The sun was finally starting to burn the fog off as we finished collecting and labeling the evidence. It started getting hot, and the humidity was already unbelievable. I suggested we go back to the crime scene and walk a much wider area. And I suggested that we should proceed to the scene from where we were standing. Just like ‘‘they’’ would have.
It turned out that to get there we had to go up and over a large steep, slippery hill that was covered with damp fallen leaves, and hotter than hell. The trees were thick, and the area between them was covered with thorny brambles and thick, reedy weeds. Took us about two hours. I hate it when people take my suggestions. I was pretty well shot when we got to the top of the hill, and called a halt.
‘‘Hey,’’ I managed to get out, ‘‘let’s stop and catch our breath.’’
Hester, whose hair looked like she had just gotten out of a shower, said, ‘‘Why?’’ and promptly sat down. Eddie looked like he could keep going the rest of the week, but squatted down beside us just to be polite.
Eddie, looking energetically about him, asked, ‘‘How we gonna tell if they’re related, sir?’’
Not unlike Hester when she’s called ‘‘ma’am,’’ I get a bit put off by ‘‘sir.’’ ‘‘Oh,’’ I said, still breathing hard, ‘‘we’ll try for prints. From the shell casings.’’ I took a breath. ‘‘You have to touch ’em when you load ’em.’’ Another breath. ‘‘Then dust the boxes and the MREs.’’ I wiped my forehead, scratching myself with a bramble as I did so. ‘‘Shit. Then see if the same prints are on more than one item.’’
‘‘Oh, sure,’’ said Eddie. ‘‘Okay, then what?’’
Hester, bless her, took up the lesson. ‘‘We run every print through APHIS.’’ APHIS is a computerized fingerprint searching system. Very fast. ‘‘And we talk to whoever belongs to the prints.’’
He thought about that for a second. ‘‘But what if there aren’t any good prints, ma’am?’’
Hester looked at him evenly. ‘‘Then we send you out to piss again.’’
I paused for a second just before we went over the crest of the hill, and looked back. I’d been wondering if we would find a trail left by the perps. We hadn’t. But, looking back, I couldn’t see where we’d just been either. I pointed this out to Hester. She thought she could see a faint area of disturbed leaves, but agreed that in twenty- four hours there’d be nothing left to mark our passage either. Not good.
We got lucky for the last time on the way down toward the patch. We discovered what was obviously a man-made barrier, sort of a long, shallow hole with three or four fallen branches piled up around it. Rifle pit.
‘‘Just like the Army,’’ said Eddie.
‘‘Yep.’’
From the area of the pit, you could see part of the track we had followed up to the scene the day before, and part of the scene itself, with some lab people just starting their day. Thick trees and brush obscured the rest of the view. But, from our standpoint, it was a link. You could also see the southern edge of the marijuana patch.
Both Hester and I took several photos from the area of the pit, and of the pit itself. We called for a couple of members of the lab team, who were finishing up the original site, to come up to where we were, to process the area around the pit.
‘‘Know what, Carl?’’ asked Hester.
‘‘What?’’
‘‘This is kind of the same general area where the media people from yesterday were coming from.’’
‘‘Shit, that’s right.’’
‘‘I wonder if they saw anybody.’’
‘‘Or anything.’’
Our first try was for Lamar, but he was out of his car at the county attorney’s office, and we didn’t want to bother him. We tried for Hester’s boss, Al, who had also talked to the media, but he was testifying at a murder trial in Linn County and wasn’t available. We finally tracked down one of the two junior state troopers who had confronted the media people. He wanted to drive right out to where we were, but we finally convinced him to go to a telephone somewhere, and we called him. Save a lot of time that way.
He had the names of both media people and their organization. ‘‘The Des Moines Register. ’’ Nancy Mitchell. Of the Cedar Rapids bureau. Good. Philip Rumsford, freelance photojournalist. Worked for an agency out of Minneapolis-St. Paul, but lived in Dubuque, IA.
As it happened, both Mitchell and Rumsford were on their way to the park, for follow-up information. At least that’s what the answering machine at their office said. Hester and I waited, this time in her car. The air conditioning felt wonderful, but I made it perfectly clear to the people at the scene that we really had to use the car for communication purposes. We let Eddie go home, with a promise to let him know if anything useful came of his discovery. He was very pleased with having found something. We waited, trying to stay awake in the comfort of the car.
Hester moved her rearview mirror so she could see herself.
‘‘God, I look like shit.’’
I didn’t say anything for a second, thinking back over what we’d found.
‘‘I said,’’ said Hester, ‘‘ ‘God, I Look Like Shit.’ ’’
‘‘Oh, yeah,’’ I said. ‘‘Well, so do I.’’
‘‘Jesus, Houseman, you’re supposed to say that I don’t look like shit.’’
‘‘Oh. Okay. Sorry.’’ I grinned. ‘‘You don’t look like shit.’’
She sighed. ‘‘Sue has a hard life ahead of her.’’
Nancy Mitchell turned out to be the senior partner of the two. Between thirty-five and forty, she was fit, attractive, and although looking very harried, she did not look like shit. Philip Rumsford, who was about twenty-two, wasn’t nearly as fit, and was both photographer and second-string reporter. Harried didn’t seem to be in his repertoire, but sweat sure did. They had come in a small gray car, dusty, rusty, and with nonfunctional air- conditioning. That had been the first thing Philip mentioned, even before we had identified ourselves. ‘‘Damned air- conditioning’s out.’’ He looked a little peeved. Since Nancy was driving, I assumed it was her car.
Nancy, on the other hand, just seemed a bit surprised that we actually were seeking her out. I was becoming truly jealous over cell phones. Anyway, Lamar’s reputation for hating the press was really well known, and our request to talk with her had come as quite a surprise.
‘‘I’m Nancy Mitchell,’’ she said, extending her hand. We shook.
‘‘Carl Houseman,’’ I said, ‘‘and this is Agent Hester Gorse.. .’’
‘‘I’m Phil Rumsford…’’
That out of the way, we got toward business.
‘‘So, you wanted to see us?’’
‘‘Right.’’
‘‘This is unusual,’’ said Mitchell. ‘‘It’s supposed to be the other way around.’’
I grinned. ‘‘Not in this county.’’
She grinned right back. ‘‘So I’ve heard.’’
‘‘Look,’’ I said, ‘‘let’s get right down to it. You are the two who were up on the hill, aren’t you?’’
‘‘Oh,’’ said Mitchell, disgusted. ‘‘This isn’t about some sort of trespassing…’’
‘‘No, no. Not a bit. Not at all.’’ I glanced at Hester, who seemed quite prepared to let me blunder about on my own. ‘‘Since your air conditioning is out, why don’t we get in our car…’’
A carrot like that’s hard to refuse, especially in high humidity.
Settled in, the edge began to disappear.
‘‘What we need to know is how you got where you were and if you saw anybody on the way.’’ I held up my hand to stop Mitchell. ‘‘If you don’t publish it right away, I can tell you that there was more than one shooter, that they got both our man and the doper, and that they likely got in by the same route you did.’’
‘‘Wow,’’ said Mitchell. She looked at her younger partner.
‘‘Since you’re print media,’’ said Hester, ‘‘you don’t have quite the rush on a deadline, so you can sit on this for a short while. Right?’’
‘‘Right.’’
‘‘So, how did you get to the scene?’’
Mitchell pointed in the general direction of our trek up the hill. ‘‘Over there, just past the big maple trees, we went up the hill.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘Hell of a trip, must have taken us two hours.’’
‘‘How did you know where to go?’’ Hester asked. That was a really good point. If they had simply observed the crowd at the foot of the path that all the cops were using, there would have been no way to tell that it wound
