Blood trail

9

YELLOW CRIME-SCENE tape had been stretched around tree trunks and stapled to pieces of hammer-driven lath in a hundred-foot perimeter around where Frank Urman's body was found. Two state DCI employees had been left to guard the scene, and they scrambled to their feet from where they had been sitting on the tailgate of a pickup chewing tobacco when Joe's vehicle and Pope's Escalade nosed over the ridge near them and parked.

Pope climbed out of his car with his cell phone pressed to his ear, and motioned to the DCI men that they could go. His gesture to them was a backhanded flicking of his fingers as he walked, as if shooing away a street vendor. Joe noticed that the two exchanged dark looks and one mouthed, "Asshole," before they left.

"He makes friends everywhere he goes," Joe said to Lothar, who pretended not to hear.

Since Pope didn't take the time to introduce his friend, Joe offered his hand.

"Joe Pickett."

"Wally Conway," the man said, smiling warmly. Conway was in his midfifties, with longish, thinning brown hair, bulldog jowls, and an avuncular nature. Joe got the impression Conway was good at putting people at ease, making them smile. He wore a huge down coat that was reversible: camo on the outside and blaze orange on the inside. A hunter. Joe had seen him around town but didn't know him.

"You're an architect, right?" Joe said.

"Yes, and you are-were-the local game warden," Conway said. "I've been following your exploits for years."

Since Conway was Pope's friend he'd no doubt heard, from Pope, that Joe held the record for the most damaged vehicles and equipment in departmental history-and was insubordinate as well. It was hard to gauge how close the two men were since Pope had shown no deference to Conway since they'd arrived.

"I hope you don't mind me crashing the party," Conway said, looking to Pope to explain his presence but Pope was busy on the phone. "Randy and I go back a long way. Since he was in the area, he asked me to come along. I hope you don't mind. I promise to stay out of the way."

"Nice to meet you," Joe said. He liked Conway's pleasantness, and wondered how he and Pope could be friends. But given Pope's sudden change of attitude toward him, Joe thought he might have been too rough on his boss. Maybe, just maybe, there was a human being in there somewhere, he thought.

Pope snapped his phone shut and stepped between Wally Conway and Joe. "You met already," he said.

Joe nodded.

Robey and Lothar stepped forward and Pope introduced his friend to them. Conway asked if there was anything he could do to help out, and Lothar suggested they unload his gear from Pope's Escalade. Which left Joe and Pope standing together.

"What?" Pope asked defensively.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were giving me that look, like, why are you bringing a civilian up here? Like, why didn't you clear this with the governor? "

Joe said, "I was?"

Pope stepped forward and shook his finger in Joe's face. "The reason is, Joe, I need people around me I can trust. And I trust Wally Conway."

"And you don't trust me," Joe said.

Pope started to say something but stopped. Instead, he smiled a triumphant smile.

Joe shook his head and turned away. THE ONLY THINGS Buck Lothar retrieved from his duffel bags for the hike down the hill were a square-shaped camo daypack and a telescoping rod of some kind. He also buckled on a holster. Joe recognized the weapon as similar to his.

"Sig Sauer P229," Lothar said. "I prefer it to the Glock.40 you're wearing."

"I prefer a shotgun," Joe said. "I can't really hit anything with a handgun, anyway." Thinking, Except from three inches away, a dark reminder of an episode from two years prior that still gave Joe night sweats and filled him with guilt.

"Tracking stick," Lothar said, answering Joe's unasked question about the rod in his hand. "I'll show you how it works a little later."

"What about your dogs?"

"We'll leave them up here for now," Lothar said. "My understanding is that there have been dozens of you people down there trampling all over the crime scene, right?"

"Right."

Lothar said, "All those scents will just confuse them. If we can figure out where the shooter was and isolate a scent, I might bring them down later. But not until."

Joe shrugged, and reached in the carriers to pet the dogs. They lapped at his fingers.

"Dogs are helpful," Lothar said, "but nothing beats human observation and brain power. We might not even need them."

Robey said, "Wouldn't we need a piece of clothing or something from the shooter to offer to the dogs? Don't they need to have the scent beforehand so they know who they're after?"

Lothar smiled paternalistically. Joe had the impression he did a lot of that.

"It would help if we had an article of the shooter's clothes, of course," Lothar said, "but it rarely happens that we're that lucky. No, these are great dogs. Great dogs. With a great handler-me-they can track blind. You see, humans always leave something behind. Even in the worst-case scenario, when they haven't left something obvious like a cigarette butt or a clothing fiber caught in a thornbush, the shooter will have shed dead skin cells. Tens of thousands of them. They fall off the body like rain." Lothar gestured to Robey. "They're falling off you as we speak, and settling to the ground all around you." Which made Robey look in vain at the grass around his boots, as if he could see a pile of his dead skin cells.

Lothar continued, "Each dead skin cell is unique to the individual, with a unique scent. If we can find where the shooter stopped for a period of time-and there hasn't been too much deterioration of the ground due to weather or trampling-we should be able to get a scent on him. But first, we need to rule out dozens of things."

Lothar patted the top of one of the carriers. "Butch and Sundance are like my samurai swords. I don't pull them out of their scabbards unless I plan to use them to track down a man."

"Not even for a drink of water?" Joe asked.

Pope snapped, "Joe, they're his dogs."

Before Joe could reply, Pope's cell phone burred and Pope snatched it out of his breast pocket and turned away. Conway was visibly uncomfortable, not knowing whether to stand with Joe, Robey, and Lothar or stick close to his friend, who was walking up the hill gesturing as he talked. Joe felt sorry for him.

"What's the deal with those two?" Lothar whispered.

Joe shrugged.

"This isn't one of those Brokeback Mountain kinds of deals, is it? I mean, this is Wyoming." He grinned to show he was kidding.

Robey sighed and looked heavenward. "You know," Robey said, "I think I've heard just about enough Brokeback Mountain jokes to last me a lifetime."

"Yup," Joe said.

"Think about it," Robey said heatedly, "men can't even go fishing together anymore without someone making a Brokeback Mountain joke. And now a man can't go hunting without getting butchered! What are we supposed to do, fucking knit?"

"Man," Lothar said, still grinning, "you guys are a little sensitive…" LOTHAR AND POPE led the way down the hill with Joe, Conway, and Robey following. Lothar kept up a nonstop chatter. Pope nodded and prodded. He seemed pleased, Joe thought, proud of having Buck Lothar next to him, on his team. While Lothar told the story of tracking down an escaped inmate from the SuperMax prison in Canon City, Colorado, who had gotten out by shrink-wrapping himself in plastic and hiding among rolls of clean linens, Pope looked over his shoulder at Joe and Robey and beamed at them, as if to say, "He's on our side."

"What kind of weapon was used, do we know that?" Lothar asked. Pope looked to Robey.

"No bullet was found," Robey said. "The best guess of our forensics guys based on the entrance and exit holes is a thirty-caliber."

Lothar snorted.

"What?" Pope asked.

Again the paternalistic smile. "A.30 bullet is used in at least eleven configurations that I know of, from a.308 carbine to a.30-06 to a 300 Weatherby Magnum. Plus, if you don't actually have the lead and you're basing the finding on the hole size, it could have just as easily been a 7mm with seven configurations or a.311 with three more configurations! Your shooter could not have used a more common caliber, so this tells us exactly nothing. Nothing! "

Robey leaned into Joe and whispered, "TMI." Too much information. THEY DUCKED under the crime-scene tape. Lothar asked Joe to show him where the body was hung and how. The master tracker stared at the space where Urman had been hung as if studying the body that was no longer there. Finally, he grunted as if coming to a conclusion of some kind and began walking the perimeter with his chin cupped in his right hand. Joe started to follow but Pope reached out and stopped him.

"Let him do his job," Pope said softly. "This is what we hired him for."

For fifteen minutes, Lothar studied the ground, the trees, the tape, the horizon, the opposite hillside, before pronouncing the crime scene "as useless as tits on a boar" because of the way it had been trampled by Urman's nephew and friends as well as law enforcement for two days.

"We can just forget this as being any help at all," Lothar said. "We've got to shift focus to where the shot was fired from and where the victim was hit. If we can pinpoint those two locations, we might have something to work with."

"Makes sense to me!" Pope said with enthusiasm. LOTHAR SAID to Joe, "When starting a search, there are three methods to choose from: the Grid Method, which consists of seven ninety-degree turns followed by seven intersecting ninety-degree turns; the Fan Method, where we start here at the center point where Urman's body was hung and walk away in a straight line fifty yards or so, complete a one-hundred-and-seventy-degree turn and walk back to the center point, then do it again a few feet over from the first trek until a pattern like a fan emerges; or the Coil Method, which is to start at the incident area and circle it, coiling back to it with three-meter spacing. I think this scene calls for the Coil Method."

Joe nodded, studying the folds and contours of the landscape. Behind him was black timber. In front was the saddle slope they had walked down from the vehicles, and on the other side of the slope the timber cleared and rose to a ridge, topped by granite outcroppings that had punched through the grass.

"Any questions?" Lothar asked.

"One," Joe said. "What happened to the prisoner who escaped from the SuperMax in Colorado?"

"I meant about search methods," Lothar said impatiently.

"We can coil around," Joe said, pointing across the meadow toward the rising slope, "but it makes sense to me that Frank was probably shot up there. That's where an elk hunter would be so he could look down on the meadows to the south."

Pope said, "Joe, would you please let the man do his work?"

"Actually," Lothar said, looking where Joe had gestured, "he makes a lot of sense. Joe knows more about animal hunting than I do, so he's probably right. We should start up there. My area of expertise is man hunting, not elk hunting."

Pope huffed and crossed his arms across his chest, chastened.

"So what about the escaped prisoner?" Joe asked.

"Butch and Sundance treed him near Colorado Springs." Lothar sighed, as if the conclusion of the story was so boring and inevitable that it was a waste of his time. "And a guard killed him with an AR- 15. He fell out of the tree like a sack of potatoes." JOE BEGAN to admire Lothar's skill as they crossed the saddle slope. It was like hunting or stalking in super-slo-mo, Joe thought. Lothar moved a foot or two, then squatted to study the ground in front of him for bent grass stalks, footprints, depressions, anything left behind. Robey had stayed back at the crime scene to call his office, and Pope was still there, once again working his cell phone. Wally Conway was with him. As Joe and Lothar distanced themselves from Robey and Pope, the quiet took over. Whether it was Lothar's caution and study affecting him or the fact that just the day before a man had been hunted down and murdered at this very location, Joe's senses seemed to tingle.

The afternoon was cooling down quickly as a long gray sheet of cloud cover was pulled across the sun. Joe felt the temperature drop into the midforties. It dropped quickly at this elevation, and he zipped his jacket up to his chin. A slight breeze kicked up, enough to make the tops of the trees sound like they were sighing. Whirls of wind touched down in the far-off meadows, making dead leaves dance in upward spirals.

He nearly stumbled into Lothar, who had dropped to his hands and knees and lowered his head to ground level until his jaw was nearly in the dirt, looking toward the opposite slope.

"All right," Lothar said, "the story is starting to tell itself to us."

"What story?"

"Come down here and see for yourself."

Joe bent to his hands and knees, mimicking Lothar's perspective.

"What am I looking at?" Joe asked.

"Get your head low," Lothar said, "so low the grass touches your cheek, and look toward the mountainside over there."

Despite feeling a little silly, Joe all but pressed his face against the ground. When he did, from his new angle, he could clearly see two lines, like dry-land ski tracks, through the grass on the far slope.

"Those are heel marks," Lothar said, "where our shooter dragged Urman from where he shot him to where he hung him in the trees. They're hard to see because the grass is so short and the sun is straight over our heads. But when you get down at grass-stop level, you can see where Urman's boot heels or boot toes bent the top of the grass and made furrows."

Joe grunted, impressed. He assumed Urman's body had been moved to where it was hung up, but surprised it had been moved such a long way.

"It makes sense now when you think of it," Joe said, standing up and brushing bits of grass and dirt from his clothing. "The shooter wanted to hang him from a tree like a deer or elk, and the nearest trees are back where we started. So he had to drag the body across here."

"Which means," Lothar said, "we have a good chance of finding a footprint. If the shooter was dragging the body, he was setting his feet hard into the ground to pull. Urman wasn't a small man, so it would have been hard work. Even though the ground is hard and dry, he might have made a footprint we can find because he was stepping down with so much effort in order to drag the body along."

Joe nodded.

"I've got a question for you," Lothar said. "You mentioned that far hillside would be a good place to hunt because one can see so well from there."

"Yup."

"If it were you, where would you set up to look for elk? Where specifically?"

Joe studied the slope, fixing on the granite outcroppings. Several were too low down to provide a good field of vision into the valley. But there was one outcropping toward the top of the slope that not only offered a hunter enough cover to hide behind, but was high enough up the slope to see well into the valley below. Joe pointed at it. "There." THE SPLASH of blood on the granite was dark, almost black. It was puncture-wound blood, entry-wound blood. A few feet away on the rock was a spray of bright red arterial blood where the bullet exited Frank Urman's body and tumbled somewhere down the saddle slope. From where Joe stood above the outcropping, he could visualize a herd of elk grazing on in the meadows below, downslope.

"From the angle of the entry and the exit," Lothar said, "we can assume without doing any definitive ballistics or testing that the shooter"-he turned and pointed over Joe's head to the top of the ridge behind them-"was there."

Joe followed Lothar's finger. On the horizon was a bump of a knoll-perfect to hide behind.

"Will we be lucky enough to find a shell casing?" Lothar asked aloud but rhetorically as they climbed toward the knoll. "A cigarette? Anything? It's a shame Americans don't smoke anymore. In Europe, Asia, and the Middle East I can always count on finding butts."

Joe labored up the slope directly toward the knoll.

"No!" Lothar said. "Stop. Do not go up there."

Joe stopped, confused.

"Look," Lothar said, and Joe turned. In a depression in the granite, filled with fine sand deposited by the wind over the years, was a definitive boot print.

"It's perfect," Lothar said, as if examining a diamond. "I'd guess size eleven, Vibram soles but worn enough so the track is distinctive, one eighty, two hundred pounds based on the impression. Perfect!"

"It looks fresh," Joe said. "The wind or weather didn't get to it overnight."

"Even better than that," Lothar said, "is I doubt it was made yesterday. I think it's today's track, last night's at the very worst. Our man is still around."

Joe felt a chill wash over him.

While Lothar slipped his daypack off to prepare to make a composite cast, Joe looked back at the knoll.

"Don't you want to see what's up there?" Joe asked.

"Not now."

"What do you mean? When, then?"

"Not until dark," Lothar said. "We come back at dark."

"Why wait?"

Lothar looked up. "Joe, do you remember how when you got down on the ground down there you could see clearly where the victim was dragged? But that when we were just walking along we couldn't discern a thing?"

"Yes."

"That's why we track at night. It all comes out at night. You'll see what I mean. Trust me."

"But won't he get away?"

Lothar nodded. "He might. But if he took the chance of coming back here, for whatever purpose, he might have reason to stick around." BACK AT the crime scene, Lothar briefed Pope on what they'd found and how he intended to take action. When Lothar mentioned the possibility of the shooter still being in the area, Joe saw Pope's face drain of color.

"Maybe we should retreat to the vehicles," Pope said, "you know, so we can rest up."

"You mean get out of the line of fire," Lothar said. "Good idea."

As they hiked back to the trucks, Pope said, "The governor is prepared to issue a warning urging hunters to pack up their camps and go home. He's preparing to close all state lands and alert the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and private landowners of what's going on."

"My God," Joe said.

"That's right," Pope said. "I begged him to hold off, to give us a few days. But he's worried as hell that Klamath Moore will spill the beans anytime now. If Moore tells the world that hunters are being systematically hunted down and executed and it looks like the governor has been withholding that information, he'll look worse than incompetent. He'll be liable, and so will we."

Joe grunted. AS THEY walked up the hill toward the trucks, Joe felt vulnerable and exposed in more ways than one. Literally, they were in the open on the slope, and if the shooter was still out there it would be an easy shot with a scoped, high-powered rifle. He looked over his shoulder at the mountainside he and Lothar had just scoured. It wasn't inconceivable that the shooter could drop back over the rim into the knoll he'd used to kill Frank Urman and train his rifle on the four of them. "AND THE hits just keep on coming," Robey said to Joe and Pope as they approached the vehicles. "I talked with the sheriff's departments in Albany and Fremont counties. One guess what was among the items found in John Garrett's pocket when his body was brought in, and what was found inside the mouth of Warren Tucker but wasn't included in the reports for some unknown goddamned reason?"

"Red poker chips," Joe said.

"Yes," Robey said. "Red poker chips."

"Maybe the governor should close things down," Joe said. "It's looking like what we hoped it wasn't."

"That's what Rulon's new chief of staff is advising him," Pope spat. "She's telling him he should have done it yesterday."

Joe thought, She's a smart woman.

Pope reached out and grasped Lothar's arm. "We've got to find this shooter. Do you understand? We've got to find him tonight."

Lothar pulled away, annoyed. "I can't promise anything," he said.

"But you need to," Pope said, his eyes bulging with the kind of intensity Joe had seen directed at him several times. "That's why we brought you here. That's why we're paying you. This guy out there is about to destroy my agency."

Lothar looked away from Pope to Joe and Robey and mouthed, Asshole.

Wally Conway, who'd seen the interaction, looked away passively, not taking sides.