Chapter 14

I got my tracking expertise in the Mojave Desert, where the ground is mostly clay, with gravel and sand scattered through it, and the occasional gully with its pure sand bottom. But I'd been a cop in Red Hawk for two years, and while I hadn't been anything like the official police tracker, I'd done enough that I knew in general how to handle the job in the wetter, more vegetated Oklahoma environment.

I backed off to the path we'd come into the woods on, and found one of the investigators just coming along – Allen Mills. "What do we have, Chief?" he asked.

"A DB in there," I told him, pointing the way. "We haven't approached – you'll see where we stopped, just at the edge of the clearing. I haven't even tried to make a determination as to who it is or why he's dead – but as you can smell, he is most definitely dead."

Mills smiled. "Really, most sincerely dead?"

I grinned. "You like that flick too?"

"Yep."

"It's Cecelia's favorite," I said, and sure enough she was grinning. It's seldom that she expresses her emotions so openly outside of the family, but The Wizard of Oz calls for an exception.

"Not my favorite," he said, "but it'll do. They don't make 'em like that these days."

"No, they don't," I said. "You got an ETA on forensics?"

"About 20 minutes," he said, and looked at his watch. "Make that 15 now."

"Okay. You ever handled a DB?"

"No, but I checked with Stan before I rolled."

"Okay, I know he cleared that DB case – what was it, two years ago?"

"Yeah, about that."

"Okay," I said, "then I'll leave you to get started, as much as you can. Me an' Cecelia are gonna see if we can spot how he got there."

"No signs here?"

"Not that I could see," I told him. "I watched the ground as I came in, but there'd already been a bit of trampling and if anything had been there, it's not now."

He nodded, looking at the ground. "That yours, Officer Carpenter?" he asked, pointing to the splat of vomit.

"Yes."

"Good work. Everyone throws up their first time in a situation like this – most can't make it so far from the scene before they do."

She nodded, and her color, which had been slowly coming back, fled again. "I quite literally could not have run another step beyond this point – it would emerge."

"You did good, Officer," he said. It was clear his attention was now on his job, so I led Cecelia back along the path a few yards.

"Okay, C, I want you to stay behind me. You saw me work that time in the desert, so you know more or less what I'll be doing."

She nodded, and I turned and plunged into the woods. It wasn't a mature forest – somewhere along the line whoever had owned the land at the time had chopped down whatever grew there, and now the growth was young, with trunks averaging about six inches in diameter or thereabouts. The brush was thick, as is always the case in new forests where the trees aren't big enough to block light from coming to the ground, and there's been no creeping fire to clear the undergrowth away. The previous fall's leaves were all over the ground, and there were random fallen branches to trip us up or break beneath our feet.

Tracking isn't just looking for tracks. Here in this piece of woods tracks would be unusual anyway. It's hard to make tracks on a bed of springy dead leaves. What I was mostly looking for was disturbances in the leave litter, scars on tree trunks, threads caught on bark or bushes, anything that might have come from the body which was now off to our right. Something that had fallen out of a pocket would serve. Drag marks, spots of blood, a clump of hair stuck to a log, anything would be better than what I was finding, which so far was nothing.

It was slow work. Even in the desert, where you can actually see the ground, tracking isn't something you can do at a dead run, and if I was to find anything here I had to be very careful – assuming, of course, that there was anything to find. For all I knew the man had walked in the same way Cecelia had led me, and had dropped dead in the clearing of a perfectly natural heart attack. Calling out the crime scene people and an investigator, and this tracking expedition of mine, were precautions – if it were a natural death it would be just expended time, money, and energy, but if the body were the result of violence we'd have a head start and wouldn't have to go back and try to find evidence that we'd trampled on the first time.

I hadn't looked at my watch, but we'd been at it for about 20 minutes, slowly bending to the right to make a big circle around the scene, when I heard my call sign on the radio. I pulled it off my belt and said to it, "Unit 1, go Dispatch." I stopped where I was, so that in my distraction I wouldn't miss anything.

"Unit 1, the mayor would like to speak with you."

"What about?" I said, and I heard the annoyance in my voice.

"He hasn't said, Chief."

I didn't tell her to ask him – I knew she would have already, and I knew that as a city employee she wouldn't push the mayor too hard. "If he wants he can come out to this location, and I'll see him when I can. And tell him on my authority that if that's not satisfactory, he can come in and I'll hand him my shield."