Free The Treacherous Teddy by John J. Lamb

then made a U-turn to go back in the direction from which it had come. The marks also signified that at least one person had been on the road sometime after it began raining yesterday afternoon.
    Just what we need—another piece of anomalous evidence, I thought.
    I took a closer look at the tracks. It didn’t look as if a full-sized car or truck had caused the muddy marks; the wheelbase track was too narrow. This indicated that a quad-runner or similar all-terrain vehicle might have left the tracks.
    I pulled out the radio. “Mike-Fourteen to Mike-One, I think I’ve found something interesting.”
    “What’s that?” Tina replied.
    “ATV tracks in the mud, maybe fifty yards or so from the yard. They look like they came from the direction of the quarry and then go back the same way.”
    “Copy. I’m glad you found something, because we came up dry. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
    While waiting for the women to make their way down the hill, I took overview photos of the tire impressions. Then I checked the underbrush beside the road for other signs of evidence, but didn’t find any.
    The radio crackled again, and this time it was the day-shift dispatcher. “Mike-Control to Mike-One, we just got a call from the Massanutten Crest Lodge. Some lady staying there wants to report that her Saab was stolen from the hotel parking lot sometime last night.”
    “What’s the victim’s name?” Tina asked.
    “Sherri Driggs. She’s visiting here from Atlanta, and the car is an oh-eight Saab, Nine-Five model, with Georgia plates of Three-Bravo-Juliet-Oscar-Zero-Zero-Six.”
    I knew Ash had to be relieved to know that her information about the hit-and-run vehicle’s license plate was correct. The alphanumeric had indeed begun with the Three-Bravo-Juliet sequence. Furthermore, Georgia license plates had dark letters and numbers against a white background.
    Tina said, “Got it. Send Mike-Three ASAP and tell him that I want a complete report and photographs of where the car was parked.”
    “Ten-Four.”
    “And call me immediately if the victim has any information about who might have taken the vehicle.”
    “Ten-Four.”
    We finally had a lead on the Saab, but the information merely added several more why s to an already baffling mix of unanswered questions. Around here, vehicle theft was still a rare crime, so why had someone stolen the Saab? Why had he gone to Rawlins’s farm contemporaneous to the murder? And if you needed some hot wheels for a getaway car, why boost them from the Massanutten Crest Lodge, where the security was tight? It was the most luxurious hotel in the central Shenandoah Valley and only about six miles away, high on the eastern slope of Massanutten Mountain. In fact, Ash and Tina probably could have seen the castle-like upper ramparts of the hotel from the top of the hill they’d been searching.
    A few moments later, I heard the rustling sound of footfalls coming through the underbrush. Ash and Tina emerged from the trees about thirty feet from where I stood. It was obvious they hadn’t had an easy time of it on the hill. Both women had mud-stained knees, and their boots were caked with large wads of the claylike soil. They paused to scrape the worst of the mud from their boot soles on an old log and then joined me.
    I said, “Well, here I am working my fingers to the bone, while you gals are out enjoying a mud bath at the spa.”
    Tina kicked another chunk of mud free from her boot. “You’re a laugh riot, Brad. I should have let you go up there.”
    “I’d have mud dled through. I take it you didn’t find any evidence?”
    “Not a darn thing. But if someone was wandering around up there in the dark, I don’t know how he did it without falling and breaking his neck.”
    Ash said, “You heard that last radio transmission?”
    “Yeah, your Saab was a rollin’ stolen,” I replied. The expression was a California cop colloquialism.
    “That explains why it took off the way it did,”