Blood Trail - C. J. Box [33]
“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 Cañon 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