Page 23 of Unnatural Death

“Look at the ridge detail, Doc.” Marino shines the light, showing me fine looped and whorled lines, bits of dirt and dead vegetation stuck to areas of the plaster. “It’s good enough that we could make a match.”

“A match with what?” Lucy isn’t going to relent.

“Another footprint. Saying another one is found out here,” he answers her.

“And if it is and then another one is found after that? I’m sure they would match, all of them made by the same Sasquatch,” she says. “In other words, faux, fake, a hoax, someone’s idea of fucking with us. Most of all, fucking with you.”

“The only one fucking with me is you,” he snarls.

* * *

“Listen, Marino. I’m just giving you what you’re about to get from a lot of other people.” Lucy surveys her work, the four main rotor blades held in place with the bright red straps. “It would have been better if someone else had made the cast. That’s the takeaway from all this.”

“Well, someone else didn’t. We’re just lucky I did,” he snaps.

“I’m sure that was the plan.”

“What plan? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Even if someone else had found the footprint before you did, the story would end the same way,” Lucy says. “That’s what happens when there’s a fanatic in the crowd. Next thing, plaster of Paris is being mixed up in a bucket.”

“At least I thought to bring it.”

“And someone might ask why? Were you expecting to find something special?”

“Because I always carry it in a scene case. And I’m not a fanatic.” He glares at her. “It’s no different from you thinking UFOs are real.”

“That’s because they are. We just aren’t surewhatthey are or from where.”

“Tell me how it is that you found the footprint,” I say to him as I get up from the skid. “I need to know the details. If people find out about this, you and our office are going to be in the hot seat any way we look at it. Lucy’s right about that.”

“As soon as I got here and suited up, Tron took me into the gold mine.” Marino digs in a pocket of his coveralls, pulling out a roll of evidence tape. “We were talking about how best to get the male victim’s body out and I was shining my light all over the place while hearing weird noises.”

“Such as?” I feel compelled to ask since it will be me putting on a harness and descending into the mineshaft.

“It sounded like something moving somewhere deep down in the dark.” He begins taping the lid back onto the banker’s box. “As I was looking around, I noticed disturbances in the dirt near an opening that leads into another tunnel.”

Scuff marks, maybe the partial shape of a heel, and some distance away Marino found the intact footprint between the ore cart rails, he says.

“How far from the mineshaft where the body was dumped?” I ask him.

“Maybe thirty feet inside, which was pretty deep considering what a hellhole it is,” he reports, and the location continues to bother me.

“Assuming the footprint was planted,” I say to them, “one might expect that whoever’s responsible would make sure it was discovered. What if it hadn’t been?”

“We wouldn’t have missed something like that,” Lucy says.

“Bullshit,” Marino retorts. “Your investigators had already missed it.”

“That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have found it.”

“And it doesn’t mean you would have, either. If you have no experience in something like this, you might not know what you’re looking at.” Opening the helicopter’s back cabin, he sets the banker’s box on the floor. “Even if you did, some investigators might choose to walk right past it pretending they don’t see it. Why? Because they don’t want the very shit I’m getting.”

“Someone anticipated that you’d say all these very things and act exactly as you have,” Lucy tells him. “In other words, you’re being played.”

“By who? You act like you know.”

“Real or not, we don’t know how long the footprint had been there,” I remind them. “At least I’m assuming we don’t. If a foot impression was left in a protected area like an old mining tunnel, I suppose it could have been there for a while.”

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