disqualify those.”
“Did you get Colonel Moore’s shoes?”
“Sure did. I compared them to unidentified plaster casts. They lead right to the body, then back to the road.”
“Do you have a diagram yet?”
“Sure.” He walked over to a rolling bulletin board and snapped on a portable light. Tacked to the board was a four-foot-by-eight-foot diagram of the murder scene. The scene took in a stretch of road, the victim’s parked humvee, the beginning of the bleachers, and, on the other side of the road, a small section of the firing range that included a few pop-up targets and a sketch of a spread-eagled figure that the artist had rendered sexless.
Footprints were marked by colored pins, and there was a legend at the bottom of the board identifying the known owners of the boot-and shoeprints, with black pins indicating unknown owners or unclear footprints. Little arrows showed directions, and notes indicated whether the prints were fresh, old, rained on, and so forth. In cases where a print was super-imposed on another print, the most recent print had a longer pin. There were other notes and explanations to try to add some clarity to the chaos. Eventually, this whole board would be fed into a computer, and you would see a more graphic display, including, if you wished, the prints appearing one after another, as if a ghost were walking. Also, you could eliminate or call up any set of prints you wanted. But for now, I had to make do with my own experience, and that of Cynthia and Cal Seiver.
Seiver said, “We really haven’t analyzed this. That’s sort of your job.”
“Right. I remember that from the manual.”
He added, “We’ve got to spiffy this up a little for the FBI. There’s too many variables and unknowns here, including the fact we don’t have the footwear that you wore.”
“That might he in the VOQ now.”
“When people hold off on providing footprints, I get suspicious.”
“Fuck off, Cal.”
“Right.” He looked at the legend and said, “Colonel Moore is yellow.”
I replied, “Colonel Kent is who we want.”
Pause.
“Kent.” I looked at the legend. Kent was blue.
We all studied the diagram, and, in the quiet hangar, you could hear the computer printer spewing out paper.
I said to Cal Seiver, “Talk to me.”
“Right.” Seiver began, and, from what he was saying, it appeared that Colonel William Kent had visited the body no fewer than three times. Cal explained, “See, here he walks from the road to the body. Stops very near the body, probably kneels or squats because, when he turns, his prints rotate, then he probably stands and goes back to the road. This was probably the first time, when he went out there with his MP who found the body. . . See, here’s her print. . . Casey. She’s green. Then the next time may have been here where he accompanied you and Cynthia with her running shoes. Cynthia is white.” He managed to remind me again, “You’re black. Lots of black. I’ll give you pink pins when I get your boots. But for now, I can’t tell you from—”
“Okay. I get it. How about the third time he walked out to the body?”
Cal shrugged. “He walked there when I was there, but we had tarps down by then. I guess he went out to the body more than once before you two got there, because it seems that we’ve got three trails of his prints from the road to the body. But even that’s hard to say for sure because no trail is complete. We got prints over prints, and we got soft ground and hard ground, and grass.”
“Right.” We all studied the pins, the arrows, and the notations.
I said, “There was a man and woman out there also, wearing civilian shoes. I could get you the shoes, but what I’m interested in is Colonel Kent. I think he visited the scene earlier, probably in uniform, with the same boots he wore later, somewhere between, say, 0245 and 0330 hours.”
Cal Seiver thought a moment, then replied, “But the body wasn’t found until. . . what time?. . . 0400, by the duty sergeant, St. John.”
I didn’t reply.
Seiver scratched his bald head and stared at the diagram. “Well. . . could be. . . I mean, here’s something that doesn’t make sense. . . here’s St. John’s bootprint. Orange. That’s a definite. The guy had a wad of gum on his sole and it printed. Okay. . . so here we have St. John’s bootprint, and it
“But you have St. John’s noted as being superimposed on Kent’s.”
“Well, that’s a judgment call by the tech. Could be a mistake. Probably was, now that I see it. St. John was there first, so he couldn’t have walked over Kent’s. . . but you’re saying you think Kent was there before St. John found the body.”
“I’m saying it,” I replied, “but you will not say it to anyone.”
“I only give information to you two and to a court-martial board.”
“Correct.”
Cynthia said to Cal, “Let’s see the plaster impression of this spot.”
“Right.” Cal looked at some sheets of typed paper on the bulletin board and matched something to something, then led us to a distant corner of the hangar where about a hundred white plaster casts of footprints sat on the floor, looking like the evidence of Pompeii’s populace heading out of town.
The casts were numbered with black grease pencil, and he found the one he wanted, hefted it up, and carried it over to a table. There was a fluorescent lamp clamped to the table, and I turned it on.
We all stared at the cast a few seconds, then Cal said, “Okay, this bootprint is St. John’s, heading toward the body. This little mark at the edge is the direction of the body. Okay, also heading toward the body is this bootprint, which is Colonel Kent’s.”
I looked at the two bootprints. They were superimposed side by side, the left side of Kent’s left boot overlapping the right side of St. John’s right boot—or St. John’s overlapping Kent’s. That was the question. I didn’t say anything, and neither did Cynthia. Finally, Cal said, “Well. . . if you. . . do you see that indent there? That’s the wad of gum on St. John’s boot, but it wasn’t touched by Kent’s boot or vice versa. You see, we have two military boots of the same make, same tread, and the prints were made within hours of each other. . . and we have intersecting and interlocking tread marks. . .”
“Do you need a deerstalker cap for this?”
“A what?”
“Why did someone put the shorter pin on Kent’s print on the diagram?”
“Well, I’m not an expert on this.”
“Where is the expert?”
“He’s gone. But let me give it a try.” He changed the position of the lighting, then shut it off and looked at the cast in the shadowy overhead light of the hangar, then got a flashlight and tried different angles and distances. Cynthia and I looked as well, this not being an exact science but more a matter of common sense. In truth, it was nearly impossible to say with any certainty which bootprint had been made first.
Cynthia ran her finger over the places where the two bootprints intersected. With a smooth sole, you could easily tell which was deeper, but even that was not proof that the deeper one was made first, given the fact that people walk differently and are of different weights. But the deeper print is usually first because it compresses the earth or the snow or the mud, and the next footstep is walking on compressed earth and will not sink in as far, unless the person is a real lard-ass. Cynthia said, “St. John’s print is a hair higher than Kent’s.”
Cal said, “I’ve seen Kent, and he weighs about two hundred pounds. How about St. John?”
I replied, “About the same.”
“Well,” said Seiver, “it really depends on how hard they came down. Relative to their other prints on the diagram, and considering the flat impressions of both prints, neither was running. In fact, I’d guess that both were
