I hustled down the path as fast as I could, slipping on the loose gravel, sliding on slickrock, plowing through thorny bushes and dodging cacti. The barking grew louder and I could see the glow of flashlights through the mesquites at the bottom of the first valley. The dogs were going nuts. The agents were shouting. There were at least three distinct voices. Beyond them, about a mile farther down, an Explorer bounded down off of the drag and made its way up to the trail in our direction before the topography forced it to stop. The sound of the car door slamming echoed through the night. I was maybe twenty feet from the line of trees when the barking abruptly stopped.
I drew my Beretta, held my penlight beam parallel to my sightline, and approached in a shooter’s stance. I could still hear the voices, but they were softer, muffled. I pressed through the sharp branches, using my shoulder to shield my face from the thorns. They latched right into the fabric like fishhooks and tore on their way out. I heard spiders the size of my hand scuttling across the detritus away from me.
I found the agents at the bottom of a dry creek bed, where presumably water had once flowed but now only creosotes grew from the rocky soil. One of them was down on a knee, shining his light on a flat river rock with what was definitely a small spatter of blood on it. Not much really. Maybe a drop the size of a dime smeared across the length of the stone. Without the dogs there was no way we ever would have found it. I heard them thrashing through the shrubs about thirty feet to my right.
The agent rose and openly appraised me. He looked like I imagined Wilford Brimley must have in his early fifties, with the kind of mustache that appeared to wear him as an accoutrement rather than the other way around. He inclined his head and grunted. I’d dealt with enough grizzled veterans to know that his expression meant that I had been reluctantly accepted as long as I was helpful and didn’t step on any toes. I hoped my return nod purveyed the message that as long as he stayed out of my way, I wouldn’t be forced to shoot him. I figured he got the gist when he glanced at my Beretta.
The other agent was off to the side, talking into his two-way with his back to me, whispering so that he couldn’t be overheard by either of us. I tapped him on the shoulder and relived him of his radio when he turned around.
“This is Special Agent Lukas Walker,” I said into the microphone. “I need you to check and see if there was any unexplained Oscar activity last night.”
“I can’t do that without a direct order from my supervisory agent,” a woman’s voice said.
I glanced back at the man from whom I had borrowed the two-way, read his face, and peeked at his left hand where it rested on the hilt of the club tucked into his belt.
“The killer could be out here with me and your husband right now.”
A long pause.
“Give me just a second,” she finally said.
I don’t think it even took that long.
“No unusual or unexplained activity last night. Only confirmed patrol vehicles on established routes.”
“And there were no long or unnecessary delays from one Oscar to the next?”
“Not without documented arrests. Is that what you documentaries needed?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I needed to know.”
That wasn’t at all what I wanted to hear, though.
I passed the radio back to the agent and slowly turned in a circle.
The unsub knew this area. Knew it like the back of his hand. Knew it so well, in fact, that he knew exactly where all of the Oscars were and how to circumvent them without setting them off. He knew how to beat the east-west drag system. He knew not only how to remove the body from the scene of the crime, but how to get it to a vehicle of some kind and out of the area without leaving a single telltale track. He knew everything that I didn’t. Fortunately for me, that narrowed the list of potential suspects down to a much more manageable number. I was going to have to be exceptionally careful how I approached it, though. The unsub was definitely wired into the system.
The barking stopped.
All three of us turned in unison and looked to the south.
I bolted straight toward where I had last heard the dogs, charging headlong through shrubs that tore at my clothing and dodging others that would have done serious damage to me at that speed. I couldn’t hear a blasted thing over my own ruckus, save for the distant hoot of an owl and what I could have sworn was the howl of a coyote. I burst from the mesquite thicket with the majority of my skin still attached to my bones, stumbled up a short rise, then skidded down a slick slope lined with scree. I barely stopped in time to keep from impaling myself on a flowering nopales cactus the size of a tree with pads like dinner plates. I skirted it and heard a sound so incongruous with the situation that I couldn’t initially place it. It was the sound of…laughter?
On the other side of the nopales, the dogs were running in wild circles, first one way, then the other. Noses to the ground, tails in the air, they wheeled around the small clearing, sniffing creosotes and sage and cacti and the ground, nearly colliding with each other while their handler sat on the ground between them. Sykora was laughing so hard he was crying. There was dirt on the tip of his nose. He looked up and saw me and started to say something, but ended up laughing even harder. He held up a handful of damp earth. Whatever the overture was supposed to mean, I obviously didn’t get it. The expression on his face didn’t fit with the laughter. It was one of both frustration and…admiration?
Sykora wiped the tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands and managed to climb to his feet. The dogs continued to run aimlessly around him until he steadied them with a single gesture of his hand. One sat to either side of him as he held out the dirt again. I stared at him blankly, waiting for an explanation. Frankly, I had been starting to wonder if he’d found himself a button of peyote when he sniffed the pile in his hand and offered it to me again. His laughter trailed off. I realized I was undoubtedly looking at him with the same befuddled expression as the dogs.
“Go on,” he said. “Take a whiff. Tell me that’s not absolute genius.”
I leaned forward and was hardly within a foot of it when I smelled a foul stench and quickly recoiled.
“For the love of God! What the hell is that? It smells like piss!”
Sykora started laughing again, but stopped abruptly when he saw my face. That was one of the great things about being able to interpret facial expressions; I could also deliver them with the kind of precision that made them impossible to misread, even for someone who spent the majority of his time with animals. Even the dogs must have recognized the expression that suggested thrusting urine into the face of a man with a semi-automatic pistol dramatically shortened one’s life expectancy into the range of…oh…seconds.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Sykora said. “Coyote urine to be exact.”
“You can tell the species of animal by the smell of its pee?”
“I train tracking and rescue dogs for a living. I have whole shelves in my garage lined with bottles of urine. Tell me you wouldn’t find little details like that important if you knew you could end up off on your own and about to stumble blindly into a mountain lion’s den?”
I couldn’t fault his logic.
“What did you mean by genius?”
“Don’t you see?” He held up the handful of earth again and shook it. I think we’d reached the point in the conversation where we both recognized that he’d been holding the dirt-urine longer than absolutely necessary. He hurled it off into the shrubs. “He had the urine with him. He knew we’d have a canine unit. Not only did he cover his tracks, he confused his scent trail. The urine is so concentrated that the dogs can’t smell anything else over it. We’re going to have to go back, find his scent again, then try to pick it up out there in the open desert. That’s if we’re lucky. Between all of us and the arrival of the crime scene unit, we’ve undoubtedly destroyed whatever scent trail was once there. This guy knows exactly what he’s doing. He even sprayed the urine in what looks like a spiral pattern to get the dogs running in circles. Chasing their own tails. Get it?”