Blood Trail - C. J. Box [38]
Lothar started at the single good boot print they’d found earlier. As the moonlight fell on the short grass it created shadows and indentures that couldn’t be seen in the day. Using a slim flashlight held inches above and parallel to the ground, they could detect more now-visible footprints going up the hill toward the knoll. Lothar placed the tip of the tracking stick on the depression where the ball of the shooter’s foot had pressed into the grass, and telescoped out the instrument to the ball of the second. With a twist of his wrist, he locked the tracking stick into the exact length of the shooter’s stride.
“Thirty inches,” Lothar whispered to Joe. “He has a normal stride for a man in good shape. At that rate, even weighted down with a weapon and a light pack, we can expect him to travel at a normal pace of a hundred and six steps per minute, four to eight miles a day. A healthy and well-fed man can sustain this pace for four days.”
Joe nodded.
“We’ll use moonlight as long as we can,” Lothar said, twisting the flashlight off. “We can see his footprints in the moonlight—”
“Which amazes me,” Joe said.
Lothar grinned. “It’s all about the ambient light. It strikes at a different angle and in a different way and it brings the shadows and depressions of a footprint out of the ground. It gives the ground a whole different texture. And now that we know the shooter’s stride length, if we lose the track—like if he was walking on solid rock or something—we can estimate where he should have stepped and maybe find a dislodged stick or a mud transfer or something.”
“Since we’ve got his track, why aren’t we using the dogs?” Joe asked.
“Too loud,” Lothar said, shaking his head. “Dogs might run him down, but of course he’d know we were behind them. This way, if we’re able to find him purely on our own, we might catch him totally by surprise.”
THERE WAS nothing left behind in the knoll they could see with the red flashlight lenses, no spent rifle cartridges, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, or definitive markings to reveal the shooter’s height or weight. But Lothar had no doubt this was where the shot was fired by the way the grass was still pressed down in places and the clear view it afforded of the granite outcropping where Frank Urman was hit. They picked up the track as they cleared the top of the ridge, and in the moonlight it was so obvious even Joe could see it with his naked eye. Only once did Lothar need to use the flashlight and his tracking stick to find it again.
They followed the boot prints for half an hour as the moon rose. Because they were not using artificial light, Joe’s eyes adjusted and he found himself able to see well by moon and starlight.
“There’s something I don’t get,” Lothar whispered to Joe. “I get the feeling he came here the first time taking every possible precaution because I simply don’t see his tracks on the way in or out, but that when he came back the second time he was sloppy and careless, just trucking along. What made him drop his guard?”
Joe shrugged. He was wondering the same thing.
“I like it,” Lothar said, patting his weapon. “If he’s become sloppy, we have a better chance of taking him down.”
“That’s what you want to do?” Joe asked. “Take him down? How about we try to arrest him first?”
Lothar snorted. “Do you think he’ll let us?”
“I say we try.”
Lothar grinned wolfishly. “I say we light him up and smoke his ass.”
IT WAS difficult to walk without making any sound, Joe found. There was too much downed, dried timber and finger-thick branches that snapped when stepped on. Joe felt remarkably uncoordinated, and it seemed like he made twice as much noise as Lothar, who had a way of walking deliberately and silently by leading heel first and shifting his weight forward into each step. Joe tried to mimic the technique,