“A little less than a mile, but it’s slow going. Trail’s pretty steep,” Barber said.

“They said you were the one to find the body?” Sheriff Kirkwood said.

Barber nodded as he finished the coffee and screwed the cap back on tight.

“Yesterday at sunset,” he said as he handed back the thermos to the sheriff. “We had a call from a camper about a light they saw from a trail off on that hill on the left there, so we were looking around. They had a screw-loose arsonist two summers ago over in Idaho who burned down a hundred square miles so they’re always quick to send us out for violators.”

“Violators?” Agent Braddock said, squinting down into the shadowed landscape below them.

Barber nodded.

“Yep,” Braddock finally said. “They send us out on those calls, too.”

2

Down the hollow’s steep and tricky zigzagging trail, Kit Hagen was sweating in less than three minutes.

She had never seen so much rock. Rock in ridges and in slopes and slides and in crevices. All of it as gray as ashes. Born and raised outside of LA, she took in the bowl-like indentation and was reminded weirdly of Dodger Stadium of all things. It was as if God had chiseled an immense baseball stadium of rock into the side of a mountain, and they were now heading down from the nosebleeds for the field.

A sudden crunching sound of falling rocks just below on the trail made Kit stop in her tracks. As she watched, Braddock lunged forward and caught Sheriff Kirkwood by his jacket’s back collar just before he could fall.

“Thanks,” the sheriff said as he stepped to his right and peeked over the trail edge.

Kit Hagen looked down with the both of them where the land fell off sharply. Four or five stories below there was a stream, green and bubbling as it wound its way down the mountain through a serrated ravine.

“Pretty steep indeed,” Agent Braddock said, looking back at her with a wide-eyed nod.

They continued their descent. Six feet even and broad-shouldered with close-cropped hair, Section Chief Dennis Braddock looked more like an iron worker foreman or a professional rugby player than an FBI agent. For his homicide course at the FBI Academy, his wife, Anna, had valiantly attempted to soften the former marine’s bulk and blunt-edged features with professorial khakis, tweed blazers and dad ties. But it didn’t work.

“Watch your step,” Ranger Barber called back from farther down the trail.

Hagen smiled as she watched the lanky ranger duck under the trunk of a huge dead branchless pine sticking out over the trail at a rudely phallic angle.

She was still smiling to herself at the weenie tree when the trail finally leveled off another fifty feet below it. As she stood in the base of the hollow, its high rock walls didn’t remind her of Dodger Stadium anymore.

Then her smile evaporated as she looked over a tumble of rocks a few car lengths away, and finally found what they had come here to see.