Free Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery) by M.L. Rowland

circles in the dirt around the clearest, most complete tracks, then tied a long length of pink flagging tape to a nearby branch.
    She heard Cashman try the radio again. Another wonk.
    Cashman jogged back up to her.
    “We need to think this through, Cashman. We now have four sets of tracks going in one direction and two sets going in the other. I have to think about what to do.”
    “I know what I’m doin’,” Cashman said. “I’m going up the trail.” He stepped past her and continued up the trail.
    “Wait,” Gracie said. “Cashman! Wait a minute!”
    Cashman stopped ahead on the trail, but didn’t look back.
    She stood for several seconds, muttering curses about Cashman, about the tracks, about her life in general. What the hell was she going to do? Let him go off on his own? “All right, dammit,” she called up to her teammate. “I’m coming.” She followed Cashman up the trail.
    Gracie loved the challenge of the wilderness, treasuring it for its deadliness, not in spite of it. Most people wandering its trails seemed to underestimate the risk, treating the outdoors too casually, overestimating their own importance, assuming nothing would happen to them. And, if it did, help was just a cell phone call away.
    Every once in a while, the nature gods would sit up and take notice. Fed up with the arrogance of humankind, they would take someone out.
    Gracie skidded to a stop. “Dammit.”
    “
Now
what?” Cashman called back to her.
    “Now there are only two sets of tracks altogether. Only the smooth sole. Going in both directions. And the honeycomb. But in only one direction. What do you see up there?”
    With flashlight trained to the ground, Cashman disappeared around a bend in the trail. Half a minute later, he reappeared. “Looks like a couple of ’em went to take a whiz or a crap or something.”
    “What happened to the other tracks?” Gracie asked. She turned and backtracked down the trail to the last Reebok print she had marked—a right. Logically the next track should be a left. She examined the ground.
    The Reeboks had vanished.
    “Where’d they go?” Gracie turned 360 degrees, shining her flashlight beam along the ground in a wide swath until, finally, she spotted an indentation from a boot heel where someone had stepped onto a wide, foot-high berm of dirt and stones, and out onto an expansive promontory of boulders.
    “There!” Her sweeping light illuminated a chaos of footprints in the soft dirt. “They must have stopped and taken a break here or something.”
    Gracie trained her light on the ground. “What’s that?” She stepped over the berm and crouched down. She picked away several stones and branches strewn on the ground, and brushed away the top layer of dirt with her hand, revealing a large dark stain standing out against the drier, buff-colored dirt. Her stomach muscles tightened. “Cashman, does this look like blood to you?”
    Steve moved to stand next to her. “Yeah, that’s blood,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Some hunter probably field-dressed a deer he bagged out of season. Covered his tracks so he wouldn’t get busted for poaching.”
    Cashman moved to the far end of the outcropping and looked down over the edge, his headlamp emitting only a meager radius of light into the void. “Think they went down?”
    Gracie stared at the stain, focused on the fact that there were probably no deer at that altitude that time of year, if ever.
    “Wanna search down below?” Cashman asked.
    “I don’t think this is deer blood. I wonder if there was some kind of accident. Maybe with our missing hikers. This is getting way too complicated. We need to call this in.”
    “Roger, Roger,” Cashman said with a shrug. But when he keyed the microphone, the radio wonked. “Dead spot,” he said. He paced back down the trail a short distance and tried again.
    From where she was, Gracie heard the wonk of the radio. “Nothing,” Cashman called back up to her.
    “Why go down