He zipped up his own jacket and followed her out across the chilly clearing to one of the tent platforms, shaded by the towering evergreens. The crow on the top of the tallest one watched in silence.
She pointed to the rutted, frosty ground next to the tent platform. “If you’re looking for his tire tracks, you’re in luck. He was here during that snow and sleet storm, but the temperature was barely below freezing, and the ground was still soft from the last rain. I know, because I almost got stuck on my way up to the road—on my pointless drugstore trip.”
Gurney studied the ground around the platform. The cold snap had hardened the earth and preserved the tread impressions of two vehicles—one with four wheels and one with two. The motorcycle she’d seen in the visitor’s truck bed had evidently been unloaded and ridden while she was in Harbane. Ridden where was the question.
Gurney guessed it was to the site of the ramming—which would square with the sequence of engine and gunshot sounds heard by Nora Rumsten. If so, it would suggest that the rider was involved in the shooting, either as triggerman or in some backup capacity. One possible scenario was that whoever shot Sonny arrived in the truck with him, and the motorcyclist’s job was to get the shooter away from the scene as quickly as possible. He could also have been responsible for the blow to the head Gurney received in the moments after his collision with the stump.
Tess Larson watched as Gurney walked in a widening circle around the tent platform, intent on the tire tracks. It appeared that the motorcycle had been offloaded from the truck and ridden into an adjoining area of the forest that was free of underbrush. If the intended destination had been the ramming site, the rider had decided not to take the easy route up the lane and along the road, possibly to avoid being seen by a passing driver.
Before following the motorcycle tracks into the woods, Gurney turned to Tess. “I need you to do one more thing. Go back in the house, get a sheet of paper, relax, and take yourself back to the day before yesterday, to your meeting with Jim Brown. Take your time and write down everything you can remember about him. Physical details, mannerisms, voice, accent—anything at all, no matter how trivial it seems. Can you do that?”
“Only if you tell me what this is all about.”
“What happened up the road while you were in Harbane wasn’t an accident. Two vehicles collided, the occupant of one of them was shot, and I think your visitor was involved.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean, that guy sent me to Harbane to get me out of the way?”
“That would be my guess.”
The fear in her eyes increased. “What if I’d refused to go?”
“Not worth thinking about.”
“Good lord. Alright, I’ll see how much I can remember about him.” She turned and went into the house.
As Gurney followed the motorcycle tracks into the woods, he wondered how long he could avoid revealing his own position in the affair. He’d led Tess Larson to believe he was part of the official police team. He wasn’t comfortable with the deception, but there were moments in any investigation when expediency trumped openness.
The clear tread impressions made the route easy to follow. It extended from the campground nearly all the way up to the site of the ramming. Since the destination was far out of sight from the starting point, he concluded that the rider must have been following a route programmed into an off-road GPS. Interesting, but no big surprise. It was already obvious that everything about the attack had been carefully planned. The tread marks stopped short of the roadside, at a point in the woods where the motorcycle would have escaped the notice of any motorist who happened to be passing.
From the few remnants of yellow crime scene tape, Gurney got a sense of the area that had been cordoned off by the police. It consisted of a rough circle with a radius of forty or fifty feet, centered on the point of the collision. He noted it failed to extend far enough into the woods to encompass any evidence of the motorcycle’s presence—an omission that would create a major blind spot in the BCI investigation.
He took out his phone and photographed the tire marks, adding wide-angle shots to locate them within the overall scene. He walked back down through the woods to the campground and completed his photo inventory with shots of the tire tracks left by the truck.
He had a responsibility to make the photos available to the state police or at least to inform them of the presence of the tire tracks, along with Tess Larson’s story of what had transpired with her elusive visitor, but he was reluctant to do so before initiating an inquiry of his own, with the help of Kyra Barstow.
