By the time he had drunk all the coffee left in his thermal mug, his cell phone was ringing. He answered without checking the readout. "Good morning, Sheriff Drummond."
"Not the sheriff, Ski. It's Stevens. I found the car."
The motel sign with the raccoon on it was in sight, but Ski executed a tight U-turn, which caused his tires to smoke on the pavement. He was five miles from where Deputy Stevens had discovered a maroon Toyota. Ski drove the distance with the lights behind his grille and on his light bar flashing. It was Sunday morning, so there weren't too many other vehicles on the road, which helped put him there in a matter of minutes.
The other deputy was standing beside the driver's door of the Toyota. As Ski got out of his SUV, he called to him, "You're sure there are no footprints?"
"None on this side, Ski, or I wouldn't be standing here."
The deputy had fifteen years' seniority over Ski, but he was a laid-back guy and seemed not to have taken offense when, during their brief cell phone conversation, Ski had urged him repeatedly to avoid destroying tracks or compromising evidence.
"Wish I could have told you I'd found him asleep behind the wheel," Stevens said when Ski reached him.
"Wish you could have, too."
"I'd like a piece of this sum'bitch."
"Get in line."
Placing his hands on his knees, Ski leaned down and looked through the driver's window into the car. He saw nothing either on the front seats or in the back, and nothing on the floorboards. The key was still in the ignition. Starks hadn't planned on coming back.
"How'd he get out without making a footprint?"
"Other side," Stevens said.
Ski walked around the hood in order to avoid stepping on the tire treads imprinted into the soft soil of the shoulder behind the car, which Stevens had had the good sense not to disturb when he approached in his patrol car. They'd need those to compare with the ones found near the lake house and the motel.
Ski studied the footprints. Starks had left a full right one when he stepped out, then a full left that was slightly deeper and more distinct than the right, then a partial right footprint where he'd walked into tall weeds.
From there, the trail became decidedly more obscure. Starks had had endless options for places in which to hide and directions in which to go. Directly ahead was an open field fifty yards deep that was railroad frontage. It stretched along the tracks in both directions for as far as one could see.
Across the tracks was a similar open area that bled into an industrial section on the outer edge of downtown Merritt. There were assorted warehouses, a trucking company, a distribution center for paper products, a work glove factory.
More worrisome to Ski than the businesses in daily operation were the abandoned buildings of failed enterprises. Several multistoried, sprawling structures stood in various states of disrepair, providing countless nooks and crannies in which a man could hide. Beyond that industrial area were the middle school campus and a city park with a municipal swimming pool and athletic fields for soccer and baseball.
Davis Coldare had played his final game on that diamond last Monday night.
Ski swore, using a particularly foul phrase he'd learned in the Army. Stevens stood by, wisely saying nothing, shifting his chaw from one cheek to the other.
Behind them, on the other side of the street from the deserted Toyota, was a row of houses. Basically on the fringe of a lower-middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood, the frame houses were seventy years old at best, owned by breadwinners who toiled hard to make ends meet. One of the houses had a log-hauling rig parked in the front yard.
"Talked to any of the residents?" Ski asked.
Stevens shook his head. "Didn't want to leave the car, have somebody come by and screw up the tracks. But nobody's come or gone since I got here."
By now three other deputies had converged on the site. As they approached, Ski cautioned them to watch where they stepped so the scene wouldn't be corrupted. "I'll shoot any one of you who compromises a trace of evidence." He was only half joking.
He assigned one of them to conduct a door-to-door of the houses, to ask if anybody had seen the man who'd left the Toyota parked on their street. If anyone had information, they were to be brought to Ski immediately.
Then he went to stand in the center of the street and, hands on hips, did a slow three-sixty survey of the entire area, hoping to see something that would give him a clue as to where Starks had gone when he'd hobbled from the car. Was he miles away by now, or close? Chances were he was watching Ski from his hiding place, perhaps from the cloudy window of one of the vacant warehouses.
Ski wondered if Starks had abandoned the car here for a specific reason, but he was betting not. There were no other tire tracks indicating that Starks had been met here and picked up. Ski figured he'd driven this far from the motel before being struck with the full impact of what he'd done. He'd feared his car might have been seen, possibly by someone driving past the motel when the fatal gunshot was fired. Maybe he thought Lisa Arnold had seen the direction he'd taken when he fled.
Whatever had gone through Starks's mind--and God only knew--he was rational enough to realize he had to ditch the car and take his chances on foot. He probably thought this was as good a spot as any. There were no streetlights in this part of town. It was a street traveled by only the handful of families who lived on it, and it was doubtful they had a neighborhood crime watch.
Starks had walked away from the car in stocking feet. That was something to Ski's advantage.
He turned to Stevens. "You're the best print man in the department. Get what you can from the car. Go over it with a fine-tooth comb."