No tape cordon, no evidence markers, nothing to say this was a crime scene. Nothing to guard, the Corvette was gone.

The site was a forty-foot beige soup bowl, sides eroded and bearded by serpentine roots and the stumps of long-dead trees. At the bottom, nothing but flat dry space. Scorch marks scarred the first few feet of drop along the southern wall. The Corvette hadn't rolled to the bottom.

A large clump of petrified root boll beneath the burned area seemed a likely culprit. White flecks said someone had tried to cast prints.

The cop pocketed her phone. Two stripes on her sleeve. E. Pappas. "L.A.? All yours, I was just on my way out."

Milo handed her a card. "No debate on my place or yours?"

"My chief isn't much for jurisdictional quibbles, Lieutenant. Car got towed to your auto lab."

"Good riddance, huh?"

"You bet," she said, without a trace of regret. "We're a force of twenty-one people, I'm the only corporal, and in six years I can remember exactly one homicide and that was an open-shut domestic. Arson's another story, we get the usual pyros during dry season, our FD has its hands full. Thank God this one didn't spread. It won't even appear on our stats."

"Did you see the initial scene?"

"First to arrive."

"Who called it in?"

"Elementary school chaperone--a parent with some little kids on a field trip. I'm no arson detective but it looked like an amateur job. Gasoline got poured on the passenger seat but the windows were left closed so the fire got starved out quickly. Your offender wasn't any wizard at hiding evidence, either. Tried to roll the darn thing down to the bottom but it got caught on that chunk of root. Even if it had made it to the bottom, it still would've been in plain view. You want to conceal something, I'll show you gullies ten minutes from here so overgrown you could hide stuff forever."

"Anything on the casts?"

"Nope, sorry. After the car had been moved we saw what looked like shoe prints, but they turned out to be twig marks. Maybe you'll pull up some latents from the vehicle. Only thing left behind was a hat and I made sure it got bagged and tagged for you."

"Thanks. What kind of hat?"

"It was partially burned but I'd say a baseball-type. The little color left was blue."

"Where was it left?"

"We found it on the passenger seat, where the accelerant was squirted. That tells you how dinky the fire was, couldn't even finish off a cloth cap."

"This spot isn't particularly hard to get to," said Milo. "People come here a lot?"

"Would you?" said Pappas. "We've got gorgeous areas all over the place, my opinion, this is one of the uglier ones. Only reason that field trip was here was the teacher wanted to scare the kiddies about erosion."