McCain looked at her shoes and was pleasantly surprised to see that she wore hiking boots. He again shouldered his daypack and whistled for Jack who came and fell in line with the group.
“The coroner is on the way too,” Sinclair said. “One of the deputies can come back up and wait for them after he sees where the body is.”
After they had walked down the hill a good ways, McCain pointed out the thin tire track and a couple of the shoe prints he had marked. A little farther down the hill, he stopped and said, “See the pink circle of tape down there in the brush? That is where the body is.”
“Okay,” Sinclair said. “I don’t think we all need to be down there. And one of you deputies needs to go back to the rigs to meet the coroner. Another deputy can stay here. McCain, I’d like you to come along with me and, I assume, Deputy Williams?”
Williams was the ranking deputy, so he said, “Stratford, you’re way younger and fitter than Deputy Garcia. Why don’t you hike back to the rigs, and Paul, you stay here per the agent’s request.”
“I’m fine with that,” Stratford said as he turned and headed back the other direction. “Those dead bodies give me the willies.”
Sinclair, Williams, McCain and Jack hiked down the last 500 yards to the body. When they arrived, McCain and Williams stood back and let the FBI agent do her thing. She carefully got in close to the body and examined it without touching it. And then she took out her camera and took about a hundred photos.
“Did you notice anything here, McCain?” she asked after looking at the body and surrounding area.
“Other than the gaping chest wound and the big space where the heart should be, I did notice bruising around her throat. And it looks like she was bound around the wrists. I couldn’t see the ankles. And she had a fairly large bruise forming on the left side of her face. It’s hard to see from here, but I looked from down below and I could see it.”
“Okay, I’ll check it out,” she said. “I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think she was sexually assaulted. She’s in the same clothes her sister said she was wearing the day she went missing. Would someone re-dress a body if there was a sexual component to this thing?”
“How do you know?” Williams said. “This guy obviously has some serious issues.”
They looked and chatted for a few more minutes and then heard some voices up the hill. It was the coroner’s crew talking to Garcia. They were packing a stretcher and some other equipment. It was going to get real crowded here in a couple minutes, so McCain took the opportunity to bow out. He told Sinclair that unless she needed him here, he was going to head back up to the truck.
“That’s fine,” she said and paused. “You know, you could do one more thing for me. If you don’t mind, can you try to follow the wheel track back up the hill? That would get us to where the killer parked. Maybe we can get a truck or car tire track there.”
McCain did just that. At first, he tried to follow the track that would have been made by the cart without the added weight of the woman, when the killer would have been pushing it back to a vehicle. Then he realized that was stupid. The deeper tire imprint was easier to follow, and it had to come from the vehicle too. So he followed it instead.
When he got to the road, sure enough McCain could see where a vehicle had pulled off into the grass. The problem was it was very rocky, so tire imprints were incredibly hard to see. McCain again pulled some pink flagging tape out of his pack and tied it to a bush nearby. He’d leave it to the experts to see if they could get an imprint of the tire. But from what he could see, they were going to have a tough time.
All this time, Jack had been the perfect dog, sitting quietly off to the side and dutifully following McCain wherever he went. As they were walking back to his truck, McCain turned and said to Jack, “Hey boy! You’ve been such a good dog, let’s go find a squirrel.”
Jack took off for the trees. As McCain followed, he noticed something small and white in the long grass. He reached down to pick it up. It was one of those wrappers that individually wrapped toothpicks came in. It was empty, but on the outside McCain could read the name of a restaurant. The paper was still white and clean, so McCain figured it hadn’t been there long. Then he looked back to his pink marking tape. He was quite a ways from where the vehicle had been parked. Too far, in his opinion, for something to have blown out of a rig. Especially last night. There was absolutely no wind when he and Jack were sitting on the ridge watching for cars.
He decided he would give it to Sinclair to see if she wanted to follow up on it.
McCain and Jack hiked around a bit more, and then went back to where the truck and the other official rigs were parked. They waited there for Sinclair to see if she had learned anything else.
When she arrived, she asked if she could catch a ride back to town with him.
“Sure,” he said. “Jump in.”
He told Jack to get in the backseat, gave a nod to the deputies standing at their cars, and they were on their way.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you finding the girl, and doing it on your own time.”
“No problem. I just had a hunch about the
