Blood Trail (12 page)

“You’re
leaving
?” Joe said.

“Do I have to repeat myself? You heard me.” With that, he patted the hood of Joe’s pickup and walked away.

“Bastard,” Robey said through a mouthful of beef jerky.

“Would you rather have him here with us?” Joe said.

“No, but . . .”

“Let him go,” Joe said. “Wacey Hedeman once said of Sheriff McLanahan—before he was sheriff—‘Having him on the payroll is like having two good men gone.’ That’s how I feel about Pope being here.”

“He’s scared,” Robey said.

“So am I,” Joe said, getting out to help Lothar retrieve his gear from Pope’s vehicle.

 
 
AS DUSK approached, the wind died down and the forest went silent, as if shushed. Joe used his tailgate as a workbench and checked the loads in his Glock and shoved an extra twelve-shot magazine into the pocket on the front of his holster. He loaded his shotgun with double-ought buckshot and filled a coat pocket with extra shells. Because of the cold stillness, the metal-on-metal sounds of his work seemed to snap ominously through the air. He’d strapped on his body armor vest and pulled on his jacket over it, and filled a daypack with what he thought he might need: flashlight, radio, first-aid kit, bear spray, GPS unit, rope, evidence kit, Flex-Cuffs, a Nalgene bottle of water.

Lothar approached him. “I think it should just be the two of us,” he said.

Joe looked up at the back of Robey’s head in his pickup. He could see his friend’s jaw working as he ate more jerky. “I hate to leave Robey alone,” Joe said. “He’s not used to this kind of thing.”

Lothar said, “Man tracking isn’t a group sport. The more people we have, the more likely we’ll blow our advantage. You have the experience and the equipment and he doesn’t. Simple as that. Besides, we need someone here in camp with a radio in case we need to relay information. If all of us are deep in the timber without a way to call for help if we need it, we’re screwed.”

Joe started to object when Robey swung out of the pickup. “I overheard,” he said, “I’ll be fine, Joe. I’m a big boy.”

Wally Conway, who’d stood by silently watching Joe prepare his weapons, said, “I’ll be here with him.”

Joe felt bad about overlooking Conway, said, “You’re right, I’m sorry. But at least call the sheriff’s office so he can send up a couple of deputies. Or get those DCI boys back that Pope sent home. You may need help and we may need reinforcements.”

“I said I’m fine,” Robey said, adding some heat to his voice. Joe didn’t want to press it at the risk of further alienating his friend. Robey had rodeoed in college until he broke both his pelvis and sternum in Deadwood, which is when he decided to get serious about law school. Although he’d gotten plump and soft over the years, he didn’t want to acknowledge the fact.

“Robey—”

“Really,” Robey said to Joe with force. “Just get me set up with a weapon and a radio and I’ll be here when you guys get back.”

“I can shoot,” Conway said weakly. “I’ve hunted all my life. I can help out any way you want me to.”

Lothar looked away as if he had nothing to do with the quarrel.

“I’m just wondering about our strategy here,” Joe said to Lothar. “There’s just four of us. I was thinking we might want, you know, an overwhelming show of force.”

Lothar shook his head. “That’s old school. We’re going for a small, deadly force here. Matching wits with the bad guy and taking him down with as little fuss as possible. Isn’t the idea here to get this guy before he makes the news? Isn’t that what Pope and your governor want most of all?”

Joe grimaced. “Yup.”

“Then let’s do it this way,” Lothar said. “We can always apply overwhelming force later if we need to. Your governor can fill the trees with the National Guard and the sky with helicopters. But in my experience, and we’re talking fifteen years of it on just about every continent, it’s better to go light and smart instead of dumb and big. If we can find this guy before he knows we’re on him, we lessen the chance of unnecessary casualties. Plus, if we get him, we’ll look damned good and maybe you can send this Klamath Moore guy home.”

Joe looked at Robey and Conway. “You sure you don’t want to call for backup?”

“I’m sure,” Robey said.

Conway nodded, deferring to Robey.

Against his instincts, Joe let it lay.

 
 
FAR ENOUGH AWAY from the vehicles not to be overheard, Joe pulled out his cell phone. Despite what Pope had said about signals fading in and out, he had all bars.
“Pope
. . .
”
Joe hissed, as if it were a swear word. He punched the speed dial for home. While he waited for someone to answer, he saw Lothar showing Robey and Conway how to arm and fire an AR-15. Robey was sighting down the open sights as Lothar talked him through it.

Sheridan answered.

“Hi, Sherry,” Joe said. “Is your mom around?”

I DON’T WANT
to come out again, but I have no choice. When I saw him in the airport and found out why he’s here and what he’s doing, I knew I had an opportunity I may never get again. He has forced my hand. The question is whether or not he’s doing it deliberately as part of his plan or it’s something that just happened. But when I saw his face, heard his voice, saw that his attitude hadn’t changed, I knew at that second that I would be out again, despite the fact that I’m physically tired and my absence may be noted.

I know the terrain so well now. It seems to flow under my feet. I feel like I’m gliding . . .
.

11

IN THE opaque blue light of the full moon, Joe saw what Lothar meant when he said it all comes out at night. Joe stayed back, giving Lothar room to work, nervously rubbing the stock of his shotgun with his thumb, watching the master tracker work while keeping his ears pricked to sound and peering into the shadows of the forest for errant movement.

Lothar started at the single good boot print they’d found earlier. As the moonlight fell on the short grass it created shadows and indentures that couldn’t be seen in the day. Using a slim flashlight held inches above and parallel to the ground, they could detect more now-visible footprints going up the hill toward the knoll. Lothar placed the tip of the tracking stick on the depression where the ball of the shooter’s foot had pressed into the grass, and telescoped out the instrument to the ball of the second. With a twist of his wrist, he locked the tracking stick into the exact length of the shooter’s stride.

“Thirty inches,” Lothar whispered to Joe. “He has a normal stride for a man in good shape. At that rate, even weighted down with a weapon and a light pack, we can expect him to travel at a normal pace of a hundred and six steps per minute, four to eight miles a day. A healthy and well-fed man can sustain this pace for four days.”

Joe nodded.

“We’ll use moonlight as long as we can,” Lothar said, twisting the flashlight off. “We can see his footprints in the moonlight—”

“Which amazes me,” Joe said.

Lothar grinned. “It’s all about the ambient light. It strikes at a different angle and in a different way and it brings the shadows and depressions of a footprint out of the ground. It gives the ground a whole different texture. And now that we know the shooter’s stride length, if we lose the track—like if he was walking on solid rock or something—we can estimate where he should have stepped and maybe find a dislodged stick or a mud transfer or something.”

“Since we’ve got his track, why aren’t we using the dogs?” Joe asked.

“Too loud,” Lothar said, shaking his head. “Dogs might run him down, but of course he’d know we were behind them. This way, if we’re able to find him purely on our own, we might catch him totally by surprise.”

 
 
THERE WAS nothing left behind in the knoll they could see with the red flashlight lenses, no spent rifle cartridges, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, or definitive markings to reveal the shooter’s height or weight. But Lothar had no doubt this was where the shot was fired by the way the grass was still pressed down in places and the clear view it afforded of the granite outcropping where Frank Urman was hit. They picked up the track as they cleared the top of the ridge, and in the moonlight it was so obvious even Joe could see it with his naked eye. Only once did Lothar need to use the flashlight and his tracking stick to find it again.

They followed the boot prints for half an hour as the moon rose. Because they were not using artificial light, Joe’s eyes adjusted and he found himself able to see well by moon and starlight.

“There’s something I don’t get,” Lothar whispered to Joe. “I get the feeling he came here the first time taking every possible precaution because I simply don’t see his tracks on the way in or out, but that when he came back the second time he was sloppy and careless, just trucking along. What made him drop his guard?”

Joe shrugged. He was wondering the same thing.

“I like it,” Lothar said, patting his weapon. “If he’s become sloppy, we have a better chance of taking him down.”

“That’s what you want to do?” Joe asked. “Take him down? How about we try to arrest him first?”

Lothar snorted. “Do you think he’ll let us?”

“I say we try.”

Lothar grinned wolfishly. “I say we light him up and smoke his ass.”

 
 
IT WAS difficult to walk without making any sound, Joe found. There was too much downed, dried timber and finger-thick branches that snapped when stepped on. Joe felt remarkably uncoordinated, and it seemed like he made twice as much noise as Lothar, who had a way of walking deliberately and silently by leading heel first and shifting his weight forward into each step. Joe tried to mimic the technique, stepped on an errant twig, whispered,
“Sorry!”

Lothar stopped in the shadows, and Joe could tell by the angle of the tracker’s head and the set of his shoulders he was about to receive another lesson in the art of man tracking.

“You’ve got to be quieter,” Lothar said in an urgent whisper.

“I’m trying,” Joe said.

“If he hears us he could set up an ambush.”

“I
know
that.”

“If we can maintain silence we might hear him first.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Joe hissed back.

“Sound travels at a speed of seven hundred and twenty miles per hour, or about eleven hundred feet per second. The forest will slow that down a little, but if we hear something we can estimate distance. And if we see a flash of light like from a headlamp or flashlight, we can use sound and light to determine how to close in on him.”

“So we can light him up and smoke his ass,” Joe said with sarcasm.

“That would be correct. So step lightly.”

 
 
WHILE THEY moved through the dark timber, Joe recalled his call to Marybeth. When he told her about seeing Earl Alden’s jet land at the airport and Alden being greeted by her mother, there was a long silence until Marybeth sighed and said, “Here we go again.”

When Marybeth asked when he’d be back, Joe said, “Early tomorrow,” with a kind of heavy sigh he hoped would mislead her into thinking his assignment was benign. As usual, it didn’t work. Under sharp questioning, he told her what had gone on, from seeing Klamath Moore and his throng at the airport to Randy Pope going back to town, leaving Joe up there with Conway, Robey, and Lothar the Master Tracker.

“There are so many things wrong in what you just told me,” she said, “I don’t know where to start.”

“I know,” he said sourly.

“What is Randy Pope up to?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wish you could just come home.”

“Me too,” Joe said. “I operate best on the margins, not in the middle of a team.”

“Having Nate around hasn’t hurt either,” she said.

“True.”

“Joe, be careful. Something about this doesn’t sound right.”

Joe agreed, and asked her to contact Sheriff McLanahan’s office or Phil Kiner and request backup, whether Robey said he needed it or not.

 
 
NOW, AS HE shadowed Lothar through the shafts of moonlight in the trees, he wondered whether the shooter was just as aware of them as they were of him. Given the skill and experience the killer had shown (at least on his initial stalk and kill of Frank Urman), Joe didn’t doubt the shooter was fully capable of making a stand and possibly even leading his pursuers into a trap. Maybe, Joe thought, the shooter’s sloppiness was deliberate in order to make his tracks easy to follow. To lure them in. And despite Lothar’s bold talk, Joe had no idea how the tracker would really react in a situation, whether he’d stand and fight or panic.

Joe wished he’d spent more time with Sheridan and Lucy that morning, wished he’d made love to Marybeth rather than inventorying his gear for the fourth time. Wished he wasn’t on a dark mountainside with a man he didn’t trust tracking a killer he couldn’t fathom.

“WANT A piece of jerky?” Robey asked Wally Conway in Joe’s pickup.

“No thanks,” Conway said. “I don’t think I could eat anything right now.”

“I’m just the opposite,” Robey said. “I can’t stop.”

“I guess people react to fear in different ways,” Conway said.

The moon had risen over the treetops and was bathing the top of the pines and the mountain meadows in a ghostly blue-white. Although it was getting colder, Robey hadn’t yet turned on the engine. He kept his window a quarter open as well, so he could hear shouts or shots if there were any. The truck radio was set to a channel Joe fixed for the handheld he had taken with him two hours before. There hadn’t been a report from Joe and Lothar since they walked down the saddle slope. Lothar had told Robey not to expect one until they decided to head back. Lothar also asked him to try not to call them and break radio silence unless it was an emergency.