“Do you like her?”
“Sure. I don’t know her very well, but she seems nice.”
Sophie tilted her head to the side, studying him.
“Why did you tell her you were divorced?”
What is that old saying about little pitchers and big ears? “When I told her I had kids, she asked if I was married.”
A sad expression crossed her face as she looked down at the table. “Why did she want to know that?”
Cole wondered about that himself, although he had a notion about it. “Just making conversation, I guess. It’s okay, Sophie. I have to tell people about our family some of the time.”
She nodded, her eyes downcast, as she continued wiping the table.
He crossed the room, pulled her close with one arm, and hugged her briefly to his side. “You’ve done a great job helping me clean. Let’s go home now and see what we can rustle up to eat.”
She tipped up her face, giving him a quivery smile that almost broke his heart. “Mrs. Gibbs is making soup.”
“That sounds good on a cold day. Let’s help Angie finish up so we can go.”
Following Sophie from the room, his mind jumped back to Carmen. She seemed interested in getting to know him better. He supposed someday he might find himself attracted to a woman other than Olivia. If and when that happened, he knew one thing for sure: he had these kids and their needs to consider before he made decisions about adding anyone to their family.
Chapter 10
Brody removed his hand from Adrienne’s hair and stood.
“You have to go down and organize a retrieval mission,” Mattie said.
“I’ll stay with her.”
“Sorry, Brody. You can’t. You’re too close.” Besides, the boyfriend was always a suspect. She didn’t know what to do with that.
He glared at her. “This is all I have left.”
“That’s not true. You’ve got memories, and staying here with her corpse shouldn’t be one of them.”
He looked down on Adrienne’s face, uncovered, reddened, and lifeless.
“I brought a plastic tarp in my backpack. Let’s cover her and secure the gravesite. Then you need to head down that trail. I’ll give you some flagging tape to mark it on your way down.”
He looked at Mattie. “I can find my way back up here.”
“Of course. But there may be more than one party needing to get up here later this afternoon. You might not be able to guide them all. We don’t want anyone getting lost.” She glanced up at the sky, covered with gray snow clouds. He followed her glance and apparently knew what she was thinking.
“And it might snow before I get back,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Shit. I’ll make sure we can find the trail.”
Mattie nodded, trusting him to keep his word. “We need to hurry.”
She removed the black plastic sheeting she’d carried up in her backpack and started spreading it out. Brody went to the far side of the grave, keeping his eyes averted from the carnage wrought by some scavenger, and helped her spread it over the site. They secured the sheeting by anchoring the edges with stones. The wind tugged at it, trying to tear it away, but soon the black plastic turned into a taut shield from the elements. It would be up to Mattie and Robo to defend the grave from further desecration by wildlife.
“Robo and I will go back to the trail with you, and I’ll mark it with orange tape from there to here on my way back. I think it’s probably shorter to head due east instead of coming up the draw like we did to follow the scent trail. I’ll build a cairn in the middle of the trail to mark where you should turn off and head back here.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Brody said. “What if her killer returns while you’re up here alone? What if that anonymous tip was a setup?”
“I suppose anything’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely.”
“You have your service weapon.”
“Right. And Robo won’t let anyone sneak up on us.” She pulled out her GPS and used the compass function to chart a course due east. “It’s time to go.”
“Wait a minute.” Brody looked back at the black plastic sheet that covered Adrienne’s grave, his face filled with a mixture of emotion. Hesitation, grief, and concern were all registered there, easy for Mattie to read. She gave him a minute to sort through his thoughts, and then said, “You need to get started, Brody.”
She set out, dodging around towering pine and boulders, staying on an easterly course.
After following for several yards, Brody broke his silence. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay up here?”
She didn’t want to tell him that she’d feared all along that they would find a corpse, and she’d planned for it. “I’ll be all right. I brought some food and plenty of warm clothing.”
“I’ll come back this afternoon. I’ll think of things we need as I go down.”
Mattie glanced at his haggard face, noting his slumped posture when he typically stood ramrod straight. “Brody,” she said, pausing for emphasis, “unless someone can put you on a horse, think twice before you try to make this climb again. You’ve spent days without food and sleep, and you’ve covered a lot of territory on little fuel. Mark that trail on your way down so anyone can find it.”
“I’ll be back.”
Stubborn.
It took about ten minutes to connect with the trail. Brody surprised her when he offered a handshake. He gripped hers hard when she took it. “Thank you for all you’ve done . . . and everything you’re going to do,” he said.
“Sure, Brody. You’d do the same for me.” That wouldn’t have been true a few months ago, but things had changed between them.
He turned and started down the trail. Mattie watched him until he trudged out of sight on the far side of the first rise. Brody looked done in, and she worried that it would take him a long time to make it back to the trailhead. Well, there was nothing she could do about that.
She began to build the cairn, stacking rocks smack in the middle of the trail, large ones on the bottom and progressively smaller ones layered up to the top. She built it about two feet high and knew it couldn’t be missed. Taking out her GPS again, she and Robo headed due west to return to the gravesite, marking trees with orange flagging tape about every twenty yards as they went.
Once there, Mattie decided to walk a grid with Robo, just in case they could turn up something the killer dropped. She gave him a drink of water and put on his working collar. Snapping a short lead onto his collar, she led him to the start of the grid that she’d already planned mentally, located between the trail and the gravesite.
“Seek,” she told him, his command for evidence detection, and she gestured toward the ground.
Robo put his nose down and went to work, quartering the area in short sweeps. Soon he touched the ground with his mouth and sat. At first Mattie couldn’t see what he was indicating, but when she brushed aside some pine needles she discovered a flattened cigarette butt. “Good find, Robo.”
She bagged it and started searching for footprints. She found several partial cowboy boot prints in the soft ground next to a tree. He must’ve leaned here to have a smoke. She marked them with orange tape on a thin metal spike.
She also found horseshoe prints. She photographed them, but she could barely see them in the photo. Looking up at the heavy sky, she knew she needed to preserve all the prints from the snow, so the CSI technicians could process them with their equipment.
After finishing the grid, she decided to use plastic evidence bags to cover the prints. Splitting them open, she chose the prints that were the most clearly defined, covered them, and then anchored the plastic with sharp bits of tree branch and rocks around the edges, being careful to avoid pressing on the middle. She left the orange flags so that anyone entering the area would know not to disturb them.