Chapter 32

Cecelia glanced around, at the same things I'd looked at when I turned my circle and at the mostly clear sky overhead. Then she looked back at the undeveloped area. "I know what's bothering you, Darvin – this is a much larger site than he's used previously."

"That's exactly it!" I said. "Before he's been able to pull up in a vehicle, dump and pose the body, and take off without leaving any sign. This time he had to move the body what, 50 yards? More?"

I stood there thinking. "I've got sign. I've got footprints. How did he get the body over there? I didn't see a single indication that a vehicle had driven in or out..."

"A tarp?" Cecelia asked.

"I didn't see any drag marks ... wait, maybe I did. Come with." And I took off beside the trail, looking for certain specific indications. We'd walked perhaps 50 feet when I stopped and squatted down. "Right there, beside that broken rock," I said, pointing at a piece of shale or slate or something that looked like those sorts of things which, though embedded in the ground, had broken in two sometime in the past. "See that line?"

Cecelia squatted down beside me, and copying my fingers-on-the-ground trick, got her head sideways almost on the ground. "With your guidance I do, but I would never have noticed it on my own."

"It's a drag mark on hard ground. It's from a travois."

She looked at me. "How do you know that?"

"Remember, we're cousins of the Nimipu." The Lahtkwa Nation is related to the Indians that whites call the Nez Perce. "They're what I call Plains Indians in the mountains – you know they built conical lodges, and hunted buffalo every year in Montana, and we learned a lot of that from them, along with our love of Appaloosas. I've seen travois marks before. This puppy may not be an Indian, and anyway not all Indians used a travois, but he's learned about it somewhere."

Knowing now what I was looking for, I followed along the trail back toward the body, and found half a dozen other indications, in one place several inches long on both sides, so clear that I could only account for missing them the first time by concluding that I was so focused on blood and foot indications that I'd seen them without realizing what I saw.

So he'd made a mistake. Whether it would prove to be a useful mistake I didn't know. It might never make a difference, and it might turn out to be the most important part of the case. That's the problem with investigations – you just never know what you've got until it all comes together. You can gather boxes full of information, as this case already had, and have 99% of it turn out to be pointless. But you don't know what's pointless and what's crucial until the case is over and you can look back and judge everything in light of what you now know.

Another mistake was the phone call the perp had made that morning. I had found all I was going to find, I was sure, but I walked a spiral away from the body just to make sure that there was no other sign that might be useful. I had worked my way out to 10 or 15 yards from the body when Lt. Stubblefield came up to me. I stopped, and so did he, making sure that he didn't walk where I hadn't looked yet – he'd learned.

"I just got a call," he said. "When this creep called you this morning, it was a throwaway cell phone."

"I figured that."

"But maybe it's not all bad. It turns out that this particular phone came from the Wal-Mart on Coors, and the perp bought two others at the same time, day before yesterday. He hasn't activated the others so we can't get their numbers – they don't actually have numbers yet – but one of my people went over there and looked at their security video. He's on there."

I looked at Stubblefield. "That's great as far as it goes, Loo, but unless it's better quality than you'll find around, it ain't gonna be a lot of help."

"It's not great quality, no, but it's good enough that we have a description."

I grinned. "An' I bet you're gonna let me read it."

He grinned back. "Yes, I am." And he handed me a piece of paper.

It seemed our perp was white or Hispanic, 5'8" or thereabouts, around 180 pounds, with a clipped mustache ... he almost looked like me, it seemed. He'd been wearing a Dallas Cowboys hat so it was tough to say anything about his hair other than that it was dark. He'd also been wearing a Cowboys jacket with what appeared to be a t-shirt underneath it, jeans, and some sort of tennies – the term I learned for tennis shoes as a kid and which I've now expanded to cover sneakers, running shoes, cross training shoes, and all the rest of the specialized shoes that are really just glorified tennis shoes.