In the Land of Milk and Honey (23 page)

“Cattle use this creek?” I asked Grady, looking at the mess of mud and snow and hoofprints along the bank.

Grady sighed. “Hell. It's not legal, but a lot of the farmers do it, especially the Amish. It's hard to explain to a man whose
family has farmed the same land for generations why politicians in Baltimore don't want his animals to have access to the free and plentiful water on his own land.”

I really didn't give a toss about the pollution of Chesapeake Bay at the moment. But our possible killer's footprints, so clean in the snow, had vanished into a churned-up creek bed that had been literally ridden herd over. I walked up and down the bank as carefully as I could, trying not to step anywhere there might be evidence. There was chicken wire strung up across the creek to the north, and a matching wire wall glinted to the south. Presumably, this kept the farm's animals from escaping the property.

The freaky thing was, there were no signs of tracks on the other side of the creek anywhere between those two makeshift fences. I rubbed my forehead, a sense of frustration starting in my stomach.

“Damn it!” Grady cursed, apparently reaching the same conclusion.

“How far is the road?” I asked.

As if to answer my question, an SUV lumbered past, visible through the trees on the far side. There was a road maybe thirty feet beyond the other side of the creek.

In a righteous world, the boot prints would have climbed out on the opposite bank and led right to that road. In a righteous world, there'd be tire tracks off the side of the road over there, tire tracks we could attempt to trace.

No one had to tell me it wasn't a righteous world.

I looked at the creek again, then went back to look at the boot prints. The prints with the toes facing the creek definitely overlaid the prints with the toes facing away. Unless the killer had walked backward in both directions—one way carrying a dead body—he hadn't come from the farm.

Grady stood there shaking his head. I decided,
Screw it
, and shucked my boots and rolled up my pant legs. At least this suit was a trendy wash-and-wear and didn't require dry cleaning.

“You don't have to do that.” Grady sounded uneasy.

I ignored him. If there was one thing I knew for sure about being a woman on the police force, it was that you didn't turn up your nose at getting physical or messy. You didn't wait for some guy to do it. If you wanted respect, you had to be willing to jump into the shit headfirst.

But, goddamn, this sucked. I waded into the ice water masquerading as a creek and followed the bank to the chicken-wire obstruction.

“Anything?” Grady called to me as I ran my hand along the chicken wire and stepped deeper into the creek.

When I reached the middle, the frigid water was streaming painfully around my upper thighs.

“Damn,” I muttered as I felt along
the fence.

A few inches below the surface of the water the wire ended. To be sure, I sent one leg forward on a foray. It swept through nothing but water. No wonder our Jane Doe had gotten wet. The killer had pushed her under these barriers and then likely followed by ducking under himself.

“Bastard walked through the creek,” I said, my voice shaking with cold and not a little disgust. “He came in and out under one of these fences, but he had to leave the water somewhere. We need to search the banks upstream and down from here. We'll find his tracks.”

I sounded confident. And I did believe what I was saying. We were talking about a man, after all, not a superhuman, not a ghost.

I was wrong.

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