The Last Detective by Robert Crais Page B

would be responsible for identifying and securing any evidence of the crime.
    Starkey divided the area into a rough grid of squares which we searched one square at a time. She moved slowly because of the poor footing, but she was methodical and good with the scene. Two of Ben's prints suggested that he had turned around to return to my house, but the impressions were jumbled and could have meant anything; then his prints headed downhill.
    She said, “Where are you going?”
    “I'm following Ben's trail.”
    “Jesus, I can barely see the scuffs. You a hunter, or what?”
    “I used to do this.”
    “When you were a kid?”
    “In the Army.”
    Starkey glanced at me as if she wasn't sure what that meant.
    Ben's footprints led through the grass for another eight feet, but then I lost his trail. I went back to his last print, then spiraled out in an expanding circle, but found no more prints or any other sign of his passing. It was as if he had sprouted wings and jumped into the air.
    Starkey said, “What do you see?”
    “If someone grabbed Ben, we should see signs of a struggle or at least the other person's footprints, but I don't see anything.”
    “You're just missing it, Cole.”
    “There's nothing to miss. Ben's prints just stop, and the soil here bears none of the scuffs and jumbled prints that you'd expect to find if he struggled.”
    Starkey crept downhill, concentrating on the ground. She didn't answer for a few minutes, but then her voice was quiet.
    “Maybe Gittamon was right about him being involved. Maybe you can't find a struggle because he ran away.”
    “He didn't run away.”
    “If he wasn't snatched, then—”
    “Look at his prints—they come this far and then they stop. He didn't go back uphill, he didn't go downhill or sidehill; they just stop. He didn't just vanish. If Ben ran away, he would have left prints, but he didn't; he didn't walk away from this point. Someone carried him.”
    “Then where are the other person's prints?”
    I stared at the ground, shaking my head.
    “I don't know.”
    “That's stupid, Cole. We'll find something. Keep looking.”
    Starkey paralleled my move downhill. She was three or four yards to my side when she stopped to study the ground.
    “Hey, is this the boy's shoe or yours?”
    I went to see. A faint line marked the heel of a shoe that was too large to be Ben's. The impression was crisp without being weathered, and was free of debris. I compared the crispness of its edge with the edges that marked Ben's shoe prints. They had been made at about the same time. I got behind the print and sighted forward through the center of the heel to see which way the print was headed. It pointed directly to the place where Ben's trail ended.
    “It's him, Starkey. You got him.”
    “We can't know that. One of your neighbors could have been dicking around up here.”
    “No one was dicking around. Keep looking.”
    Starkey pushed a stalk of rosemary into the soil to mark the print's location, and then we widened our circle. I seached the ground between the new print and Ben's, but found nothing more. I worked back in the opposite direction covering the same ground a second time, but still found nothing. Fragments of additional shoe prints should have been salted through Ben's like the overlapping pieces of a puzzle. I should have found scuffs, crushed grass, and the obvious evidence of another human moving across the earth, but all we had was the partial heel print of a single shoe. That couldn't be, but it was, and the more I thought about the lack of evidence, the more frightened I became. Evidence was the physical history of an event, but the absence of a physical history was its own kind of evidence.
    I considered the surrounding brush and the flow of the slope, and the trees that surrounded us with their dead winter leaves spread over the ground. A man had worked his way uphill through heavy brush and brittle leaves so quietly that Ben did not hear him approaching. The