"Captain, do you really think so? I wouldn't try walking through that."
"You'd stay here and wait for the fuzz? It's not that bad. You'd make two miles an hour without a backpack. Hell, he might even have planned it this way. I hope he left footprints.
We'll want to know if he wore hiking boots." Hennessey scowled. "Not that it'll do us any good. He could have reached the nearest house a good hour ago."
"That doesn't mean he could use the booth. Someone might have seen him."
"Hmm. Right. Or...he might have broken an ankle anyway, mightn't he? Donaho, get that copter up and start searching the area. We'll have someone in Fresno question the neighbors. With the alarm blaring like that, they might have been more than usually alert."
Lieutenant Donaho had not greatly enjoyed his first helicopter flight, which had ended twenty minutes ago. Now he; was in the air again, and, the slender wings were beating round and round over his head, and the ground was an uncomfortable distance below.
"You don't like this much," the pilot said perceptively. He was a stocky man of about forty.
"Not much," Donaho agreed. It would have been nice if he could close his eyes, but he had to keep watching the scenery. There were trees a man could hide in, and a brook a man might have drunk from. He watched for movement; he watched for footprints. The scenery was both too close and too far down, and it wobbled dizzyingly.
"You're too young," said the pilot. "You young ones don't know anything about speed."
Donaho was amused. "I can go anywhere in the world at the speed of light."
"Hell, that isn't speed. Ever been on a motorcycle?"
"No!"
"I was using a chopper when they started putting up the JumpShift booths all over the place. Man, it was wonderful. It was like all the cars just evaporated! It took years, but it, didn't seem that way. They left all those wonderful freeways for just us. You know what the most dangerous thing was about riding a chopper? It was cars."
"Yah."
"Same with flying. I don't own a plane. God knows I haven't got the money, but I've got a friend who does. It's a lot more fun now that we've got the airfields to ourselves. No more big planes. No more problem refueling either. We used to worry about running out of gas."
"Uh huh." A thought struck Donaho. "What do you know about off-the-road vehicles?"
"Not that much. They're still made. I can't think of one small enough to fit into a displacement booth, if that's what you're thinking."
"I was. Hennessey thinks the killer might have set off the alarm deliberately. If he did, he might have brought an off-the-road vehicle along. Are you sure he couldn't get one into a booth?"
"No, I'm not." The pilot looked down, considering. "It's too damn steep far a ground-effect vehicle. He'd leave tire tracks."
"What would they look like?"
"Oh, God. You mean it, don't you? Look for two parallel lines, say three to six feet apart. Most tires are corrugated and you'd see that too."
There was nothing like that in sight.
"Then, I know guys who might try to take a chopper across this. Might break their stupid necks, too. That'd leave a trail like a caterpillar track, but corrugated."
"I can't believe anyone would walk across this. It looked like half a mile of bad stairs back there. And how would he get through those bushes?"
"Crawl. Not that I'd try it myself. But they don't want me for the gas chamber." The pilot laughed. "Can you see the poor bastard, standing in the booth, dialing and dialing—"
Lucas Anderson had been a big man. He had left a big corpse sprawled across a sapphire-blue rug, his arms stretched way out, big hands clutching. Anderson's arms had been dragging a dead weight. One of the holes in his back was high up, just over the spine.
And men moved about him, doing things that would not help him and probably would not catch his killer.
Someone had come here expressly to kill Lucas Anderson. He would have some connection with him, in business or friendship or enmity. He might have left traces of himself, and if he had, these men would find him.
But the alibi machine might have put him anywhere by now. With a valid passport he could be in Algiers or Moscow.
Anderson's bookshelf of his own works showed some science fiction titles. His killer could have been a spaceman—and then he could be in Mars orbit by now, or moving toward Jupiter at lightspeed as a kind of superneutrino.
Yet they were learning things about him.
The cleaning machines had come on as soon as the alarm had been switched off. An alert policeman had got to them before they could do anything about the mess.
There was no glass on the body.
There was no glass under the body either.
"Now, that's not particularly odd," the man in the white coat said to Hennessey. "I mean, the pattern of explosion might have done that. But it means we can't say one way or another."
"He could have been dead when the shot was fired."
"Sure, or the other way around. No glass on him could mean he came running in when he heard all the noise. Just a minute," the man in the white coat said quickly, and he stooped far down to examine Anderson's big shoes with a magnifying glass. "I was wrong. No glass here."
"Hmm. Anderson must have let him in. Then he shot out the window to fox us, and set off the alarm. That wasn't too bright." In a population of three hundred million Americans you could usually find a dozen suspects for any given murder victim. An intelligent killer would simply risk it.
Someday, Hennessey thought when the black mood was on him, someday murder would be an accepted thing. It was that hard to stop. But this one might not have escaped yet
"I'd like to get the body to the lab," said the man in the white coat. "Can't do an autopsy here. I want to probe for the bullets. They'd tell us how far away he was shot from, if we can get a gun like it, to do test firing."
"If? Unusual gun?"
The man laughed. "Very. The slug in the wail was a solid-fuel rocket, four nozzles the size of pinholes, angled to spin the thing. Impact like a .45."
"Hmm." Hennessey asked of nobody in particular, "Get any footprints?"
Someone answered. "Yessir, in the grass outside. Paper shoes. Small feet. Definitely not Anderson's."
"Paper shoes." Could he have planned to hike out? Brought a pair of hiking boots to change into? But it began to look like the killer hadn't planned anything so elaborate.
The dining setup would indicate that Anderson hadn't been expecting visitors. If premeditated murder could be called casual, this had been a casual murder, except for the picture window. Police had searched the house and found no sign of theft. Later they could learn what enemies Anderson had made in life. For now... ‘
For now, the body should be moved to Fresno. "Call the copter back," Hennessey told someone. They'd need the portable JumpShift unit in the side.
When the wind from the copter had died Hennessey stepped forward with the rest, with the team that carried the stretcher. He asked of Donaho, "Any luck?"
"None," said Lieutenant Donaho. He climbed out, stood a moment to feel solid ground beneath his feet. "No footprints, no tracks, nobody hiding where we could see him. There's a lot of woods where he could be hiding, though. Look, it's after sunset, Captain. Get us an infrared scanner and we'll go up again when it gets dark."
"Good." More time for the killer to move—but there were only half a dozen houses be could try for, Hennessey thought. He could get permission from the owners to turn off their booths for awhile. Maybe.