"Catherine asked me to give you a call, Greg," Wendy said.
"That was good of her," Greg answered. "It's a little lonely out here."
"I think she had something more specific in mind than just checking in. Where are you?"
"Hang on," Greg said, scanning out the Yukon's windshield. At the next corner was a sign he could barely make out from here. "West Warm Springs."
"Where is that?"
"It's off South Rainbow."
"You mean five ninety-five?'
"The guy who wrote these directions knew it as Rainbow. At least, that's what I'm counting on. I spent about twenty minutes looking for something that could be described as a rainbow before I realized that, for a change, he had used an actual street name. I'm really only guessing about Warm Springs. On the directions, he wrote that there were bulldozers and noise. I'm guessing he meant construction, and there are a bunch of relatively new houses down here. New since he wrote this, anyway. But I could be wrong. There's so much here that's just wide open to interpretation. Whoever this guy was, he was kind of… kind of crazy."
"That's actually why Catherine asked me to call you," Wendy said.
"To tell me he's crazy?"
"No, to tell you who he is."
"We know?"
"We do now. Isn't DNA a wonderful tool?"
"So who is he?"
"He's Troy Cameron. The one and only son of Bix and Helena Cameron."
Greg had been ready to hear almost anything, since he really had no idea who the John Doe was. But that… that took him off guard. "He is?"
"He definitely is. Not only that, but those hairs and fingernail pieces you found in his tent? They belong to his sister, Daria."
"The one who's missing?"
"The very same."
"Wow. Small world, I guess."
"I guess so."
"Listen, Wendy," Greg said. "I have to cover a few more blocks here, then I'll have to get out and hike, so I should go."
"Hike? Like, in the desert?"
"Looks that way."
"Carry water," she said. "Plenty of it. And Greg?"
"Yes?"
"Are you talking while you're driving?"
"I pulled over when the phone rang." he said. "But I need to drive now."
"That's good. Don't be a dope, okay?"
"Always an admirable goal," Greg said, but she had already hung up.
He had, over the course of the past few hours, often had to park and walk around, searching for anything that looked like it might have ten years ago and could potentially correspond to the notes Troy Cameron had scribbled down over and over again.
Some of it was virtually impossible. At one point, he had written, "Left at laundrymat." There was no Laundromat anywhere in the vicinity. Greg had gone into some of the shops that were there, in a strip mall that had probably not existed a decade ago, and asked if anyone remembered a Laundromat in the area. An elderly woman working in a card shop said that she did and spent fifteen minutes telling Greg about the surly man who ran the place and about the mouse she saw run underneath the dryers once. He was sure she would have told him precisely how many items she had washed there if he gave her enough time, but he had finally managed to extricate himself and continued on his way.
Some of Troy's landmark descriptions had been surprisingly astute, in their own strange way. Greg had spent several minutes at one point looking for a half-moon, wondering if the guy had first written out these directions at night and how that would affect the attempt to follow them, before noticing an old iron manhole cover in the middle of the street with a smiling crescent moon on it – a little less than half a moon, to be precise, but close enough. At another point, Troy had written, "Left by woof woof woof." Greg wondered how in the world he was supposed to turn at a decade-old sound, but after a few minutes, he spotted an old chain-link dog run behind a ramshackle house, with the remains of a couple of wooden doghouses inside it. The fence drooped now, and the house was vacant, its windows boarded over. It didn't appear that any dogs had used it in ages, but they certainly had at some point. He made the left and found the next landmark shortly thereafter.
He had never expected, when he first became a CSI, that he would spend a day doing something like this. Especially a day after he had already pulled a night shift. Walking around the city following old handwritten directions wasn't something they taught in school. But you did what the job demanded. The task of the moment set the agenda. If you tried to tailor the job to your preferences, you burned out fast.
He parked the Yukon and got out, carrying the directions in one hand and a backpack, which contained water and survival gear, in the other. He had known there would be some desert travel and prepared for it, wearing hiking boots, a T-shirt with a long-sleeved cotton shirt over it, and a ball cap. He didn't look much like a CSI, but at least he wouldn't perish in the wilderness. And his cap had the word "Forensics" printed across the front, so he had that going for him.
Warm Springs Road ended at Fort Apache. He doubted the road had extended that far back in Troy Cameron's time – at least, when he had described this route. Most of the houses Greg had passed had been newer than ten years old – the bulldozer stuff Cameron had mentioned. But Cameron did say that he walked for a long way in a straight line, away from the afternoon sun. That meant he was walking toward the east, and Greg, backtracking his way, had been driving into the west.
From this point on, all of the descriptions were of desert scenery. Fortunately, Cameron hadn't used a lot of plants as landmarks, instead picking rocks that reminded him of animals or places, the shapes of individual hills, and in one case a cloud formation. Greg figured that one wouldn't be too helpful.
He moved slowly into the wilderness, looking for a rock like a sheep's back, which was how Troy had described it. He guessed that would mean it had a woolly texture to it, maybe lots of lumps that would look like tight curls. It was, according to Cameron, on the side of a steep hill, and it was where he had turned toward the road.
Greg scanned the hills rising before him. They were dotted with desert scrub: low yellow-blossomed rabbitbrush, spindly ocotillo, bright green creosote, mesquite bushes with thorns like stilettos. One slope was particularly steep, although farther from the road than Greg expected, and high up on it was something that might have been a sheep rock. He made his way to it, tramping across soft din and then hard, bare rock. On the way up the slope, he leaned forward, into the hillside, for balance. A walking stick might have been a good idea – the last thing he wanted to do around here was grab the local plants for support, since most of them had barbs or thorns, daggers waiting to impale the unwary palm. He also kept an eye out for rattlesnakes. It was a little early in the year for them, but he didn't want to happen across one that didn't own a calendar.
When he got to the rock he had his eye on, not only was the upper surface oddly bumpy, but there was a broad main section and then a slightly offset smaller section on a top corner that, if he squinted a little, looked like a sheep's head.
Almost every time he began to despair, to think that whatever Cameron had observed ten years ago no longer existed, he came upon something that did. Cameron might have suffered brain damage if that bullet in the head predated the directions he wrote out, or he might have been a little off all along. But he had a good eye for permanence – for all of the landmarks that were long gone, such as the "laundrymat," there were others, such as the sheep rock and the half-moon, that were still around and not that hard to find.