Again the paternalistic smile. “A .30 bullet is used in at least eleven configurations that I know of, from a .308 carbine to a .30-06 to a 300 Weatherby Magnum. Plus, if you don’t actually have the lead and you’re basing the finding on the hole size, it could have just as easily been a 7mm with seven configurations or a .311 with three more configurations! Your shooter could not have used a more common caliber, so this tells us exactly nothing.
Robey leaned into Joe and whispered, “TMI.”
THEY DUCKED under the crime-scene tape. Lothar asked Joe to show him where the body was hung and how. The master tracker stared at the space where Urman had been hung as if studying the body that was no longer there. Finally, he grunted as if coming to a conclusion of some kind and began walking the perimeter with his chin cupped in his right hand. Joe started to follow but Pope reached out and stopped him.
“Let him do his job,” Pope said softly. “This is what we hired him for.”
For fifteen minutes, Lothar studied the ground, the trees, the tape, the horizon, the opposite hillside, before pronouncing the crime scene “as useless as tits on a boar” because of the way it had been trampled by Urman’s nephew and friends as well as law enforcement for two days.
“We can just forget this as being any help at all,” Lothar said. “We’ve got to shift focus to where the shot was fired from and where the victim was hit. If we can pinpoint those two locations, we might have something to work with.”
“Makes sense to me!” Pope said with enthusiasm.
LOTHAR SAID to Joe, “When starting a search, there are three methods to choose from: the Grid Method, which consists of seven ninety-degree turns followed by seven intersecting ninety-degree turns; the Fan Method, where we start here at the center point where Urman’s body was hung and walk away in a straight line fifty yards or so, complete a one- hundred-and-seventy-degree turn and walk back to the center point, then do it again a few feet over from the first trek until a pattern like a fan emerges; or the Coil Method, which is to start at the incident area and circle it, coiling back to it with three-meter spacing. I think this scene calls for the Coil Method.”
Joe nodded, studying the folds and contours of the landscape. Behind him was black timber. In front was the saddle slope they had walked down from the vehicles, and on the other side of the slope the timber cleared and rose to a ridge, topped by granite outcroppings that had punched through the grass.
“Any questions?” Lothar asked.
“One,” Joe said. “What happened to the prisoner who escaped from the SuperMax in Colorado?”
“I meant about search methods,” Lothar said impatiently.
“We can coil around,” Joe said, pointing across the meadow toward the rising slope, “but it makes sense to me that Frank was probably shot up there. That’s where an elk hunter would be so he could look down on the meadows to the south.”
Pope said, “Joe, would you please let the man do his work?”
“Actually,” Lothar said, looking where Joe had gestured, “he makes a lot of sense. Joe knows more about animal hunting than I do, so he’s probably right. We should start up there. My area of expertise is man hunting, not elk hunting.”
Pope huffed and crossed his arms across his chest, chastened.
“So what about the escaped prisoner?” Joe asked.
“Butch and Sundance treed him near Colorado Springs.” Lothar sighed, as if the conclusion of the story was so boring and inevitable that it was a waste of his time. “And a guard killed him with an AR- 15. He fell out of the tree like a sack of potatoes.”
JOE BEGAN to admire Lothar’s skill as they crossed the saddle slope. It was like hunting or stalking in super-slo-mo, Joe thought. Lothar moved a foot or two, then squatted to study the ground in front of him for bent grass stalks, footprints, depressions, anything left behind. Robey had stayed back at the crime scene to call his office, and Pope was still there, once again working his cell phone. Wally Conway was with him. As Joe and Lothar distanced themselves from Robey and Pope, the quiet took over. Whether it was Lothar’s caution and study affecting him or the fact that just the day before a man had been hunted down and murdered at this very location, Joe’s senses seemed to tingle.
The afternoon was cooling down quickly as a long gray sheet of cloud cover was pulled across the sun. Joe felt the temperature drop into the midforties. It dropped quickly at this elevation, and he zipped his jacket up to his chin. A slight breeze kicked up, enough to make the tops of the trees sound like they were sighing. Whirls of wind touched down in the far-off meadows, making dead leaves dance in upward spirals.
He nearly stumbled into Lothar, who had dropped to his hands and knees and lowered his head to ground level until his jaw was nearly in the dirt, looking toward the opposite slope.
“All right,” Lothar said, “the story is starting to tell itself to us.”
“What story?”
“Come down here and see for yourself.”
Joe bent to his hands and knees, mimicking Lothar’s perspective.
“What am I looking at?” Joe asked.
“Get your head low,” Lothar said, “so low the grass touches your cheek, and look toward the mountainside over there.”
Despite feeling a little silly, Joe all but pressed his face against the ground. When he did, from his new angle, he could clearly see two lines, like dry-land ski tracks, through the grass on the far slope.
“Those are heel marks,” Lothar said, “where our shooter dragged Urman from where he shot him to where he hung him in the trees. They’re hard to see because the grass is so short and the sun is straight over our heads. But when you get down at grass-stop level, you can see where Urman’s boot heels or boot toes bent the top of the grass and made furrows.”
Joe grunted, impressed. He assumed Urman’s body had been moved to where it was hung up, but surprised it had been moved such a long way.
“It makes sense now when you think of it,” Joe said, standing up and brushing bits of grass and dirt from his clothing. “The shooter wanted to hang him from a tree like a deer or elk, and the nearest trees are back where we started. So he had to drag the body across here.”
