2 Blood Trail (14 page)

“. . . and the wer would continue to die.” She sighed and began building the fallen pine needles into little piles. This was what she’d chosen to do with her life—to try to make a difference in the sewer the world was becoming—no point in complaining just because it wasn’t always an easy job. And she had to admit, it was a job that had gotten a hell of a lot more interesting since Henry had come into her life. The jury was still out on whether or not that was a good thing given that the last time they’d worked together she’d come closer to getting killed than she ever had in nine years on the Metro Police.

“And this time, I’m being eaten alive.” She rubbed at a bite on the back of her leg with the rough front of her sneaker. “Maybe I’m going at this the wrong way. Maybe I should have started with the people. What the hell am I going to recognize out here?” Then her hand froze over a patch of needles and slowly moved back until the needles were in full sunlight again.

The scorch mark was so faint she had to hold her head at just the right angle to see it. About two inches long and half an inch wide, it was a marginally darker line across the pale brown carpet of dead pine—the mark a spent cartridge might make against a tinder dry resting place.

Oh, all right,
honesty forced her to admit
, it could’ve been caused by any number of other things-like acid rain or bunny piss.
But it sure looked like a cartridge scorch to her.
Of course, it could’ve come from a legitimate hunter out here to blow away whatever it is legitimate hunters blow away.

There were plenty of bits of bare rock nearby where the gunman could have stood to retrieve his brass and plenty of places Vicki had cleared herself but she searched for tracks anyway. Not expecting to find any didn’t lessen the frustration when she didn’t.

Better to find where the shot came from. The ridge stood barely two and a half feet higher than the forest floor and the lines of sight hadn’t improved. Vicki looked up. The pine was higher than most of the trees around it but its branches drooped, heavy with needles, right to the ground. Then on the north side, she found a way in to a dimly lit cavern, roofed in living needles, carpeted in dead ones. It was quiet in there, and almost cool, and the branches rose up the trunk as regular as a ladder; which was a good thing because Vicki could barely see.

This was it. This had to be it.

Had she seen the pine from the field? She couldn’t remember, trees all looked alike to her.

She peered at a few tiny spurs snapped off close to the trunk, her nose almost resting on the bark. They could have been broken by someone scrabbling for a foothold.
Or they could have been broken by overweight squirrels. There’s only one way to be sure.
Settling her glasses more firmly on her face, she swung up onto the first branch.

Climbing wasn’t as easy as it looked from the ground; a myriad of tiny branches poked and prodded and generally impeded progress and the whole damn thing moved. Vicki hadn’t actually been up a tree since about 1972 and she was beginning to remember why.

If her nose hadn’t scraped by an inch from the sneaker print, she probably wouldn’t have seen it. Tucked tight up against the trunk on a flattened glob of pine resin, was almost a full square inch of tread signature. Not enough for a conviction, not with every man, woman, and child in the country owning at least one pair of running shoes, but it was a start. The stuff was so soft that removing it from the tree would destroy the print so she made a couple of quick sketches—balanced precariously on one trembling leg—then placed her foot as close to it as possible and heaved herself up.

Her head broke free into direct sunlight. She blinked and swore and when her vision cleared, swore again. “Jesus H. Christ on crutches. . . .”

She’d come farther into the woods than she’d thought. About five hundred yards away, due north, was the spot where Ebon had been shot. A half turn and she could see the small pasture where Silver had been killed, a little closer but still an amazing distance away. If Barry Wu had pulled the trigger, he should have no trouble making the Olympic team or bringing home a gold. Vicki knew that some telescopic sights incorporated range finders but even they took both innate skill and years of practice to acquire the accuracy necessary. Throw in a
moving
target at five hundred yards. . . .

She’d once heard that according to all the laws of physics, a human being should not be able to hit a major league fastball. By those same laws of physics, the assassin had hit not one, but two, and hit them out of the ballpark besides.

A quick search turned up rubs in the bark where he’d braced his weapon on the tree.

“Unfortunately,” she sighed, leaning her head back against a convenient branch, “discovering how and where brings me no closer to finding the answers to why and who.” Closing her eyes for a moment, the sun hot against the lids, she wondered if she’d actually go through with it; if when she found the killer, she’d actually turn him over to the wer for execution. She didn’t have an answer. She didn’t have an alternative either.

It was time to head back to the house and make some phone calls, although she had a sick feeling that a drive into town and a good look at Constable Barry Wu’s sneakers would be more productive.

Climbing down the tree took less time than climbing up but only because gravity took a hand and dropped her seven feet before she landed on a branch thick enough to hold her weight. Heart pounding, she made it the rest of the way to the ground in a slightly less unorthodox fashion.

Had her Swiss army knife contained a saw, she would have attempted to remove that final branch, the one that lifted the climber out of the tree and into the light. Unfortunately, it didn’t and whittling off a pine branch two inches in diameter didn’t appeal to her. In fact, except for attempting to keep them out of those fields, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to prevent the tree from being used as a vantage point to shoot the wer.

“Never a beaver around when you need one,” she muttered, wishing she’d brought an ax. She had, however, uncovered two facts about the murderer. He had to be at least five foot ten, her height—any shorter and his shoulder wouldn’t be level with the place where the rifle barrel had rested—and the odds were good that his hair was short and straight. She dragged a handful of needles and a small branch out of her short, straight hair. Had her hair been long or curly, she’d never had made it out of the tree alive.

“Excuse me?”

The shriek was completely involuntary and as she caught it before it passed her lips Vicki figured it didn’t count. Her hand on her bag—it had made a useful weapon in the past—she whirled around to confront two puzzled looking middle-aged women, both wearing high-powered binoculars, one of them carrying a canvas bag about a meter long and twenty centimeters wide.

“We were just wondering,” said the shorter, “what you were doing up that tree.”

Vicki shrugged, waning adrenaline jerking her shoulders up and down. “Oh, just looking around.” She waved a not quite nonchalant hand at the canvas bag. “You out here to do a little shooting?”

“In a manner of speaking. Although this is our camera tripod, not a rifle.”

“It’s illegal to shoot on conservation authority property,” added the other woman. She glared at Vicki, obviously still unhappy at having found her up in a tree. “We would report
anyone
we found shooting out here, you can be certain of that.”

“Hey.” Vicki raised both hands to shoulder height. “I’m unarmed.” As neither woman seemed to appreciate her sense of humor, she lowered them again. “You’re birders, aren’t you?” A recent newspaper nature column had mentioned that
birders
was now the preferred term;
bird-watcher
having gone out of vogue.

Apparently, the column had been correct.

Twenty minutes later, Vicki had learned more about nature photography than she wanted to know; learned that in spite of the high-power binoculars the two women had seen nothing strange on the Heerkens farm—
“We don’t look at other people’s property
, we
look at birds.
”—and, in fact, didn’t even know where the Heerkens farm was; learned that a .30 caliber rifle and scope would easily fit into a tripod bag, allowing it to be carried into the woods without arousing suspicion. Although neither woman had ever come across a hunter, they’d both found spent shell casings and so were always on the look out. With middle-class confidence that no one would ever want to hurt them, they laughed at Vicki’s warnings to be careful.

There were two bird-watching clubs in London as well as a photography group run by the YMCA that often came out to the conservation area. Armed with names and phone numbers of people to contact—“Although the members of that
other
club are really nothing more than a group of dilettantes. You’d do much better to join us.”—Vicki bade farewell to the birders and tromped off through the bush, willing to bet big money that not everyone with a pair of binoculars kept then trained exclusively on birds and that someone was shooting more than film.

 

“Henry Fitzroy?” Dave Graham peered over his partner’s shoulder at the pile of papers on the desk. “Isn’t that the guy that Vicki’s seeing?”

“What if it is?” Celluci growled, pointedly turning the entire pile over.

“Nothing, nothing.” Dave went around to his side of the desk and sat down. “Did, uh, Vicki ask you to check into his background?”

“No. She didn’t.”

Dave recognized the tone and knew he should drop it, but some temptations were more than mortal man could resist. “I thought you and Vicki had a relationship based on, what was it, ‘trust and mutual respect’?”

Celluci’s eyes narrowed and he drummed his fingers against the paper. “Yeah. So?”

“Well . . .” Dave took a long, slow drink of his coffee. “It seems to me that checking up on the other men in her life doesn’t exactly fit into those parameters.”

Slamming his chair back, Celluci stood. “It’s none of your damned business.”

“You’re right. Sorry.” David smiled blandly up at him.

“I’m just looking out for a friend. Okay? He’s a writer, god knows what he’s been into.”

“Right.”

Seemingly of their own volition, Celluci’s fingers crumpled the uppermost paper into a tightly wadded ball. “She can see who she wants,” he ground out through clenched teeth and stomped out of the office.

Dave snickered into his coffee. “Of course she can,” he said to the air, “as long as she doesn’t see them very often and they meet with your approval.” He made plans to be as far out of range as possible when Vicki found out and the shit hit the fan.

 

By 10:27, Vicki was pretty sure she was lost. She’d already taken twice as long coming out of the woods as she’d spent going in. The trees all looked the same and under the thick summer canopy it was impossible to take any kind of a bearing on the sun. Two paths had petered out into nothing and a blue jay had spent three minutes dive-bombing her, screaming insults. Various rustlings in the underbrush seemed to indicate that the locals found the whole thing pretty funny.

She glared at a pale green moss growing all around a tree.

“Where the hell are the Boy Scouts when you need one?”

Vicki saw no apparent thinning of the woods; one moment she was in them, the next she was stepping out into a field. It wasn’t a field she recognized either. There were no sheep, no fences, and no indication of where she might be.

Settling her bag more firmly on her shoulder, she started toward the white frame house and cluster of outbuildings that the other end of the field rolled up against. Maybe she could get directions, or use their phone . . .

“. . . or get run off for trespassing by a large dog and a farmer with a pitchfork.” She was pretty sure they did that sort of thing in the country, that it was effectively legal, and that it didn’t matter because she wasn’t going back into those woods. She’d take on half a dozen farmers with pitchforks first.

As she approached, wading knee-deep through grass and goldenrod and thistles, she became convinced that no one had worked this farm for quite some time. The barn had a faded, unused look about it and she could actually smell the roses that climbed all over one wall of the white frame house.

The field ended in a large vegetable garden. Vicki recognized the cabbages, the tomato plants, and the raspberry bushes—nothing else seemed familiar.
Which isn’t really surprising.
She picked her way around the perimeter.
My vegetables usually come with a picture of the jolly green
. . . . “Oh. Hello.”

“Hello.” The elderly man, who had appeared so suddenly in her path, continued to stare, obviously waiting for her to elaborate further.

“I, uh, got lost in the woods.”

His gaze started at her sneakers, ran up her scratched and bitten legs, past her walking shorts, paused for a moment on her Blue Jays’ T-shirt, flicked over to her shoulder bag, and finally came to rest on her face. “Oh,” he said, a small smile lifting the edges of his precise gray mustache.

The single word covered a lot of ground, and the conclusion it drew would’ve annoyed the hell out of Vicki if it hadn’t been so accurate. She held out her hand. “Vicki Nelson.”

“Carl Biehn.”

His palm was dry and leathery, his grip firm. Over the years, Vicki had discovered she could tell a lot about a man based on how he shook hands with her—or if he’d shake hands at all. Some men still seemed absolutely confused about what to do when the offered hand belonged to a woman. Carl Biehn shook hands with an economy of movement that said he had nothing to prove. She liked him for it.

“You look like you could use some water, Ms. Nelson.”

“I could use a lake,” Vicki admitted, rubbing at the sweat collected under her chin.

His smile broadened. “Well, no lake, but I’ll see what I can do.” He led the way around the raspberry bushes and Vicki fell into step beside him. Her first view of the rest of the garden brought an involuntary exclamation of delight.