Page 41 of Stay in Your Lane!

Everett turned a surprised look on me. “Our next—oh. Uh…” He blinked as if I’d caught him by surprise—maybe I had—but then he shifted gears. “I mean, we need to wait and see what your brother finds out from the M.E. While we’re waiting, I guess we could…” He chewed his lip.

“If you’ve got any thoughts, I’m all ears.” I sighed. “Because I have no idea what to do at this point.”

He was quiet for a moment, then flicked his eyes to me. “I keep going back to the Air Force 1s. A few nights ago, I was looking around online for info, and like, they’re not super common, but they’re not ‘only one dude in the whole town probably has them’ rare. And even the really, really limited editions like the Tiffany ones have the same tread pattern on the bottom. So I just…” He shook his head. “I don’t know how far we’ll get pulling that thread.”

“Oh.” My shoulders sank. “Well, damn.”

“I know, right? But then I went down a rabbit hole about shoe impressions. Turns out if you have a shoe and an impression with the same size and style, and you can match like one or two little imperfections—like wear and tear damage, or a spot where a rock took a chunk out of the tread—it’s almost guaranteed to be the same shoe. The odds of two shoes having the exact same damage and wear—especially two shoes of the same style and size—is like one in some number I’d never even heard before. A quadrillion or something.”

“No shit?” I sat back, chewing on the information. “I mean, I’ve heard some of that, but I never realized… So, if we can find a pair of Air Force 1s that’s the same size as the bruise on the body?—”

“And the print in the dirt outside!”

“And the print outside,” I acknowledged. “If we can find them, and we can find some sort of imperfection in both the prints and the shoe… Then whoever owns the shoes is probably the person who kicked or stomped on Ricky.”

“Especially if there’s still dirt or blood in the treads,” Everett said. “Did you know they can figure out you’ve been somewhere just by the dirt in your shoes or on your car’s floormats? I read about this one case where they found a body in some remote place by a river, and then they found trace amounts of a certain kind of dirt in the suspect’s shoes, floormats, and clothes that is only found in like this one tiny area. Which proved the guy had been there.”

I blinked. “How far down this rabbit hole did you go?”

The way he blushed had no right to be that cute. “I, um… I think I ended up with like twenty browser tabs open.” He gestured at his phone and sheepishly added, “I still have five of them open because I wanted to reread some of the articles. And keep them handy in case we need them.”

“Could you send me the links?” I took out my phone. “I think I want to read them too.”

He stared at me like he wasn’t sure if he’d heard me right. Then, tentatively, he said, “I can—yeah, I can send them.”

“Cool. Thanks.” I smiled, and so did he, and my God, I wasn’t just relieved to be back on the same page with him because of this case, was I?

No, I was not.

But I wasn’t going to think about that right now. I was going to think about shoe impressions, and shoe imperfections, and the odds of two shoes being identically damaged and worn, and how much I admired Everett’s dedication to this case, and…

Fuck me. This was neither the time nor the place for me to be getting butterflies over someone. We were trying to figure out a murder, damn it.

Then again, my brother met his wife at the scene of an accident, so what did I know?

I cleared my throat. “Okay, so we need to figure out the size of the shoes, and identify any imperfections that might?—”

“Already did!” Everett declared.

“You… You did?”

“Yep! From the picture you took with the ruler, I figured out the print on the ground was a men’s size twelve. Which means it’s definitely not Leon.”

I blinked. “Oh. Damn. Okay. It’s—how do you know about Leon’s?”

“I took a picture of it next to his beer bottle,” he said. “And when I compared the measurements—anyway, he’s a size fourteen.”

I stared at him for a second. “Wow. What about the one on the body? We can guess it’s the same one, but without measuring it—maybe when we get our hands on the autopsy report?”

“We don’t need to do that.” Everett turned the screen so I could see it. On it was the image of the print in the dirt. “You see right there on the big circle? How there’s like a chunk missing?”

I leaned in closer, and sure enough, on the large circle in the tread, at about the two o’clock position, there was a gouge. “Okay, I see it.”

“Right. So then…” He flipped a few more photos, found one of the print on the body, and zoomed in. “See it here too?”

Holy shit. Yep. There it was—the circle was broken in exactly the same place as in the one outside. On the impression in the ground, it showed as a raised area of dirt that hadn’t been tamped down like what was around it. On the body, it was a section of unbruised skin.

“There shoeprint outside the trailer matches the one on the body,” Everett said. “But Leon’s is the wrong sizeanddoesn’t have the gouge in the tread. So I’m pretty sure it wasn’t him.”

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