair on the chin. The eyes were picked out but the delicate eyebrows were complete; a small mole lay near the right eye socket. The neck: rough edges of skin, straggle of tendons, the gleam of cervical vertebrae. The edge of the skin wasn’t cut, but didn’t look torn or gnawed at—what I imagined would be the result of an animal ripping the head away from the body. I ran through what I knew about mountain lion kills: they break the neck, rip out the organs, but did not dismember a carcass. A bear, too, would gnaw away on a kill but pulling off the head … I gagged again and backed away under a tree to puke.

  I took a drink to rinse my mouth. Then I saw something else. With dread I approached a strangely shaped object that lay upstream from the head. Ravens scolded and hopped away. The torso of a man, naked brown skin streaked with dried blood, pieces torn aw
ay, a shock of white rib showing through. Viscera spilling out where the torso had been separated from the pelvis. I stared, gagged again. Maggots swarmed over the body. I spun around, suddenly sure I’d see the mountain lion. My eyes scanned the ground. A jog downstream twenty feet from the head revealed a leg; time slowed and skewed enough for me to observe a scar on the knee, note the shape of it as a clue for an ID. The leg was unclothed and severed at the ankle. I stopped, struggling again to comprehend the scene.

  I’d like to say I jumped right into procedure, as this looked less and less like an animal kill, but it took me a while to figure out what to do. I did not want to find any more body parts or stay here on my own. The vultures jumped back down to finish what they’d started, and I ran back to the head to shoo them away. I needed to protect the remains and stop trampling over what was possibly a crime scene. With downed branches of willow, I covered the remains, clapping and shouting to disperse the birds.

  I sprinted back across the meadow, marking the entry point with a small cairn of rocks, and then ran back down the trail to the parking area. My Bronco was still the lone vehicle. I pulled open the cranky driver’s door and grabbed the radio.

  “Dispatch, this is deputy O’Connor, I have a 10-84 request assistance, over.”

  “What’s your twenty?” deputy Eli Stewart rapped back. “Are you secure?”

  “Yes. I’m at Gold Creek County Park. I found some human remains about a mile up the Pinto Ridge trail. Over.”

  I briefly described the scene. My least favorite co-worker, Joe, was on patrol, and a mean part of me wanted to see how he dealt with a dismembered body. Butch, the sheriff, radioed through after Eli and I signed off to say he’d be up as soon as possible, and that I should stay put until one of them got there. Which, as I stood shivering in the sunlight, I was happy to do. This was the most horrible thing I’d encountered in ten years of working at the Creek County Sheriff’s Office.

  Chapter Two

  Butch arrived first. I felt my heart rate start to even out immediately. He hadn’t shaved and he wore an old CSU t-shirt and jeans and carried a battered canvas backpack over one shoulder. He had the weekend off too.

  “All right, Shannon. Tell me what we’ve got. You okay?”

  “Yeah. It was a shock, you know? I haven’t ever seen a decapitation or a body in pieces like this. I might have over-reacted. It’s probably an animal kill. I mean—what else?”

  “Maybe. But you were right to call in. Joe’s way out Thompson way, so he’ll be a while. Got a call in for an ambulance and I gave Kyle a buzz too. I’ll leave a note for the medics on the board, here, in case we don’t have radio contact,” Butch said, indicating the information and map board that detailed the trails of the canyon and begged hikers to pack out trash. He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and began to write.

  A sign read that a mountain lion had been spotted in the area two weeks before. I hadn’t bothered to read the board when I’d come in, and now I felt sure that the body up there had to be an animal kill, however grotesque and unusual. Whatever the cause of the man’s death, we needed to bring his remains down to establish identity and find a next of kin to inform. Kyle, our county Medical Examiner, would need to do an autopsy, although that would be a challenge with the state of the body. I checked my watch; five-thirty. Both my kids had instructions to be home by six for dinner, but now I wouldn’t be. Hopefully Dan would be there on time, because I didn’t want Margo hanging out by herself. She’d be worried when she found me gone.

  “I gotta get word to my kids that I’m going to be awhile,” I said. “I’ll radio Eli, get him to give them a call.”

  Butch nodded and I went back to the Bronco and radioed through to Elijah again.

  “Elijah, this is Shannon, over.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Can you call over to my place at around six, just to let the kids know I’ll be home late? Don’t tell them what’s happened, just that I’m working. Over.”

  “Will do, over.” Eli is a good guy. If it had been Joe Laherty on the other end of that radio, he’d have had something snide to say, or worse, just refused to do it. I slammed the car door and went back to Butch. We started up the trail.

  “A mile up, you said?”

  “About. I noticed the birds at that meadow just down from the Pony Creek trail junction.”

  “Well, wife’s always on at me to get more exercise, so here we go.”

  We didn’t talk much on the way up. In twenty minutes, we were at the cairn of stones I’d left as a marker. We crossed the meadow. The ravens still occupied the treetops and cried a noisy warning. The smell of the body hit us and Butch paused.

  “Been hot,” he said, “that doesn’t help.”

  “It was pretty torn up. There were maggots rather than flies, so it’s been twelve hours anyways,” I offered. “Birds make quick work of things.”

  I led Butch to the covered head. The vultures had already started pulling at it from under the branches of the willow limb I’d used as cover. They jumped away as we came near. Butch breathed heavily through his mouth and I wondered about the worst he’d seen. I knew he’d been in combat in Korea before starting in law enforcement, but that was a long time ago now—over thirty years.

  I reached down to move the willow branch. The creek filled my ears as we silently regarded the head.

  “Well goddamn,” Butch whispered.

  Like a macabre tour guide, I led him to the other body parts: leg, then torso.

  We both stared at the chest and viscera until Butch said, “Let’s get our photos taken and cover him up. Nothing more to do ‘til Kyle gets here.” He unshouldered his pack, pulled out his camera and a tarp, and after taking pictures from every conceivable angle we covered the torso with the tarp, securing the corners with branches and a couple big rocks.

  “Have you got anything to cover up these other parts? I just didn’t think, brought the one tarp is all.” He rubbed his face.

  “I’ve got a bandana in my fanny pack, cover his head, anyway,” I said, “but nothing for the leg.” I laughed without wanting to.

  We returned to the head, took our photos, and I pulled out my favorite purple bandana. Favorite until today, anyway. It covered the head and torn neck exactly, and we weighted it with stones. Then we traversed back to the leg and I watched while he circled the disembodied limb taking pictures. The camera was a newish automatic Canon SLR that hopefully could mitigate the dimness under the trees. Ideally the state crime lab would set up lights, the whole show, get super accurate pictures. But we had to do our best, given the situation.

  Butch stood from his final close-up of the stump where the foot should have been. His knees cracked. “Let’s look for the rest of the body now. Check this scene for anything out of the ordinary. You didn’t look around anymore before you came down?”

  “No. I didn’t know if I should—didn’t want to, Butch, if I’m honest. I just ran back down to call it in.”

  He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Nothing to do for the poor guy anyway. You go downstream and I’ll go up. If it was a mountain lion kill, there’ll be the remainder of the carcass, in some form. Even if mostly bones. But look for footprints, trash, anything.”

  I agreed and we split up. Now I had that eerie feeling again, the light dropping in the open meadow as the sun sank further behind Pinto Ridge. The ridge was a high, narrow escarpment that bled up into stands of pine, alpine fir, and aspen.

  I came upon another giant raven picking at something a hundred yards downstream from the leg, where meadow grass and willow bordered the creek. I shooed off the raven and squatted down to see what he’d been at: a hand.

  Again, the flesh that remained looked brown and smooth, the fingers slender and almost feminine. The hand had been cleanly separated from the rest of the arm. Unlike the neck, which did show a more ragged edge at the severance point, the tendon and bone at the wrist had been cut through. Axe? Machete? Not an animal, not a chance of that. The hair on
my neck stood up again. I rose and called back to Butch, who I couldn’t see now. No answer. Leave it? Pick it up? The hand looked incongruous laying there on the dirt, a pinecone and a bunch of tiny white wildflowers close by.

  Butch didn’t emerge at my further shouts, so I marked the spot with a pile of branches and kept going down the creek-side. Soon the water carved more of a trough, forming a drop off between the bank and the creek below. The meadow transitioned back into stands of pine, fir, and juniper.

  Under the conifers the ground softened, with shade flowers and grasses and the dry dusty smell of earth. I surprised two deer but did not find any more body parts. I turned back after a little over a quarter mile, and chose to walk back uphill, closer to the trail than the creek. I heard voices and realized that the ambulance crew must be on their way up. I shouted out and climbed until I hit the trail. They appeared fifty yards down and I waited for them to get closer. I recognized Kyle and the two guys who do most of the ambulance work for the county.

  “Well Shannon, you sure know how to spoil a guy’s day off. What the hell is this about a head?”

  “That’s what I found. A man’s head, torso, and leg. About a half mile up. And I’ve found a hand too. I was just on my way back through the trees to see if pieces had been scattered further afield. Butch went looking upstream. We’ve been at it—” I glanced at my watch— “about a half hour now. I’m going to keep looking in these trees.” I told them about the marker I’d left at the meadow. “Butch is on his portable,” I added, nodding to one of the EMTs who had a radio strapped to his belt. The men continued up the trail and I went back down into the trees.

  I found the right foot on my way back, not far from the left hand I’d discovered earlier. When I returned to where the head lay, Butch stood watching Kyle as he bent over the remains and the two ambulance guys shifted around looking a little green.

  “Anything?” I asked Butch as I walked up to the group. “I’ve got the left hand and right foot down there, maybe a hundred yards on. Both marked.”