"Yes, sir," Fred immediately responded.
"You're going to need help out there at Ojo, Sam," complained Bear as Jessica stared at his gloved hands, wondering if they might not be scorched from the hot springs as well, and if they were… But all the men, and Jessica, were wearing gloves against the cold, frigid air.
"No, Dr. Coran and me, we'll take care over to Ojo," Fronval commanded in fatherly fashion. "You've done quite 'nough, son. I'll catch up to you in Mammoth."
Bear held them in his gaze until they disappeared in Fronval's four-wheeler.
At Ojo Caliente, a quarter mile away, Jessica and Sam Fronval searched for almost an hour before finding what to both of them appeared the place where Sarah Langley entered and most likely exited the deceptively calm hot springs where a spectral cloud of sulfur gases caressed and embraced the humans onshore. The surface water was glasslike for the most part, and while it sent up a blanket of superheated air over its wide surface, it hardly appeared to be a killer.
Fronval, using his wilderness skills, located an area where broken branches and matted grasses told him she'd tumbled from. They found not a stitch of clothing onshore, no shoes, nothing of the sort. Furthermore, there was no indication of hiking equipment strewn about, no backpack, no tent, not a trace she was hiking in this area. Only the near invisible signs Fronval pointed to evidenced her ever having passed this way.
"What do you make of it?" Fronval asked Jessica. "Did she fall in headfirst with every stitch of her gear weighing her down?"
"Could all that gear dematerialize in that cauldron of boiling water?"
"Possibly," Sam Fronval answered, drawing on his now lit pipe.
"Highly unlikely, Mr. Fronval, that nothing survived her fall."
Fronval shook his head, continuing his devil's advocate tone. "Other people may've come along, picked up anything seen as useful."
Jessica shook her head in return. Anyone watching them would think them in heated debate. "Even if she did fall from the trail along here, there would likely have been some scattering of her things here and there. And this time of year, how many other people would be along here? And everyone knowing the girl's been missing, it would've been reported."
"Besides," he said in an agreeing manner now, rubbing his chin, "the trail's much more slippery at other junctures. If she fell into the pool, why at this spot?"
"You'd know more about that than I," Jessica acknowledged. "But if she did fall in here, the natural place to've come out is right at this spot, here," she finished, pointing. "Unfortunately."
"If she did claw her way out and walk away from the fall as suggested by Brian Cressey."
"Yeah, the fellow you call Bear?"
"Nickname… suits him. He's strong as a bear and about as single-mindedly dumb. But if he had anything to do with the girl's death, why didn't he dispose of the body right here, same as the equipment? Leave not a trace. Wouldn't a murderer, given this great, natural opportunity to dispose completely and utterly of the body.. wouldn't he?"
"I couldn't tell you for certain what goes on in the mind of a murderer, but we know that in an unplanned murder-that is, one in which someone loses control-the killer seldom thinks clearly or in any orderly fashion."
"I see."
"And I've read that sometimes killers hold onto the body for long periods, you know, for… well, indelicate purposes."
"My God," Fronval said, each word a groan.
"As for the missing equipment, I'd look into Cressey's locker, and I'd look at his hands."
Fronval's face was still twitching, still stuck on the part about keeping the body for indelicate reasons. "You really think he.. he held onto the body to stick it to the dead girl even looking like she does now?"
"Depends on how cruel and psychotic a person he is. Just how well do you know Cressey? How long's he been a ranger?"
"Not long. Transferred in from a park, Stone Mountain, Georgia, if memory serves. Don't know much about the kid, but you're right. We gotta take a look in his boots, and we need a look below his gloves…"
"I didn't like what his body language was saying back there. I was a little afraid to call him on it, ask him to reveal his hands. He was holding a high-powered rifle."
''I had my suspicion when he suggested maybe a grizzly got at the girl and turned up its nose to the burned flesh, but there weren't any signs of a bear kill whatsoever. It wasn't the scene of a classic carcass feeding."
"Of course…" She considered his meaning. "You're quite right, Mr. Fronval."
"No coyotes, ravens, or magpies waiting their turn at the corpse. A bear makes a racket when he feeds, and he makes a stench and a mess of the carcass. There weren't no claw marks or teeth gashes I could see on her."
"Perhaps the body hasn't been out in the elements as long as we suspect, sir."
"You think she was dead when she exited Ojo Caliente, don't you, Dr. Coran?"
"It will take a full-blown autopsy to be sure, but that bruise I mentioned, the one to the temple, was considerable, since it was deep enough to show below the skin that'd sloughed away from the cranium."
''She was dead when she exited the water. She was dead weight. All he had to do was hold her by the ankles. He likely fought with her, lost his temper, pushed her in, held her by the ankles until she was dead, pulled her out, and realized what he'd done."
Jessica, staring into Fronval's sad eyes, bit her lip.
"But you already knew all that, didn't you, Doctor?"
She was glad he had said the words. Less argument that way.
"The search for Sarah was already on, but he didn't know what to do. It wasn't something he planned, so he had no plan for disposing of the body. Then when the search became such a big deal for everyone, he saw an opportunity to emerge as the hero who had located the body-which wasn't so tough, since he'd held on to it.
"Bastard probably kept it in a snowbank behind the ranger station where he was putting in time alone up here. Creepy bastard."
"I suspect a thorough search of his sleeping quarters will reveal that she spent some time there after she was dead."
"That would cinch it, wouldn't it? Can you be sure there'll be trace evidence there?"
"The way she was dropping skin, yes."
"God." Fronval moaned again. "Think of it-being held under that heat by your ankles. There was no way she could escape his grasp or the searing heat."
"If she had pulled herself from the water, her feet and ankles would've been seared at least as badly as her hands, but they weren't. As for this location, we're not going to find any evidence without doing some archaeological digging about. It's an ideal spot for a murder, actually. No clues left to find. You can't without doubt know where she entered or exited the water."
"I know it was here," Fronval said with conviction.
"But it wouldn't hold up in a court of law, sir. Any other poolside in the wilderness, and we'd see indentations in the sand, evidence or a lack of evidence of her hands and nails having clawed her way out. But not here in all this mineral spillover."
The land around Ojo Caliente was constantly being reshaped and rebuilt, in places spongy, in other places cracked and hard and brittle, the stuff of geyserite: a hydrous form of silica, a variety of opal deposited in gray and white concretelike masses, porous, filamentous, and scaly. Therein shown no footprints or telltale signs the woman walked or crawled from this place, but then, too, there were no signs of any attacker's prints, either.
"We can't prove he killed her from what we can see here," she told him.
"Sonofabitch, but we've got to prove he did it; I know it in my bones."
"That bit of knowledge, I'm afraid, is also useless in a court of law, Mr. Fronval. We need to bring in photographic equipment and photograph everything, even this spot, showing the lack of any sign of struggle here. We need pictures of the body, and we need a warrant to search Cressey's quarters."