Page 11 of Hell and Gone
The ropestill hung over the branch, dangling where Lawrence had cut Carson Riley free. The end was secured to the trunk, looped around and around before it was tied off in a constrictor knot. Broken tree bark lay scattered at the cottonwood’s base, ripped off from the rope.
Scattered pine needles and fallen leaves carpeted the dirt, turned the forest floor soft and springy, years of moldering autumns lying one on top of the other. Beneath the dangling rope, a patch of leaves and dirt was scattered, frantic activity born out in the scramble and mess.
Lawrence hung back, standing outside the grove with both horses and watching as Everett slowly circled the tree and made his way toward the sliced noose. He crouched, peering at the fallen leaves, the tracks.
There was sign there, evidence, though faint. Everett could read the past through the sign, could almost picture it unfurling in his mind. At least, part of it. Horse prints, nervous ones. Then dug-in hooves, a horse bolting on command. “His horse took off from underneath him. He was strung up from her back.”
Lawrence nodded, once. “Found her wanderin’ in the pasture.”
“She took off in a hurry. Either something spooked her or Riley gave her a kick.”
“Hedidn’tkill himself.”
Everett held Lawrence’s glare. “I’m going to find out what happened, Jackson. Whether it was a murder or a suicide, I’ll find out.” He stared until Lawrence looked away.
Standing, he sidestepped the depression of leaves, the man-shaped hole beneath the rope where Riley had lain after Lawrence cut him down. He backed off, searching the ground, the trees. He let what he knew play in his mind, a scratchy film reel of a man on horseback, a noose around his neck. The horse taking off. Was Riley struggling? What made Banshee run?
He circled slowly to the left, taking everything in. He was searching for tracks, for more signs. The forest seemed to swallow everything, the leaves absorbing even his own boot prints, his own slow move through the underbrush and branches.
But it didn’t hide everything.
“You sound sure of yourself,” Lawrence called. “What other killers you say you tracked down?”
Everett didn’t look back as he crept through the underbrush. He kept his voice low. He didn’t blink, focusing on the broken branches at the base of a thorn bush thirty feet beyond the grove. “For one, Afghanistan,” he said. “We tracked a group of Taliban fighters sixteen clicks and across two peaks in Kandahar province and then flushed them out of the cave they hid in. They’d been leaving bombs along the highway. My unit found their trail.”
He ducked down, picking up one of the broken thorn bush twigs half covered in dirt and molding leaves. He scanned the forest floor. There, another twenty feet away. An ant pile. Upturned dirt.
“You know what people never think of? It’s the things they do that are routine. They can cover all their tracks except for the things they do without thinking. After we flushed the caves of those bombers, we had to process them like crime scenes. Fighting terrorists is like fighting crime. You have to figure out who is who, figure out what was what, what kind of weapons they had, what kind of gear. And try to find out who had been in the caves. These weren’t just holes in the rock. These were well built. Fortified. They’d even been wired up with electricity run off of generators.” He turned to Jackson, meeting his gaze. “You know the best place to pull fingerprints out of those caves?”
Lawrence shrugged. “I never been to Afghanistan.”
“Off the lightbulbs. No one thinks twice about their fingerprints when they’re screwing in a lightbulb.”
Everett went back to searching for tracks, for signs, for hints that spoke to him, evidence of human hands where there shouldn’t be. His thoughts went thin as he tried to force back the memories.
There had been another time he’d chased down a killer, had caught him, in fact. But that memory was twisted and broken, wrapped around betrayal and blood, and he couldn’t go back to it without hearing the screams and feeling the flames. Or tasting blood again, mixed with Afghanistan’s dust and the stench of decay.
“What’s any of that got to do with Carson?” Lawrence picked his way around the grove, giving the noose and the tree a wide berth.
“Do you see the game trail running through here?”
“Sure. Deer cross the forest all the time. In and out of the pasture.” Lawrence called out the deer trails crisscrossing around them and through the trees.
Everett pointed to the bottom of the thorn bush and then to the ant pile. The thorn bush was behind the grove, clustered between the trees of the forest about thirty feet from the noose, and the ant pile was even further back in the thickness of the woods. “If you were trying to cover up a murder and make it look like a suicide, you’d have to leave no tracks. You’d have to use a slender horse, something light. Something that can move through the game trails like a deer would. But game knows their land. The deer know where the thorn bushes are and how to avoid them.” He pointed to the broken branches around the thorn bush and the scattered twigs leading from the bush to the ant pile. “And they know where the ants burrow. Deer know to avoid them. They don’t want to get bit.” Delicate deer prints danced in the scattered spots of black dirt around them. None were near the ant pile.
Yet the edge of the ant pile was toppled and compressed. As if it had been stepped on.
And four feet ahead of the ant pile, pressed into a decomposing leaf stamped into the dewy forest floor, lay a single outline of a shoed horse’s foot.
Everett crouched over the horse print. “A rider came through here within the last three days.” He held up the broken thorn bush twig. “This is a fresh break. Someone came through who didn’t know the area, didn’t sidestep the thorn bush. The horse moved quickly away, not wanting to get cut. They didn’t look where they were going and ended up here. Trampling an ant pile.”
He poked the ant pile with the thorn bush stick. A second later, the pile erupted with furious ants, scrambling upward, crawling over themselves to escape and attack, swarm whatever had disrupted their home.
“The horse was bit. And,” he moved ahead to the single print. “Stamped off the ants here. Just like a man would. Something simple, something automatic. Now, does that look like Banshee’s print?”
“Banshee is a much bigger horse than this,” Lawrence said. “She’s a big girl, and she’s got big ole feet. Big shoes, too.”
“Any of your other hands have horses like this? Do you have any slender horses, almost foals? Based on the weight of this print, the shape, the size…” Everett squinted. “A young mare.”
