Ben's footprints led through the grass for another eight feet, but then I lost his trail. I went back to his last print, then spiraled out in an expanding circle, but found no more prints or any other sign of his passing. It was as if he
had sprouted wings and jumped into the air.
Starkey said, 'What do you see?'
'If someone grabbed Ben, we should see signs of a struggle or at least the other person's footprints, but I don't see anything.'
'You're just missing it, Cole.'
'There's nothing to miss. Ben's prints just stop, and the soil here bears none of the scuffs and jumbled prints that you'd expect to find if he struggled.'
Starkey crept downhill, concentrating on the ground. She didn't answer for a few minutes, but then her voice was quiet.
'Maybe Gittamon was right about him being involved. Maybe you can't find a struggle because he ran away.'
'He didn't run away.'
'If he wasn't snatched, then--'
'Look at his prints--they come this far and then they stop. He didn't go back uphill, he didn't go downhill or sidehill; they just stop. He didn't just vanish. If Ben ran away, he would have left prints, but he didn't; he didn't walk away from this point. Someone carried him.'
'Then where are the other person's prints?' I stared at the ground, shaking my head. 'I don't know.'
'That's stupid, Cole. We'll find something. Keep looking.'
Starkey paralleled my move downhill. She was three or four yards to my side when she stopped to study the ground.
'Hey, is this the boy's shoe or yours?'
I went to see. A faint line marked the heel of a shoe that was too large to be Ben's. The impression was crisp without being weathered, and was free of debris. I compared the crispness of its edge with the edges that marked Ben's shoe prints. They had been made at about the same time. I got behind the print and sighted forward through the center of the heel to see which way the print was headed. It pointed
directly to the place where Ben's trail ended.
'It's him, Starkey. You got him.'
'We can't know that. One of your neighbors could have been dicking around up here.'
'No one was dicking around. Keep looking.'
Starkey pushed a stalk of rosemary.into the soil to mark the print's location, and then we widened our circle. I searched the ground between the new print and Ben's, but found nothing more. I worked back in the opposite direction covering the same ground a second time, but still found nothing. Fragments of additional shoe prints should have been salted through Ben's like the overlapping pieces of a puzzle. I should have found scuffs, crushed grass, and the obvious evidence of another human moving across the earth, but all we had was the partial heel print of a single shoe. That couldn't be, but it was, and the more I thought about the lack of evidence, the more frightened I became. Evidence was
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the physical history of an event, but the absence of a physical history was its own kind of evidence.
I considered the surrounding brush and the flow of the slope, and the trees that surrounded us with their dead winter leaves spread over the ground. A man had worked his way uphill through heavy brush and brittle leaves so quietly that Ben did not hear him approaching. The man would not have been able to see him through the thick brush, which meant that he had located Ben by the sound of the Game Freak. Then, when he found him, he took a healthy ten-year-old boy so quickly that Ben had no chance to call out.
I said, 'Starkey.'
'There's bugs down here, Cole. I fuckin' hate bugs.' She was examining the ground a few feet away.
'Starkey, forget the names I gave you from my old
cases. None of those people are good enough to do this.' She misunderstood.
'Don't worry about it, Cole. I'll have SID come out. They'll be able to tell what happened.'
'I already know what happened. Forget the names from my case files. Just run the people who served with me, and forget everything else.'
'I thought you said none of those guys would do it.'
I stared at the ground, then at the thick brush and broken land, thinking hard about the people I had known and what the best of them could do. The skin on my back prickled. The leaves and branches that surrounded us became the broken pieces of an indistinct puzzle. A man with the right skills could be ten feet away. He could hide within the puzzle and watch us between the pieces and we would never see him even as his finger tightened over a trigger. I lowered my voice without realizing it.
'The man who did this has combat experience,
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Starkey. You're not seeing it, but I can see it. He's done this before. He was trained to hunt humans and he's good at it.'
'You're creeping me out. Take a breath with that, okay? I'll have $ID come out.'
