feet, tops. A mile and a half of track, ten feet of shoulder, on the
left, on the driver’s side. I felt millions shrink to thousands.
Then I felt them expand all the way back up to billions.
‘Good news and bad news,’ I said. ‘I think you’re right, so
you’ve cut the search area down by about ninety-nine per cent.
Maybe more. Which is good.’
‘But?’
‘If he was in a vehicle, did he throw it out at all?’
Summer was silent.
‘He could have just dropped it on the floor,’ I said. ‘Or
chucked it in the back.’
‘Not if it was a pool vehicle.’
‘So maybe he put it in a sidewalk trash can later, after he
parked. Or maybe he took it home with him.’
‘Maybe. It’s a fifty-fifty situation.’
‘Seventy-thirty at best,’ I said.
‘We should look anyway.’
I nodded. Braced the palms of my hands on the windshield’s
header rail and vaulted down to the ground.
It was January, and the conditions were pretty good. February
would have been better. In a temperate northern hemisphere
climate, vegetation dies right back in February. It gets as thin
and sparse as it ever will. But January was OK. The undergrowth
was low and the ground was flat and brown. It was the
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colour of dead bracken and leaf litter. There was no snow. The
landscape was even and neutral and organic. It was a good
background. I figured a container for a dairy product would be
bright white. Or cream. Or maybe pink, for a strawberry or a
raspberry flavour. Whatever, it would be a helpful colour. It
wouldn’t be black, for instance. Nobody puts a dairy product in
a black container. So if it was there and we came close to it, we
would find it.
We checked a ten-foot belt all around the perimeter of the
crime scene. Found nothing. So we went back to the track and
set off north and east along it. Summer walked five feet from
the track’s right-hand edge. I walked five feet to her right. If we
both scanned both ways we would cover a fifteen-foot strip, with
two pairs of eyes on the crucial five-foot lane between us, which
is exactly where the container should have landed, according to
my aerodynamic theory.
We walked slow, maybe half-speed. I used short paces and
settled into a rhythm of moving my head from one side to the
other with every step. I felt pretty stupid doing it. I must have
looked like a penguin. But it was an efficient method. I lapsed
into a kind of autopilot mode and the ground blurred beneath
me. I wasn’t seeing individual leaves and twigs and blades of
grass. I was tuning out what should be there. I felt like some
thing that shouldn’t be there would leap right out at me.
We walked for ten minutes and found nothing.
‘Swap?’ Summer said.
We changed places and moved on. We saw a million tons
of forest debris, and nothing else. Army posts are kept
scrupulously clean. The weekly litter patrol is a religion. Outside
the wire we would have been tripping over all kinds of
stuff. Inside, there was nothing. Nothing at all. We did another
ten minutes, another three hundred yards, and then we paused
and swapped positions again. Moving slow in the cold air was
chilling me. I stared at the earth like a maniac. I felt we were
close to our best chance. A mile and a half is 2,640 yards. I
figured the first few hundred and the last few hundred were
poor hunting grounds. At first the guy would have been feeling
the pure urge to escape. Then close to the post buildings he
knew he had to be ready and done and composed. So the
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middle stretch was where he would have sanitized. Anyone with
any sense would have coasted to a stop, breathed in, breathed
out, and thought things through. He would have buzzed his
window down and felt the night air on his face. I slowed down
and looked harder, left and right, left and right. Saw nothing.
‘Did he have blood on him?’ I said.