Chapter 16

While Cecelia put crackers, jerky, a couple of loaves of French bread, a big bag of trail mix, and some bottles of water into my backpack, I got my gun from the clip under the driver's seat. If we were dealing with a potential homicide, I was going to be too careful rather than not careful enough. I didn't anticipate any danger – that body had been there a while, and no one would be there watching over it to make sure we didn't do any backtracking – but I didn't get to be 42 years old by taking unnecessary risks. I never got stomped by a bad horse, and I never got snakebit, and I never got shot, because I take care not to get into situations where I have no way out. Of course things can happen when you're not expecting 'em, but preparedness is the best way to deal with that.

I did a quick and easy cleaning job, running a patch through the barrel and wiping the weapon down with a rag that was impregnated with gun oil. I shucked the ammo out of the magazine, and made sure that no dust or grit had gotten in. I reloaded the magazine and slipped it back into the gun, got a spare magazine out of my duffel bag and loaded that, wrapped it in another oily cloth, and stuck it in a pocket of my backpack. I put the box of ammo in too. If I needed to shoot either I wasn't going to need more than the 15 rounds in the first magazine, or all the ammo I could carry wouldn't help me, but I was again being too careful rather than not careful enough.

I filled a couple of canteens and strapped them around my waist, shrugged into my backpack and got it settled, and kissed Cecelia. "You will return as soon as you can, of course," she told me in a quiet voice, her lips brushing mine.

"Yeah. Sorry to do this to you, but I'm the only one who can do it."

"I know, Darvin, and I approve. Not only is it a necessary task, but it is refreshing to see you use something that is yours from youth. I only wish I could go along, and observe."

"I know, but you've got Darlia."

"Precisely, and while her stamina is great, it is not as great as yours, nor are her legs as long – even if I had a legitimate reason to accompany you, which I do not. We will, therefore, confine our exhausting activities to the vicinity of the camp, rather than permitting her to collapse far from friendly environs."

I put my hands on her cheeks – those smooth, slightly hollow cheeks that I've loved since 1994. "Cecelia, you would converse in learned terms and fancy words with the guy who ran the firing squad that shot you. I don't know no one else who talks like you."

She giggled. "Nor do I know anyone else who mangles the English language as industriously as you do. Begone, my husband, before I decide to permanently end your abuse of my mother tongue by means of a sudden and unanesthetized amputation."

"Okay, C, I'm going." I kissed her again, and went – but only as far as Darlia, who was playing with a couple of her dolls on the steps to the shed. I kissed her too, and gave her a big hug, and then she caught my cheeks and kissed me – a slobbery kiss that I had to wipe off my mouth while she laughed at me. One of these days she's gong to grow up and get married and have kids of her own – and I suspect that when I give her a kiss on her forty-fifth birthday she's going to make it slobbery.

I stood up again, and signaled the cops with my head, and we walked west, behind the shed, toward the crime scene.

There was still crime scene tape up when we got there, in a circle roughly 40 yards across. At that it was only roughly a circle, since the brush and Joshua trees hadn't obliged by making a desert fairy ring. I looked down at the overhanging bank for a moment, where there now wasn't any body, and then glanced at Castro. "I suppose the crime scene people have trampled all over the place."

"They had to, Mr. Carpenter."

"Yeah." I ducked under the tape and stepped off the bank of the gully, my bent knees and the soft sand cushioning the landing. I don't do five-foot drops as easily as I had when I'd lived in this country ... half my life ago, that had been. I slogged through the sand and crouched down on my heels a few feet from where the body had been. There was nothing there for me – and from what Castro had said, there'd been precious little for the cops. "Stay where you are," I called back up to Castro, Sverdlov, and Mulcahy. I looked up and down the bank and found a caved place with footprints all over it, where no doubt the cops had been coming and going. I scrambled up it, onto the opposite bank from where my companions still stood. I turned my head back and forth, not expecting to see anything with such a quick and dirty look but willing to give it a try just in case. Nope – nothing.

I decided to give up on the area inside the tape – I'd seen on the east bank, and saw now on the west bank, that the whole area was one big mishmash of footprints. If there'd ever been anything to find inside the scene, it was long gone now. I walked west, and once I was two or three yards outside the tape I commenced to circle to the north. I walked slowly, my head mostly down. Of course in the desert I look at the ground a lot anyway. Anyone who looks at the horizon in the desert is asking to step on a rattlesnake or a cholla ball, or put his foot in a rabbit or tortoise burrow, or trip over a rock. It's not like walking in the parking lot at church on Monday morning. But this time I wasn't just watching to see where I put my feet – I was looking for whatever faint signs I could find.

When I'd made a quarter circle and come back to the gully, I retraced my steps. There was nothing to make me believe that the body had come from the western side, but since that's where I was I'd cast around there first. And it really didn't matter, I supposed, where I started – any sign there might be, would be in the last place I looked. And in accordance with Finagle's law that the perversity of the universe tends toward the maximum, if I'd looked there first, the sign wouldn't have been there. It's happened to me enough that if I weren't a Christian I could easily believe in mischievous little spirits who watch where you're searching and move things away from there. At that, the Coyote of Lahtkwa legend would do exactly that if he thought of it.