Chapter 10
Staying just feet from my rear bumper, the Deputy followed me out of town. I was certain that the Sheriff would soon know more about why his Deputy scowled at me. After all, he had told the folks in the diner about my adventure yesterday. So reporting my confrontation with him this morning would certainly be on his agenda with his boss.
I passed the Welcome to Willow Run sign and took the turnoff heading north toward the National Forest. Powell stuck close to my rear bumper. I braked at the entry to the unpaved Monarch Trail access parking area. The entrance was blocked by a large X formed by two crossed wooden poles. A sign on the poles read Trail Closed. So the local law had decided to preserve the scene after all. My opinion of their skills shot up one or two notches on seeing this.
I continued on past this access area and saw in my rear view mirror that the Deputy was turning around. He must have satisfied himself that I wasn’t going to mess with his crime scene, so he didn’t need to tag along.
But he was wrong. I wasn’t going to let this go. I just wasn’t going to park in this access lot. That would be too obvious if the Deputy came back by. But like the grid of highways in this country, most trails intersect other trails. So I would simply hike in from a different starting point. After driving another mile, I pulled into the next access parking area, The Dells, and checked the trail map I’d picked up at the motel. Sure enough, the Monarch and Dells trails intersected. I would have two or three more miles of hiking to get to Monarch Trail, but I had plenty of time. I started hiking.
It was still early in the day, and the sun slanted through the trees at an acute angle, just barely lighting the forest floor. The birds and squirrels were busily pursuing their breakfasts or marking their territories. It was peaceful. Again, I was alone on a trail. My faithful companion, solitude. I had been alone yesterday, until the wilderness got crowded with a body, the bounty hunters, and the Deputy. I hoped for a less crowded wilderness today. Solitude would be perfect.
After a hike of a couple miles, the trail forked. At the fork stood a brown wooden post. There were yellow arrows on two sides of the post. The arrow going to the right was labeled Dells, while the one to the left read Monarch. I went left. This trail connector was not well maintained. Downed branches lay across it, and bushes grew over it. A trek of perhaps a half-mile brought me to a section of path I recognized from yesterday. I was joining the Monarch Trail not far from where it entered the ravine below the cliff.
When I emerged out of the woods and into the ravine, the sun was well up in the sky, and the air felt hot. Before entering the ravine, I did a 360-degree scan for anyone in the area. Satisfied that no one was taking aim at me, I walked straight toward the spot where I found the body.
The bloodstain that had been on the ground was gone. I noted that the piece of brown paper, the one that had been under the right hand of the dead guy, was also gone. I couldn’t recall if it had vanished with the body yesterday or not. It probably didn’t matter, but it bothered me that I had overlooked that, in spite of it being just a small detail. Even with the panic I felt on discovering that the body was gone and later showing the spot on the ground to Deputy Powell, I should have been alert enough to notice the absence or presence of that bit of possible evidence. But I just couldn’t remember. I really was rusty, a very rusty ex-cop.
At least today I was alert enough to realize something else. Yesterday when I found that the body was missing, I had seen the drag marks in the dirt and then the single line of boot prints leading toward where a vehicle must have been parked, just beyond the rise ahead. But if someone had come out here to snatch the body, where was the trail of boot prints leading up to this point? Without that, the scenario proposed by the Sheriff and Deputy was more plausible: the guy fell down, then got up and walked away.
I started scanning around the area, looking for the trail of boot prints coming in toward the body. It had to be here. I saw the disturbed ground where Enid and I scuffled. I saw my footprints leading away from the body toward where the vehicle was parked and then back again to this spot. But that was it. So I stepped over the spot where the body had been and walked slowly several paces away, scanning left and right, looking for another set of imprints. The ground in this direction was rocky. If the body snatcher had come in this way, he wouldn’t have left an obvious trail.
About a dozen feet out, I found an area where the ground was more soil than rock. And there were boot prints coming inward, the same kind of imprints that led away from the body. I placed a dollar bill next to one of the clearly visible prints and took some pictures of both the right and left foot impressions and of the spacing between individual prints to judge stride length. US paper currency is six inches in length. In the absence of a measuring tape, it served as a good indicator of scale. The boot print was perhaps eleven inches in length. Smaller than those of the Deputy, the Sheriff, or me. Yet larger than the small feet of the dead Hispanic.
The presence of this imprint simply confirmed what I already knew. Someone came over and carried him away. It also confirmed what I suspected, that the Sheriff was not very thorough in his search for evidence at the scene. There was no indication that he had come over this way or followed my other path over to where the vehicle had been parked. He had simply walked up to where I found the body, collected the blood, and left. He had already concluded what happened. A guy fell down, got up, and walked away. Case closed.
But then, why would the Sheriff be motivated to look for evidence? There was no body. Could I really blame him for being skeptical? I might be an ex-cop, but I was nobody to him. Just an unemployed drifter. Not credible in the least.
Yet I knew I was right. And there was more to be learned. So I followed the track of prints for several more yards. I saw that the track turned slightly and then went in a straight line toward where the vehicle would have been parked. No deviation. No wandering around. This was not a search pattern. The strides were widely spaced and deeply impressed in the ground, like he was running. It was as if he knew where to go and what he would find. He ran to the spot, and then walked away carrying a corpse.
Backtracking to the spot where the body had been, I took pictures of the left and right boot prints in front of me, again using my dollar-bill ruler.
I walked over the rise to the tire tracks and studied them. The track width would provide a guess at the type of vehicle. My shoed foot is almost exactly a foot long. I paced heel-to-toe across the width of the track. The distance from tire center to tire center was about six feet. And the tread width was nearly a foot. Big dimensions, what one might expect for a sizeable truck or a Hummer. I placed a dollar bill, my six-inch ruler, across the tire track and took a picture.
I needed to confirm my speculation from last night, that two bounty hunters were involved. I went past where the vehicle had been parked, searching for footprints from the guy with the rifle. I soon found them in some soft ground. They were headed directly to where the vehicle had been. I had intended to get a time measurement of how long it would take for the guy with the rifle to get from the ridge above down to this spot. I didn’t think it could be done in the brief time between when I saw him up there and when the body disappeared. To get the measurement, I would have gone up to the ridge, found his tracks, and then followed them down to here. But now there clearly was no need to do that.
I took some pictures of these boot prints in the sandy soil, again using my dollar-bill ruler. The pattern looked very similar, if not identical, to the other boot print pictures and perhaps even the same size. But these new prints were strikingly different. Unlike the prints left by the body snatcher, there was a distinctive gap in one of the imprint ridges near the ball of the right foot. It was as if a chunk of the sole had been gouged out by a rock or other sharp object. And the left foot splayed outward a bit relative to the straighter tract of the right foot. Two different sets of boots, two
different guys: the one with the rifle and the body snatcher.
Still wanting to make the climb to the top of the cliff to check something, I first noted the time on my cell phone. As I climbed, the sun was again in my eyes. Bushes blocked my view of the ravine below, and my attention was focused on climbing over the loose footing. I located the place where I’d stopped when first spotting the guy with the rifle. Then I knelt down. Twenty-four minutes. I duck-walked sideways across the slope, just as I had done yesterday. Then I crawled up to the ridge where the guy with the rifle had been. I checked the time. Seven more minutes had elapsed. During that entire time, just over a half hour, I was out of sight of the ravine below. I would not have been able to see anything from the base of the cliff all the way to where the vehicle had been parked. That was plenty of time for the body to have been taken, and I wouldn’t have seen any of it.
From the vantage point of the ridge, I couldn’t see the place where the vehicle had been parked. But I could see the route I had taken up the slope and the spot where the body had been. Briefly, I wondered why it had not occurred to me to look down at the body when I’d been up here yesterday. But the circumstances were quite different then. I had been focused on looking for a man with a rifle. At that point, my thoughts were on preserving my own body.
So, the different boot prints confirmed there were two guys. One was on the high ridge watching me. The other one was snatching the body. Then, as soon as the body was taken, there was no need to keep an eye on me any longer. So the guy with the gun ran down the other side of the slope to the vehicle. They were probably gone long before I finished my climb back down. I saw none of it, except a brief glimpse of the guy on top of the ridge. It was a slick operation that had to be improvised on the spot. Very impressive.
I had to talk to the Sheriff about this new evidence. It wasn’t much, but I felt it was important. He wouldn’t be pleased that I was doing this. Yet it seemed like the right thing to do for the sake of the dead man.