two shells and a thermos. Yet all three are clean of prints. How could that be? Is he a professional or not? Or is he just a lucky amateur?
Bob looked at the bipod marks, still immaculate in the dust, undisturbed by the process of making plaster casts of them. They would last until the rain, and then be gone forever. They told him nothing, bipod, big deal. You could buy the Harris bipod in any gun store in America. Varmint shooters used them and so did police snipers. Some men used them when they took their rifles to the range for zeroing or load development, but not usually: because the bipod fit by an attachment to the screw hole in which the front swing swivel was set. That meant the screw could work lose under a long bench session and that it could change the point of impact much more readily than a good sandbag. Some hunters used them, but it was a rarity, because you almost never got a prone position in the field, so the extra weight was not worth it. Some men used them because they thought they looked cool. Would that be our guy?
He stared at imprints of the legs, trying to divine a meaning from their two, neat square images. No meaning arrived. Nothing.
But contemplating the bipod got him going in another direction: What's he see? Bob wondered. What's he see from up here?
So he went to the prone and took up a position indexed to the marks in the dust. From there he had a good, straight-on view of Dade's position, yes, and the shot-with the stable rifle, the sun behind you, the wind calm as it was at that point in the day--it was just a matter of concentrating on the crosshairs, trusting the rig, squeezing the trigger and presto, instant kill. You threw the bolt, and no more than a few seconds later you had the woman.
He now saw how truly heroic Julie had been. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine out of a thousand inexperienced people just freeze on the spot. Sniper cocks, pivots a degree or so, and he has a second kill. But bless her brilliant soul, she reacted on the dime when Dade went down, and off she went with Nikki. He had to track her.
Bob had a thought here. What happens if the point where she was hit wasn't within pivot range of this spot?
What happens if there's some impediment? But there wasn't. It was an easy crank, an arc of about forty degrees, nothing in the way, you just track her, lead her a bit and pull the trigger.
Why did he miss?
Bob thought he had it.
He probably didn't keep the rifle moving as he pulled the trigger. That's why he hits her behind the line of her spine, he's centered on her, but he stops when he fires, and the bullet, arriving a tenth of a second later, drills her trailing collarbone.
That made a sort of sense, though usually when you were tracking a bird or a clay with a shotgun and you stopped the gun, you missed the whole sucker, not just hit behind on it. Maybe the birds moved faster. On the other hand, the range was a lot farther than any wing or clay shooting. On the third hand, the velocity of the rifle bullet was much faster.
There were so many goddamned variables.
He sat back.
Used to be pretty goddamned good at this stuff, he thought. Used to have a real talent for understanding the dynamics of a two- or three-second interval when the guns were in play.
None of this made any goddamned sense, not really, and he had no way of figuring it out and his head ached and it was about to rain and destroy the physical evidence forever and Junior nickered again, bored.
Okay, he thought, rising, troubled, facing the fact that he had not really made any progress. He turned to go back to the horse and his empty house and his unopened bottle of Jim Beam and Then he saw the footprint.
Yeah, the cops missed a footprint, that's likely.
He looked more closely and saw in a second that it was his own footprint, a Tony Lama boot, size 11, the one he was wearing, yes, it was his goddamned own. A little hard to ID because he'd turned and sort of stretched it out and That was it.
There it was.
He turned back, quickly, and stared at the bipod imprints.
If he has to pivot the bipod, the bipod marks would be distorted. They'd be rounded from the fast, forceful pivot as he followed her, and one would inscribe an arc through the dust. But these bipod marks were squared off, perfectly.
Bob looked at them closely.
Yes: round, perfect, the mark of the bipod resting in the dust until the rain came and washed it away.
He saw it now: this was a classic phony hide. This hide was built to suggest the possibility that a screwball did the shooting. But our boy didn't shoot from here. He shot from somewhere else, a lot farther out.
Bob looked at the sky. It looked like rain.
He rode the ridgeline for what seemed like hours, the wind increasing, the clouds screaming in from the west, taking the mountains away. It felt like fog, damp to the skin. Up here, the weather could change just like that. It could kill you just like that.
But death wasn't on his mind. Rather, his own depression was. The chances of finding the real hide were remote, if traces remained at all. When the rain came, they would be gone forever. Again he thought: nicely thought out. Not only does the phony hide send the investigation off in the wrong direction, it also prevents anyone from seeing the real hide until it is obliterated by the changing weather. So if he does miss something, the weather takes it out.
Bob was beginning to feel the other's mind. Extremely thorough. A man who thinks of everything, will have rehearsed it in his mind a hundred times, has been through this time and time again. He knows how to do it, knows the arcane logic of the process. It isn't just pure autistic shooting skill, it's also a sense of tactical craft, a sense of the numbers that underlie everything and the confidence to crunch them fast under great pressure, then rely on the crunching and make it happen in the real world. Also: stamina, courage, the guts of a burglar, the patience of a great hunter.
