Tracker

Fog swirls around your feet in playful eddies. You watch them instead of the back of the man walking in front of you. Even though you’re not looking at him, however, you can’t escape what his presence means.

His knock came at your door less than an hour ago. You live well away from town, anyone visiting in the early hours of the morning isn’t a good sign, but this one’s even worse than usual. Grim faced and clothed in his distinctive blacks, he held out his badge and asked for you to follow him. It wasn’t a question though. You weren’t given a choice. No one refused the Inquisitor.

“Found the body by the lake,” he starts explaining without any preamble. “Someone took a wire to the girl’s neck.”

“Who is it?” you rummage up enough courage to ask.

The Inquisitor glances over his shoulder. The look’s dark, disapproving. “None of your business. All you have to worry about is tracking the culprit.”

You keep your silence although part of tracking is anticipating where somebody’s going to go and seeing if the evidence supports your guess. A-wounded-deer-heads-toward-water kind of thinking.

The sun crests the horizon before you reach the scene. It’s not warm enough, though, to burn off the fog. All it does is make it bright and crisp.

“Over there,” the Inquisitor gestures to where you can just make out the edge of the lake in the fog. It laps gently against the dark rocks of the shore.

You see the crumbled shape of the woman and approach by stepping on larger rocks. You needn’t have been so careful, though. There’s a bevy of footprints around the body.

You keep your eyes averted from her bloodied throat and focus on the ground around her.

“Disturbed the scene rather badly,” you mutter.

“Old fisherman who lives down the lake found her,” the Inquisitor replies. He comes to crouch beside you. “These prints,” he points out a smooth, narrow set of prints. “Are his and these,” he points to heeled boot prints, “are mine.”

You glance at his feet.

“Let me see the soles.”

He scowls but you hold out your hand like you’re asking him to hand something over.

“Tracking’s my job,” you insist and keep your hand out.

He grumbles but lifts up one foot so you can see the tread on the bottom of his boot. You examine them and move on.

“These are her’s,” you trace in the air a smaller impression. The woman walked more on the balls of her feet than her heels, which left little but the toe print of her slippers. “You have anyone else out here?” you ask.

“My boy,” the Inquisitor answers, “he’s in training.”

“Boots like yours?”

“Just smaller,” he nods.

You move around the body, disregarding the prints you know until you find some you don’t. “Odd,” you mutter under your breath.

“What?”

You jump and only then realize you spoke out loud.

“The fisherman may not have been the first to find her,” you point to two round spots in the sand beside her body. “Someone knelt here and tried to stem the flow of blood from her throat. When it didn’t work, they pitched the rag they used.”

“How do you know that?”

You point to some willows by the shore. “They threw the rag into the water. The water brought it back.”

A bright red cloth tangles in the long stalks of the willows. The Inquisitor moves to retrieve it and you welcome the two seconds when he’s not watching you.

“Whoever tried to stem the blood may have witnessed the murder,” you say, “those tracks are pretty clear heading that way.” You indicate a trail headed toward the fisherman’s house down the lake. “These tracks might be the killer,” you point to another indentation but it’s faint, smudged by others and lacking much to make them distinctive. Leather shoes maybe, you guess, because there’s no hard sole to the indentation. “They’re going to be difficult to follow. Which do you want first? The Witness or the Killer?”

The Inquisitor drops the bloodied rag into a leather sack and doesn’t look up.

“You decide,” he says, “who do you think you can find faster?”

A. The Witness?

Or

B. The Killer

Blessings and see you Thursday =)

Jennifer