“Wire’s been cut here,” he said, pointing to an opening forty feet from Tanner’s back door. Cherry leaned close, studied the truncated wires between two solid posts.
“Cut recent,” she said. “Not a touch of rust.”
McCoy passed through the broken wire and into the woods. I was looking down for footprints or disheveled branches, McCoy looking up, broad brown hand porched over eyes crinkling against the sunlight.
“There,” he said after we’d walked two dozen feet. I looked up and saw a black-and-green metal assemblage resembling a chair attached to the tree about thirty feet up.
“A deer stand,” I said.
“Portable and camouflaged,” McCoy said. “The killer climbs the tree, snaps the stand in place, sits in comfort and watches Tanner’s place. He notes Tanner’s patterns, leaves a pot of toxic stew and waits a bit longer. Hoping he can go inside and have – what did you call it, Carson – his symbolic moments?”
“Jesus,” Cherry said, sighting between the tree and Tanner’s trailer, two hundred feet away. “The guy could have been watching the whole Tanner meltdown from here.”
I climbed the tree. The stand was positioned to reconnoiter the multi-windowed rear of Tanner’s trailer. A man with good binoculars could watch like his nose was pressed to the glass.
I retrieved the stand, hoping we could pull prints, figuring we wouldn’t, given the extreme care our perp had shown so far. McCoy pushed further down the trail as Cherry and I combed the ground beneath the tree for evidence, finding nothing.
“Got a trail back here,” McCoy yelled after a few minutes. We followed his voice to a hard dirt path half obscured by undergrowth.
“Looks rugged,” I said. “Could you ride it on a dirt bike?”
“Somebody has recently,” he said, pointing to a tire scraping in the gray dust. “If it was me, I’d ride to the Forest Service firebreak a quarter-mile north. Then it’s an easy ten-minute run to a real road. This guy had it figured out.”
McCoy’s phone rang. He snapped it open, spoke for several minutes, questioning his caller about times of day, from the sound of things. He asked the caller to verify the official time of sunrise. Waited. Nodded when the information arrived and turned back to Cherry and me.
“The spiders have spoken, folks. And they’re saying something interesting. Let’s re-group back at the park, where I can put together a little show and tell.”
We met at the office in the lodge. Cherry had called Beale, protocol, and he’d grumblingly assented to an appearance. He brought Caudill along, presumably to do the remembering if anything important was said.
“You’re doing this without the FBI?” Beale grunted when he entered. “That’s gonna piss off Krenkler.”
“They’ll be apprised of everything going on, Roy. And you can tell them anything we leave out, right?”
The barb zoomed by Beale, who nodded and broke wind as he sat. Inside the room it was the five of us and, for about a minute, a female ranger in her early twenties who entered to hand McCoy a file holding slender strips of paper and a few other pages. McCoy studied the information as he and the young ranger spoke quietly in a corner. When she turned to leave McCoy patted her shoulder and said, “Great job.” The kid practically floated out the room on a cloud of euphoria.
“Can we get some goddamn coffee in here?” Beale bayed.
“The waitresses only work in the restaurant, Roy,” McCoy said quietly, turning from his task to pull his wallet. “But if you run over there I’ll buy the coffee. Donuts, too.”
Beale’s eyes darkened in dilemma: be the coffee gopher or miss out on a freebie. He snatched up McCoy’s twenty and waddled out the door.
McCoy finished his calculations and looked up. “The road into Rock Bridge trail? Eight vehicles went down it after seven p.m. yesterday. Five before eight p.m. One was between eight and nine, just barely dark. Here’s the two I think we’re interested in: one vehicle headed toward the trailhead just past midnight, exited at half-past two. The second vehicle entered at bit before five a.m. and left at six-ten.”
I stared at McCoy as if he’d conjured polka-dot elephants as the table’s centerpiece. “How the hell do you know that, Lee?”
He dangled the slender scrolls that resembled calculator paper. I saw printing, numbers and times. “Ever see a pair of skinny hoses crossing the road and attached to a box to the side? Traffic counters. We have several throughout the park, including one on that final stretch of Rock Bridge Road leading to the trailhead. They count entering and exiting vehicles.”
Cherry looked up. “You’re saying …?”
“I’m saying the vehicle crossing the counter at midnight was carrying the body. The perpetrator took it down the trail to the arch, strung it from the bridge.”
“The other vehicle,” I said, confused by the timeline, “the one that crossed the counter hose near five a.m., why don’t you think it was our man?”
“The killer had to haul the body to the bridge, then create the suspension system. That meant getting in the water, running rope under the bridge, climbing back atop the arch and setting the knots. Then hiking back out. Had to take at least two hours.”
“What about the later entry?” Cherry asked.
McCoy leaned forward. “A strange story by itself. Someone went to Rock Bridge a bit after five in the morning.”
“Whoa,” I said, holding up a hand, my alarm bell ringing. “That’s supposition, Lee. All your counter registered was a vehicle on the road. You can’t conclude that the person in the vehicle got out and hiked to Rock Bridge.”
“Maybe it was a benign civilian who drove to the trailhead,” Cherry said, weighing in on my side. “An insomniac who couldn’t sleep. Or an alky having a predawn eye-opener. Believe me, I see a lot of that. The mystery early visitor left without ever setting foot down the trail. He or she might never have gotten out of their car.”
“That’s not what the spiders tell me,” McCoy said. I said, “Pardon me?”
“We’re all hikers here. We’ve all been the first person down a trail at daybreak, right? What do you do about every hundred feet?” McCoy used his hands to make a swimming motion in front of his face.
“Push away spider webs,” I said, getting the clue. “I always use a walking stick or fishing pole to knock them down.”
“There should have been cross-trail webs on the way to Rock Bridge. The spiders are industrious critters with plenty of time to string webs after the killer was gone. But I didn’t find a single strand … all the way to the bridge. Our five o’clock visitor went all the way to the body, knocking aside the webs.”
“It jives with Miz Bascomb,” I said. “She heard a vehicle on the road a few hours after the killer drowned Tandee Powers. The vehicle with the stick shift.”
McCoy cleared his throat. His brow was knit in frown, his chin perched on tented fingertips. “It’s interesting to me that the killer is gone before two or three a.m., but nothing appears on the geocache site until hours later, after daybreak. That seems to jive more with the appearance of the second person.”
“You think the killer’s not entering the symbol and data on the site?” Cherry said, shaking her head. “The mystery visitor is?”
“The timing suggests it,” McCoy said.
“It’s a reach,” Cherry said. “But I’m at the point where reaching is progress. The question is – if it’s true