That part still sn’t make much sense to me.” I was staring at where he was pointing. All I saw were minute turbances in the leaves, a slightly rolled twig, a tiny smudge in the t. “How can you tell the other two followed later?” Bishop pointed to a spot on the ground. “Heel marks are the iest to spot. All the weight comes down on them, at least when ‘re on flat ground or going down hill. And you see where there’s a tiny skid mark from the top of the heel mark to the bottom? That icates the direction they’re taking… It’s a little hard on this partly zen ground. Okay, there’s another one, but it’s on top of the first, obviously it came along behind.” “I can see that, but the time thing-“
Bishop straightened and pointed behind us, back toward the road.
e how we’ve been walking? All in a line? That’s normal in the ods, especially stuff that’s pretty thick like here. Now the first guy e pretty much like we did straight ahead, and along that row of all, white birch trees there. The other two wandered some. They to the other side of those trees, and over there they got into a bit angle, so they backed out and went the other way. All that indicates, the way, that they were in tight formation, the little guy following larger one. Here they crossed the first guy’s tracks, but they didn’t p on ‘em; they wobbled off instead slightly to the left. They wouldn’t that if all three had been in Indian file. I also think the first guy knew area like the back of his hand, while the second two obviously n’t, but that might be stretching things a little.” We came to a depression, a wet-bottomed swale that might have e been a small creek or a runoff during the rainy season. Bishop held his hand and went ahead, going up and down the edge of this area.
stopped suddenly, far off to the left, and straightened, looking ahead %188 and behind. Then he took his knife out and slashed a foot-long blaze on a small tree beside him.
“What the hell’s he doing?” Spinney muttered next to me. Bishop, now bent almost in half, had begun walking slowly in circles around the tree he’d marked, reaching out in an ever-wIdening spiral. Around and around he went, slowly and purposefully.
Spinney pointed to the damp depression ahead. “Even I can see the tracks through that, coming and going, even on the rocks where they left muddy footprints.” Hamilton smiled. “Don’t worry. We’ve worked a lot with this guy.
He’s so good it’s creepy.” Bishop had stopped his circles. He seemed to be backtracking on a parallel course, about twenty feet away from ours, frequently marking trunks as he went. Through the forest of bare trees, we could see him heading back toward the road, his green uniform barely distinguishable from his cold and gloomy surroundings. I looked up at the dark, swollen clouds, seemingly just beyond the reach of the uppermost branches. I didn’t like the additional clammy feeling that was beginning to creep inside me, like a confirmation of my fears.
Finally, he came back to us, returning to the edge of the swale. “Found a fourth guy.
We all looked at one another, but stayed silent. If he’d had more to add, we knew, he would have.
We followed him across some stepping stones, slightly above the tracks Spinney had pointed out. On the far side, where the trees clustered together again, he stopped and let out a grunt of surprise.
We followed his look. Tied to a tree, about chest-high, was one of those mini-mag lights. Its reflector top had been entirely removed, so that its halogen bulb stood exposed at the top, making it look like a miniature lighthouse. The bulb was not burning.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, looking back the way we’d come. “That explains the truck lights.” He twisted and pointed ahead. “If I’m right, we’ll either find more of these, or something like it, until we get to the place they intended on meeting.” We could no longer see the end of the road from here; the trees had accumulated enough to totally block the view, but we could have seen the glow from a pair of car lights at night. “He was guiding the way, I muttered.
Bishop grinned. “Right-back and forth. That’s why the top’s off this light, so you can see it from both directions. The first guy must have told the second two to bring a flashlight, and to pick their way from light to light.” %189 “Why not just escort them from the road? Or just meet at the road d have done with it?” Hamilton asked, half to himself.
“He’s a wanted man,” I answered. “This rig allows him to see if re’s more than his guests coming.” “And it lets him fade away into the night while the other two’re king their way back,” Spinney added.
“It didn’t work, though,” Hamilton said. “There’s the fourth y.
There was a moment’s silence. Bishop filled it quietly. “I think t’s because the fourth guy was trailing the first one, not the other 0. He didn’t need this,” he pointed at the light in the tree, “because could see the first guy’s flashlight as he set this whole thing up. Also, ‘s a naturaclass="underline" From what I can find of his tracks, he’s spent a lot of e in the woods; knows just where to walk. He barely left a single n behind, even in that muddy area he rigged a rope with a grapng hook on one end from one tree to another and went hand over nd there.” Bishop headed off at a faster clip, surer now of what he was iling. He still made occasional side trips, but obviously for confirmation only. In fifteen minutes, we stepped out of the woods onto a large, ss-covered rock outcropping, stuck like a giant’s foothold onto the e of the mountain slope. To our left, the slope continued up; to our ht, it angled past and below the rock ledge, creating a twenty-foot p straight down to a tangle of thick brush and small trees. The entire e had taken us almost an hour, although we had probably covered more than four hundred feet.
The view extended due west for almost a mile, its dramatic effect omily heightened by the low, threatening cloud cover. Bishop had stepped ahead, not far from the edge, and now dropped one knee. “You better stay where you are for a bit here, while I look und.” Hamilton picked up on his cautious tone. “What’d you find?” “Blood.” Again, he began moving in ever-widening circles around the spot ‘d marked with a red handkerchief. I noticed he had several more of er colors sticking out of his two back pockets. He stopped right at the edge of the cliff and looked over for a while. you want, why don’t you stand over here and keep an eye on me. going to cut around to the bottom and see what I can find.” The three of us did as he asked, as he moved left toward the untain, gained the slope, and then cut around to the area below us. went very slowly, muttering into his tape recorder, once or twice %190 A7c~~
Mo9~ taking a picture, while we scanned the bushes and undergrowth for any movement. None of us had missed the possibility that if two people had come and gone, and another was fatally lacking the blood Bishop had found, then the fourth, whose return to the road still hadn’t been documented, might still be out here, watching.
Bishop finally stopped directly below us, where the brush was particularly thick. Had it not been for his movements, we might have lost sight of him entirely. We saw his face look up at us.
“Lieutenant, I think you better get down here. You, too, Lieutenant Gunther.” During our slow-motion trek through the woods, we had filled him in on our suspicions about Rennie, along with the fact that he and I had almost grown up together. There was little doubt in my mind now that Bishop wanted me as well as Hamilton because I knew best what Rennie looked like. I was no tracker, but I had seen the torn moss at the cliff’s edge, and had recognized from the broken shrubs and twigs sticking from the rock face that something heavy had brushed against it on the way down.