“I can’t swear to it, but that’s what it looked like to me. And by the way that girl smelled—she was down in there for a while.”

“She’s been missing since Wednesday afternoon,” Mendez said.

The big man was impressed. “Wow. If this gal pulls through after all that, I’ve got to meet her. She must be something.”

Funny, Mendez thought, he wouldn’t have said so, having met Gina Kemmer. He would have pegged her for the more timid of the two friends. You never knew how people would handle adversity until push came to shove.

Hicks went over to snag one of the crime-scene team to send him down the hole.

“You couldn’t pay me to go down there,” Scott said.

Mendez laughed. “With those shoulders, you wouldn’t fit, man.”

“Good! I got no truck with mice. Mice come at me, seriously, man, I’ll scream like a little girl.”

“It takes a big man to admit that, Tom.”

The CSI came with Hicks, protesting. “Are you fucking kidding me, man? You want me to go down there?”

“You’re a crime-scene investigator,” Hicks said. “There’s a crime scene.”

“I don’t get paid enough for this.”

“You’ve got to take that up with the county commissioners,” Mendez told him. “In the meantime, I want to know if there’s any evidence down there.”

“Watch out for the mice!” Tom Scott called down after him as the investigator made his descent.

“Fuck you!”

The Search and Rescue leader laughed, then stood back and looked around, sobering.

“Seriously, man, this would be a lonely place to die.”

Zahn’s place was maybe a quarter mile or more over one hill. Marissa Fordham’s house probably half a mile to the south. The Bordain ranch was even farther away to the north and west. Nobody would hear you scream up here. No one would hear your cries for help coming up out of the well. There was nothing up here but rabbits, coyotes, and rattlesnakes.

It wasn’t hard to figure why someone had brought Gina Kemmer up here to kill her.

He turned again to Tom Scott. “You didn’t find any sign of our missing math genius?”

Scott shook his head. “Nope. Nada.”

It was hard to picture Zander Zahn shooting someone. But it was even harder to picture him stabbing someone, and he had certainly done that. Where the hell had he gone?

But anybody living out in this area could have known about this spot. Anybody who hiked these hills. Anybody who might have taken a long walk with Marissa Fordham.

“You guys owe me big time,” the evidence tech said, making his way back up the ladder with a big brown paper evidence bag hooked over one arm.

“Whatcha got there, Petey?” Hicks asked.

“Black clothes with what looks to me like dried blood. Looks like they were drenched in it.”