Page 24 of Crosshairs

Colton scratched his arm, picking at what looked like a mosquito bite. His Adam’s apple bobbed and he cleared his throat. “Maybe a motorbike around one.”

“A motorcycle?” No one had mentioned that.

“No, not a cycle. It didn’t sound that big. More like the whine of a motocross bike.”

Linc instantly recognized the difference between the Harley in his mind and a smaller cross-country bike. Something a teenager might ride. What if this was a simple case of teenage love gone bad rather than the human trafficking suspicions he’d been having?

“Anything else?” Linc asked.

Colton stared at the ground a few seconds, then looked up. “I heard she was a pretty girl.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

He shrugged again in the universal teen language. “Around school.”

“You two went to school together?” When Colton nodded, Linc said, “Then you knew she was pretty. What school?”

His face turned red. “Yeah, I’d seen her around Natchez High, but we didn’t run in the same groups. I hope you catch whoever did it.”

“We will.” He pulled a card from his pocket and handed it to the boy. “Thanks for your help. If you think of anything else, call me. And if you don’t mind, hang around. I’m sure the ranger I’m with will want to talk to you.” Linc turned to walk away and then stopped. “Have you seen anyone else in the woods in the last hour?”

Colton shook his head. “Not on this side. Haven’t been over by the Trace, though.”

Linc nodded, then quick-timed it to catch up with Ainsley and Sam. It’d probably been Colton who had raised his body alarm.

So why did Linc still have this sense he was being watched?

12

Muggy air wrapped around Ainsley as they walked to the crime scene. Air so thick you could stir it with a spoon. She couldn’t wait to get back to the mountains in Tennessee where she’d lived for the past four years. Before that, it’d been a new park almost every year.

She barely kept pace with the district ranger as they hiked to the old Methodist church. Right now Sam was a good thirty feet ahead of her and had barely broken a sweat, whereas perspiration rolled down Ainsley’s face.

He stopped and waited for her. “Forgot you’re not used to the heat.”

It wasn’t the heat that slowed her down. “I’ll have to get acclimated to breathing water again,” she said, catching her breath.

He chuckled. “Yeah, it’s not the heat that kills you—it’s the humidity.”

Standard joke in the South. “Absolutely. Has a time of death been established?”

“Unofficially, the ME estimates Hannah died sometime between eleven and three. When I get the report, I’ll send it to you.”

She was glad he used the girl’s name. Let her know he viewed her death on a personal level.

They left the road for a narrow gravel path. Sam pointed to the dirt beside the path. “Before the storm last night, you could seefootprints in the mud. It’d rained Monday and she was barefoot. You could tell she was running, and in a few places closer to the church, you could see a bigger shoe print. The man was running as well,” he said. “Photos are in that folder, and you can see the casts at the Port Gibson office.”

They stopped under a huge live oak at the base of a hill, and she flipped through the pictures. Whoever took the photos had done a good job, zeroing in on the deep prints of the front of Hannah’s bare foot and the even deeper ones of her pursuer. They both were definitely running. “Looks like he was wearing boots.”

“Yeah, but we haven’t identified the shoe tread.”

Ainsley looked up from the photos as Linc joined them. “Get lost?”

“Nope. Ran into a kid who was here that night. Said he heard a motorbike either late Tuesday night or maybe in the early hours of Wednesday morning.” She listened as he recounted his talk with the boy. “I told him to hang around, that you’d want to speak to him.”

“Thanks. I’d like to speak with his parents too.” Ainsley turned to Sam. “How much farther to the crime scene?”

“Just up the hill,” Sam replied. “If you look close, you can see the church through the trees. Her body was found right over here.”

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