“So none of you can give me specifics or prove where you were?”
Heath shoved his hands into his pockets.
Mattie’s adrenaline surged, and Robo stiffened into protection mode. She pulled her Glock from its holster.
Brody raised his rifle. “Hands!”
Eyes opening wide, Heath raised his hands again, palms empty. “Geez,” he muttered. “Chill.”
“I told you,” Brody said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“What’s got you on edge, man? Why are you grilling us? We’ve got rights, you know,” Gardner said, the firelight revealing a scowl on his face.
“We had an incident in Timber Creek Tuesday afternoon,” Brody said. “A young girl died.”
Heath’s gaze jumped to Gardner and then to each of the others in the group. When he looked back at Brody, he seemed to have worked things out. “And your K-9 officer spotted my Pathfinder in town on Wednesday, and one thing led to another. You’re up here looking for me.”
His response confirmed that Mattie hadn’t imagined their furtive reaction on Wednesday. They’d spotted her the same time she spotted them. They probably even discussed it as they drove out of town.
Brody gave him a nod of acknowledgment. “Do you know anything about the girl’s death?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, yesterday, another young girl went missing,” Brody said.
“Jesus,” Gardner muttered under his breath, shuffling his feet, eyes downcast. He looked up and locked eyes with Mattie for a long moment before his slid away and he resumed his study of the ground.
“We had nothing to do with that either. We were in Denver on Tuesday and we left Timber Creek Wednesday after lunch.” Heath looked at Mattie. “We drove out of town soon after you saw us.”
Finally, Mattie could break her silence. “We need to find that missing girl. If you had nothing to do with her disappearance, you’ll let me and my dog search your tents. Can I have your permission?”
Heath looked at the others. The Robbins cousins held out their hands, palms up, as if to say they had no choice.
“They have no right to search our things,” Gardner said.
Frowning, Heath looked at him. “We have nothing to hide.”
Gardner shook his head. “Even still.”
Brody was frowning too. “Either you have this child or you don’t. It’s easy enough to prove you’re innocent. Will you let us take a look inside your tents?”
Heath looked at Gardner as if in appeal for him to give permission.
“We don’t have your missing child here,” Frank Robbins said. “Go ahead and search our tent.”
Gardner gave him the stink-eye.
Ted Robbins murmured his consent as well.
“Searching our tent is all right by me,” Heath said.
Clearly outnumbered, Gardner caved, though he didn’t look happy about it. “Go ahead. You won’t find what you’re looking for.”
Mattie led Robo to the tent the Robbins cousins had occupied, unzipped the flap, and peered in, looking for anything that could be of danger to her dog. Sharp objects like unsheathed knives, fishhooks, or needles. Instead, she saw rumpled sleeping bags, backpacks tossed toward the back of the tent, and clothing scattered all over. No Sophie.
After refreshing Robo’s memory with the scent article, she directed him into the tent. It didn’t take him long to search the small area, and he came right back to her. No hits. She backed out of the tent, zipped it closed, and led Robo to the second tent. Inside, she saw pretty much the same thing, although their stuff was better organized, the sleeping bags straightened, clothing tucked away in backpacks.
Robo zeroed in on one of the backpacks, touched it with his nose, and sat.
Her heart skipped a beat. Was this Sophie’s backpack?
After sizing it up in her flashlight’s beam, she decided it was too big. It probably wasn’t Sophie’s. But had Robo hit on her scent? Or drugs?
Mattie crawled inside on her knees. After pulling a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, she picked up the pack and took it with her outside the tent. As she approached the group at the campfire, she held it up for Brody to see. “He gave me a hit on this.”
Brody arched one brow and looked at Heath. “Who does this backpack belong to?”
Heath threw a glance of apology at his tent-mate. “It’s not mine, man.”
“Is it yours, Mr. Gardner?”
Gardner shrugged. “What if it is?”
Brody looked back at Mattie. “Is it her scent?”
“Either that or drugs.”
Against the background of general declarations of innocence from the men and their denials of having done anything wrong, Brody appeared to be pondering the situation. Finally, he spoke. “Okay, I want to treat you guys fairly, so I’m going to let you know that you have the right to remain silent.” And with that, he went on to give the entire group the Miranda warning from memory, ending with: “Do you understand your rights? Can we talk about this and clear things up?”
At this point, Mattie knew that Brody wanted anything these guys said to be able to be used as future evidence, so she prepared to listen carefully.
“Mr. Gardner, in addition to search and rescue, our dog is trained to sniff out drugs. There must be meth or something like that in this backpack.”
“There’s no meth in there!”
“Then what is it?”
Gardner looked around at the others as if for help, but there was none forthcoming. “There’s nothing in there but a little bit of weed.”
Brody stared at him.
Heath spoke up. “It’s legal to have personal use marijuana in Colorado.”
Brody turned his piercing gaze toward Heath. “You can have two ounces and smoke it in the privacy of your own home, but it’s illegal to possess or transport it inside the boundary of the national forest. Which is where we happen to be standing right now.”
Heath’s bit of defiance wilted. “You’re screwed,” he muttered to Gardner.
Brody scanned the group. “My priority here is our missing child. Will you guys take a little ride with us back to the sheriff’s office, where we can sort these things out?”
“Oh, come on, man,” Ted Robbins said, whining. “You can’t arrest us for this.”
“You’re not under arrest. But I need you to work with me. I’ve got to be convinced that you had nothing to do with our missing child so I can move on to someone else.”
“The pot isn’t ours, sir,” Frank said, waving a hand between him and his cousin.
“We didn’t even smoke it. He did,” Ted said, evidently having no qualms about pointing a finger at his friend.
“At the very least, you’re a witness. We’ll take you in and sort this out.” Brody turned to Mattie. “We have a unique situation here. While you were searching the tents, I learned that all of these guys are registered sex offenders, except for Ted.”
The words fanned the anxiety she’d felt for Sophie since reading Merton Heath’s case file. She looked at Frank, who seemed to be willing to cooperate. “How come you’re all here together?”
Frank looked her directly in the eye. “The three of us met in a halfway house in Denver. All of us were convicted of basically the same crime, sex with a minor, but for all of us, the relationship was consensual. We just had the bad judgment of picking girlfriends younger than us. Girls whose parents were out to get us.”
The girl from the Heath case had been only twelve years old, so this explanation didn’t ring true, and at the moment, Heath was examining his feet and refusing to meet her gaze. She decided not to confront him with this now so that Stella could get the first shot at him back at the station.