"Dogs are helpful," Lothar said, "but nothing beats human observation and brain power. We might not even need them."
Robey said, "Wouldn't we need a piece of clothing or something from the shooter to offer to the dogs? Don't they need to have the scent beforehand so they know who they're after?"
Lothar smiled paternalistically. Joe had the impression he did a lot of that.
"It would help if we had an article of the shooter's clothes, of course," Lothar said, "but it rarely happens that we're that lucky. No, these are great dogs. Great dogs. With a great handler-me-they can track blind. You see, humans always leave something behind. Even in the worst-case scenario, when they haven't left something obvious like a cigarette butt or a clothing fiber caught in a thornbush, the shooter will have shed dead skin cells. Tens of thousands of them. They fall off the body like rain." Lothar gestured to Robey. "They're falling off you as we speak, and settling to the ground all around you." Which made Robey look in vain at the grass around his boots, as if he could see a pile of his dead skin cells.
Lothar continued, "Each dead skin cell is unique to the individual, with a unique scent. If we can find where the shooter stopped for a period of time-and there hasn't been too much deterioration of the ground due to weather or trampling-we should be able to get a scent on him. But first, we need to rule out dozens of things."
Lothar patted the top of one of the carriers. "Butch and Sundance are like my samurai swords. I don't pull them out of their scabbards unless I plan to use them to track down a man."
"Not even for a drink of water?" Joe asked.
Pope snapped, "Joe, they're his dogs."
Before Joe could reply, Pope's cell phone burred and Pope snatched it out of his breast pocket and turned away. Conway was visibly uncomfortable, not knowing whether to stand with Joe, Robey, and Lothar or stick close to his friend, who was walking up the hill gesturing as he talked. Joe felt sorry for him.
"What's the deal with those two?" Lothar whispered.
Joe shrugged.
"This isn't one of those Brokeback Mountain kinds of deals, is it? I mean, this is Wyoming." He grinned to show he was kidding.
Robey sighed and looked heavenward. "You know," Robey said, "I think I've heard just about enough Brokeback Mountain jokes to last me a lifetime."
"Yup," Joe said.
"Think about it," Robey said heatedly, "men can't even go fishing together anymore without someone making a Brokeback Mountain joke. And now a man can't go hunting without getting butchered! What are we supposed to do, fucking knit?"
"Man," Lothar said, still grinning, "you guys are a little sensitive…" LOTHAR AND POPE led the way down the hill with Joe, Conway, and Robey following. Lothar kept up a nonstop chatter. Pope nodded and prodded. He seemed pleased, Joe thought, proud of having Buck Lothar next to him, on his team. While Lothar told the story of tracking down an escaped inmate from the SuperMax prison in Canon City, Colorado, who had gotten out by shrink-wrapping himself in plastic and hiding among rolls of clean linens, Pope looked over his shoulder at Joe and Robey and beamed at them, as if to say, "He's on our side."
"What kind of weapon was used, do we know that?" Lothar asked. Pope looked to Robey.
"No bullet was found," Robey said. "The best guess of our forensics guys based on the entrance and exit holes is a thirty-caliber."
Lothar snorted.
"What?" Pope asked.
Again the paternalistic smile. "A.30 bullet is used in at least eleven configurations that I know of, from a.308 carbine to a.30-06 to a 300 Weatherby Magnum. Plus, if you don't actually have the lead and you're basing the finding on the hole size, it could have just as easily been a 7mm with seven configurations or a.311 with three more configurations! Your shooter could not have used a more common caliber, so this tells us exactly nothing. Nothing! "
Robey leaned into Joe and whispered, "TMI." Too much information. THEY DUCKED under the crime-scene tape. Lothar asked Joe to show him where the body was hung and how. The master tracker stared at the space where Urman had been hung as if studying the body that was no longer there. Finally, he grunted as if coming to a conclusion of some kind and began walking the perimeter with his chin cupped in his right hand. Joe started to follow but Pope reached out and stopped him.
"Let him do his job," Pope said softly. "This is what we hired him for."
For fifteen minutes, Lothar studied the ground, the trees, the tape, the horizon, the opposite hillside, before pronouncing the crime scene "as useless as tits on a boar" because of the way it had been trampled by Urman's nephew and friends as well as law enforcement for two days.
"We can just forget this as being any help at all," Lothar said. "We've got to shift focus to where the shot was fired from and where the victim was hit. If we can pinpoint those two locations, we might have something to work with."
"Makes sense to me!" Pope said with enthusiasm. LOTHAR SAID to Joe, "When starting a search, there are three methods to choose from: the Grid Method, which consists of seven ninety-degree turns followed by seven intersecting ninety-degree turns; the Fan Method, where we start here at the center point where Urman's body was hung and walk away in a straight line fifty yards or so, complete a one-hundred-and-seventy-degree turn and walk back to the center point, then do it again a few feet over from the first trek until a pattern like a fan emerges; or the Coil Method, which is to start at the incident area and circle it, coiling back to it with three-meter spacing. I think this scene calls for the Coil Method."
Joe nodded, studying the folds and contours of the landscape. Behind him was black timber. In front was the saddle slope they had walked down from the vehicles, and on the other side of the slope the timber cleared and rose to a ridge, topped by granite outcroppings that had punched through the grass.
"Any questions?" Lothar asked.
"One," Joe said. "What happened to the prisoner who escaped from the SuperMax in Colorado?"
"I meant about search methods," Lothar said impatiently.
"We can coil around," Joe said, pointing across the meadow toward the rising slope, "but it makes sense to me that Frank was probably shot up there. That's where an elk hunter would be so he could look down on the meadows to the south."
Pope said, "Joe, would you please let the man do his work?"
"Actually," Lothar said, looking where Joe had gestured, "he makes a lot of sense. Joe knows more about animal hunting than I do, so he's probably right. We should start up there. My area of expertise is man hunting, not elk hunting."
Pope huffed and crossed his arms across his chest, chastened.
"So what about the escaped prisoner?" Joe asked.
"Butch and Sundance treed him near Colorado Springs." Lothar sighed, as if the conclusion of the story was so boring and inevitable that it was a waste of his time. "And a guard killed him with an AR- 15. He fell out of the tree like a sack of potatoes." JOE BEGAN to admire Lothar's skill as they crossed the saddle slope. It was like hunting or stalking in super-slo-mo, Joe thought. Lothar moved a foot or two, then squatted to study the ground in front of him for bent grass stalks, footprints, depressions, anything left behind. Robey had stayed back at the crime scene to call his office, and Pope was still there, once again working his cell phone. Wally Conway was with him. As Joe and Lothar distanced themselves from Robey and Pope, the quiet took over. Whether it was Lothar's caution and study affecting him or the fact that just the day before a man had been hunted down and murdered at this very location, Joe's senses seemed to tingle.
The afternoon was cooling down quickly as a long gray sheet of cloud cover was pulled across the sun. Joe felt the temperature drop into the midforties. It dropped quickly at this elevation, and he zipped his jacket up to his chin. A slight breeze kicked up, enough to make the tops of the trees sound like they were sighing. Whirls of wind touched down in the far-off meadows, making dead leaves dance in upward spirals.