Free The Watchmen by Brian Freemantle

reported missing so I came straight back to the car and called in.”
    “How come you stopped and walked into the forest at this precise point?” asked Cowley.
    “Didn’t,” said the man. “The report that was phoned in put the fire about a mile down the creek, toward the bigger inlet where there’s quite a few boats. So that’s where I started. When I didn’t find anything I walked along the bank until I came to it. It’s not in the creek itself. Looks like a long time ago someone dug out a space to leave a boat: a kind of a canal. That’s where it is—kinda pulled out of the channel and left in its own space.”
    “So did you walk out that way?” pressed Jones, indicating the lighted area.
    “No sir,” said Mitchell. “Took myself some markers toward the road here—those three trees over there, taller than the rest—and went back along the creek to my car. And drove up here.”
    “Did you go in to check once you got here?” pressed the scientist.
    “Just once. Straight in, straight out.”
    “What’s the ground like, underfoot?”
    “Soft. I can show you my tracks.”
    “This is getting better.” Jones beamed.
    “What about the creek bank and the canal itself?” asked Cowley.
    “Mud.”
    “But the creek is navigable for something fifty-two feet long?” queried Bradley. “That’s a big boat.”
    “Hardly,” said the officer. “I didn’t spend any time looking closely and the current’s washed out any marks there might be on the bottom, but you can see the bottom. And where the water doesn’t reach there’s a lot of score marks on the bank, where it obviously hit.”
    Jones looked in the direction of the light again and said, “Don’t know how we’re going to get the goddamned thing out through those trees.”
    “There’s some open ground by the canal itself,” offered Mitchell.
    “Sufficient to get it clear of the water for the first examination?”
    “I’d say so,” guessed the patrolman.
    Turning to Steven Barr, the forensic leader said, “You think you could get me one of those dinky garden tractors, small enough to maneuver through those trees? I’ll want to haul the boat out of the water. Drain it and then go over it tonight and tomorrow. Depending on how we find the creek, after that I might raft it back to where there’s enough hard standing to bring in the lifting helicopter.”
    “I got one of my own in the backyard,” Sheriff Sharpe said proudly. “Happy to make it available.”
    “Then let’s go to work,” urged Jones to the scientific team assembled loosely behind them.
    Jones did have a spare plastic anticontamination coverall, which he loaned to Cowley with the injunction not to enter the forest until there was a signal. Bradley borrowed one from another scientist approximately his size. The technical squad suited up and moved off with the military precision with which they’d disembarked from their helicopter, Wayne Mitchell going to the tree line with them to point out his route. One of the squad, another black man, immediately took a plaster cast of Mitchell’s indentation and one of the patrolman’s foot. From the way they worked Cowley guessed they were a permanent professional team. There was hardly any conversation, everyone seeming to know what to do without any instruction from Jefferson Jones. The group divided into three-man squads, each to a section that they subdivided by tape, stirring and lifting the forest debris with slim, rubber-encased sticks. Twice more footprint casts were taken. From the line, Cowley guessed they were again those of the Highway Patrol officer. Behind the main body a still photographer and a television operator maintained a constant record.
    One of the turnoff trucks turned out to be a refreshment truck—which further impressed Cowley, although the coffee didn’t. He welcomed the excuse to abandon it when he was summoned, by name, to the communications van. From his communication truck back at the sports field,