Concentrate!
To the right of the path was a second set of footprints. The same size and tread as the others, but going down canyon. They cut deeper into the earth than the others and were erratically angled. As if the person had been running from something.
When Guy passed the bunkhouses he saw a glow through the trees. Soon after, the path turned and Rhoda came into view. She was squatting down, studying something intently. After a moment she stood and moved along a few yards. Stopped and squatted again, shining her light around. Repeated the procedure twice.
Then the light stopped moving. She set it down and fumbled in her pocket. Pulled something out, a sack of some kind, and plunged her hand into it. Plucked at a bush whose branches hung low over the path.
Evidence bag. She was now inverting it and holding it up to the torchlight. Guy moved forward eagerly and—
Fell on his ass in the mud.
A thump and a yowl of pain made Rho drop the evidence bag. She twisted, still squatting, and clawed at her slingbag for her revolver. Fear shot through her as she thought of what Wayne had impressed upon her from day one: “An officer who goes into a potentially dangerous situation without backup is just plain stupid and can wind up just plain dead.”
Gun out and ready, she shone her torch on the target.
What she saw made her fear evaporate and a mixture of anger and mirth replace it. Guy Newberry, her favorite city slicker, lay in a sinkhole next to the path, thrashing about and smearing himself with mud. He struggled to a sitting position, shielded his eyes from her light, and laid a track of Soledad County’s rich soil across his forehead.
“Jesus Christ, Rhoda, turn that thing away!”
“I will if you stop shouting. What the hell’re you doing here?”
“Following you.” He reached out a hand for her help, and she pulled him to his feet, but not before she retrieved the evidence bag.
He said, “I thought you had a problem with coming back here, but now I find you traipsing around in the middle of the night.”
“I do have a problem.” She scowled at him as she replaced her .357 in her bag. “I was so spooked by your graceful arrival that I nearly shot you. Don’t you know better than to follow somebody in a place like this?”
“Okay, I’m sorry. Why’d you come?”
“An idea I had. And you know, on the way down here I realized something: After thirteen years with the department, the solution to a case is more important than my own emotional baggage.”
“You’ve solved the case?”
“Not hardly. But I’m on my way.” She held up the bag and shook it at him.
Guy moved closer and squinted at the contents of the bag. “I can’t see.”
Rhoda positioned it against the palm of her hand and shone the light closer. The object inside was a slender curl of gold chain, broken near its clasp, the two halves linked by filigreed letters that spelled out the name CHRYSTAL.
“A bracelet?” he guessed.
“More likely an ankle chain. The branch where it was caught is low enough.”
“Who’s Chrystal?”
“The murder victim from Point Deception.”
“I thought she hadn’t been identified.”
“No, we’re withholding her name till we can locate next of kin. Look here, Guy — this is really interesting.”
Guy studied the two sets of footprints she indicated with her torch. “She went up the canyon walking normally, but came back running.”
“Right.”
“Why didn’t anybody notice that this afternoon?”
“Because the Soledad County Sheriff’s Department screwed up once again on evidence collection in this canyon!”
Rhoda’s tone was raw and bitter. Quickly Guy said, “Not for long they didn’t.”
“...No.”
He was silent, thinking about the hairs he’d found in the Blakeley house. They must have been left there after Ackerman was dead, but...
“So she was here in the canyon before she was grabbed at the turnout?” he asked.
“Either that or the person who grabbed her brought her here and she escaped.”
“But only briefly.”
“Yes.”
Their eyes met and after a moment he realized they were thinking the same thing.
“You never did show me the rest of the canyon,” he said.
The only times Rho had ventured into the far end of the canyon were during daylight, in the company of her fellow deputies as they searched for evidence they might have overlooked on the night of the murders. Then she’d gone with a horror of viewing the abattoir where Bernhard Ulrick had died, and an equal horror of appearing weak in front of her colleagues. Now she moved steadfastly along the path, strengthened both by her resolve to find out what had happened to Chrystal Ackerman and by the presence of Guy Newberry, who seemed a stranger to fear.
The sound of the waterfall guided her, and she kept her light trained on the two sets of footprints. Shortly after they passed the fall, the path narrowed and the prints stopped. She paused, shone her light ahead at a wide pool of water.
Behind her Guy said, “What?”
“This is as far as the prints go. The end of the canyon’s flooded.” She raised the torch and aimed it at where the drug lab should be. The shed had listed to the left. If the rains were heavy this year and the stream rose, the shed would collapse, and at least one of the monuments to the crimes perpetrated here would vanish.
“She could’ve waded over there,” Guy said.
“Maybe. But why? There’s nothing inside but some broken-down furniture.”
“She had no way of knowing that.”
“True.”
“Something happened here, though. Something that made her run.”
Rho sighed and stepped into the pool. It was about six inches deep with a mucky bottom. Cold water rushed into her athletic shoes. After she sloshed forward a few steps she said to Guy, “You coming?”
“I’ll hold down the fort here.”
Naturally.
As she got closer she saw that the shed had badly deteriorated. She shone her light through the door, noted that part of the roof had fallen in. Water covered the floor and mildew obscured the blood-spatter patterns on the walls. She hoped never again to witness such a scene: so much blood, bone, flesh, and brain matter...
She shook her head, forced the image away. Tried to step up into the structure. The weight of one foot made it pitch violently. When she withdrew, the shed settled at a more acute angle.
“I don’t think she came this far,” she said to Guy.
“Then come on back before you get so soaked you catch pneumonia.”
She waded toward him. “So what happened here?” she asked. “Why’d she run?”
“Someone was chasing her?”
“There’s only one set of prints.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a person.”
“An animal?”
“No.”
“What, then?” She took the hand he offered and stepped up onto the bank.
He said, “A memory. I’ve been talking with the old man down at Point Deception. Gregory Cordova. He claims that the family who were squatting in that cabin on the ridge that your department raided were here on the night of the murders.”
A chill that had nothing to do with her wet feet stole over Rho. “Why didn’t he tell us that?”
“I suppose because they were already gone, and he didn’t want to get involved. Anyway, he doesn’t know the parents’ names, but he remembers that the little girl was called Chrissy.”
Chrissy. Chrystal. Of course, she knew that. Oriana Wynne had given them the name; it was in the casefile. “Ackerman was the right age,” she said.